Malte Wagenbach, The Oslo Project – January 2025
We are so terrified of building the wrong future that we have forgotten how to build any future at all. Across every domain – from climate solutions to governance experiments to economic alternatives – the same paralysis emerges: we critique existing systems with devastating clarity, map ideal alternatives with sophisticated precision, yet struggle to bridge the chasm between analysis and implementation.
This is not an argument for lowered standards, but for higher courage. The path to regenerative civilisation runs directly through the worlds we are embarrassed to try.
⸻
1 | The perfectionism trap
Contemporary systems thinking has produced a generation of brilliant diagnosticians. We can map feedback loops, identify leverage points, and design elegant interventions on whiteboards. Yet our sophistication has become its own impediment – we are paralysed by the complexity we have learned to see.
The climate movement exemplifies this paradox. We have unprecedented scientific clarity about the scale of transformation required: rapid decarbonisation, regenerative agriculture, circular materials flows, post-growth economics. Yet implementation stalls not from lack of knowledge but from what philosopher John Dewey called "the quest for certainty" – our insistence that solutions be comprehensive before they can be legitimate.
Meanwhile, oil companies drill. Venture capitalists deploy capital. Autocrats consolidate power. They build badly, constantly, iteratively. Their systems are crude, extractive, often self-defeating. But they build. And building creates material facts that reshape the landscape for everyone else.
The irony is acute: those committed to better futures often exhibit less implementation courage than those actively destroying the conditions for any viable future at all.
⸻
2 | Regenerative failure as pedagogy
Silicon Valley popularised "fail fast" as a mantra, but applied it only to profitable ventures within extractive paradigms. We need to radicalise this concept: regenerative failure as a methodology for systemic transformation.
Regenerative failure differs from optimisation-oriented iteration in three key dimensions:
Ecological accountability: Each prototype must improve rather than degrade its context. Failure means falling short of regenerative impact, not merely missing profit targets or user adoption metrics.
Community embedding: Experiments unfold within and accountable to place-based communities rather than abstract markets. Failure becomes collective learning rather than private loss.
Commons contribution: Even failed experiments must contribute knowledge, tools, or relationships to shared infrastructure. Nothing disappears into proprietary silos when it doesn't work.
The Transition Towns movement offers instructive examples. Many local currency experiments failed to achieve widespread adoption. Most community energy cooperatives remain economically marginal. Many localisation initiatives struggled with scale and coordination challenges.
Yet these "failures" generated crucial intelligence: which governance structures work across cultural contexts, how to navigate regulatory constraints, what social infrastructure must precede economic transformation. This knowledge now informs more sophisticated efforts like platform cooperatives, bioregional planning networks, and municipal broadband commons.
Regenerative failure transforms dead ends into stepping stones.
⸻
3 | The implementation gap
McKinsey estimates that achieving net-zero emissions requires $275 trillion in cumulative investment by 2050. Yet less than 1% of venture capital flows toward climate solutions, and most sustainability funding targets mitigation rather than systemic transformation.
This is not merely a capital allocation problem but a legitimacy crisis. Financial institutions struggle to price investments in systems that don't yet exist. Regenerative projects cannot demonstrate track records because the infrastructure for measuring regenerative impact remains embryonic.
We face what economist Carlota Perez calls a "installation-deployment gap" – the lag between technological possibility and institutional adoption. But our current gap runs deeper: we lack not just deployment mechanisms but courage to deploy imperfect solutions while we develop better ones.
Consider the contrast between mainstream climate finance and indigenous land management. Indigenous communities manage 80% of global biodiversity on 22% of global land, often using practices that Western science is only beginning to understand. Yet indigenous communities receive less than 1% of climate finance.
The asymmetry reveals our bias: we fund abstraction over implementation, projection over practice, novelty over wisdom that already works imperfectly but regeneratively.
⸻
4 | Prototype cultures and permission structures
Across the margins of the dominant system, communities experiment with post-capitalist living arrangements. These range from ecovillages and cohousing cooperatives to platform cooperatives and community land trusts. Most remain small-scale, face significant challenges, and would not satisfy conventional metrics of "success."
Yet they create what sociologist Erik Olin Wright calls "real utopias" – institutional prototypes that demonstrate alternative ways of organising economic and social life. Their value lies not in perfection but in proof-of-concept for possibilities that remain theoretical within academic discourse.
Damanhur, an intentional community in northern Italy, has operated an alternative economy for over four decades. Members use an internal currency (credito), practice collective ownership of productive assets, and govern through complex but functional democratic systems. The community faces ongoing challenges: generational transition, integration with broader economic systems, cultural tensions between founders and newer members.
Yet Damanhur demonstrates that alternative economics can persist across multiple decades, weather financial crises, and support hundreds of people with reasonable material well-being. These are not trivial accomplishments within a context where most cooperative ventures fail within five years.
Platform cooperativism offers another instructive case. Worker-owned platform businesses like Stocksy (photography) and Resonate (music streaming) challenge the extractive logic of venture-funded platforms. Most platform cooperatives struggle with capitalisation, user acquisition, and competition from venture-subsidised alternatives.
