Culturing Developmental Friendship for a Politics of Love

Abstract

When political decision makers become aware of their habitual use of unilateral power, transformation starts. The thesis is this: through self-inquiry regarding habitual power-hoarding, feedback avoidance, and resistance to inquiry, a more participative and inclusive politics is cultured. Though a collective process, the new culture begins with “inner” work of individual politicians. The natural resistance of conventional political structures is acknowledged. Grounded in group relational-psychodynamic theory, developmental friendship becomes an active practice. A new political culture evolves through new habits of feedback and inquiry that increase creative collaboration among additional political actors. The following action research demonstrates a successful evolution of political space within a European context.

Addressing inconvenient truths, such as climate change and social-ecological crises, is urgent. While this paper does not detail the socio-planetary crisis or causes of ecosystem collapse (Stockholm Resilience Inst, 2024), it focuses instead on so-called small “p” human-political processes that support decision making groups in responding to complex challenges that evolve those involved.

The focus is on creating conditions that foster aligned action and counter learning defenses (Argyris, 1990), such as cognitive biases (Kahneman, 2011), including confirmation and normalcy biases. These biases trap system actors in denial or minimization. The paper takes off from asking how to catalyze transformation in the face of deep-seated obstacles.

While individual cognitive reframing is necessary, it is not enough. Indeed it can become over-intellectualized. The action hypothesis is that a relational culture matures through improving its collective feedback, power, and collaboration dynamics. The practice of developmental friendship that is introduced supports organizational maturity (Torbert, 2020), that is the emergent sum of individual maturity in practice with one another. It requires personal growth within and among those who seek to foster culture shift. The work has been trialed across sectors from corporate executives to eco-villages (Bradbury, 2022a). What follows describes action research among European politicians and political actors.

The psychologically and interpersonally toned approach that follows complements technical and economically focused understandings of transformation, e.g., IPBES Global Assessment, 24 2019.^[i] Here, the emphasis is on bringing personal inner development – self-reflection and reflexive experimentations - to acting differently with political colleagues. It extends recent action research concerned with creating social innovations (Bartels et al., 2025) by involving citizens in political governance (e.g., Bussu et al., 2025) through relational mobilization (Skipper & Pepler, 2021).

Group analytic concepts (Grace, 2016), which developed from original psychodynamic relations theory (Bion, 1961; Klein, 1930) are useful here. The depth approach dovetails with Bateson’s (1972) insight that systems learning extends cognitive reframing (Argyris & Schön, 1978) to become transformative when creative, even playful aspects are enhanced. See Figure 1 which notes action, reflection and experiments within one of three orders of learning respectively. Each level of learning is connected by feedback loops that extend toward culturing developmental friendship which in turn feeds back to experimental action and reflective reconceptualization. See also the extended discussion of these underlying concepts in Appendix A, conceptual model.

Figure 1.

Learning as System of Feedback: Experimenting to Culturing Friendship

Transformation of Political Culture Itself: A Multiyear Case

Starting in 2017 a group of around fifty political actors – elected and advisors – began meeting in action researching cycles (Karlsen & Larrea, 2019) within a partnership between regional policy makers and university-based action researchers. The original focus was green recovery, specifically welfare and the future of work. Some years in, the question of the transformation of the political culture itself arose. The author was consulted ¹ to bring creative emphasis on “inner/personal territory” in support of territorial development. In summarizing the potential within a regular meeting of all the policy makers, the author invited each to:

“Turn the camera around on ourselves as policy makers and leaders. Let’s pay more attention to our own meaning making and action taking, both personally and when sharing the implications of our insights with colleagues. Those who volunteer to join in will be supported in personally meaningful projects that you will design to connect back to the mission of green recovery.”

Reflexivity is Destabilizing

The explicit invitation to turn the camera around struck a discomfiting note. While power is well understood as important, interrogating it with implicated others is anxiety-provoking. It would mean that rather than focusing solely on external citizens’ needs, issues of feedback, power and collaboration within the group must be made more explicit. In psychoanalytic terms, such an invitation is likely to generate an “anti-stance” (Nitsun, 2005) in service of maintaining equilibrium, i.e., learning defensiveness ensues to protect a current system of learning.

