Begin Again
I.
The summer solstice sun rises scorching hot. The heatwave here a heavy reminder that the global crisis of climate change is already present in England’s green and pleasant land.
Zak Stein says that all global crises are crises of education - education is the meta-crisis.1 So maybe we demand then, let us solve education!
But as he points out, baked into our culture “ is a tendency towards action-bias as the situation heats up.”2 This desire for action is modernity speaking through us, but as Bayo Akomolafe says “the times are urgent; let us slow down.”3
The paradox Bayo Akomolafe gestures us towards is that the actions we need are not the hurried actions of solving but a reorientation to limits. A living inside things that we have previously transcended. In some ways conceptualising that is the easy part. Limits on the economy, our approach to ecology, on political centralisation, on nation states, these are all essential limits, but to achieve those limits requires an expansion of sorts: the meta-crisis asks for greater imagination, greater dreaming, greater coming together.
What that means then is not a reformation of schools, but something deeper and broader. Education is the solution to the meta-crisis if we re-envision education as an intergenerational project; a generalised educative project for the collective.
Recently Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures released Rewiring 4 Reality, a project dedicated to fostering relational accountability, intergenerational connection, and collective growth.4 This is an invitation to explore the complexity of modernity and “challenges participants to interrupt harmful habits of separability, shed illusions of mastery, and cultivate relational accountability.” It is designed to connect generations explicitly, but focuses on Gen Z: as the generation being birthed into adulthood in the midst of this crisis, they are the generation for whom adulting will mean leadership in a world of cascading crises that they did not create.
For those of us from older generations this requires an acceptance of limits for us: this project asks us to step out of the way, to support that process in a way that is different to what we might be encultured to want to do, to resist our action-bias and step into roles of support not through action but through answers. But only answers to the questions that Gen Z might ask:
“What was missed?
What was ignored?
What have you learned—not just in triumph, but in failure?”
This is hard work. We carry cultural baggage. Not only a comfort in and desire for action-bias but we are so deep in this cultural water that we often fail to see just how deeply it shapes our thinking.
II.
This summer the FIFA World Club Cup is being held in the USA in the heat of the summer and action-bias is showing up in the commentary too. Euro-centric football philosophies being pushed globally is a phenomenon that mirrors how we have pushed a governance, economic and philosophical viewpoint globally.
The BBC speaks of the “weather concerns continuing” and quote the Borussia Dortmund manager, Niko Kovac, as saying that it is “like a sauna” whilst acknowledging that whilst "It was tough going for both teams, but the opposition are used to it [in South Africa]."5
This is a kind of intellectual arrogance in action. Jamie Hamilton says:
“What makes players ‘good’ is increasingly seen through a reductive physical lens.
This is not a nostalgic argument. It is a methodological one. If we are to understand football as a global phenomenon, we have to stop treating European football as its unmarked standard. We have to ask not just what tactics work, but why certain tactics are seen as intelligent at all. The goal here is not to displace one hegemonic centre with another, but to recognise that what we call “analysis” is never just observation, but interpretation, shaped by history, money, power, and climate.”6
We’ve imposed our worldview onto the world, in football, in education, in economics, in such way that we have sidelined or erased different perspectives and cultures that might offer different ways of thinking about and approaching the meta-crisis. We don’t have the cultural intelligence to bring in others who might help guide us imaginatively through the necessary journey of limits.
If we can’t see that with regards to playing football in a hot climate in the summer, one might wonder, what hope we might have for the actual meta-crises of inequality, energy or climate breakdown. How blind have we become to the consequences of our neoliberal philosophy and how it has taken hold in everything?
Jamie Hamilton’s body of work is an ongoing inquiry into a philosophy of football that is most prevalent in Latin America that is completely overlooked and underappreciated in Europe. As Hamilton points out, in South America they have learnt how to play with heat.
“What these [European] laments actually reveal is not a meteorological problem, but a conceptual failure: the inability, or unwillingness, to adapt tactical methods to different environmental contexts…
So the failure isn’t climatic, it’s methodological…
Heat makes the meat visible.”
Heat is a limiting factor. In football and in life.
III.
