The Flourishing Constellation
Skills for the work, companions for the road. Navigating the polycrisis together.
See what's inside Free to join. Opens the community on Skool.
Skills for the work, companions for the road. Navigating the polycrisis together.
See what's inside Free to join. Opens the community on Skool.You stopped filing these as separate crises a while ago. Climate, economy, politics, ecology: one tangled structure, throwing off failures faster than anyone can address them in order. Most of the people around you are still working the queue.
Seeing that clearly and knowing what to do with it are two different capabilities. This community exists to close the distance between them.
The Flourishing Constellation is a network for people already oriented to the scale of this, who want two things the wider culture rarely supplies: competence and company. The name is the intent. Many separate lights, forming a pattern other people can navigate by.
The center of gravity is the weekly Sensemaking Circle. Members bring what they're seeing from their own corner of the world, work out together what it means, and practice the skills of moving well inside it. Around that sits a growing curriculum in polycrisis foundations, peers across sectors and geographies, and a path toward becoming a trained Polycrisis Guide for those who want to help others find their footing.
The premise is that ecological overshoot, climate disruption, economic fragility, and institutional decay are one interacting system rather than a queue of problems. Which means the useful response is not more information about any single crisis. It's the capacity to read how they move together, and to act with other people while the ground keeps shifting.
Reading the structure underneath the headlines, so you can tell a symptom from a driver. Feedback loops, delays, thresholds, and what happens when a system runs past its limits.
Staying candid and curious with people who don't yet see what you see, and with people who see it and have gone quiet.
Moving people through change that asks them to give something up, without losing them along the way.
Acting well after the plan runs out, which is the standing condition from here on.
Collaboration isn't a fifth item on that list. It runs through all four. None of them work if you're working alone.
People who are limits-to-growth literate, ecologically serious, and committed to transformation rather than maintenance. Community organizers building local resilience. Sustainability and climate professionals who have run out of road inside their institutions. Educators, facilitators, planners, and public health people who can see the interactions and want somewhere to think about them out loud.
You don't need credentials or a formal role. You need to be serious about the work, honest about what you don't know, and willing to contribute as well as receive. This is a community of practitioners, not an audience.
Competence matters because awareness without skill hardens into despair or rhetoric. Company matters because doing this alone is harder than doing it alongside people who share your sense of what's at stake.
Members describe it as one of the few rooms where they don't spend the first ten minutes establishing why the situation is serious. The shared premise frees everyone for deeper work.
A polycrisis is what you get when several large systems fail at once and their failures feed each other, so the combined effect is worse than the sum of the separate crises. Climate disruption strains food systems, which strain economies, which strain politics, which weakens the capacity to respond to climate disruption. The term matters because it points at the interactions rather than the items.
Polycrisis usually names the tangle of interacting crises themselves. Metacrisis usually names the layer underneath: the patterns of thinking, incentive, and sensemaking that keep generating crises of this kind. Different writers draw the line differently, and the argument about the boundary is less useful than the observation both terms are reaching for, which is that the problems are structurally linked and won't be solved one at a time.
The planetary boundaries framework identifies the biophysical limits within which human societies can operate safely, and several have already been crossed. It's one of the clearest available answers to the question of what exactly is overshooting. Members use it as shared reference for the ecological side of the picture, alongside limits-to-growth work going back to the 1972 study.
Climate is central but not the whole frame. If you want a group focused on emissions policy or climate advocacy, there are better ones. This community is for people who have concluded that climate can't be addressed in isolation from economic structure, political capacity, and ecological limits, and who want to build the skills to work at that intersection.
Community. Individual preparedness has its place, but the interesting and difficult work is collective: how a neighborhood, an organization, a coalition, or a town builds the capacity to absorb shocks and keep functioning. That's a systems and leadership problem before it's a supplies problem.
Members bring what they're seeing where they are, whether that's a policy shift, a local disruption, a pattern in their sector. The group works out what it might mean, where it connects to other developments, and what it changes about what any of us should be doing. It's practice at collective reading of a fast-moving situation, which is a skill and improves with repetition.
A path for members who develop real competence and want to help others navigate this with skill and steadiness rather than panic or denial. It's relational and rigorous rather than a certificate you buy, and it develops as the community does.
Yes. The community is free to join, and the intention is that it stays that way. It runs on invitation, depth, and the conviction that the people already committed to this work deserve each other.
Chris Soderquist of Pontifex Consulting, who has spent more than two decades building system dynamics models and facilitating strategy work with public health agencies, nonprofits, coalitions, and corporations.
The full description, the curriculum, and the Sensemaking Circle schedule are all on Skool.
Open The Flourishing Constellation on Skool Free to joinEudaimonia: human and ecological flourishing. That's the word underneath all of it, and a direction worth orienting toward together, especially when the news makes it feel remote.