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What

What We Are

Working With Social Complexity

The Proteus Initiative is directed towards all those who are engaged in, or responsible for, complex social situations:

  • leaders, managers, facilitators
  • social development practitioners, consultants and activists
  • those interested in holistic approaches to the helping professions
  • all those organisations concerned with any aspect of social transformation and renewal.

We help practitioners facilitate:

  • accurate and responsive readings of social situations
  • intuitive and rigorous understanding out of seeming chaos and intractability
  • interventions that may restore wholeness to fragmenting parts.
The Proteus Initiative has been founded by social practitioners with many years experience of development practice. Employing an understanding and practices first developed for seeing into living processes within the world of nature, we seek to enable a new way of engaging with social and developmental phenomena: a way which may work effectively with social complexity. So that we gain the capacity to move beyond social and ecological complexities as problems to be solved, and view them instead as emergent situations that we relate to in participatory ways.

We often think our problems come to us from without, but we have become trapped within a way of thinking that contributes to these problems: social, economic and ecological fragmentation is a function of our own construction of the world. We create the world we inhabit through who we are and how we approach it. A new kind of engagement, a new way of thinking, is called for.