Dancing in the messy middle: institutional immunity and the challenges of ‘bridging’

This essay builds on the Centre for the Edge’s discourse analysis that maps the systematic difference in language between government organisations ‘at the centre’, and those operating ‘at the edges’ to build just and regenerative alternatives. These differences are about more than vocabulary: I think they reveal two different ways of constructing reality itself. This essay explores what it would take for edge thinking and practice to overcome the apparent institutional ‘immune response’ that protects and sustains outdated worldviews, in order to transform the mindsets of our public institutions. I argue that we will need to work more directly with this institutional immune response, while also recognising and addressing the unequal burden of labour that this work imposes on those operating at the edges.

You can read Jame Plunkett’s sister essay here, which introduces the discourse analysis and offers further reflections on what it means.

I’ve been a part of countless conversations between public institutions that make up ‘the centre’, and edge organisations building alternatives. The exact flavour doesn’t especially matter: what’s more striking is how familiar the underlying pattern is. The person from the edge has often spent years working in hostile and constrained conditions: holding on to a vision for their work that stretches the current system beyond what it already knows.

From their perspective, the centre can seem trapped in an ever-shrinking world of compliance and control. Centre-people want to know how the edge-vision relates to evidence of what has worked previously, affordability, risk management, options for scaling. The centre’s language often feels mechanical, talking about delivery and targets. It is anxious about risk and failure. From the perspective of the edge, the centre often struggles to grapple with the depth of ecological, economic and social crises we face, or to acknowledge the likely inadequacy of the tools it continues to rely on in the business of government.

Across the table, through the eyes of the centre, edge-people’s ways of talking can be hard even to comprehend. When they do speak in plain enough language, some of what they say seems faintly implausible, utopian even, and very hard to translate into the dominant language of accountability and fiscal constraint. The result is a recurring tension: what feels like transformation at the edge is often received as ambiguity and vagueness at the centre; what feels like rigour at the centre is experienced as reduction and narrowing at the edge.

The discourse analysis we’ve published alongside this essay and James Plunkett’s sister essay shows these kinds of exchange are not isolated misunderstandings. They reflect a clearly patterned difference in how reality is being described and organised linguistically. Drawing on my own work, I want to share some reflections here about these differences, and what happens when the regenerative worldview of the edges comes into contact with the production logics of the centre, which is structured to protect and preserve its version of how the world works.

Often the metaphor chosen for this important work is ‘bridging’. We need to ‘bridge’ from radical alternatives to the centre. As I unpack in this essay, I think this is a problematic metaphor, for two reasons. First, it obscures the emotional and relational labour of this work. And second, it underplays the risk that the very act of bridging requires the removal of transformative potential.

Instead I think that ‘dancing in the messy middle’ may be a more helpful metaphor that points to the real, developmental work that’s needed here: an uncomfortable, generative space where different ways of seeing reality encounter one another, and where we can begin to destabilise the assumptions, beliefs and mindsets which are no longer serving us well.

One important disclaimer I need to be clear about. This essay explores how we might find better spaces for the centre and the edges to engage together. I think that’s important work. However, I do not think that all transformative work should seek engagement with the centre. The centre’s resistance to change is also rooted at some level in structural power and material interests. Institutions remain deeply entangled in economic and political systems that continue to benefit from extraction, exploitation and ecological degradation. So in some cases, the most responsible strategy for edge-work is shielding and protection: preserving the autonomy of emergent alternatives until conditions are less hostile. This shielding work is a vital part of our stewardship in Emerging Futures, separate from but alongside the themes I explore here.

Why worldviews matter — and why the centre must change

The good news (on the surface at least) is that something does seem to be shifting at the centre. Talk of missions, prevention, resilience, community, co-production, systems thinking — these are words appearing more regularly now in strategies and speeches across government, in a way that would have been unusual a decade ago.