Indeed, for over 45 minutes, the policy makers and elected politicians broke into discussion of whether to proceed. Of the 10 five-person groups, one dissented entirely. However, when consulted (per the norms of the policy-making body), a strong majority by show of hands had reached an agreement. It was articulated for the formal documentation as a decision to enter into “self-development to enrich the political process, as long as it considers the reality of our system.” A small steering group of political actors, politicians, and action researchers then volunteered to act as the steering group - henceforth referred to as a microworld - from which specific experiments would be designed to ripple out and back to all concerned in the Regional Learning Group (RLG).

Action Research Team Role Models Self-Assessment

The action researching team created the first iteration of the learning microworld. Its focus was to reflect on relational use of power, feedback and collaboration dynamics. For this they used a mobile assessment to learn about their own habits of giving and receiving feedback, as well as their use and or avoidance of power and collaboration. The assessment allows each user to sort among several images to match their own sense of good-, bad- and average-days regarding their use of feedback, power and collaboration. This is then algorithmically compared with a larger data base. Upon completion each user receives a report that highlights individual interpretive habits or “action logics” (Torbert et al., 2004). Appendix B offers additional detail on specific questions and interview protocol; Appendix C illustrates some of the images. In this work self-inquiry is a form of reflexivity in action together.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity refers to the extent to which actors include a personal, involved, and self-critical stance on their role, their inquiry and their power/empowerment throughout the learning and action research resulting in new ways of relating (Bradbury, 2022b). It requires awareness of one’s own biases and how they might be received by others while deliberately practicing putting insights into action in becoming more “stakeholder friendly.”

Those who had volunteered in the public meeting to form a microworld learning group were next invited to self-assess. Assessment users reported to the action research team that they enjoyed the experience of seeing themselves as they considered their own habits of feedback (and its avoidance), power (and its hoarding) and collaboration (and its strategies). All were willing to bring personal insights to shape a personal experiment appropriate to the needs of the RLG.

Group Developmental Edge

The action researching team interviewed the microworld participants about their self-assessment, using an action research approach to encourage interviewees to bring insights to action (Nielsen & Lyhne, 2016). An important bridge between reflection and action was created when interviewees were encouraged to take time to notice and name the emotions that shaped their otherwise “rational” work. Contrasting themselves on a “good vs. bad day,” each had an opportunity to reflect with the action research interviewers on their insights, intuitions and feelings, including those previously denied or minimized. Each actor then briefly described, in writing, a personal experiment and clarified what they needed from others in the RLG, e.g., if experimenting with receiving more feedback, others are invited to share it. This work became part of the ongoing series of workshops.

Designing a developmental edge experiment had to align with the larger group’s goals on enhancing green jobs and welfare. Thus, the assessment and experiments started a process of diving beneath surface experience to a deeper inquiry of motivations and practices regards power, feedback and inquiry, illustrated in Figure 2. See also Appendix D for a summary of how the action research team oscillated between microworld and expanding RLG.

Figure 2.

Diving Into Self-Awareness With Others

Participants’ Voices: From Reflection to Experimentation

The personal experiment of each microworld participant described what they believed would link their own development to that of the political culture in which they worked, with ideally both stretching together, e.g.,

“[a senior male] Now I think of the next step of my development path and, I especially feel the need to support others. That is, I would like to help others develop their transformation skills. I see two ways for this. One is to do an exercise with two or three people who are starting their journey. The other, in collaboration with a researcher or someone else interested in the subject, to write about my lessons learnt. It would be very gratifying if one or a few people in the deliberation group, working with me, would become aware that they have transformative abilities and that it is very good to develop them. If I were to meet my developmental edge goal, all those involved with me would also have more ambitious goals. This would be a good result for the team, all of us! If I took that step and the team raised their level of ambition, this would help us to regain awareness of long-term collective vision. As an innovative community, a key question for all of us now is how do we want to face the global challenges facing the planet?”

“[junior female] I need to develop self-awareness to make my voice more effective in the group. To achieve this, I need the feedback from members of the group. I perceive today that the larger group cannot receive the contribution that I can make, because my voice lacks legitimacy. A step in my development would be to bring more awareness in my interactions. In doing so I would be helping to give legitimacy to the voice of those who do not have a position of hierarchy in the group, and this would make the group more authentic. A small gesture that is true can cause a great transformation. If we can get this group to be more authentic, if we really believe in collaborative governance, this can have a big impact. We are demoralized as a society and this group based can help overcome this demoralization.”

