A central question explored in Planetary Dreaming is: How can the capacity for meaningful change be cultivated? At the heart of our initiative, Planetary Dreaming: Designing the Future, lies an exploration of systemic thinking. From this viewpoint, we recognize that all systems, whether they be organizations or societies, possess an innate resistance to change. This insight leads us to confront the reality that many individuals find themselves ensnared within rigid, self-perpetuating systems.

The influential management thinker Peter Senge has described the resilience of systems with the metaphor of the ‘immune system of systems’.

We know the harmful hyperactivity of immune systems from biological processes such as in pregnancies where the mother’s immune system initially resists the foetus, or at the onset of a caterpillar’s transformation, where its cells in the beginning will fight off new butterfly cells.

We see the same in social processes such as learning – when we learn something new, we often feel uncomfortable and incompetent. We can easily convince ourselves that, what we are trying to learn is not so important after all and give up: this is our psychological ‘immune system’ at work.

Correspondingly, in businesses, we encounter an organizational immune system whenever innovators, entrepreneurs, and developers have their ideas ignored or obstructed.

The question is how to push these systems into change if they always hit back and shuts down our attempts at transforming them. There is of course no easy answer – if there were, we would already have done it.

Instead of a miracle cure, we suggest some ways in which we can begin to challenge and disrupt the existing systems, so as to create a better platform from which to design the future.

According to systems leadership theory one way to challenging the resistance that systems put up, the ‘immune system of systems’, is by building creative havens, where ideas can grow and be tested before they are released into the larger system. Inspired by systemic leadership theory, we call the construction of these creative havens container-building.

In a sense, the entire Planetary Dreaming initiative can be seen as one such container, serving as an incubator for the development of new ideas. The journey of container-building is a path of decisions that takes the initiators, hosts, and participants through a process increasing attention towards deep needs, values and dreams. The very premise we design from.