SHIFT INSTITUTE

research & development for new systems that thrive

The Shift Institute is the System Shift Lab’s transdisciplinary research & development (R&D) arm, fostering action-oriented living systems frameworks grounded in emerging life-aligned worldviews, which can upgrade our understanding of life and society, as well as underpin change strategies for how people, organisations and networks can transform adaptively to crisis conditions through new ways of living and being.

This not only means supporting decision-makers to make better decisions – it also means working with them to change the systems they are embedded in, which tend to impair their decision-making capabilities, and it means actively amplifying and actioning insights into how to live and be across our networks.

The Institute works at the forefront of producing the best and most relevant ideas across the natural and social sciences, finding ways to integrate their insights so that we can use them to underpin applied whole-systems intelligence. This in turn can help support the development of adaptive organisational change, through the cultivation of wisdom, creativity and coherence.

We help organisations develop capacities for rapid publication, dissemination and testing of new research on the converging global crises we face, their systemic context and consequences, and their local consequences around the world. We also help them leverage research capabilities to explore the development of practical change-strategies, which will in turn inform new research directions. Research and action (praxis) are cultivated to be mutually constitutive in an accelerated whole-systems ‘learning to learn’ process.

Organisations we work with develop the skills to assess in real-time the structural, ideological, and ethical problems associated with the old, extractive paradigm, as well as the systemic, cultural and values-based transformative actions required to achieve breakthrough change. These skills will help individuals, institutions and networks to create and enhance generative new social, economic, technological and political systems for a new, adaptive life-cycle that can catalyse the emergence of an ecological civilization.