A curious turn of events.

I set out at the start of this year to try and figure out where The Undaunted should play from now on. It has taken way longer than I’d hoped and my deliberations have been somewhat interrupted by events.?

I published a piece on New Years Day titled 'Love. Fury. Design. Conduct. Legitimacy. 2025', an extract from this about the design of society called 'Design as Activism' about a month later and, more recently a series of older articles about systemic social change from the very beginnings of The Undaunted, The Unheard Scream and Unstitution back in 2009 - 2021...

In ‘Love. Fury. Design…’ I opened with a statement ‘We must engage, together, in systemic societal change before we reach a critical mass that causes systemic societal collapse’.

I closed with two comments ‘So the questions now are how will we conduct ourselves from now on? How will we come together to create and design a society that we want to live in? How will we organise this? and how will we ensure the legitimacy of our and each other's multi-dimensional humanity?’ and ‘For the first time in my memory, I sense that we have reached a groundswell, a tipping point in society, where the questions have been asked, the theories have been tested, the ideas have begun to form and the design process can begin. But we have to do this together and we have to conduct ourselves, think of ourselves and each other very differently now. And maybe that is the (tipping) point where humanity proves that we can evolve, collectively.’

And while I have been procrastinating for the last two months, the central crux of everything that I and The Undaunted have been trying to be and do in the world and our thinking about where we go now was taken out of my hands.

Trumped.

Donald Trump has inadvertently created an acceleration (beyond the tipping point) of the very systemic societal change that I and others have been calling for, for years. His motives, approaches and conduct have been rooted in entirely opposite thinking and aspiration to my own but he may, through his abuse of power, have actually given power to the very people he was trying to take it away from.

In fact he and his cronies are the living embodiment of why we need existential change and, in a way that he hadn’t predicted, he might achieve more for human evolution than he could possibly have imagined. In this alone, I proudly and pithily say ‘Thank you Donald Trump’. What a weird world we live in.

Over the edge.

In ‘Love. Fury. Design. Conduct. Legitimacy’ I wrote ‘The thing I have noticed most in 2024 has been a subtle but significant shift. I have seen people all over the world and for very different reasons begin to move from either accepting or questioning and challenging the ideas, the established design of society and social systems to really starting to get to grips with how to create a very different type of society, for real, quietly and without any need to be intellectual elites or theorists, proclaim any grand ideas about an alternative society or go toe to toe with the established systems.

It is as though increasing numbers of ordinary people are saying to the custodians of established systems, norms and steady states, through quiet actions rather than loud words, “it’s ok, you carry on doing what you are doing and we will carry on doing what we are doing and let’s meet in the middle sometime”.

This is what we (The Undaunted) call ‘the spaces between’ where designing a very different society, born from learning exchange and exploration of ideas WITH rather than FOR the lived and living experience experts who have been marginalised for centuries, is just, underwhelmingly, “the way we do things around here”.

It is as though there is a fundamental change happening right now where more and more people are excited about the idea that society is something that they imagine, co-create, design and engage in, together, rather than something that happens to them, is forced on them.

Back in 2020 Unstitution stated “Look what happened while we slept at the wheel. It’s time to wake up” as part of a question “Just who the fuck is in charge?”. The answer back then, as now, was “We all are”.

I sense that we have all been going through a 5 year waking up process but that now, at the end of 2024? and the start of 2025, here we are, awake, alive and very much inspired by our own potential, our own power and our own capability, as human beings, to feel, think, do, create and design for ourselves and each other.’

Since the start of this year I have seen a vast increase in the amount of awesome writing about systemic social change, where, for the first time, much of this is speaking to human beings in human ways rather than in the impenetrable language of the intellectual elite, the self styled complexity theorists, change makers, systemic thinkers, sectorists and academics.?

This is something that The Undaunted has been calling for for years too and I am really excited about the potential in all this to create the very groundswell and mass market appeal that we want and need.

Procrastination.

At the start of this year, I asked myself a series of deep questions in the hope of gaining answers and direction.

How can I encapsulate everything that has happened in the chaotic world of The Undaunted and as me, a very messy human, living in the extremes of profound beauty and appalling barbarity, trying to fight off feelings of impotence and maintain some level of sanity in a crazy world?

How can I possibly bring together the learning, exploration and ideas, the magnitude of the conversations and demonstrations of living experience expertise from the hundreds of amazing people we have engaged with from across society in the last year?

How can I sum up the reading and watching and listening to everyone and everything that has inspired us, and much that hasn’t, where the learnings are even more pronounced in the spaces I don’t want to be in but where I know we have to venture to to find the truth and dance with monsters?

How can I reconcile the Gordian knot of deeply held beliefs, long developed principles, big ideas and concepts, explorations and provocations, that have been born from learning, observation, trial and error; and create something coherent and of meaning with what we are seeing and sensing out in the world but without holding these things too tightly, too emphatically?

How can I do this whilst also trying to deal with the last 12 months of personal learning and understanding - self truth and self reconciliation - about my own brain, my autism and Pathological Demand Avoidance (I still hate that term) and the barely hidden mental breakdown that I have been living through and recovering from that led to my diagnosis in the first place?

How can I reconcile all this with the bigger issues, stresses and trauma of what has been visited on my family in the last 24 months and that has continued to devastate our lives whilst also bringing us what my wife and The Undaunted co-founder, Melea Press calls our ‘horrific gifts’ - the wonderful learning and sense of achievement that have been equal bedfellows with the destruction and chaos?

How can I overcome my deep social phobia, chronic anxiety, exhaustion and CPTSD and gain the confidence to take The Undaunted back out into the world??

I am, apparently, a pattern former and common denominator finder, a change strategist, a creative, a systemic thinker, a complexity theorist and simplicity practitioner.

As someone who has spent a career trying to find simple and elegant ways of navigating through change and complex layers of discovered truth, intimate story, organisational structure, entrenched social systems and cultures, echo chambers, intransigent leadership and endemic apathy, I should be able to do this.

I kept saying to myself, 'Steve, as a concerned human being who is terrified about the future, you must do something'.

Finding answers has taken longer than I thought. Inertia set in and all the while over the last two months, the world has profoundly changed, again. The theoretical world of systemic social change has arrived in the real streets and fields and public consciousness of us ordinary people. Collapse and the need to make real change real have moved to centre stage and, as a consequence, my own inertia, confusion, self-doubt and uncertainty has been brilliantly, forcibly, taken away from me.?

And so, here we are, standing together on the cusp of the dawn of a new human, societal age. It is what I have been shouting and screaming for for years and now it has arrived. I feel like the kid in the sweetshop. There are so many choices, so many places to go. The Undaunted will be what it has always been but now with a sense of purpose rooted less in what might be but in what is already here, what has, like another 'horrific gift' landed on our collective doorsteps.

My next post will shine a light on what we, and hopefully you, can do next.?

Hey Ho, Let’s Go.??