This is a beautiful example of sharing valuable insights in a way that avoids ‘best practice’ tropes and is so personal.

The way The Decelerator exists seems actively quite radical in the prevailing organisational landscape!

Hearing about the way they’ve set themselves up, how they’re operating and ‘being’ in the world, there’s lots that resonates with how I’m trying to build my own coaching and facilitation business, and how I’m approaching this chapter of my working life.

The key ideas that resonated with me were:

- Intentionality

- Slowness

- Experimentation

- Systems perspective

- Sensitivity and care

- Wisdom

Intentionality - What suffuses everything here is a deep sense of intentionality. There is a real clarity of purpose, and everything feels in service of that. Active choices are being made that flow naturally from what the organisation stands for, and there’s a willingness to keep choosing.

Slowness - In an organisational landscape where the pace always seems to be fast and getting faster, there’s strength in slowing down. It reminds me of some of the ideas in Haemin Sunim’s beautiful book ‘The things you can only see when you slow down’. The slowness creates more opportunities to make mindful choices - and that put me in mind of this quotation from Carlo Petrini, one of the founders of the Slow Food movement:

“Being slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast. If tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.”

Experimentation - “After five years of exploration and an 18-month pilot…” - there seems to be a willingness to experiment thoughtfully at the heart of what The Decelerator is. And it’s not just an idea, it’s backed up by structures and processes that embrace the emergent, and that prioritise regular opportunities to reflect, review and reimagine. It feels like a balance between clarity of vision and an openness to what the journey into that vision could look like.

Systems perspective - In what they were sharing about their approach to Strategy & Partnerships and Sustainability, there’s not a ‘survival at all costs’ mentality around sustaining.

Instead, it feels like a more systemic form of sustainability. Where resilience and continuity are nurtured by The Decelerator’s ability to show organisations new ways of thinking and being.

In this way, the work is distributed throughout the sector rather than held in one place only, which would be inherently more fragile. In your focus on open-sourcing and knowledge sharing I hear a more cooperative approach that stands in contrast to the usual competitive dynamics at play in systems, that drive scarcity mindsets and selfish behaviours.

Sensitivity and care - “Our goal is for organisations to approach endings as intentionally as time and circumstance allow—driven by impact rather than crisis or circumstance alone.” - there’s a real sensitivity here, not organisations having something done to them (“being decelerated”), rather journeying with organisations to help them navigate change at the pace of their own experience.

And that feels closely wedded to care - “avoiding overextending ourselves in an increasingly precarious landscape, and avoiding spending disproportionate amounts of valuable human and financial resources chasing funding.” Prioritising self, other and organisational care in a landscape weakened by spirals of manic activity and burnout feels really powerful.

Wisdom - “It’s often assumed that The Decelerator’s work is all about closure - that endings only matter at the very end. But as John Hitchin, a member of our Council of Elders, aptly put it earlier this month: "A good gardener knows that a fruitful orchard needs regular pruning."” - That The Decelerator has built these wise, wider perspectives into the governance/community of their business is beautiful.

I’m reflecting on how these ideas resonate with the way I’m approaching my own work and life, and I plan to write about that soon.

What about for you? Do any of these words resonate with you? In what ways?

I’d love to hear your perspectives.