Accepting limits is antithetical to those raised in the belly of Empire. To face climate change is to turn fully towards the fact that the patterns that exist in the Anthropocene are in some ways failures to contend with limits. But when accepting this we need not ask ourselves what we should cut from our lives, the question is how do we reorient ourselves. Not better analysis or observation, but different interpretations and different orientations, and different generations being trusted as active agents in that process.
In some ways the work that I have done, the work of all radical self-directed education spaces over the last ten years, is an action towards the call to centre Gen Z leadership in global problems. Seeking to provide them as teenagers with the tools they might require, creating contexts for sharing the wisdom of adult facilitators from older generations in answer to the questions that they pose to us, all the while attempting to rewrite, in the here and now, some of the limits that our culture is very comfortable imposing.
Consent-based education is a rejection of the limits we place on children based on adultism.
Self-directed education is a rejection of the limits imposed upon youth by our obsession with productivity and a view of progression in education as akin to a just-in-time manufacturing model. In rejecting this we move towards wholly trusting individuals with ownership of their journey.
Consensus based decision making is a rejection of the limit that our understanding of governance has birthed in us, that speed in decision making is the ultimate good, even over solutions that take time and allow for everyone to get what they want.
Play-based education is a rejection of the limits imposed on us when we reduce education to product over process.
As someone who thinks deeply about play and the capacity within it for children to engage in deep learning I have spent the last month or so designing a board game. I was interested in creating something that explores collective decision making processes. I wanted to create the framework of a game that could hold as much learning in the reflections brought forth from playing it as in the action-bias of playing itself. I wanted to create something that touched on the themes of limits; both that they feel deeply now, but also those that they will have to contend with as they age into adulthood.
I offered to share it with a small group of self-directed young people who kindly agreed to beta-test it with me. I created this game with the assistance of Braider Tumbleweed II, an AI chatbot that was spawned in the Rewiring 4 Reality project.7 It’s a messy garbled attempt at a decolonial board game8 birthed out of questions about neoliberal subjectivity in self-directed education9 and place based-education, midwifed with AI help, and is still in the process of becoming. A project/process for personal inquiry that turned into a project/product for play.
IV.
Begin Again is set in a post-collapse society and it invites young people to create a community deep in the woods and reckon with the challenges of navigating how to go about doing that, asking young people what culture they want to create as they go about rebuilding society.
“Creating culture through change-up or community meetings at self-directed learning communities is actually quite boring, most topics are not relevant to me.”
The mechanics of the game are somewhat simple. There are twelve prompt cards for decisions that need to be made. Broadly taken in turn they move from the practical to the social, through the emotional and into the spiritual. There are two ways of making decisions and each round alternates between the two.
“Sometimes I go along for the change up meeting because I have something to say and don’t want to miss out on saying it - but it is still not relevant to me. It is still boring.”
Every odd round the players decide by simple majority voting, whilst in every even round they must use sociocracy to come to a consensus decision that is “safe enough to try, good enough for now”.
“Often it is a useless subject and so unworthy of your time. You want to have a presence though. If someone is going to do choose something that I feel is wrong you at least want to stop that. You have to be there because sometimes it is so stupid, you have to be there to make sure that this stupidity isn't allowed here.”
V.
Why do we use meetings?
The most universally despised aspect of adult life transported as the only vessel of specified time that they are expected to sail?
I’ve always argued that meetings should be efficient and place connection at the centre of them to drive engagement. Miki Kashtan says that “efficiency in meetings is about increasing the ratio of useful output to energy expenditure.”, whilst agreeing with me that one of the three key experiences of the decision making process is connection, built around an understanding of shared needs.
That’s not always what I’ve seen. It’s hard work.
If people are able to say their why, they can more easily let go of their what.
Needs are abstract qualities, values, aspirations or purposes; they are not specific people, location, actions, time or objects.10
It’s why I value the idea of placing what needs are being served by any proposed solution on a community change up board alongside the solution itself. And always bring the discussion back to the shared needs.
“I observed that other children interject and bring discussions into small situations. For example we often struggled to maintain the focus of meetings when people were given the opportunity to speak and broadened the topic to the things that they were interested in.”
VI.