The words in italics of the participants’ narratives (sampled above and in Appendix E) are coded for awareness of how one relates to others as key for transforming the relational dynamics of power, inquiry and collaboration.

In the quotes we see how individuals’ needs and offers combine to develop an experimental microculture that is a little more open and inquiring. Such experimentation is risky too as new openness - with less deference to seniority and expertise - may be experienced as loss as much as gain (Grace, 2016) especially by those who start with most power. The action research team was aware that a small minority – made evident in the first vote against this work – remained unenthusiastic. To grapple with a possibly irresolvable dichotomy of individual versus group and informed by the psychoanalytic idea that not talking about loss risks a backlash (Grace, 2016), the lead action researchers chose to explicitly revisit the earlier problematique of “individualism versus collective.” Still, a strong majority remained supportive, even enthusiastic, about proceeding in what in narrative form appears as a linear process, but is turbulent and requiring ongoing commitment. In the words of a senior actor:

“Opening channels of continuous and face-to-face communication, beyond documents and books, is a [new way of working for us]. Yes, it can be achieved. I’m moving to have two or three face-to-face meetings a year to strengthen this new community of practice.”

What’s at Stake

Next, each system actor of the larger group was invited, per a “photo future” exercise we devised, to share two photos. This was informed by Wang et al. (1996) photovoice, now commonly used by action researchers, (e.g., Seferiadis et al., 2017). One photo was of the old culture, the other a new, political culture, the actor aspires to. We saw a variety of images of [old] hierarchically designed rooms replaced with [new] circle formats; of [old] male politicians on podiums replaced with [new] diverse and youthful leaders, etc. The action researchers collated the photos on two giant screens for a next all actors meeting, placing “before” photos at one side and “after” photos on the other wall. The participants were invited to take seats in between. Beginning with a silent introspection and guided meditation (meditation is highly unusual in this formal culture whose meetings happen within a hall and under the watch of dozens of marble statues), the action researchers then encouraged all participants to “check in” in small groups on the question of what’s at stake – personally and as a group - in creating a new political culture. They were asked to use some aspect of the photos to anchor their point and debrief back into the larger RLG. One senior official, who took up the new openness to political culture, explained:

“Instead of working in hierarchical, conflictual ways, which focuses our attention against one another, we’re starting to work together. We see we can address common challenges. This new culture is leading to the work of multiple agencies becoming more streamlined. This saves time, energy and money. Let’s continue and expand this.”

All were next encouraged to co-write a vision statement for the new culture. It was captured on a large sheet of paper and delivered ceremoniously as input (“feedforward”) into the next stage of political culture development. It was just in time for an upcoming election. In it, more productive citizen meetings were called for; policy makers who wanted would work more inclusively with representative citizens. Around this, younger actors, who had previously felt themselves sidelined, began to express a new willingness to speak, feeling new permission within an increasingly participative-democratic format.

Power and Love Combine

The most commented upon component in the action and learning cycles concerned a new, cautious receptivity to airing - rather than the more usual disappearing of - emotional truths. A senior elected politician agreed to use his own conflict with an action research team member as a “microworld” in which to interrogate power dynamics. Tension over including subjective feelings in political deliberation were aired and resulted in uncovering an unconscious but non-democratic posture that had shackled voices in pursuit of rational discourse. The anti-group sense of loss of the familiar could now be acknowledged directly.

The result was that the senior politician was willing to design a personal experiment in which he’d practice welcoming what he called “softer emotions.” For example, he’d be more spontaneous in public addresses. His discovered enthusiasm for the process led to commenting publicly on the importance of friendship in politics, writing: “It is time to integrate power with love, affection, admiration. The most transformative political relationships that I know have been based on the love that certain people felt for each other,” (quoted in Larrea et al., 2021). The reader might consider that the mention of love is a small but dramatic step for an elected, male politician.

Voices from a following workshop - entitled “politics and emotion” is offered as evidence of some of the ripple effect moving into the larger learning RLG system. In opening the workshop, the author was invited to share her understanding of how the learning experiment was evolving and its implications for the ongoing political culture. After a brief discussion of adult learning and emphasizing a need for openness etc, there was some amusement when all were encouraged to sing along to the Beatles’ “Love is All We Need.” When the floor opened to dialogue, an ex-mayor, himself not previously active in the RLG, shared his own experience of anxiety/panic attacks and made it clear that any new political culture requires us to notice how men and women have been, he said, “brainwashed to discount emotional truths.” His vulnerability piggybacked on the singing and became an invitation to others. A new willingness to talk about heretofore taboo dynamics appeared to be taking root in the room. All participants could benefit from noticing their own contribution to cultural norms and be persuaded that something new is possible, starting with themselves (rather than only waiting leadership). As a follow up - now ongoing – there is an action research study to note and transform gendered norms of political culture. It is progressing with expected tensions.

