MY BASE
Science and other sources.
I never just make things up. I soak up information. I want to know "it" precisely, not approximately. Nor is it supported by dubious sources. This page lists the sources I have used to build my knowledge and, consequently, to write this website. It is, of course, not exhaustive. The list includes the most essential sources—the sources that are useful as a starting point if you want to delve deeper—with a brief indication of the source's content and what I used it for.
De fields of Vital Systems, Resilience and Variety, and the keynote Navigating clear-eyed each rest on a different stack of books and articles. The first stack is that of living systems, emergence and change. The second is that of shock and recovery. The third is that of cybernetics: one law from 1956 about the number of responses a system has in store, and what five disciplines have since discovered about that same capacity without using each other's words, from brain research to ecology. The fourth is that of fundamental biological insights. Below is what my thinking rests on — and, to be fair, a few things I push against.
References — Vital Systems
Vital Systems rests on a different stack of books than Resilience. Not the literature of shock and recovery, but of living systems, emergence and change. Below: what my thinking rests on — and, honestly, what I push back against.
Systems thinking & complexity
The foundation: learning to see how parts together produce something none of the parts possess.
Donella Meadows — Thinking in Systems (2008). The book that turns 'system' from buzzword into working tool. I still use her leverage points almost weekly: where do you intervene, and where do you waste your energy?
Fritjof Capra & Pier Luigi Luisi — The Systems View of Life (2014). The bridge between physics, biology and the social. Proves that systems thinking is not a metaphor but a coherent science.
Melanie Mitchell — Complexity: A Guided Tour (2009). The clearest introduction to complexity I know. Where emergence, feedback and self-organisation come from — without dodging the mathematics.
Stuart Kauffman — At Home in the Universe (1995) & Investigations (2000). Self-organisation as the natural tendency of matter, not the exception. His 'adjacent possible' — what becomes just barely possible at any given moment — shapes how I look at change.
Earth as a system (planetary health)
The outer edge of my vital-systems figure: the nature within which everything unfolds — as both boundary and source.
Johan Rockström, Will Steffen et al. — Planetary Boundaries (Nature, 2009 / 2015 / 2023). The nine boundaries within which humanity can operate safely. Not an opinion, but the measurable edges of the earth system.
Kate Raworth — Doughnut Economics (2017). Links the planetary ceiling to a social foundation. The doughnut is the sharpest image I know of 'within the limits, and no one beneath them'.
James Lovelock — Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). The early, contested formulation of the earth as a self-regulating system. Long dismissed, by now largely rehabilitated by earth system science.
Sarah Whitmee et al. — Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene (The Lancet, 2015). The report that defines 'planetary health': human health cannot be thought apart from the health of the system in which we live.
Change: complexity, scale and direction
Here I deliberately depart from the mainstream transition and innovation literature. I find it too tidy: it describes change as an orderly leap from niche to regime, and leaves power, capital and the real unruliness of complex systems out of view. This is the line I do find convincing.
W. Brian Arthur — The Nature of Technology (2009), and his work on increasing returns and lock-in (1989). The actual mechanism behind a stuck system: self-reinforcement. Explains what mainstream transition theory only names.
Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers — Order Out of Chaos (1984). The physics beneath the word 'emergence': how new order arises far from equilibrium. The hard ground that much systems talk floats above.
C.S. Holling & Lance Gunderson — Panarchy (2002). The adaptive cycle across nested scales at once. The richest theory of change I know — and the place where my work on vital systems and my work on resilience meet in one language.
Joseph Tainter — The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). Complexity has diminishing marginal returns. The uncomfortable insight that societies can collapse under their own success — not despite, but through the organising.
Thomas P. Hughes — Networks of Power (1983). The original study of large technical systems and their 'momentum'. Historically infinitely richer than the schema the transition school made of it.
Carlota Perez — Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (2002). Techno-economic paradigms over half a century, with the role of capital and the state. Structural where most innovation literature stays naive.
Mariana Mazzucato — The Entrepreneurial State (2013) / Mission Economy (2021). Direction does not arise spontaneously from the market. The antidote to 'just let citizens and businesses sort it out' — the state as co-shaper, not as clean-up crew after the fact.