But they prove that platform infrastructure can be democratically governed, that surplus can be shared among workers rather than extracted by investors, and that users value platforms aligned with their values even when functionality lags behind dominant alternatives.
These experiments create "permission structures" – demonstrations that alternatives are possible, not merely desirable. They shift the conversation from "what should we do?" to "how do we scale what already works?"
⸻
5 | The ethics of iteration
Building badly raises legitimate ethical concerns. How do we experiment responsibly when the stakes include planetary habitability and social justice? How do we distinguish productive iteration from harmful externalization of costs onto vulnerable communities?
Three principles help navigate this terrain:
Subsidiarity over scale: Begin with local experiments that can be evaluated and adjusted by those most affected by outcomes. Scale only what demonstrates regenerative impact across diverse contexts.
Process over product: Design experiments to maximize learning rather than optimize metrics. Value insights that inform broader transformation over success within existing paradigms.
Care over conquest: Center relationships and ecological health over efficiency and growth. Measure success by improvement in life conditions for all affected beings, not just human beneficiaries.
These principles distinguish regenerative experimentation from extractive "innovation." The difference lies not in perfection but in accountability – who bears the costs of failure, who benefits from success, and how learning gets shared.
⸻
6 | From implementation to emergence
The climate crisis operates on geological timescales while human institutions operate on political cycles. Economic transformation requires generational patience while ecological tipping points demand immediate action. Social change unfolds through cultural shifts while technological solutions require massive coordinated investment.
These temporal mismatches create what systems theorist Donella Meadows called "policy resistance" – the tendency for systems to push back against interventions that threaten existing equilibria. Yet Meadows also identified how small changes in system structure can create dramatic shifts in system behaviour.
Building badly creates structural changes that shift the landscape for future intervention. Each successful cooperative demonstrates economic viability. Each thriving ecovillage normalises alternative lifestyles. Each functioning local currency proves monetary alternatives can work. Each community energy project builds technical and social infrastructure.
None of these experiments, alone, transforms global systems. But collectively they create what complexity scientist Brian Arthur calls "increasing returns" – positive feedback loops that make further transformation easier, cheaper, and more likely.
The missing piece is not better analysis but institutional courage: the willingness to fund experiments that might fail, support communities building alternatives that don't yet work perfectly, and create policy frameworks that encourage productive experimentation rather than demand predetermined outcomes.
⸻
7 | An ecology of experiments
Rather than seeking single solutions to systemic challenges, we need what resilience theorist C.S. Holling called "adaptive cycles" – diverse experiments that test different approaches while sharing learning across contexts.
This requires new infrastructure:
Experiment networks that connect local initiatives working on similar challenges, enabling rapid knowledge transfer and collaborative problem-solving across geographic and cultural boundaries.
Failure funds that specifically support high-risk, high-learning experiments with explicit permission to fail as long as they contribute insights to collective intelligence.
Commons protocols that ensure knowledge generated through experimentation benefits broader movements rather than getting enclosed within proprietary platforms or academic institutions.
Regenerative metrics that measure ecological and social impact rather than just economic indicators, creating accountability structures aligned with systemic transformation goals.
We already see early signals: the P2P Foundation's documentation of commons-based peer production, the Transition Network's open-source methodology, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium's shared infrastructure for cooperative platforms.
But we need orders of magnitude more support for communities and organisations willing to build badly in service of building better.
⸻
8 | The courage to begin
The future we need will not emerge from perfect plans executed flawlessly. It will emerge from countless imperfect experiments that teach us how complex systems actually transform, what regenerative practices look like in specific contexts, and which institutional innovations create positive rather than extractive outcomes.
This requires a fundamental shift in how we think about progress: from optimization toward predetermined goals to adaptation within evolving contexts. From scaling uniform solutions to cultivating diverse experiments. From demanding certainty before action to building through action itself.
The sports drink company I am building operates from this philosophy. We know consumer packaged goods participates in extractive systems. We know small brands face structural disadvantages. We know regenerative practices increase costs in markets that price only extraction.
Yet we also know that every alternative economy begins with someone willing to build badly toward building better. Someone willing to accept smaller margins to support regenerative agriculture. Someone willing to design for ecological impact rather than merely optimize for profit. Someone willing to experiment with business models that serve life rather than just returns.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Will it transform global food systems? Probably not directly. But it creates one more proof point that business can serve regeneration, one more relationship with farmers transitioning to ecological practices, one more example for others contemplating similar experiments.
The courage to build badly multiplies across contexts until building better becomes inevitable.
⸻
Coda: Permission granted
You do not need permission to experiment with better ways of living. You do not need perfect solutions to begin building alternatives. You do not need to wait for institutional support to start creating the infrastructure for regenerative futures.
What you need is the courage to build badly, the wisdom to learn from failure, and the persistence to keep building until what you are building starts building itself.
The world we need exists in fragments across thousands of experiments that do not yet work perfectly. Our task is not to wait for someone else to assemble those fragments, but to add our own imperfect pieces to the emerging mosaic.
Build badly. Learn quickly. Share everything. Begin now.
The future is assembled one flawed experiment at a time.
—M.W.