Additional evidence that a new culture of inclusivity and openness is continuing to expand cautiously includes workshops with stakeholder actors in Latin America (e.g., Argentina, Chile) in which post-colonial tensions between global north and south dynamics are newly discussible. As to be expected, per the psychoanalytic lens of loss and need for mourning, such openness is not received an unambiguous good. What had previously been denied or minimized is also painful to share and to listen to. Rather than retreating into familiar but over-intellectualized debate about rights and privileges, actors involved are supported in choosing to take one step closer to one another in muddling through together (Bradbury & Larrea, 2025; see also Larrea, 2024 for facilitating such work).

Discussion: Delicate Work within Developmental Friendship

The premise of this work is that we unconsciously defend against information when it is anxiety-provoking. We do this despite a conscious desire for learning. Moreover most decision making leaders do so within default power-hoarding hierarchies. As useful as inherited defenses are for our species, they are increasingly maladaptive with today’s complexity.

The experimental emphasis here is on culturing a new pathway of working with excluded voices. It starts with the consenting individual’s willing engagement to take time for self-reflection and follow up with experimental reflexivity. Rippling out – via dialogue (starting with dyadic interviews) it finds fruition in experiments which pattern new transformative ways of interacting with mutuality. While inviting new expressions of mutuality, the emergence of heretofore unacknowledged emotions, such as anger and grief, can potentially lead also to negative group behaviors such as blame which are counterproductive (as Bendell [2024] also discusses when discussing the psychological components of preparing for climate collapse). This is therefore delicate work.

Whereas acting with civility is within easy reach of most people, self-reflection and reflexivity take effort. It is particularly difficult and delicate work because it makes room for potentially destabilizing emotions as anxiety, depression, love to be noticed and absorbed within the relational space. When we sense more closely, we see that reflexivity places demands on actors to notice/become aware of their own invisible thoughts and feelings, per Figure 2. This serves to remind us that not rational thinking alone is no longer in play, even (or especially) within political processes.

Actors are asked to investigate below the surface of their own (reactive) (Garvey-Berger, 2024) thinking, followed by another demand that they make their inner world visible enough to start an actual conversation of feedback with implied others, who are invited to stretch to meet the evolving actor, by also evolving. Yet a conversation itself is also not quite enough as owning any projection about why we may feel resentful or lacking trust becomes focal. For such a level of engaging feedback, awareness of invisible mood and emotion again come also to the fore. Some may argue that this is beyond too many. Indeed, the deeper one dives, the impulse to blame may also arise. Attention, therefore, to developing a space conducive to conversation/dialogue is a potent enabler for generating new patterns of behavior and learning, (Bradbury-Huang et al., 2010). Experimentation and curiosity require giving and receiving feedback; such that self and others are supported in finding mutuality. This is earnest work for all involved and scales to the degree that a group can become self-facilitating. In this, conflicts are actively selected as opportunities for group learning (Larrea, 2019).

In culturing a group to proceed beyond analytic-mind, actors express their willingness to be curious about what is under the surface of their own sensemaking; each moves away from opinions that are sealed off from learning. Creativity and playfulness is especially fruitful in lightening the psychological burden. In our work the creative photo-futures exercise, for example, actors could creatively prefigure their desired political culture. This is simultaneously fun and remains an oblique comment. We also include mindful silence and invitation to feel, rather than just think about or strategize a new political culture. In effect, each actor clarifies for themselves how they are willing to be responsible for bringing interpersonal authenticity to augment the power of the position they enjoy; how much will they practice with feedback; how will they collaborate anew. These commitments point to the components of developmental friendship that together get reinforced as new dynamics of power, feedback and inquiry.

