This is a continuation of my previous writing on ‘Collective decision-making from the “Awakened We.” That piece came out of a one-month community experiment — a recognition that decision-making can be sourced from something deeper than preference, agreement, or negotiation.
Since then, the inquiry has continued in practice inside Regenera — a three-month living laboratory for building regenerative community culture.
What I’m sharing here are field notes from that lived exploration.
This matters, because the way we make decisions together is already creating the world we live in.
Collective decision-making is not just about methods. It is shaped by power, fear, belonging, and the willingness to tell the truth. In most groups, decisions are made while parts of people remain unspoken — to stay liked, to stay safe, to stay in control. Certain ideas, intuitions, or tensions are compartmentalized or softened before they enter the space. When those parts are included, something shifts. Decisions are no longer something we make, but something that emerges. And how we arrive there already shapes the culture we are creating.
Inside Regenera, we are working with Torus Technology as a simple structure for collective decision-making without central authority. In Torus we work from emergence: what serves now? Rather than trying to anticipate every scenario, we stay with what is present and alive in the moment. Decisions arise from direct contact with what is here.
This shifts decision-making away from managing outcomes, toward responsive action based on what is actually unfolding. This becomes especially relevant in complex, rapidly changing systems.
Proposals move through the group and are shaped in real time by what people sense, say, and take responsibility for. In practice, this shifts attention away from managing outcomes, and toward tracking what is actually happening in the room — in bodies, in relationships, and in the field between us.
What we are learning about collective decision-making
A number of patterns are becoming visible through our decision-making processes. I’ve seen similar dynamics across different approaches, including Sociocracy, Holocracy, and the advice process.
What is becoming visible:
1. Feelings, emotions, and preference
Torus Technology uses the intelligence of the feelings. As described in Regenera’s Codex: After a proposal is made in Torus, each person in the space holds up both hands, with fingers corresponding to their level of resistance to the proposal. Zero fingers means “I have 0 resistance to the proposal; this works for me.” Ten fingers up means “I have 10 resistance and will leave the space if this happens.”
Teammates can also show insistence by pointing fingers down. In this case, ten fingers down means “I have 10 insistence and will leave the space if this does NOT happen.”
Resistance is information that sources from the group intelligence. People share the intelligence behind their resistance or insistence, starting with the highest numbers. These shares take the form: “I feel scared/mad/sad/glad because…” For example, someone might say: “I have 5 resistance. I feel scared because 5Rhythms happens on Sundays, and many people will not be available to clean the fridge that day.”
Based on what is revealed, anyone may make a new or revised proposal—for example, “I propose a fridge cleaning rotation, with two teammates cleaning the fridge on Mondays instead of Sundays”—and check again for resistance.
There are a few distinctions we are using that are very impactful:
feelings as present-moment information
emotions as unresolved past experience activated now
preference as mental positioning that may or may not be connected to present truth
When this is not distinguished, people start relating to the past as if it is happening now.
For example:
“I feel scared about Fridays because I already have another group commitment” can be present information, useful input for our decision
“I feel angry about cleaning rotas because of how my parents used to do it”
is likely activated past material.
If that emotional charge is not digested, it will keep reappearing — and no decision will resolve the underlying tension. You can have ten conversations about the cleaning rota, but it won’t land.
Because the decision is not the actual issue. In our current experiments, we invite people to take responsibility for this distinction, and to process emotional charge outside of the decision-making space when needed.
At the same time, this requires care. This distinction can become a way to dismiss or bypass emotions. That’s not the work. The work is digestion — not suppression.
So that what remains can actually inform the whole.
2. Not all decisions belong in the group
One ongoing learning is discernment. First of all, because group attention is a limited resource. Second, because not every issue needs a collective decision. We noticed that so far we didn’t have any thresholds for people to discern whether to bring their decision to our collective decisionmaking space. In our group reflection it became clear that we want that, to care for efficiency and so that the process doesn’t start to drain us. We want to build a regenerative culture after all.
We invited us all to start asking questions like:
Does this impact the whole system?
For how long?
Does it align with our shared purpose?
Is this actually a collective decision?
Without this discernment, everything becomes collective — and the group loses clarity and energy.
Recently, I gave feedback to someone that their input in a logistics decision felt misaligned with the purpose of that space. I noticed fear in myself while saying it — the fear that the group’s attention was being scattered. The conversation landed, and something in their participation shifted afterward. These moments seem small, but they shape the collective field.
3. Radical responsibility and adult participation
A core practice in this space is radical responsibility.
If you can see a job, it means you have enough capacity to engage with it — not in a rescuing or caretaking way, but in a clear ownership-based way. We assume people are in relationship with what they perceive, not passive observers of it.
This shifts the culture.
Instead of outsourcing authority, people are encouraged to make proposals when they feel tension or care about something. Feelings are treated as information and energy for action, not as something to vent or manage socially.
We also actively notice when we slip into “waiting,” “tolerating,” or “enduring.” These are often subtle ways of placing authority outside oneself. In our feedback session last week multiple of the Regenera members named they could feel themselves slipping into waiting or enduring at times. We want to actively experiment with how to shift this, so decision-making truly is a regenerative process - that gives us energy.
At the same time, we stay vigilant not to collapse into drama-triangle dynamics — especially rescuing or over-owning what is not ours.