But the more time I have spent working between the centre and the edges, the less convinced I am that this linguistic shift reflects a deeper transformation in how the centre sees the world. The discourse analysis supports this hunch. While the centre has begun to use some of the vocabulary of the edges, it still tends to see the world through a production logic that sits very uneasily with the regenerative and relational logics that shape the work of those at the edges.

As James and I have explored in previous essays, this can leave government trapped in a local maximum: a somewhat narrow worldview, highly adapted to solving yesterday’s problems, but increasingly unable to perceive the larger realities of this time of complex interconnected challenges. We have also explored how institutions successfully reproduce this worldview through the hidden wiring of rules, professional norms, incentives and processes.

This really matters, because the operating environment for government and public institutions has changed. Flood risk is increasing. Soil systems are degrading. Biodiversity loss is accelerating. Housing, health and care systems are under sustained pressure. Inequality is rising at both the top and the bottom. Fiscal costs associated with adaptation are rising. The growing gap between the conditions institutions are designed to manage and the realities they now face is reflected in rising costs and growing difficulty in sustaining long-term public goods.

A new set of discrete policy changes layered on top of the existing machinery of government is not going to be the answer to these challenges. What’s needed now is a more fundamental shift in worldview: a different understanding of how the world works, what counts as evidence, beliefs about what human beings are like and how they are likely to act, what progress means, and what government is for.

So a worldview is more than a set of opinions. It is the way we see the world, a lens that shapes our perceptions themselves. Because we are always looking through this lens, our worldview’s underpinning assumptions feel like common sense. That’s what makes worldviews so significant and at the same time, so hard to examine.

The challenge now is for the centre to move from an optimising, production-oriented worldview to a regenerative one, and for this worldview to shape institutional design and action. In making this shift, there is much to learn from the edges, where a growing field of practitioners has deep and long experience of developing relational, justice-based, regenerative alternatives.

The important point here is that the centre’s meaningful engagement with the edges needs to be about more than importing language. It will also require the centre to grapple with the underlying assumptions and worldviews from which those practices and ways of working emerge. This is about public institutions paying attention to the soil of edge-working, not just the flowers and the fruits that have grown from it.

Institutional self-protection: why the centre doesn’t change

The pattern of translation-over-transformation is often told as a story of the centre’s failure of imagination. There are fingers pointed: we say things like ‘civil servants don’t get it’, or ‘there isn’t enough political will’. Maybe there’s some truth in these kinds of comments, but I don’t think it is the whole story. The consistent patterns of the discourse analysis suggest something more structural is going on.

I think Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change framework is very useful here. This framework is designed to explore why individuals and organisations can express a sincere and genuine commitment to change, while simultaneously maintaining the hidden commitments and assumptions that prevent the desired change from happening.

So for example, an individual might say they want to work less hard to improve their quality of life. At the same time, they might hold a belief — even if not consciously labelled as such — that hard work equals success and security. That belief assumes that working less will therefore feel like a loss of safety, making it feel like an extremely risky choice for that individual to actually act on. Likewise, a government might genuinely want to work more systemically and relationally, while still preserving deeply held mindsets and worldviews that make that kind of shift feel threatening. Kegan and Lahey’s model shows that what appears as resistance is often a way of protecting something that’s experienced as essential to identity and stability in some way.

James notes that there are certain worldviews in government that it is now time to retire. I agree. Despite important shifts in rhetoric around resilience, prevention and long-term risk, the dominant operating logic remains committed to fiscal control within short political and spending horizons. Policies are still required to demonstrate quantified, attributable impacts — and departmental boundaries remain the primary organising unit as a result. Risk is treated principally as something to minimise and forecast, rather than something to govern adaptively. GDP growth remains the absolute anchor of fiscal sustainability. Projects with clear economic returns or cost savings continue to dominate appraisal processes: where value can’t be counted, for example if it is relational or interdependent, it becomes secondary.