Practicing developmental friendship is not about being nice or being authentic per se. It is a pragmatic movement toward collective learning. Developmental friendship, therefore, rests on a choice that those involved make, repeatedly, to notice and manage their own reactivity. The term is informed by previous experiments at first to transform interpersonal gender conflict (Bradbury & Torbert, 2016) and then elaborated for larger political spaces (Larrea et al., 2021). In sum, developmental friendship is a group enabling relational space shaped by personal commitment to:

1. Engaging in shared work.

2. Bringing high relational regard toward one another.

3. Wishing to develop with one another.

4. Making a commitment to self-development through reflexivity.

5. Experiencing a quest that increases – and requires – mutuality on the way to a more sustainable world.

6. Recognizing the significant role of a “third” presence – namely the community of co-practitioners that includes and transcends individuality.

Reporting from Reflexivity

As co-convener of the learning experiment described, I understood that I too must be a role model. Much like a guinea pig, I too must step to my own developmental edge. Therefore, I too used the self-assessment instrument to reflect on my own habits of feedback, power and collaboration. I reflected especially on my first brush with the public deliberation process, reported above, in which I felt exposed to public feedback. In diving down into my assessment report – which highlights my cumulative habits of sensemaking on both good and bad days - I saw my better self was held constrained by an anxiety over my identity as expert and doubtlessly reinforced after many years within academia. The inner voice sounded something like “if this work is publicly voted down, it’s because I am seen as incompetent, unable to persuade others of the collective value.” Happily, it wasn’t voted down (whew), but the reflection had me see the immobilizing self-blame that I was also denying. I therefore return to a more spacious view of the work, a more inclusive understanding of the group. In this my experiment at my own developmental edge, was to meet my own and others vulnerability. It was true that I was not the expert in charge; but likely also true that others must also feel exposed by my invitation to inquire publicly into power dynamics. I could also see that deemphasizing expertise was, in principle, not a loss but a gain in this context. It allows a more mutual discussion. So, in returning to my developmental edge – and the basis of my own learning experiment – I elected to integrate the voices of self-blame and collective possibility: “Yes, I am an expert in some domains, and I can take a courageous stance in voicing my expertise; simultaneously, like many, I am struggling to get this right. I can allow myself and others a little more playful spontaneity. There may be something very helpful yet to be uncovered together.” This was my new edge as culture-facilitator. My integrative insight led me to sing as described above when opening the workshop on power and emotion. There, after interweaving a short lecture on adult learning (a demonstration of expertise) I invited others to sing along with me in all you need is love. This brought a playful edge that made an ironic gesture to the naïve belief that if we can just all get along, there is the possibility of creativity together. So in encouraging all to sing, literally and metaphorically, I was exposed, with the crucial difference that I no longer felt alone. As illustrated by the ex-mayor who shared of his own vulnerability, we began to experience a culturing of relational space that is post-analytic and a bit playful. We experienced that it is not alien to do this work even within a heretofore conventional political culture. In allowing more humanity in, we could work at a new integration of personal development within the cherished communitarian ethic. We could soften the boundaries between and among actors.

Protainers Enable

Developmental friendship, as described, is both produced and reinforced within a creative learning space whose members are willing to make reflexive experiments. It is helped by ritual openings to meetings, which include, e.g., reminders about confidentiality and listening well, so that we step to our best self (Divecha, 2025).

Bracketing off inner blame and anxiety (as illustrated with my own anxiety and self-blame) is a form of containment. The concept/practice of containment comes from object relations theory (e.g., the depth psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein [1930] and organizational group analysis, Bion [1961]). In this a person is aided in growing within a holding environment/container that by alleviates anxieties as much as possible. Developmental friendship is a form of containment too, albeit referred to as a protainer. Because this work is psychologically difficult and delicate, it is done in service of collaborative group commitments (e.g., green recovery), hence the “con” of container is replaced with a “pro” to imply that the group is working in support of self and others, i.e., pro-sustainability, pro-green future. Said simply protainment allows natural human anxiety to relax toward curiosity and therefore operates at three levels. The three levels are loosely related to the three orders of learning associated with the practice of developmental friendship illustrated in Figure 1. The first protainer is the personal. This personal level of protainment notes and seeks to close the distance between a person’s sense of “best day self” and “bad day self.” This requires a conversation between one part that has access to expanded awareness and another part whose awareness is constricted, fearful and threat focused. A second layer of protainment is interpersonal, that is, conversation with others understood to be developmental friends, themselves working personally with their own reactivity. A third level of protainment is within the group itself to the degree that it enables integrated action-experiments. Protainment as developmental friendship thus offers a virtuous feedback loop which enriches beneficial action. Capacities at personal, relational and group levels sum to the capacity for playful learning aimed toward good outcomes. No one person can bring a perfect protainer, but a group can collectively make up for one another’s anxieties.

