Our skills and works are but tiny reflections of the wild world that is innately and loosely orderly. There is nothing like stepping away from the road and heading into a new part of the watershed. Not for the sake of newness, but for the sense of coming home to our whole terrain. "Off the trail" is another name for the Way, and sauntering off the trail is the practice of the wild. That is also where - paradoxically - we do our best work. But we need paths and trails and will always be maintaining them. You first must be on the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild.
― Gary Snyder1
Challenge: How can you develop a relevant capability that will be your inner guide for the complex terrain you must pass through on your way to transformation?
Cluster: Capability Practice Patterns
Type: Essential Practice Pattern
Purpose
The Practitioner Pattern identifies the qualities and capabilities that sustainability practitioners should cultivate in order to work holistically in complex sustainability transformations.
Pattern Description
To apply Living Systems Practice across diverse contexts, practitoners need to foster capabilities beyond normal, linear, mechanistic and conservative professional practice. This Pattern outlines the qualities that practitioners need to cultivate in order to practice effectively in complexity to achieve holistic performance: a generalist as well as a specialist.
Generalists have a capacity to make sense of fragments of information, to have a basic “scaffolding” across different areas, to know their strengths and weaknesses, to identify gaps in their practice settings, to communicate and consult widely, to make connections between apparently unconnected domains and events, and to be prepared to take calculated professional and personal risks within an ethical sensibility.
The implicit mission of any sustainability practitioner is to work on the specific sustainability tasks at hand within the overall scope of a sustainability transformation, as well as foster the emergence of a sustainability culture, to support that transformation.
As sustainability is holistic in concept, practitioners require an understanding of culture as emergent. While mechanistic approaches are appropriate in the right context, it is preferable to default to an attitude based in the holistic, and cultivate a capacity to identify opportunities to connect and to better observe emergent patterns that others may not see. Sustainability practitioners should pursue this capacity as their “inner cultural core.”
With the increasing complexity in the way we do things and our increasing connectedness and interdependence, drivers of change become inherently emergent, and scenarios for the future become increasingly problematic and beyond reasonable prediction. The sustainability practitioner will need to develop a feel for complexity and emergence, as much of the journey to sustainability will traverse complexity rather than being a linear step-by-step approach.
Sustainability practitioners will find themselves working in complexity without appropriate guidance, models or maps. Sustainability practitioners must understand the local system in order to identify patterns and respond to the requirements of the situation, through probing and experiment. When they are informed by higher order ways of knowing and acting combined with a capacity for reflection on experience (as part of an action learning cycle), the practitioner can both self-guide, and be open to guidance from participants. A self-aware responsibility leads a sustainability practitioner through unclear pathways, even if mistakes are made.
Elemental Patterns
Generalist and Specialist: The practitioner works coherently across different scales and contexts; collaborates with people across specialisations and different cultural backgrounds; develops a capacity to assess when to act as specialist or generalist; uses specialist knowledge to test small-scale potential outcomes within larger scale activities; relates coherently to other practitioners who self-identify as specialists yet can identify connections between apparently unrelated phenomena.
Fractal-minded: The practitioner maintains awareness of scale, context and existing patterns at different scales; is capable of identifying new patterns of behaviour in local systems; respects current stabilities and extant patterns of physical and cultural development; understands that action at one scale influences outcomes at other scales.
Navigational: The practitioner develops their own roadmaps in any practice setting, especially the complex and chaotic; informed by their inner culture; discovers a system’s state through probing and safe-fail experiments.
Aware: The practitioner maintains an inner sustainability culture and a self-aware responsibility in relationship with others; acknowledges their own strengths and weaknesses; appreciates cultural environments; knows how to behave appropriately for the context.
Motivated: The practitioner energises a process and inspires participants and collaborators about the prospects for change, through a high level of intrinsic personal motivation; applies specialist expertise with a high level of commitment.
Receptive: The practitioner listens to and learns from local narratives and responses of participants; finds ways to understand and work with local meanings of sustainability, especially where meanings are contested; understands learning cycles and frameworks and matches them to local learning styles and intelligences.
Flexible: The practitioner applies sustainability principles through fluid and flexible processes, to allow space for the range of human cultural expression; avoids applying processes of change that are rigid and ideologically based.
Connective: The practitioner stimulates networks to communicate and generate knowledge, opinions, ideas and stories; understands the significance of informal networks as a source of new ideas about local conditions.
Responsive: The practitioner displays a respectful and genuine attitude; regards participants and collaborators as experts in their own affairs; responds to the requirements of the situation rather than imposing their own agenda; seeks advice about the potential meaning of emergent patterns; stimulates progress at a pace appropriate to local capacity; acts in an inclusive way and models inclusive behaviour.
Resilient: The practitioner understands the unpredictability of complex systems and their tendency to ebb and flow through panarchical behaviour; demonstrates patience to continue with a process under adverse circumstances; understands that sustainability practitioners can be a focus for conflict in contested space and serve as a “relief valve” for a client group.
Reflective: The practitioner reflects on experience to review processes, patterns and meanings; monitors own reactions to events and self-checks for biases, ideologies and habitual patterns; cognitively reviews conclusions and syntheses before communicating them; learns through reflective practice.
Courageous: The practitioner takes personal and professional risks because of the uncertainty of outcomes; maintains the capacity to cope well when projects and processes fail to meet participants’ expectations; is guided by inner sustainability culture when working in change settings where anti-sustainability attitudes are dominant.
Coherent: The practitioner lives authentically, with high-level coherence between sustainability principles expressed through both professional practice and personal life-style; avoids cognitive dissonance between theory and practice, by modelling sustainable behaviour.
Reticent: The practitioner is comfortable with uncertainty, even when things appear to be going well; maintains a humble, yet observant and self-efficacious attitude, as a form of “positive reticence” due to knowing that weak signals are hard to detect, and disruption is never too far away.
Technate: The practitioner has a “technate” capacity; holds technology in its appropriate place, aligned with the nature of the practice setting; understands how to integrate technology, people and place in the service of people and protection of natural systems; relates to technology as a living system, and human systems as socio-technical in character; has a mature understanding of technology as both artefact and social process.
Atlas Navigation
Go to the Elemental Patterns within the Knowledge Pattern:
Generalist + Specialist Fractal-minded Navigational Aware Motivated Receptive Flexible Connective Responsive Resilient Reflective Courageous Coherent Reticent Technate
Go to the Knowledge Pattern within the Capability Patterns Cluster
Go to the Soul Pattern within the Capability Patterns Cluster
Version
Version 1.1 - 20 Jun 2024
Version 1.2 - 23 May 2025
Version 1.3 - 15 May 2025
Snyder, G. (1990). The Practice of the Wild: Essays by Gary Snyder. p.157. New York: North Point Press.