The Immunity to Change framework is designed to reveal the underpinning assumptions that ultimately keep a particular worldview like this in place. Thinking about government — or perhaps more specifically, the archetypal centre institution of the Treasury, it would seem that these assumptions include beliefs like these:

• Reality needs to be legible and comparable to be governed

• Spending must be attributable and measurable to be controlled

• Long-term benefits that are hard to forecast are too uncertain to justify borrowing against today

• Responsible actors minimise uncertainty and retain control wherever possible

These are the assumptions that then shape familiar patterns of behaviours across government, and help to explain why systemic concepts get reformulated as something that can be specified and measured. Taken together, these hidden commitments and assumptions form the centre’s institutional immune system: a protective membrane that all new ideas have to pass through in order to gain traction and engagement.

From the edges, these behaviours and patterns seem completely irrational in the face of the polycrisis. Through the lens of Immunity to Change, they appear as coherent efforts to preserve legitimacy on terms that historically have conferred stability and authority on government.

The result is that even when institutions recognise the need for regenerative, system-shifting approaches, they struggle to metabolise the logics of the edge that represent these approaches, without forcing them into more familiar categories. And what we see instead — as the discourse analysis shows — is translation: incorporation of edge language, but without the deep transformation required to truly adopt a more regenerative worldview.

What to do about this? The Immunity to Change framework points to the likely futility of attacking head-on commitments that get in the way of regenerative logics. Instead the framework suggests change will only come about when we are able to create the conditions in which some of the centre’s deepest assumptions about evidence, value, accountability and risk can be surfaced, examined, loosened and released, without triggering the very defences that keep the current worldview in place. Before we dive deeper into the question of how to do that, I want to reflect on the impact of these patterns, and where the costs of this immunity fall most clearly.

The hidden labour of translation: who bears the cost of institutional immunity

I am frequently asked to translate Emerging Futures work to centre-people who are not familiar with it: make this simpler; make it more digestible; do you have to talk about capitalism like that? The implicit request here is to render edge work into more comfortable, recognisable language and imagery that feels safer and more familiar to funders, policy people and public institutions.

Of course, translation of edge ideas and practice into language the centre can understand can be valuable. In my role, I do it to help unlock resources, to build relationships, and to try and influence the wider policy, legal and regulatory environment.

But there’s a shadow to this kind of work, too. Every act of translation involves a judgement about which blows to soften and which complexity to flatten. In order for edge practice to become legible to the system, it must often be stripped of the worldview that made it transformative in the first place.

I’ve seen this happen time and again. Thinking back to the organisation I set up a decade ago, Little Village, it was far easier to secure funding for our work when I presented our model as service delivery, rather than as something rooted in mutual support and love as a force for change. Library of Things gets described as a share-shop, rather than a model of regenerative governance and transformative finance. The Stour Trust becomes a community development project, rather than a vehicle that is reimagining economic and racial justice via models of acquisition and stewardship. Each of these initiatives is both things, but the centre tends to recognise only the version that fits its existing categories.

In making those compromises of translation, I wonder what gets lost. When does translation become appeasement? In other words, what happens when we become too skilled at making edge work comfortable for institutions of the centre? When are we simply protecting dominant institutions from the discomfort of confronting the limitations of current system logics, rather than supporting the deep institutional transformation these times ask of us?

These dynamics are so important, especially as the burden of this translation and transformation work falls disproportionately on those at the edges, many of whom do not enjoy the comfort, power and privilege of those working in stable centre organisations. The discourse analysis shows relatively little curiosity about the edges among centre organisations. Meanwhile, edge organisations devote a great deal of attention, relatively, to understanding and speaking to the centre.

There’s a double penalty here. Bridge building work between edges and the centre can often feel like those of us doing it as if we are expected to absorb dissonance on behalf of the system. It can feel like our bodies are being asked to carry the tension that belongs more appropriately to the public institutions, not us. Edge workers already describe the strain of building alternatives in conditions that are often hostile and under-resourced, which makes exhausting work even harder. They are also doing the additional labour of making this work more legible to institutions whose own assumptions remain largely unquestioned, despite their rapidly weakening capacity to navigate these times of polycrisis.

