"What Do You Do?": An Explainer

When people ask what I do for work, I hesitate, not because the work lacks clarity, but because our language for it does.

At its simplest, I operate as a "radical free agent." 

Radical, here, means root-level, a commitment to first principles and a refusal to inherit unexamined assumptions. Free agent names a deliberate choice to work beyond formal institutional constraints in order to maximize agency in service of collective impact. Agency, in this sense, is the capacity to respond fluidly to emerging needs rather than be constrained by institutional territory, budgets, or mandates. This independence allows me to become what a community most requires in a given moment, whether that's a strategist, a translator, or a quiet connector behind the scenes.

At its core, I work to catalyze and connect communities and initiatives. A catalyst does not impose direction. It reduces friction so momentum can build. In practice, this might involve convening actors who share an intention but lack coordination, or clarifying a strategic question that unlocks movement.

Professionally, I describe this as systems change strategy and network weaving. Personally, the boundary blurs. This work is less a traditional occupation and more a disciplined mode of participating in society, shaping how I spend my days, build relationships, and allocate attention. Livelihood and life converge around contribution.

The Water We Swim In

A radical free agent stance only makes sense in context.

Most people rarely examine the systems they inhabit, including culture, markets, governance, finance, infrastructure, and social norms. These structures are popularly compared to water for fish. They remain invisible until they destabilize.

That destabilization is underway, manifesting as ecological breakdown, economic fragility, political polarization, and institutional distrust. Many of these crises share a common root in industrial-era logics applied to a hyperconnected, living planet. We built social and economic machinery as if humans were separate from nature, as if complexity could be reduced to linear control, as if growth had no ecological boundary.

Systems change strategy asks a simple but uncomfortable question: what must shift in the underlying architecture, not just in surface symptoms?

A system, in this context, is the web of relationships, incentives, narratives, and material flows that shape behavior at scale. Change the architecture, and different outcomes emerge. Ignore it, and reforms remain cosmetic.

The aim is to transition toward regenerative systems, social and economic arrangements that restore ecosystems, strengthen communities, and circulate value in ways that increase collective wellbeing over time. This shift requires awareness of complexity. Living systems are adaptive, interdependent, and context-specific. One size does not fit all.

Strategy at this level concerns leverage. Where are the points of intervention that alter trajectories? Which assumptions need revision? Which alliances unlock movement?

Working at this depth often requires freedom of movement across boundaries. Institutional roles tend to optimize within a defined mandate. A radical free agent can move between mandates, carrying coherence where fragmentation persists.

Network Weaving as Free Agency in Practice

Network weaving is a practical expression of this stance.

In modern professional spaces, networking centers the individual. Who can advance my position? Which contact increases my opportunity?

Network weaving zooms out to consider the entire system. Where are silos blocking flow? Which communities share complementary capacities but lack connection? Who is absent from the room yet essential to the outcome?

A network weaver maps relationships across a landscape and deliberately strengthens the ties that increase systemic health, meaning resilience, trust, information flow, and coordinated action across different contexts.

These systems can be understood across several dimensions. Domains refer to fields such as finance, governance, food systems, education, or technology. Scales range from individual to local, bioregional, and planetary. Contexts differ culturally, politically, ecologically, and economically. Time horizons stretch from short-term interventions to generational transformation.

Most initiatives operate within one or two of these dimensions. A radical free agent operates across them, sensing patterns and strengthening coherence.

In practice, this looks like convening unlikely collaborators, translating across informational, cultural, and institutional silos, and cultivating shared orientation, introducing people who should know each other, clarifying misunderstandings, and aligning local initiatives with broader efforts.

This work primarily operates across nested systems. An individual exists within a locality, a locality within a bioregion, a bioregion within a planet. Each level has distinct dynamics and influences the others. Progress at one scale that contradicts another eventually collapses.

For systems to transform, alignment across scales becomes essential. Local transitions must resonate with national policy and planetary boundaries. Global frameworks must remain grounded in lived realities across varying contexts. Information asymmetries between levels frequently prevent coherence. Weaving actively reduces those gaps.

Current Portfolio

The following initiatives represent the nested systems approach described above, each operating at a scale that mutually informs and reinforces the others. Subsequent posts will explore different components of this portfolio in depth.

Local

I base my community level work around where I live in Sevenoaks town. I primarily engage through Sevenoaks Climate Action Network, contributing to community energy and Library of Things initiatives, co-organizing the 2026 Sevenoaks Climate Fair, and introducing frameworks like doughnut economics into local discourse. In my personal capacity, I am critiquing local planning and governance documents and identifying where emerging alternatives can be made actionable for councillors and residents.

Bioregional

I work to strengthen coherence across the river valleys and ridges surrounding Sevenoaks, exploring how dispersed local initiatives can be woven into a functioning bioregional system. This involves deepening existing efforts in the Darent Valley and exploring the conditions for a similar initiative along the Greensand Ridge. I also contribute to Bioregional Thames as a co-steward, helping hold the collective vision and bridging valley-level activity with the broader Thames bioregional network.

Planetary

I am becoming active within the UN Regeneration Collective, a community of current and former UN staff, diplomats, and experts exploring what it would mean to return to first principles in designing global governance. The existing architecture, built on a neoliberal nation-state logic, is structurally inadequate for the entangled challenges it faces. What is needed is something capable of genuine planetary sensemaking, radical decentralization of power, and designing for complexity, while acknowledging humans as one participant within a broader community of life. I am currently sensemaking within the network, identifying where my specific experience and skillset would have the most leverage.