Is Protainment and Developmental Friendship Generalizable?

Developmental friendship is operating when people can be in dialogue with their best selves, and then with others’ best selves in support of group goals. Though conceptually simple it is not easy to practice as it involves working with inherited group dynamics whose default includes interpersonal and intrapsychic turbulence (Bion, 1961).

Protainment is determined by capacity for self-awareness, supported by (self-) facilitation and agreed guidelines. As with any natural system it is nonlinear. It is subject to failure and must be understood as ongoiningly delicate and careful work. Fallback is a term given the loss of perspective and capacities that a person may experience in grappling with complexity (Livesay, 2013; McCallum, 2008). Fallback can occur even among the most capable of developmental friends. In fallback we are – for a period - not capable of making sense, and not capable of feeling or acting, or behaving in the way that we might were we acting as our best day selves. In fallback access to developmental friendship is lacking at individual and group levels as individuals, at various stages of awareness of their own motivations, may alternate between avoiding and or externalizing unexamined projections. As with a sport, protainment of self and with others is a practice that must be developed. For example, listening to the other and into our own depth while not remaining alone with a new discovery is a complex move in psychological maturity. We may find frequent opportunities for private practice. As developmentalist Jennifer Garvey-Berger (2024) explains, “this means that when someone does something that we resent, our job is to not hold on to a personal understanding (story) no matter how true it seems—but first to understand the story as arising from uncomfortable sensations in our body. And then, to loosen our grip on the story and explore more cleanly what happened (not our story of what happened) with the other person or people.”

Implications and Possibilities of Protained Developmental Friendship

The existence of developmental friendship is evidenced by its rippling-out, measurable in self-report and group’s exercise of (reinforcing) feedback. While not therapy per se, developmental friendship is therapeutic. It cultures a way of relating and working that may be new for many and opens toward mutuality and away from the practice of unilateral power. The words of a senior actor - who wrote in our regular invitation to anonymously review of our work - are especially significant in pointing to a kind of evidential test in tasting the “proof of the pudding”:

“I really like the ways we’ve been drawn out of our habitual business mode and challenged to move into a more personal space. I've found this very energizing and has turned the whole experience for me into a very personal journey of recognizing my habitual ways of working in the community and seeking to move beyond these. I also like very much … having more ambition for us.”

Others reported that where feedback had been understood previously as disabling (often due to early experiences in strict schools followed by working in a conventionally solemn environment) it came to be experienced as valuable.

Culture Starter of Increase in Feedback, Inquiry and Collaborative Power

Corrective feedback using the processes and practice of developmental friendship diminish argumentation with recognition that normal learning defenses otherwise impede groups. The maturity of a group’s capacity for learning and dealing with complexity is enabled by individuals’ (self) permission to learn and develop together. Self-assessment invites diving down which, in turn, ripples out within a supportive protainer. Those involved are culturing a new way of learning together to do political change work. This is a human centered “inner work” complement to technical notions of political change work that emphasizes external frameworks, say on budgets, but without attention to the mindsets of those designing the frameworks.

Those involved are supported in taking responsibility for interpreting their emotions and acting adaptively. This depth orientation is supported also by recent work in neurology of emotions, e.g., Barrett-Feldman (2017), which demonstrates that the brain is best understood as predicting from the past, but can, consciously, be guided by new self-interpretation. For example, because sensations of anxiety are indistinguishable from those of enthusiastic anticipation, we may consciously choose a pragmatic interpretation (I’m anxious and I’m excited). While interpreting oneself as a victim of external circumstances remains the default mindset of a brain that evolved to avoid attack, we are also flexible enough to withstand and therefore to work creatively with new input. It is estimated, however, that only 20% or so of the professional community is mature enough to tolerate feedback well (Torbert, 2020; Kegan, 1998). Currently, much remains to be learned about why some people mature more quickly.

This work suggests that action research facilitation supports actors in unlearning their acquired cultural habits of learning defensiveness. If a group remains concerned solely with achieving externally mandated goals, and is reluctant to “search inside,” however, it will benefit from the direction of a leader/boss (e.g., the senior politicians in this case), who is willing to connect their personal and collective values as the group undergoes a culture change.