In this context, not all edge actors will want to do this work, and nor should they. For some, the wiser strategy is to continue building outside dominant institutions, protecting the integrity of practices that would be diminished if forced into existing categories of value and accountability. Not every seed should be planted in soil that the centre can reach.

But for those who do seek to engage the centre, I think we need to name more clearly the risks of epistemic extraction and appeasement that come with this kind of ‘bridging’ work. The pattern here is clear to me: institutions gather the visible harvest of innovation, and take the benefits of it, while neglecting and failing to engage with the deeper worldview shifts from which these innovations emerged. Over time, this produces a powerful set of effects:

• An absence of institutional transformation: the edge work is translated into familiar categories rather than reshaping how institutions think or act. The centre does not feel the need to learn the grammar of the edges, but the edges must become fluent in the grammar of the centre to survive.

• Burnout and resentment in edge workers. It is exhausting to be constantly asked to translate your work, to translate it into intelligible language for institutions that are slow to adapt, especially when the urgency of the polycrisis is already felt so acutely on the ground.

• A deepening asymmetry of recognition and power: knowledge flows as extractable insight, while the worldview that produced it is ignored. In these patterns, whose ways of knowing are legitimised, and whose are erased? Whose voices are decentred? Whose bodies are most used up in this work of bridging?

• Erosion of relational health and trust between the edges and the centre: frustration hardening on both sides — at the centre’s apparent impermeability, and at the edge’s refusal/inability to fully conform to dominant frames — leaving engagement fragile, and often more performative than transformative.

Taken together, these effects are patterned and cumulative. I have lived in the thick of them for the last 4 years and I see the harm they do to people, and to our shared ambition for a transition to more equitable and just futures. ‘Bridging’ is not neutral: there are asymmetrical patterns of power and labour at play in the dynamic.

Beyond bridges: dancing in the messy middle

In all of this, I’ve been wondering whether the metaphor of ‘bridging’ is itself unhelpful. Think about it: a bridge is a fixed path, a linear trajectory from here to there — moving from one side to the other. A concrete sense of A and B, and a view of stable ground either side of the bridge.

But I think the work here is less about travelling across, and more about loosening the assumptions that maintain the gap in the first place. We need to create spaces where worldviews are surfaced rather than hidden. We need spaces where assumptions can be examined and loosened, and spaces where disagreement is treated as insight to be explored together.

So instead I’ve been playing with a metaphor of dancing — dancing in the messy middle between worlds. Here, there’s no fixed path, but rather a fluid, entangled space where everyone is participating in the holding, creating, interpreting, moving in response. Everyone’s steps affect everyone else’s.

For people at the centre, the dance would mean allowing assumptions that feel non-negotiable to be questioned. It would mean being more willing to experiment with evidence, accountability and scale in ways that no longer assume current mindsets and frames are sufficient. For people at the edges, the dance would be about recognising that institutions are made up of human beings carrying real responsibilities, fears and constraints — and engaging with those realities without surrendering the integrity of what has been learned from edge work.

This is not a call for endless accommodation, or an attempt to downplay the differences. Dancing in the messy middle shouldn’t be seen as a reason to avoid conflict or political struggle. And this is not a symmetrical space: it’s important to not pretend that it is. The conditions in which the centre and the edge join the dancefloor are unequal: risk and reward aren’t evenly distributed. In that context, the costs of mis-steps or refusal aren’t the same. All this needs acknowledgement before the music even starts.