Begin Again is less a board game and more a facilitated experiential learning workshop for young people. I think it works best like that, but really I can only imagine. I’ve only ever played it once, and not the whole way through. Whilst it is an accurate description it also sounds much more convoluted, pompous and important.
What role does that allow me to play when explaining it?
Each player receives a role card at the beginning of the game.
What is a role?
What roles do we play in life?
Why do children love role play?
Why did they all grab a piece of paper to draw their character before they had even been given the card - a need for a rich dramatisation and fuller embodiment of the role they were about to step into?
VII.
What roles do adults bring to meetings?
What roles might young people be bringing?
What baggage of culture might they bring in through the door?
In Begin Again the roles are generalised descriptions. They aren’t specific but broad. I don’t know how to describe it: show don’t tell means something more particular, but I’ll just show you an example of a role card.
The Tinker
You fix things, break things, and invent strange tools. Your shed is full of wire, buckets, and mysterious projects.
🔧 You care about: making things work, using what’s at hand, keeping stuff running.
💭 Ask yourself: “What will break if we don’t think this through?”
VIII.
Roles provide a framework through which we think.
How are our thoughts mediated by the roles that are required of us?
How do we perform our role(s)?
When roles are clear, co-created, and flexible, they can provide a container for vulnerability, experimentation, and belonging - psychological safety. But when roles are rigid, imposed, or unclear, they can create anxiety, confusion, and withdrawal.
What systems and processes can we design for thinking?
Should we design for roles, or for role playing?
How do we design for inclusivity?
What are the downstream effects of initial learning community design for autonomy, competency and relatedness - the pillars of self-determination theory?
Perhaps we use a talking stick, or raise hands and wait to be called upon by a chair, because deep thinking requires people’s attention. We need Time To Think.11
A circle is a metaphor for something deeper in our psyche. We reorient our bodies in physical space to reflect that the process by which deep thought is created is in community with everyone.
It is in a community that we learn to settle on our roles.
But is that a limitation or can it be empowering? Or both perhaps?
Can we create culture without roles?
What roles become required of us by initial culture design?
And what if those roles are carriers that solidify power, identity, or contribution into pattern and expectation?
“Meetings are a container for talking, it can take away certain barriers and allows people to talk and talk and talk.”
IX.
In Begin Again we think things through by being asked to make decisions collaboratively. In our time together we only managed to play four of the twelve problems. They were:
Where to place the village in the woods?
Where to get the water from for our village?
Where to source the timber and what to build with it?
Should we build fences or not?
We alternated between voting rounds - where we went round the circle and each present the solution to the problem that our role might suggest. And then we simply voted: majority rules.
However during the sociocracy round we listened to the problem on the card and went round the circle in turn. However, this time we presented what problems our given role might perceive. Then a discussion was facilitated on how to solve those problems working towards a decision that all players could consent to.
X.
You can’t really talk about decision making in the real world without talking about power.
Every round in Begin Again power cards are dealt out. Each person receives a card with a number on. Most players receive a 1, however, there is one card with a 3 and one card with a 5. Those players in that round have more power than everyone else.
How will they wield that power?
In the face of that power what choice do they have?
“I don’t think it is fair that adults have power over children!”
When it comes to a vote everyone’s vote is multiplied by their power card, giving some players a disproportionate amount of voting power.
“I actually really appreciate everything that my parents do for me though. I get that they have power over me, but they share it pretty well, like they didn’t move us abroad when they wanted to because we didn’t want to go. You have to think of everything that they have done for you, like a house, like working to pay for everything.”
What is more important here? The argument or the sentiment?
The written text as is or the felt experience? What was alive in the room?
You won’t know, you weren’t there, but affect and desire are fields that have to be tapped into as facilitators. This requires work, attention, and skill. Perhaps in that moment when I was looking for the particle of desire I was missing the wave of affect; perhaps when I felt the wave the particle passed me by.
Can you keep your attention on both at the same time? Schrödinger’s facilitator.
XI.
When we played it took them a good five minutes at the end of the game to reflect on the fact that under sociocracy there was no point in holding one of the power cards. That power had no possibility of being exerted. At first they thought that it did. They even made claims that they really enjoyed having the 5 when it was a sociocracy round. They enjoyed having the power, despite it being null and void in the game.