Bruno Latour — Reassembling the Social (2005). Liberating and maddening at once. Latour refuses to separate the social from the technical — precisely the separation that so often hobbles our thinking about systems.
Living systems & emergent vitality
The biology behind the word 'vital': life not as substance, but as a property a system produces and sustains.
Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela — The Tree of Knowledge (1987). Autopoiesis: life as that which continuously produces itself. The deepest definition of 'vital' I know.
Lynn Margulis — Symbiotic Planet (1998). Evolution turns at least as much on cooperation as on competition. Life as a network of symbioses — a correction to the cartoon version of 'survival of the fittest'.
E.O. Wilson — The Social Conquest of Earth (2012). Eusociality: why species that cooperate have taken over the earth. The biological basis beneath my emphasis on collective self-reliance.
Nicholas Christakis — Blueprint (2019). The evolutionary roots of the good in us — cooperating, bonding, forming a group. Evidence that the social is not a thin veneer but deeply baked in.
Industrial ecology & circularity
The systems logic behind material and substance flows — something I helped build during my Rotterdam years, with INES Mainport.
Robert Frosch & Nicholas Gallopoulos — Strategies for Manufacturing (Scientific American, 1989). The founding article: treat industry as an ecosystem, in which one party's waste stream is another's feedstock.
Thomas Graedel & Braden Allenby — Industrial Ecology (1995). The academic working-out of the same idea into a discipline. My reference work for the hard side of material cycles.
Walter Stahel — The Performance Economy (2010). The pioneer who was thinking about circularity for decades before it became a buzzword. Sell performance, not product.
Ellen MacArthur Foundation — reports. Where circular thinking moved from niche to boardroom. Not original, but indispensable for getting it into the mainstream.
The city as a living system
The city read as an organism: metabolism, scaling laws, nodes in networks. Where vital systems become most concrete.
Jane Jacobs — The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). The city as a living, self-organising fabric — decades before 'systems thinking' about cities existed. Still not surpassed.
Geoffrey West — Scale (2017). Cities and organisms obey the same scaling laws. The proof that 'the city as a living system' is not a metaphor but mathematics.
Herbert Girardet — Cities, People, Planet (2004). Urban metabolism: the city as a throughput of energy and matter. The bridge between my urban work and the industrial ecology above.
Saskia Sassen — The Global City (1991). The city not as place but as node in global flows. An indispensable counterweight to the idea that a city ends at its boundaries.
References — Resilience
The literature on which this page rests. For each work, a brief note on what it contributes to the framework.
Argyris, C. (1976). "Single-loop and double-loop models in research on decision making." Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(3), 363–375. — Distinction between surface-level learning (single-loop) and learning that revises one's own assumptions (double-loop). Basis for individual learning capacity in the capacities table. doi.org/10.2307/2391848
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. — Extension of double-loop learning to the organizational level. Basis for organizational learning capacity.
Béné, C., Wood, R. G., Newsham, A., & Davies, M. (2012). "Resilience: New utopia or new tyranny? Reflection about the potentials and limits of the concept of resilience in relation to vulnerability reduction programmes." IDS Working Paper 405, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton. — Tripartite division of resilience into absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. Translates into the four capacities of the framework. opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/working_paper/Resilience_new_utopia_or_new_tyranny_Reflection_about_the_potentials_and_limits_of_the_concept_of_resilience_in_relation_to_vulnerability_reduction_programmes/26431253
Bridges, W. (1980). Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley (later: Da Capo Press). — Three-phase model of personal transition: endings, neutral zone, new beginnings. Basis for individual transformative capacity.