In the Immunity to Change framework, lasting change occurs when the hidden assumptions underneath them are destabilised and evolved in some way. The framework suggests that simply trashing and dismissing the centre’s visible behaviours is unlikely to shift them, because those behaviours are held in place by deeper beliefs about what is safe and possible. That gives us some helpful clues about where we might practice this dance in the messy middle to greatest effect — to gently test those underlying assumptions in the first place that shape the outmoded behaviour that no longer suits these times, and create evidence for alternative ways of seeing and acting. For example:

• Future generations policy design experiment. This tests the assumption that the interests of future generations can be discounted. By shaping policy with a 30–50 year time horizon, and experimenting with alternative discount rates in areas such as biodiversity, infrastructure and public health, we can learn about how to value a longer-term view of flourishing more clearly.

• Bioregional capital stack experiment. This challenges the assumption that all forms of value need to be reduced to money, or that there is a hierarchy with financial capital at the top. Governing a bioregion where multiple forms of capital (ecological, social, cultural as well as financial) are considered alongside each other would show what this could look like in practice.

• Portfolio accounting experiment. This questions the assumption that all outcomes need to be attributed to single organisations and interventions. By focusing on system-level contributions across a portfolio, it becomes easier for multiple actors to share responsibility and to take credit for commonly defined outcomes.

• People and planet accountability experiment. This tests the assumption that only present-day human citizens and formal expertise should shape public decisions. Giving communities and nature seats at the table opens up risk and evaluation frameworks to much broader and plural forms of knowledge and value.

Kegan’s broader work on adult development suggests that we are all more than capable of growing our capacity to hold complexity. The work of this messy middle dance is developmental in this sense: it is about creating the conditions where institutions can play with evidence that their deepest assumptions may no longer be fit for the world they are governing.

Stewardship for regenerative futures

James’ essay mapped the epistemological distance between centre and edge. In this essay, I’ve explored the institutional immune system that maintains that distance, as well as the unequal labour involved in trying to bridge it, and the developmental practices required to transform it.

The discourse analysis makes it clear that the differences between centre and edge organisations go much deeper than vocabulary alone: they point to different underlying logics of public action, and different worldviews. At the centre, discourse is structured around a production mindset that is focused on control, where concerns are centred on delivery, targets, implementation, risk management and assurance. By contrast, at the edges there’s a different logic at work: more regenerative, more relational, and concerned with systems, power, emergence, learning and community. These reflect different assumptions about what government is for, what counts as valuable, and how change happens.

These differences between these worldviews are real and often very painful. They get in the way of change going far enough and fast enough for these times of polycrisis. They make relationships between the centre and the edge strained, like two different realities trying and failing to connect. But they also reflect deeply embedded assumptions, as we have seen, about value, accountability and legitimacy. What appears irrational from one worldview is often coherent within another. This is about much more than a failure of intent or imagination alone.

‘Edge’ mindsets and practices give us some vital clues about the regenerative logics we will need to navigate the transition. Where the centre and the edge do choose to work together (and it is not a universal obligation, as I’ve argued, for those at the edges), we can no longer afford for those encounters to be superficial, or dismissive. The stakes are just too high. The work is to stay in relationship long enough for the assumptions, beliefs and commitments that make up each worldview to become visible and open to question, together.

This is the dance of the messy middle. It’s demanding, challenging work that requires emotional regulation, humility, and the capacity to stay present in the midst of uncertainty and different views of how to move. It asks both centre and edge organisations to recognise that what is at stake is a renegotiation of what government is for, and which forms of value are allowed to matter: this isn’t about policy tweaks.

The challenge is to rebuild the institutional worldview, not just to change what the institution does. Without change at this depth, it’s hard to see how government will evolve from being a system primarily concerned with optimisation, to one capable of stewarding living systems through the transition.

My thanks in particular to Urvi Kelkar, for our conversations about the questions I explore here on bridging and appeasement. I’m grateful also to the many colleagues — across both centre organisations and edge organisations — who have been willing to explore the distance between these places with me.

This essay is published as part of The Centre for the Edge, a partnership between Kinship Works and JRF to help public sector leaders support and spread promising alternatives. In earlier themes, we explored the role of evidence standards (here and here) and ways of combating the public sector’s institutional monoculture (here and here).