“I think we would all prefer sociocracy to be the method of governance in our lives.”
Once a week my friend facilitates this small group in a light touch self-directed education project. My children and I had joined them today. Between those young people whose weekly rhythm this was and my own, there was no-one who hadn’t been to a two or three day a week learning community and spent at least a year in attendance; some had spent up to three years in these spaces before.
No-one had not been exposed to sociocracy quite substantially already.
Yet, no-one said, “this reminds me…” Or, “my lived experience of using this system is…”
Every dot not finished in those sentences was a dot not connected in the room.
Why? How? What!?
XII.
They did notice that during the game when we had made a decision we could then draw on the board to represent that decision. I only let the person with the 5 power card do the drawing. I didn’t say anything, just passed them the pens as I asked them if they would draw for us. They noticed this perk before we had finished playing three rounds.
XIII.
Children learn by observation, by paying attention to the fields of power.
What allowed one observation to be so quick, whilst for the other we waded through treacle comparatively even with heavy scaffolding and leading questions?
What does that say about childhood observation?
About how and where and under what circumstances children place their attention?
XIV.
Deciding upon how best to access water took forty-five minutes. This was the first round of sociocratic decision making we played. I don’t remember holding a sociocratic meeting at The Garden that had the full attention of everyone involved, a community ranging between a dozen and a score of young people at a time, for such a prolonged period of time.
What does this say about embedding sociocracy into learning community culture?
Is there something being missed about the importance of follow through here?
Or put another way, am I missing the learning that comes with facing the consequences of your decision impacting on your life as opposed to the solely imagined consequences of placing ripple tokens on the board?
I can’t discount that that learning must be happening. I can’t deny that I have seen that growth and learning myself in learning community members.
But I also can’t discount the comparative feelings of aliveness that I’m naming.
These questions are offered as a crack not a criticism.
Cracks are how I theorize the hidden tensions that escape ontological capture… cracks are not simply ruptures to be feared or repaired.12
XV.
In Begin Again every decision is reckoned with by placing tokens on the board that represent the consequences of that decision. As a community we have to self-select the level of impact in each domain, low, medium, and high, and as we play on we have to metabolise those impacts. Reckon with the consequences of our previous choices and tend to the fallout, try to fix it if we can.
There are six domains: social tension, land and trees, non-human kin, labour, spiritual/emotional field and water. Six potential sites of cracking apart that invite us in:
Cracks do not just let light in, they let world in. When we say cracks come with their own weather, we name their atmospheres of grief and astonishment, their humidity of longing, their winds that do not blow in straight lines. We name the business of becoming undone in ways that make new touch possible. We speak to the climates of feeling that resist tidy names, where sobbing might be a form of measurement.13
XVI.
One girl was brought to tears talking about power dynamics in the family home. A parent’s preference for finishing conversations with adult friends that made her late to her drama class.
"We never talked about power in a good way at our learning community. The only power dynamics that were really discussed were size and age differences. Not proximity to adult facilitators, or proximity to the most powerful young people in the community, or how young people reorganise their social life around those proximities."
XVI.
We played for two hours on that first trial run. Not only was it one of the most engaged sociocratic decision making processes I have ever seen discussing water access for the village, but forty five minutes later and we were still playing, hungry for more sociocratic discussions as we wrestled with the implications of whether to fence our village or not.
After we had wrapped the game up for the day we moved into a reflective session: one of the most potent, generative, and honest conversations about power that I have had in a self-directed education space and it happened at the end of two hours of intense concentration.
Why was this game so alive with engagement?
How did it stretch so long and deep?
Does efficiency equal engagement?
Does efficiency create connection?
Was it really just because it was a game?
“Games are just more fun than meetings. Meetings are boring.”
I wonder if Kieran Egan would say that learning communities exist too greatly in the philosophical/ironic mode and too weakly in the mythic/romantic.14
Maybe meetings should centre meaning making?
“It feels like meetings are a way to force people into an idea that we are adults and we need to discuss what we want to do. But we don’t.”
If you bump up against that sentiment what do you do with it?
Ask them what they think?
Can children fully and easily name their experience?
Especially to adults?