Quick feedback is an important part of radical responsibility and part of our culture here. If something is off, we name it. We treat feedback as neutral information. If someone brings something in a way that does not serve the shared purpose, it is reflected. We treat each other as on the same team in learning how to stay in adult responsibility together.
My experience is that this creates a high level of aliveness and clarity, even when it is uncomfortable.
4. Power, belonging, and truth
A recurring dynamic is the subtle question underneath proposals: do I matter here?
This shapes what gets spoken and what gets withheld. Sometimes a proposal is not only about the content itself, but also about something underneath it — a need for connection, for recognition, or for reassurance that one’s needs and perspective matter in the space.
In some moments, this shows up indirectly in decision-making: through tension, charge, or repetition of certain points that seem to carry more than just the practical issue at hand.
We experienced this clearly in one decision-making process that became increasingly tense and emotionally charged. At some point I named that there seemed to be an emotional undercurrent shaping how we were relating to the decision itself, not just to its content.
We then shifted into an “In the Open” session — a space held by the group where people could step into the center and express and embody what was actually alive in them, including raw emotion, thought, and sensation.
What became visible there was not just disagreement about the decision, but a layer of unmet expression and relational tension underneath it.
After this space, something in the field changed. The next day, decision-making moved with noticeably more ease and less friction — not because the issue was solved conceptually, but because coherence had been restored through expression of what was previously unspoken.
5. Group dynamics we are noticing
Some patterns show up repeatedly:
waiting instead of speaking
tolerating instead of engaging
projecting authority outward
pacing differences (some want speed, others slowness)
non-verbal expression carrying part of the signal
These are not problems to fix. They are information about how the system organizes itself under pressure.
We are actively experimenting with how to work with this.
One idea is to create short pairings before sessions between someone who tends to move quickly and someone who tends to move more slowly, so that both perspectives are carried into the space more consciously.
Another experiment is to work more explicitly with the emotional layer around pacing — the fear of going too slow or too fast. This is still exploratory and not yet a formalized practice.
The intention is not to optimize behavior, but to increase awareness of what is shaping participation in real time, so that decisions are less driven by unconscious patterns and more by present-moment clarity. Over time, this tends to create more regenerative dynamics.
6. Working principles we are testing
A few simple orientations we are using in our experiments:
“Good enough for now, safe enough to try” any decision is an experiment we try
Decisions stay in place until they no longer work, which will show when someone brings a proposal moved by their feelings
We don’t look for consensus or agreement, but for low resistance, so we can keep moving forward whilst including the information in the field
We trust that breakdowns will become visible through lived experience, not scheduled review cycles
This is closer to an art than a science. A continuous calibration between structure and emergence.
“The wisdom of the crowd is greater than the wisdom of any individual.” - Aristotle
Working with collective emergence
Part of this exploration is learning to listen beyond the individual. Using practices like Circling or Collective Presencing, attention shifts toward the relational field itself.
Not just: what do I want?
But: what is actually wanting to happen here?
Some traditions have worked this way for a long time, such as the Quakers.
For the Quakers, silence is not a pause — it is the ground. Decisions emerge through shared listening rather than argument or persuasion.
This requires:
letting go of personal timing and agenda
patience for something to take shape
sensitivity to subtle shifts in the field
Whether or not one relates to the spiritual framing, the underlying capacity is the same: listening beyond the individual perspective, including the intersubjective field.
What we are experimenting with next
We are currently testing a number of experiments:
movement and embodied sensing before decisions
a “chair for Regenera” as a way of explicitly bringing in the being and purpose of Regenera into the space
anchoring in wholeness: making decisions from resource rather than scarcity, including assumptions such as what if everything we need is already here?
giving each other feedback on what feels aligned with the purpose of the space and what does not
making smaller decisions individually, while staying in connection through asking for input or advice when needed
What this requires on a personal level
This work depends on capacity, not just intention.
We are learning to develop:
awareness of feelings in real time
discernment between feelings, emotions, and preference
the ability to make clear proposals
the willingness to ask for support
the capacity to stay present in tension without collapsing or controlling
the ability to give and receive feedback as neutral information
the capacity to stay on each other’s team, even when things get tense or unclear
From technique to presence
This remains an open exploration. What becomes visible very quickly is that collective decision-making stops being a technique. It becomes a practice of being in contact: staying present with what is happening, sensing what is emerging between people, and responding without collapsing into control or withdrawal.
The experiments at Regenera are not aimed at arriving at a finished model. What we are working with is alive and continuously changing — and cannot be fully captured in a fixed structure.
What I’m interested in researching and developing further:
a set of principles that can be applied in everyday group decisions
more structured processes that can hold this work in larger systems
the skills and capacities needed to train leaders in this way of working
exploring how sourcing and collective emergence can inform more adaptive forms of decision-making
exploring what it would take for a group to move more like a flock of birds — sensing together, moment by moment, what is needed next
I am curious what others are discovering in their own experiments with collective decision-making, and what becomes available when decisions are no longer something we manage — but something we listen our way into, together.
Go Emma!!
Yes! This is the question you are answering: how to do it! What people need most now is the personal courage to step out of the status quo and implement Torus Meeting Technologies like Purple Card and Frying Pan and Resistance Decision Making wherever they go! Then they are sourcing the Context where Archiarchy thrives!