Exploring the future of a good society – relational networks focused on collective change and transformation

This piece forms part of a series of essays about Possible Now, see the others:

• Blossoming at a new dawn – 30 years of Indonesia for Humanity
• Coming alongside Possible Now: From social innovation to a good society
• Dignity isn’t the by-product of development. It’s the foundation.
• From garden minds to garden practice: Supporting organizational regeneration while the ground is still shaking
• Possible Now and the journey from machine mind to garden mind
• Unlearning, relearning and learning anew

“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Sam Rye, Monash University

In the wake of a turbulent 2025 and 2026 with challenges to democratic societies, the dissolution of aid funding, wars and instability around the world all looming large, seeds of hope are still being planted and nurtured around the world.

The power of small groups of people, gathering together, dreaming of alternative futures feels increasingly counter cultural in this climate. But when so much energy is being spent resisting oppression, applying for grants, bending to the requirements of donors, and trying to maintain support for marginalized groups – simply gathering to imagine something different can feel like a luxury.

However, without imagination – without coming together to discuss our common hopes and dreams, and how might we combine forces to bring them into the world – will we ever really achieve the change we need for our communities, for our natural environments, and for ourselves?

In my last post, Coming alongside Possible Now: From social innovation to a good society, I wrote about how I found myself amongst the team, helping to understand and steward the early discussions and shaping of Possible Now with the global network. What was clear to me was that the principles at the core of what Possible Now was becoming were tied up in trust, mutuality and shared purpose – these were the kind of elements I was seeing and talking about as relational infrastructure. But how were these coming together, and for what purpose, felt like the next step to understand.

In conversations throughout 2025, convenings in several countries, the experimental research translation work and online sessions, one word kept floating to the surface: coherence. The idea that working across multiple countries, gatherings and different topics within the idea of Possible Now – we would need to orient towards and develop an architecture for coherence.

“The world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.” – Margaret Whealey, Using emergence to take social innovations to scale

 

This notion of coherence came up at a gathering of GFCF partners in Kathmandu in June 2025, in relation to the oft quoted “Islands of Coherence” attributed to Prigogine (which appears to be an internet reframing), and is at the core of how we have been thinking about Possible Now – a diverse range of people and groups working together in “small islands of coherence”, who are connected with one another through shared action and learning. Alongside this, our learnings from the practice-based and academic evidence indicates there is also the need for shared purpose and / or direction, to root and sustain Possible Now.

Much like #ShiftThePower captured a zeitgeist and created an energy and momentum of its own, we see the potential for Possible Now to be a base camp for people and organizations working towards a good society, reimagining the potential and means for communities around the world to be in the driver’s seat for the change they want to see, or as Jenny Hodgson puts it in her essay, Possible Now: the journey from machine mind to garden mind:

“It is an invitation to co-create a new ‘garden of alternatives’ and contribute to a new architecture of coherence which can emerge rather than be imposed, shaped by ideas of emergence and experimentation rather than control.”

Over the coming months, we’re exploring conversations with a range of people in the network, building towards the Possible Now #ShiftThePower Global Summit in Kathmandu in December. Possible Now is beginning to explore what it would take to develop the tools, ways of convening, and sharing of insights and experiences from across the network, to nurture a type of collective intelligence over time.

We know from years of work that what appears to be small and experimental work on the edges, when seen together, is a powerful movement. Possible Now seeks to recognize the diversity of what’s in motion, what’s working, and connect these through their potential for shared learning.

The potential of Possible Now also lies in the relationships between us – a shared capacity for care, belonging and collective power. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, and now is the time for our work to be connected, coherent and collective, to shift the power in this next chapter.

By: Sam Rye, Senior Research Officer and Lead: Monash Living Labs Infrastructure, Sustainability Transitions Lab, Monash Business School, Naarm Melbourne, Australia.