This short film was created in partnership with our linked guests, along with Germain Gulevic, Nick Collica, Robbie Janicek & Joel Woodhouse. It represents a culmination of a 10-week immersion, in which each individual was invited to explore a learning question within a collective.
We completed hour-long interviews with each participant, where we circled around three key questions:
Who are you?
What have your been working on?
What has the Genesis Design Challenge been like for you?
This process created a container in which each person was prompted to speak to their work in an external-facing context, within the context of a “Wayfinding Interview”. This was a departure from our process during the GDC, where we had spent most of our time working with each-other.
Natalie (tagged above) co-interviewed the participants with me, helping to offset the potential challenges of a 1-1 interview format, and offered supportive critique with the editing process.
Sitting with another person, with presence of body, mind and spirit, is a wonderful gift to give. When doing interviews, or conducting conversation, I am able to bring my multitudes to bear witness. Seeing this through to its conclusion was a deeply satisfying process. Editing this video was a labor of love and makes the final product even sweeter to behold.
I am grateful to all who participated in the process, and all who have taken the time to view this post. The following is an narrative that weaves our individual stories.
Wayfinding: A Collective Story
Who We Are
We are human beings. We are sons and daughters, sisters and friends, partners and parents. We are counselors and coaches, researchers and statisticians, artists and athletes, builders and dreamers. We are ecosystemic leaders striving to be part of things greater than ourselves, learning to grow and be nurtured by supporting others in doing the same.
We stand on the ancient, traditional lands of the Nungar, the Cree, the Narragansett, and the druids—in Australia, in Canada, in the United States, and in the United Kingdom. We are a globally distributed cohort, yet we have become a village. We are a people who, after a long journey, now see each other as brothers and sisters.
Our journey together has been an exploration of a shared Theory of Change: that self-love in collective resonance can harmonically organize prosperous work. We have come to see that our most potent offering is not a product we can build, but a way we have learned to be together—a way that feels more alive, more well, more creative, and more authentic than the cultures we often find ourselves in. We are a living experiment in what becomes possible when we have the courage to say no to the things that deplete us and yes to the things that bring us alive, carrying forward the pieces of our traditions that are worth saving and composting the rest.
We have learned that our coherence itself is the prototype. We are the people we have been waiting for.
What We Are Working On & Why Now
Our work is animated by a single, driving inquiry: How do we make the invisible, relational value of our lives and work visible, tangible, and sustainable? We are wrestling with a core question of our time: in a world that demands constant productivity and performance, how do we create the space to simply be?
We see that our current systems are not fully harnessing our talents in a generative way. We see a culture where people are performing a role they think they are supposed to play, creating a powerful cascading delusion. We see the deep emotional toll of a world where value is tied to financial metrics, and we are searching for another way—a way that leaves us feeling replenished, not drained. The “why now” is clear: we need a cultural shift before the technology can be any good.
Our work, therefore, is to tend to this cultural shift. We are building the social technology for a more human future. This takes many forms:
We are weaving a mycelium network of connection, exchanging nutrients and information between different ways of knowing to create a system that is greater than the sum of its parts.
We are designing pathways for renewal, creating programs that can improve mental and relational capacity, and foster a sense of belonging and connection.
We are prototyping new economic models that can provide alternative sources of income for communities, freeing them from a total reliance on extractive systems.
We are building navigational tools to help individuals and groups better understand where they are, where they want to go, and how to get there.
We are stewarding the healing work of our time, using modalities like family constellations to help us witness our past selves and find new ways to relate to old problems.
Ultimately, we are tending to a garden, planting seeds without knowing exactly what they will grow into, but trusting that the garden will be blooming.
What This Journey Has Meant For Us
This Genesis Design Challenge has been more than a project; it has been a path. It represents an alternative to the ways we have engaged with work and with sharing stories in the past. We have learned that work can be a part of a spiritual path, not something divorced from it.
Through this process, our big, fantasy dreams of a better world have become a little bit more real—grounded in shared documents, in conversations, and in the tangible connections we have made. We have learned to let go of our expectations and to trust the process, recognizing that growth is not always linear; we make progress and sometimes fall back, and that is the nature of wayfinding.
We have learned about the core meta-skills of a more aligned life—the arts of listening, learning, letting, leading, and living. We are seeing how these skills allow us to find our way through life with more compassion for ourselves and for others, recognizing that we are all, in our own way, wayfinding too.
This journey has been a space to crystallize our creative purpose, to process long-held personal challenges, and to find security in ourselves. It has shown us that our greatest gift to our communities can be the opportunity to develop as people. The constellation is shifting for us. We have been reminded that we have a story, and our story matters.
We now see that the world we are dreaming of is not something that will be given to us. It is something we must build ourselves. This journey has been the first, tangible act of that building.