But why be a facilitator if you don’t believe you have a particular skill in helping them name it?
Then you must accept that this skill reveals within its own self-acknowledged power a limitation?
XVIII.
Intellectual discernment is the… capacity to navigate multiple complex moving layers of reality and assess possible opportunities for responsible intervention and experimentation, rather than flattening these layers and imposing coherence in the search for comfort, consensus or definitive solutions.15
I once sat in a discussion about a picnic bench being used as a football. Half an hour of discussion where we discussed how to use this bench. How should we share this resource? A conversation where power weaved its way into the discussion as it always does, in this instance by going first and framing the debate about the use of this item as a bench. When a teenager proclaimed this bench is for sitting on, and then no-one named that to the seven year old’s it was in fact to them a bench-goal, we had to endure half an hour of them having to argue their case on his footing, by his terms, by the adult identified recognition of what the item was. Offering them a goal as a solution didn’t change the epistemic violence of negating their experiential understanding of the bench-goal.
Compromise is a lose-lose situation.16
The above quote comes from the fantastic book by Miki Kashtan Convergent Facilitation.
“Meetings always felt like a diversion from what you were trying to achieve.”
XIX.
Children sometimes talk in riddles. They are poets in miniature.
Is it our job to read between the lines of their poetry?
Sometimes I think so. As facilitators we should focus on harvesting every bit of wisdom that someone says. Excavate to find deeper meanings that can truly serve the group. Focus on the deeper need and frame it in a way that speaks to the whole group.17
But then sometimes when playing a board game they say to each other:
“Do we want to live in a community of trust?”
And then ask each other:
“Do we want to live in the story of separation?”
And sometimes I realise that the gift of youth is to speak straight to the philosophical problem at the root of modernity, the core issue of colonialism and the way it has encultured us with respect to the land, non-human kin, the ancestors, and each other.
XX.
What lessons are there here in this first tentative play-through?
What is it about games that not only make them fun but allow tween girls to step into a different onto-epistemological framework with such ease?
I don’t really know.
I really would like to know how learning communities integrate play and games into their culture creation. I know that that exists, but how deeply I’m not sure, and could we go even deeper?18
Or is it breadth that is needed?
Or a Cartesian coordinate that we might struggle to understand?
An imaginary number on a complex plane that is solely for imagination creation in young people that we as adults have left behind - fingerprints on an abandoned handrail.19
I’ve written before about negotiating the non-negotiables; about trusting young people fully with the process, co-designing the structure from the get-go.
I wonder if even that is enough?
How can we even presume to know what to do?
In my experience the best facilitation happens outside structures, when facilitators lean on all their experience to interject themselves with just the right amount of presence and authority in the heat of the moment.
Heat makes the meat of facilitation most visible.
Oftentimes structures can let too much light in; the formality can become a crack, an opening that is too broad, where too much perception gets let in, testing the limits of psychological safety - where the meat becomes too visible.
XXI.
When I was at a learning community conference at Sands School listening to an adult explain the benefits of sociocracy to a room full of other facilitators and teenagers from Sands a seventeen year old pupil interjected to say:
“You are explaining sociocracy as if this system is the best system for me as a teenager, but why do you get to decide what the best system for me is?”
I came home pondering on how there wasn’t an answer in the room that satisfied him, or even me, and then a few weeks later a fourteen year old I know said exactly the same thing.
I said, “Baby, you’re my wings.”
She said, “Baby, you’re a fish.”20
XXII.
In the third round we voted on where to get the timber and what to do with it. At this point, over an hour and half in, a young person took a movement break outside and went to bounce on the trampoline. The remaining seven voted and the vote was split four to three. We turned over the power cards and suddenly the result switched.
The person holding the power card worth 5 was in the minority, allowing them to tip the result in their favour. Instantly there was great indignation from two of the young people playing who felt that this was not fair. As this consternation reached a crescendo the abstainer returned to their seat.
“Let them vote, they might have voted with us!”
“But abstainers are part of democracy,” I explained, “the votes have been cast, and so we must move on.”
Afterwards when reflecting on the game with them I asked the two of them what felt wrong to them when the power card influenced the vote.
“It felt as if the vote was not fair because the power card meant that even though there were more of us they still won.”