Connell, J. H. (1978). "Diversity in tropical rain forests and coral reefs." Science, 199(4335), 1302–1310. — Intermediate disturbance hypothesis: moderate disturbances lead to higher biodiversity. Scientific basis for the tree/forest quote in section 1. doi.org/10.1126/science.199.4335.1302
Diamond, A. (2013). "Executive functions." Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168. — Self-regulation and executive function as individual competencies for anticipating. doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. — Cognitive dissonance as a psychological mechanism that resists change. Explains why paradigm shifts rarely happen spontaneously — neither collectively nor individually. doi.org/10.1515/9781503620766
Flavell, J. H. (1979). "Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry." American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. — Metacognition as individual learning capacity. doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906
Folke, C. (2006). "Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses." Global Environmental Change, 16(3), 253–267. — Broad review of resilience thinking in social-ecological systems. Background framework for the entire approach. doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.04.002
Folke, C., Carpenter, S. R., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T., & Rockström, J. (2010). "Resilience thinking: Integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability." Ecology and Society, 15(4), 20. — Linking resilience, adaptive capacity, and transformation. Central reference for the logic of the four capacities. ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art20
Geels, F. W. (2002). "Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: A multi-level perspective and a case-study." Research Policy, 31(8-9), 1257–1274. — Multi-level perspective on system transitions. Basis for community transformative capacity. doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(02)00062-8
Gross, J. J. (1998). "The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review." Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299. — Emotion regulation as individual responding capacity. doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2011). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press. — Psychological flexibility at the heart of ACT. Individual responding capacity.
Holling, C. S. (1973). "Resilience and stability of ecological systems." Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23. — Classical starting point for resilience theory in ecology. Foundation of the entire resilience vocabulary. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.es.04.110173.000245
Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — Stages of adult development, letting go of identity and paradigms. Basis for individual transformative capacity.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — Paradigm shifts. Basis for community transformative capacity.
Loorbach, D. (2010). "Transition management for sustainable development: A prescriptive, complexity-based governance framework." Governance, 23(1), 161–183. — Transition management and power redistribution. Basis for community transformative capacity. doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0491.2009.01471.x
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press. — Left and right hemispheres as cultural diagnosis. Scientific foundation under the "working on transitions / transitions in the work" poster from Studio Ongemak.
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. London: Perspectiva Press. — Further development of the earlier work.
Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Hartland: Sustainability Institute. — Twelve leverage points for systemic change. Indispensable for thinking about community transformative capacity. donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer (D. Wright, Ed.). White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. — Accessible introduction to systems thinking. Posthumous publication.
Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. — Transformative learning. Basis for individual transformative capacity.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — Commons governance (Nobel Prize in Economics 2009). Basis for social capital and self-organization in the emergent column. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807763
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. — Social capital. Basis for community anticipating capacity.
Quarantelli, E. L. (Ed.) (1998). What is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question. London: Routledge. — Emergent organization in disasters. Central theoretical basis for the emergent column in section 5.
Sampson, R. J. (2012). Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — Collective efficacy in neighborhoods. Basis for community responding capacity.
Solnit, R. (2009). A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. New York: Viking. — How communities spontaneously organize during disasters. Empirical basis for the emergent column.
Suddendorf, T. (2013). The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us From Other Animals. New York: Basic Books. — Prospective cognition and "mental time travel". Basis for individual anticipating capacity.
Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House. — Black swans: rare, unpredictable events of enormous impact. Starting point for the discussion in section 1.
Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House. — Antifragility as an individual-oriented alternative to resilience. Starting point for the discussion of community resilience.
Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). "Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence." Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18. — Post-traumatic growth. Individual responding capacity. doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1501_01
Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R., & Kinzig, A. (2004). "Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems." Ecology and Society, 9(2), 5. — Distinction between resilience, adaptability, and transformability as three separate system capacities. Together with Béné et al. and Folke et al., the empirical basis for the four capacities in the framework. ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5
Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2015). Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World (3rd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. — High Reliability Organizations. Basis for organizational learning capacity.