As noted above, this work was initiated in well-resourced Europe and practiced among educated people already actively engaged in action research. Yet we are also aware that colonized mindsets hold spaces inflexible to participation. Therefore, also less well-resourced within and beyond Europe may have valuable access points to the insights, feelings, sensing and new patterns being explored. They too may bring their relative freedom from relatively stifling mechanisms of power to new ways of decision making together.

Future Action Research

The work described is situated in the conceptual world of systems theory. It suggests that learning is also evolving group consciousness as more voices are listened to. To date, the weight of scientific research favors that the human mind receives and transmits into a quantum information field (Theise, 2023). Thus intentional political change efforts, like that described, may be conceived of as self-organizing fractals of a larger ecosystem, e.g., Thiese’s cell work suggests application of complexity theory beyond cells to larger organisms in self-organizing fractal theory [SOFT]. Thus, the work described may, in the future, contribute to myriad and often loosely coupled social change emerging around the globe. As the stranglehold of materialist-empiricism fades, those who have long been working to respond to the planetary crisis may become more evident in their response to eco-social crisis (see Tran & Paka, 2024). After a century of resistance from the defenders of materialism, complexity and quantum theory, working explicitly with consciousness is only beginning to be applied to social research (O’ Brien, 2021). Cultivation of consciousness, as described in this work, therefore brings attention to invisible dynamics which operate as a “culture starter” (yeast) that grows meaningful shift in mindsets. Just as a sourdough culture is also tiny, yet makes myriad loaves in perpetuum, so too consciousness itself may be seen as inherently expanding to include more.

The work described is, obviously, but a drop in the ocean of what is needed for meaningful planetary response to eco-social crisis. And yet. If we consider that a series of Irish citizen assemblies starting in 2016 helped shift a former repressive theocracy toward a bright light of democratizing culture within just a decade (Irish Citizens Assembly Project, 2020), then small groups in conversations with avenues to politicans’ decision-making matter greatly. Consider that citizen assemblies might be, in the terms of this paper, described as “developmental friendship” processes. Their success replicates conversations among best selves through family and friendship groups, which are then organized by policy makers (e.g., in public referendums) to support ways of living more responsive to reality.

Some projects only benefit us when they’re finished all the way. In others, we create value simply by trying. The emergence of microworlds of developmental friendship in political action is a generational project of the latter kind. At the heart of the heart is practicing new ways of practicing power by listening both to self and other and nature. Being inclusive, less rigid and more aware of beneath the surface of rational dynamics we access embodied knowing for how we might better live and work together. The work described has wide applicability to human groups, be they in businesses or in intentional community, in other words where any groups of agentic individuals are seeking to live/work in more learning oriented and ecologically minded ways. Much action-oriented research lies in the future for developing insight on how protainers of developmental friendship may become more useful to more people. The work described continues in experiments and publications.

Conclusion

The culture of political learning described is a form of metamodernist or post-postmodernist approach (Freinacht, 2019) that is happening within political groups as more seek a new flexibility that is power aware. This, future-forming action research (Gergen, 2022; Scharmer & Kauefer, 2025) transforms inherited power, feedback and inquiry habits to permit more agency among more actors seeking to align in response to the increasingly complex world that surrounds us.

The experiment described is its own small “p” political culture change with actors walking a middle path between renewing political culture from within, while opening to new voices (young people/previously excluded stakeholders) and new horizons (the desire to have the experience of more connection with everyday politics).

Transformation in the terms of this paper can be articulated as culturing: (a): individual and institutional actors who constitute the field, (b) creating a relational space of mutuality and, (c) acknowledging previously disappeared structural exclusions, (d) repatterning dynamics through experiments with new ways of working, and thereby (e) prefiguring a future political culture.

The contribution of the paper lies in (1) highlighting the value of a reflective self-assessment to support reflexive conversations within a group, (2) enabling feedback to be used to adaptively repattern emergent organizational culture, (3) offering developmental friendship as personal and collective practice of protainment that allows people work couragelously to transform human structures no longer fit for purpose.

Culturing participative political decision-making results in more of us taking agency in living and working in human and ecologically minded ways. In exemplifing how to link power-aware action research to new patterns of feedback, mutuality and inquiry, the paper calls more action researchers to evolve self-awareness and group consciousness, while we still have time.