“And you didn’t enjoy the fact that you lost?”
“It felt unfair and it felt like they had only got what they wanted because of the power card and they were happy about it.”
I turned to the person who had held the power card in that right, the one who had swung the vote.
“Did you feel happy when the decision was changed by the fact that you had the power in that round?”
“No, not really.”
“Why is that?”
“Because they were unhappy and I didn’t want to make people unhappy. It wasn’t my fault that I had the power card. I felt responsible.”
XXIII.
After observing such a rich, energetic and long exploration of consensus decision making and power dynamics, fairness, and process, with active listening and such care being attended to by young people in a game environment that ran counter to the experiences I often had with them in person, when supposedly “real” community problems are at stake I was left wondering a lifetime of questions, and the meta-question that is at stake when seeking to respond to the meta-crisis through the lens of collective education. A question about accepting the limits of my knowledge and understanding.
What power do I have as an adult, but more importantly how does my imagination lack the capacity for understanding what the inner experience of a child is?
How does that lack of capacity for knowing impact how I relate?
And then how does that impact how they relate back?
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.21
Thank you for reading this essay. I hope, having got this far, that it is clear that what I have written is an exploration in thinking for myself that would be greatly enhanced by your involvement. Please feel free to either comment on the post, or email me at tim.d.rutherfod@gmail.com where I would be glad to invite correspondence with you.
If you work with young people and would like to hear more about the game and trial it yourself I am happy to respond to that request and freely give you the resources to do so. Just reach out.
This comes from the title of Zak Stein’s epic essay on the meta-crisis and the educational response needed for Perspectiva magazine. Found here: https://systems-souls-society.com/education-is-the-metacrisis/
Zak Stein, as quoted above.
The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down by Bayo Akomolafe. Found here: https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/the-times-are-urgent-lets-slow-down
Rewiring 4 Reality by Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective. Found here: https://decolonialfuturesnet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/cross-generational-reckonings.pdf
BBC Sport Website. Found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c70r41x6kg5o
https://medium.com/@stirlingj1982/meltdown-d2313b6591df
If you search on Chat-GPT for the bot Braider Tumbleweed II you can find it there.
If you are thinking who is this guy to create a decolonial board game you are right. I think the point of this essay is to say who am I to do anything. I have been living with imposter syndrome over the last year despite knowing that my capacity for facilitation with young people is significant, wrestling with the fact that I was just a parent unschooling their children when I started this path. Asking the questions when did I turn into an expert? Am I even an expert? Aren’t all parents on an deschooling journey experts too? And who should even pay me for this work? And whilst I reckon all of those things there is a burning sensation that my work in self-directed education combined with my deep affectation for place-based education (can’t footnote a footnote but David Sobel has written fantastically on this) and my experiences of growing up in Herefordshire as outlined in home leaves me with a set of questions about place and spirit that I feel is lacking SDE in the UK at least. But yes, you are right to ask who is this guy? What makes him think his action-bias here is worthy.
Resisting and disrupting neoliberal subjectivity in self-directed education: what can we learn from black homeschoolers by Renee Tougas. Found here: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/oth-03-2024-0010/full/html
From Convergent Facilitation. People, locations, actions, times and objects can be remembered as PLATO.
Time to Think by Nancy Kline.
A crack comes with its own weather by Bayo Akomolafe Found here: https://986st.r.sp1-brevo.net/mk/mr/sh/1t6AVsd2XFnIGISmZFBBb4iCE5vsIv/F3YRKZg226Ri
As above
The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding by Kieran Egan.
Notes on the SMDR compass by Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. Found here: https://decolonialfutures.net/notes-on-the-smdr-compass/
Convergent Facilitation by Miki Kashtan
Convergent Facilitation by Miki Kashtan
I did do some research on this when I was creating this game and found little evidence. Apparently there is little in terms of games developed to teach sociocracy. I guess as it is predominantly a tool used in the adult world and is an extremely niche tool for using with young people. Hence the lack of games. I’m sure that some Agile Learning Centres would have some really interesting practices, I just haven’t been able to find anything written up about them online.
Bob Mortimer said this - a national treasure.
From Asaf Avidan’s song Your Anchor
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.