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Webinars

Organising in Place and Working Across Altitudes

Regen Labs and Regen Melbourne led an insightful webinar exploring how social enterprises can work across system layers, or "altitudes" to organise for place-based change. Using frameworks, real-world projects, and the concept of “altitude sickness,” the session offered practical tools to strengthen collaboration, coherence, and momentum in complex systems work.

Summary

This webinar explores how social enterprises and place-based intermediaries can navigate systems change by working across multiple layers, or “altitudes” of change, including:

  • Understanding three core system altitudes:
    • Micro (niches): Localised innovations and community-led responses.
    • Meso (regimes): Institutions, markets, and policy structures that shape dominant systems.
    • Macro (landscape): Cultural norms, global shocks, and environmental or economic trends.
  • Why building coherence across projects, partners, and system levels matters more than rigid coordination in complex, place-based work.
  • Reflections on how systems change unfolds in non-linear, emergent ways requiring patience, flexibility, and openness to iteration.
  • Insights into the mindset shift from delivering isolated programs to recognising and stewarding patterns of change over time.
  • The role of “sensemaking infrastructure” such as shared language, trust, and learning environments in supporting collaboration and strategic alignment.
  • The value of resourcing invisible infrastructure like relationships, narrative framing, and governance processes that underpin long-term transformation.
  • How intermediaries can act as connectors and stewards across different system layers, holding relationships and learning over time.
  • Considerations for embedding community leadership, equity, and distributed power into systems work from the outset.
  • Calls to action for social enterprises, funders, and policymakers to zoom in and out intentionally, and invest in the collective capacity to navigate complexity, together.

Show notes and quotes

Nicole Barling Luke: “One of the challenging things we often find when working in this grand system space is moving between altitudes.”

“When we're working in these really complex spaces, it can feel a bit like the body or the brain hasn't had time to adjust to the layers and the conditions that we're trying to accommodate at any given time, because it is so complex and interconnected. That's what we mean by working across altitudes. Where are we seeing these different layers of the system?”

“Changes at this level, at the landscape level and changes at the Micro level, where these niches are, emerge. They don't necessarily change a system; they don't transition a system, but they create the context and the opportunity to do so. They create the conditions for this Meso layer, this 'regime' layer to change.”

“We work with Kate Raworth, who is an economist based in the UK, looking at doughnut economics. She says the most interesting tool that you can have when thinking about the economy is a pen or a pencil, because it means you can redesign it. It was designed in the first instance, so what does it look like to redesign it?”

“So what would it look like to put out these wildly ambitious goals? Then say we don't know how to get there. By putting out that declaration, how might we organise ourselves differently in service to what that goal is?”

Dimity Podger: “WWF took that opportunity to embark on a national strategy to regenerate Australia and invest in niche-level innovation. That included the Innovate to Regenerate campaign and challenge, and the focus there was to try and catalyse a shift to a regenerative economy through activations at that niche level.”

“Our work in response to this Meso-level challenge for enterprises and funders has been to develop two niche innovations. The first is the Regen Community Investment Fund and the second is the Regen Economy Activator Program. Together these niche innovations are looking at that systemic gap between enterprises needing the right support and the right finance.”

“We're innovating at this niche altitude to build new systems, structures, and cultures of thinking and doing. Creating new coalitions and alliances and attempting to make some shifts and create new structures that can exist in a more stable way at that Meso level.”

Explore more

For those who are keen to dive deeper and do differently, here are some links to learnings and resources mentioned by the speakers and/or related to the open learning topic:

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Organising in Place and Working Across Altitudes | Understorey