No matter how much a community wants to change itself, it must prepare its readiness. Certain things must happen and in the right order. First, the existing state must lose its symmetry or its steady state. This is often caused by outside influences such as larger impending dangers or new opportunities arising out of the existing state. Over time this difference perturbs the steady state and creates instability in the existing system helping to dissolve the rigidity of existing system. These “differences can be quite small, but they are persistent” and they set up a perturbation that combines new with old in a manner that a new state is achieved. This state change or phase transition is sudden, complete, and realized in a new form. In chemistry the example would be water to ice or water to steam. In a community, it is more like a paradigm shift where suddenly, the entire community is seeing through a different lens. A new contextual framework has been established and what once seemed impossible to achieve is suddenly within reach.

Tomorrow Makers pulls many of its ideas from nature. We believe that understanding how nature creates ecosystems has much to teach us about assembling complexity.

Our understanding took a big jump with the reading of Out of Control by Kevin Kelly in 1993. This was a seminal book for the experimental research that perturbed further learning and evolution in our own way of working, facilitating and teaching.

http://www.tomorrowmakers.org/our-bookshelf/#kelly

We've encorporated terms such as "phase transition" into our terms of art based on our own understanding and application. Think of them not as set in stone, but rather as a framework for your own exploration, discovery, and use.