Dark Matter Labs reposted this
About a week ago we published a little paper on portfolio practice, exploring portfolios as an emerging perspective on how to govern distributed transition processes in complex ecosystems. Writing this one has been a journey, and I'm very lucky to have teamed up on this with Eunsoo Lee and to have had the critical support from Indy Johar, Joost Beunderman, Dr. Martin Lorenz and many more at Dark Matter Labs. The paper draws upon our own experiences in designing portfolios - for instance from exploring options for addressing air quality in the city of Almaty together with the UNDP (Yerassyl Kalikhan, Steven Bland, Yaera Chung and more) earlier this year. It also draws upon many insightful explorations we've had with cities at NetZeroCitiesEU, like for instance with the team at the City of Lund (with a very sophisticated and particular understanding about transition portfolios and patterns - Mikael Edelstam, Juliet Leonette). And it is rooted in some more conceptual foundations ranging from systems design to decolonial theory. Most of all, however, it's a continuation of an ongoing exploration: How can we think and act about designing urgent transitions in the self-organising and hybrid systems that we're a part of ourselves? How to bridge the 'gap' between an ecosystem's complexity and the limited capacities of any one governing organisation? What to even learn from a past that is 'essentially unique' to apply for future action? I think that taking the promise of viewing portfolios as a form distributed governance to heart might get us ahead toward an answer. And this answer is different from a mere 'list of actions' or classic diversification practice (what we call 1st gen portfolios): 2nd gen portfolios are about building deep capabilities for an entire ecosystem to sense, hold, imagine and coordinate aligned and autonomous interventions in a context of vast plurality. They make for a system-wide pattern of governance that is genuinely distributed (eg. whole-of-city), genuinely open-ended (principles over goals), and genuinely conversational: in order to implement actions this practice demands radically distributed interfaces and mediation of resources as a recurring pattern among all actors within an ecosystem. By no means this is a definite answer. Hopefully though it's a contribution to an on-going conversation that might open up some new options (or questions). Already grateful for a week of comments and discussions from Giulio Quaggiotto, Titia Nijeboer, Mikael Edelstam and many more. Curious about all of them.