Regenerative inquiry is a un/learning design methodology that aims to expand cognitive frames of reference, to raise affective/emotional thresholds and to broaden the scope of possibilities for relationships, relationship building and accountability. Regenerative inquiry is not descriptive/prescriptive, but diagnostic. It is not about mastery of content, but about learning how to process both emotions and information with critical discernment, humility and responsibility.
Regenerative inquiry is anchored in the SMDR compass framework, created to enhance our collective capacity for emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational responsibility. It is a “probiotic” approach to education that does not dictate how participants should think, feel or act within their unique contexts. Instead, it equips them to:
- navigate complexity without feeling overwhelmed or immobilized
- process emotions and information with more clarity and enhanced clarity and discernment
- cultivate humility and emotional and relational intelligence
- build stamina and resilience for the challenges of the polycrisis/metacrisis that we have to face together
Our approach to regenerative inquiry is grounded on neuroDEcolonization. Our definition of neurocolonization emphasizes how our ways of thinking, doing, hoping, relating and being, our affective physiological responses, and our libidinal attachments (how we source pleasure and comfort, and our fears and insecurities) are systematically wired, limited and impaired by modern-colonial systems. Thus, neuroDEcolonization is about uncoercively moving the nested human organism towards neurophysiological and epigenetic regeneration geared towards relational intelligence and intergenerational accountability: facing complicity, navigating complexity, rewiring the unconscious, dis-investing in harm, mobilizing reparations and activating exiled capacities for sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility (SMDR).
Regenerative inquiry is about identifying and de-activating conditioned patters of thinking, feeling and relating conditioned by modern/colonial systems, while re-activating capacities that have been exiled by modernity/coloniality. In technical terms, in terms of patterns of thinking, regenerative inquiry is about expanding intellectual options beyond universalist, Cartesian, anthropocentric, allochronic, anthropocentric, dialectical, totalizing, teleological, utility-maximizing, and reductionist patterns of reasoning, towards diffractive, diachronic, abductive and analectic possibilities. In terms of affect, regenerative inquiry is about expanding our collective capacity to face, feel and process the difficult and painful aspects of reality without feeling overwhelmed, immobilized or demanding quick fixes to be rescued from discomfort. In terms of relationships, regenerative inquiry is about expanding our capacity for building relationships grounded on trust, reciprocity, consent and accountability.
As an illustration, a simple exercise based on regenerative inquiry invites participants to hold space for a particular question or issue with the following the following 5 principles:
1.Approach the issue as collaborative inquiry: suspend the impulse to “solve” and to “fix” (55/5 rule)
2.Collectively engage with the issue seeking to identify multiple angles, layers, interconnections, tensions and “hotspots”
3.Embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, paradoxes and contradictions
4.Identify and collaboratively articulate questions worth holding collectively
5.Seek collective epiphanies rather than certainties or consensus – observe that this requires a different neurochemistry of engagement (dopamine vs. acetylcholine)
This is different from asserting or seeking validation for one’s opinion, fixing or solving a problem, offering advice, or seeking consensus.
The course Facing Human Wrongs: climate complexity and relational accountability was designed using principles of regenerative inquiry to support course participants to develop the SMDR capabilities. Click here to see what course participants said when prompted to describe what was different about this course, which can give you a glimpse of regenerative inquiry in practice.
Other links: 7 steps back/forward/aside; depth conversations; the Haruko accord; radical tenderness; the bus within us methodology (self-diffractive psychodynamic assessment)
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 