Additional sources
Postma, A. (2019). De gekke mier [Video]. Narrated by forest ranger Arjan Postma; summarized by Lagant Coaching & Training. — Story of red wood ants in nests that fall into shadow, and the scout ants who find new nest sites. Source of the "gekke mieren" (mad ants) name in Atelier Polycrisis. In Dutch. lagant.nl/blog/de-gekke-mier
Steketee, H. (2 September 2022). "De grote versnelling: hoe de ene crisis de volgende aanjaagt." NRC Handelsblad. — First broad Dutch media attention to the term "polycrisis". Marks the moment when Atelier Polycrisis found its name. In Dutch. nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/09/02/de-grote-versnelling-hoe-de-ene-crisis-de-volgende-aanjaagt-a4140638
Van Buuren, A. (2023). Column on Atelier Polycrisis. Publiek Denken, edition 57. — External academic reflection on the work of Atelier Polycrisis by a professor of public administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam. In Dutch. specials.publiekdenken.nl/publiek-denken-57/column-arwin-van-buuren
Sources — Variety
The literature under the Variety framework: one law from cybernetics, and what five disciplines have since discovered about the same capacity without using each other's words. For each work a short note on what it contributes and where it returns on the page.
The law and the man
Ashby, W. R. (1952). Design for a Brain: The Origin of Adaptive Behaviour. London: Chapman & Hall. — The book of the Homeostat and of the essential variable: the quantities that must stay within limits if a system is to stay alive. Basis for section Two and for the simulation on the page.
Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall. — The law of requisite variety, chapter 11: only variety can absorb variety. The foundation under the whole page. Freely available through Principia Cybernetica: pcp.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf
Ashby, W. R. (1958). "Requisite variety and its implications for the control of complex systems." Cybernetica, 1(2), 83–99. — The law in article form, with its explicit application to the control of complex systems. For those who want the proof rather than the summary.
Conant, R. C., & Ashby, W. R. (1970). "Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system." International Journal of Systems Science, 1(2), 89–97. — The sequel to the law: whoever wants to regulate a system must carry a model of it. Underpins the claim in section Two that "having mapped the problem" is something other than "being able to handle it": the map is only a model once it contains the system's variety. doi.org/10.1080/00207727008920220
Beer, S. (1972). Brain of the Firm. London: Allen Lane. / (1979). The Heart of Enterprise. Chichester: Wiley. — Ashby translated to organisations: the Viable System Model and "variety engineering". The source of the conclusion in section Two that no centre can match the variety of its environment, and that variety must therefore be organised where the disturbance occurs.
Beer, S. (1974). Designing Freedom. Toronto: CBC (Massey Lectures). — The same idea in six radio lectures, without diagrams. The most accessible way into Beer, and the place where he makes the law political: whoever suppresses variety in the name of control suppresses freedom.
De Sitter, L. U., Den Hertog, J. F., & Dankbaar, B. (1997). "From complex organizations with simple jobs to simple organizations with complex jobs." Human Relations, 50(5), 497–534. — Dutch sociotechnical systems design in one article: Ashby's law applied to organisational design, with "regelvermogen" (regulatory capacity) as the variety that must sit low in the organisation to absorb disturbances where they arise. The tradition my work stands closest to, and to which I add the four other levels (section Three, the organisation). doi.org/10.1023/A:1016987702271
Achterbergh, J., & Vriens, D. (2009). Organizations: Social Systems Conducting Experiments. Berlin: Springer. — The theoretical elaboration of De Sitter, with Ashby and Beer as foundation and Luhmann added. The most thorough Dutch book on variety in organisations, even though it never calls it that. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00110-9
Five levels: brain, person, team, organisation, society
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. / (2021). The Matter With Things. — See the resilience block above. Used here for the first level: the two kinds of attention, narrow and grasping versus broad and vigilant, as the biological ground of zooming out and zooming in.