Finance (as a cross-scale domain)

I contribute to Financing Ecosystems for Systemic Transformation (FEST), a field-building community prototyping new ways to direct capital toward systemic transformation. Rather than optimizing within existing financial structures, FEST develops pooled, collectively governed mechanisms that resource practitioners, community leaders, and field-builders whose work generates long-term value the current economy struggles to fund. My contribution spans strategy and relationship-building through co-designing prototype fund architecture and convening with grassroots actors, systemic designers, and investors.

Across Scales and Domains

I analyze institutional, organizational, and community strategies through a systemic, regenerative, and bioregional lens. I critique embedded assumptions, identify leverage points, co-design transformative alternatives, and translate complex information into actionable entry points for those who want to engage directly. 

Funding a Radical Free Agent

Few organizations formally hire for cross-scale systems change strategy or independent network weaving. Institutional structures are rarely designed for boundary-spanning roles.

For this reason, I am experimenting with a dual approach to financial sustainability.

Freelance collaboration: Organizations or individuals engage my strategic and weaving capacities for specific initiatives. Terms remain flexible, acknowledging uneven resource distribution across the field.

Portfolio patronage: Rather than funding a single project, supporters sponsor the coherence of the whole. This model allows individuals to contribute recurring or one-off funding to sustain cross-scale work that might otherwise remain neglected or invisible. The intention is not personal extraction, but enabling sustainability for a catalytic role that strengthens many efforts simultaneously.

Support for this portfolio complements direct funding to organizations by enhancing alignment and shared direction across them.

Process Over Blueprint

Traditional funders often ask for a step-by-step plan, but complex systems rarely permit one.

This work takes the form of an iterative feedback loop.

Sensemaking: Inquiry must be continuous. What is actually happening in this context? Who holds influence? Where are flows blocked? What initiatives already exist? Jumping prematurely to solutions wastes energy and fragments effort.

Collective orientation: Through dialogue and relationship-building, communities clarify a shared guiding star, not a rigid endpoint, but a directional commitment toward regenerative outcomes.

Coordinated action: Complexity-aware, context-specific steps gradually transform the system in line with that shared direction.

Learn and repeat: Complex environments demand continuous learning rather than linear execution. How are interventions unfolding? Are any outcomes misaligned? Reassess. Reorient. Adapt.

This pattern echoes established adaptive cycles in organizational theory and complexity science. Competence lies less in predicting outcomes and more in navigating uncertainty with integrity and responsiveness.

"Why Not Just Get a Job?"

The honest answer is structural. The work required for regenerative transformation does not fit neatly inside existing institutional containers, since most remain optimized for incremental improvement within the current paradigm.

Operating as a radical free agent is a deliberate response to that constraint.

We are entering a period of accelerating disruption. If alternative, life-aligned systems are not cultivated in advance, collapse leaves a vacuum easily filled by more extractive or authoritarian forms. Proactive co-creation of regenerative structures provides something to reach for when existing arrangements falter.

Only a minority have the privilege to focus on this transition full time, and where that privilege exists, responsibility follows. My choice reflects an assessment of my own positioning and the leverage it affords. Dedicating energy to systemic transition generates greater long-term value than contributing incrementally to business as usual.

I do not claim singular importance. This transition requires millions of people across roles and contexts. My contribution involves catalyzing alternative architectures and weaving coherence across domain, scale, context, and time horizon, while protecting the freedom necessary to move where the system most needs reinforcement.

Working Together

This engagement model is intentionally flexible. Different collaborators operate in distinct contexts, and rigid service categories tend to obscure more than they clarify. With this in mind, it helps to name what collaboration can actually look like.

For organizations and initiatives, this might involve:

• Facilitated sensemaking sessions to surface dynamics, gaps, and leverage points before jumping to solutions
• One-on-one strategic advisory for navigating complex or uncertain terrain
• Review and critique of planning, governance, or strategy documents from a systemic, regenerative, and bioregional perspective
• Network design and deliberate convening of actors who share an intention but lack coordination
• Strategic integration of new initiatives into an existing field of practice, where alignment and mutual reinforcement justify it
• Translation initiatives for information-sharing and coherence across contexts
• Ongoing collaboration on projects already underway

At the planetary scale, this extends to connecting global frameworks with local context, weaving relationships between organizations operating across scales, and cultivating the conditions under which planetary identity (the shared recognition that Earth is a place we all emerge from and depend on) can take root and reinforce itself.

For community members at any scale who want to get involved but aren't sure where to start, please reach out! Part of what I do is help people locate themselves within larger systems and identify where their particular capacities have the most leverage.

For patrons, it is important to understand what sustained support actually enables. Much of the most consequential work is invisible by conventional measures, such as the relationships that take months to build before coordination becomes possible, the continuous sensemaking that prevents wasted effort, and the cross-scale translation that keeps local action coherent with planetary direction. These processes don't produce immediate deliverables. They produce the conditions under which genuine systems change becomes possible. Portfolio patronage funds this substrate.

I am also available for part-time freelance engagements that complement and mutually reinforce the broader portfolio. If your work is sufficiently aligned, collaboration is worth exploring.

Does this work intersect with your own, professionally or personally? Do you have questions, constructive critiques, or simply want to explore synergies? Connect with me via email or LinkedIn.

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