Rogers, L. J., Vallortigara, G., & Andrew, R. J. (2013). Divided Brains: The Biology and Behaviour of Brain Asymmetries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — The evidence that the division of attention over two hemispheres is no human peculiarity but an inheritance of nearly all vertebrates, from chick to bee. Underpins the claim that the response space begins with what you can see (section Three, the brain). doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511793899
Hooijberg, R., Hunt, J. G., & Dodge, G. E. (1997). "Leadership complexity and development of the Leaderplex model." Journal of Management, 23(3), 375–408. — Behavioural complexity: effective leaders do not have a better style but a broader repertoire, and can switch. The basis under the second level and under the manager in the third example at the top of the page. doi.org/10.1177/014920639702300305
Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). "Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health." Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865–878. — Psychological flexibility as the capacity to switch response according to the situation, and its link to health. The personal response space, and the bridge to the coaching work. doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001
Hong, L., & Page, S. E. (2004). "Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers." PNAS, 101(46), 16385–16389. — The formal result behind the third level: groups with different mental models perform, under conditions, better than groups of better individuals. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0403723101
Page, S. E. (2007). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — The elaboration of that result, with the distinction the page adopts: not who is at the table (diversity) but which mental models come to the table and get used (variety).
Stasser, G., & Titus, W. (1985). "Pooling of unshared information in group decision making: Biased information sampling during discussion." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(6), 1467–1478. — The hidden-profile experiment: groups discuss what everyone already knows and leave aside what only one person knows. The explanation of why variety disappears at the table without anyone noticing. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.48.6.1467
Elmqvist, T., Folke, C., Nyström, M., Peterson, G., Bengtsson, J., Walker, B., & Norberg, J. (2003). "Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience." Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 1(9), 488–494. — The concept of response diversity: not the number of species determines an ecosystem's resilience, but the number of different ways in which species respond to the same disturbance. The fifth level, and the sharpest scientific distinction between diversity and variety I know. doi.org/10.1890/1540-9295(2003)001[0488:RDECAR]2.0.CO;2
Walker, B. H., Crépin, A.-S., Nyström, M., Anderies, J. M., Andersson, E., Elmqvist, T., et al. (2023). "Response diversity as a sustainability strategy." Nature Sustainability, 6, 621–629. — Response diversity carried from ecosystems to economies, organisations and societies, with the warning that efficiency and standardisation systematically erode it. The bridge from the fifth level back to the fourth. doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-01048-7
Two sources: protect and make
March, J. G. (1991). "Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning." Organization Science, 2(1), 71–87. — Why organisations destroy their own variety without ill will: in the short run exploration always loses to exploitation, and most steering is short run. The core of section Four, "protect". doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2.1.71
Taylor, S. S., & Ladkin, D. (2009). "Understanding arts-based methods in managerial development." Academy of Management Learning & Education, 8(1), 55–69. — The four ways in which art works in leadership development (skills transfer, projective technique, illustration of essence, making), and why it is not decoration but a way of switching perspective. Theoretical basis under "make" and under Artistic Thinking. doi.org/10.5465/amle.2009.37012179
Sandberg, B. (2024). "Outcomes of Art-Based Leadership Development: A Qualitative Metasummary." Behavioral Sciences, 14(8), 714. — Systematic summary of 31 empirical studies: arts-based methods strengthen reflection, higher-order thinking, emotional intelligence and interpersonal competencies; longitudinal evidence is still lacking. The empirical evidence section Four cites. doi.org/10.3390/bs14080714
Lehtimäki, H., Hirvonen, P., Riivari, E., & Piironen, S. (2026). "Innovation pedagogy in management education: Student-centered learning with arts-based methods." The International Journal of Management Education, 24(1), 101306. — Participants who feared they lacked artistic skills discovered that the method asks for experimentation, not mastery; confidence and creativity then grew at individual, group and network level. The source for "also for people without an artistic background". doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2025.101306
Two animals
Modlmeier, A. P., Keiser, C. N., Watters, J. V., Sih, A., & Pruitt, J. N. (2014). "The keystone individual concept: an ecological and evolutionary overview." Animal Behaviour, 89, 53–62. — The keystone individual: one animal that, through its behaviour, disproportionately determines what the group does; and the finding that colonies with more individual variation in boldness and exploration do better in a changing environment. The science behind the crazy ant (section Five). doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.12.020
Postma, A. — De gekke mier (The crazy ant). See "Additional sources" in the resilience block. Here the narrator of the story that opens section Five.
Mount St. Helens and the gophers — see "Sources — Navigating clear-eyed" below (Allen & McMahon 1983; Maltz et al. 2024).