They say opposites attract. Sure. But they also repel. Like magnets.

This describes the spiciness present in my marriage. We spent ten years working out if we should even be in a relationship (verdict: yes... I think?!) and have been on a marriage rollercoaster for sixteen years since. Luckily I love this theme park. It's thrilling and dynamic. And we have made a wonderful kiddo together, which is the biggest tick in the YES column. But the only way we cope day to day is through relationship strategies for our frequent breakdowns. Strategies like the Angry Pash (self-explanatory?) and my personal favourite: the chorus of the "I was right and you were wrong" song. It comes with dance moves. It shifts the energy, dissolves the defensiveness, and somehow makes everything survivable.

I've been thinking about that song a lot lately. Because our civilisation's relationship with the modern economy feels like another uncomfortable marriage. Volatile. Load-bearing. And this one is definitely not going to last.

The operating system of capitalism has always been out of sync with natural laws. Running on assumptions that had no choice but to eventually crash and burn, like every other empire founded on power-hoarding, expansionism, and extraction. So whilst the current state of collapse is experienced as a sequence of shocks, it's probably not a surprise. On some level, in some part of your body, like mine, you knew. You probably sat in many a meeting where the wrong things were being optimised for. Watching institutions grab at data, implement doomed strategies, crank up speed, when what was actually needed was something they didn't have a budget line for.

You may well have been told, in various polite and impolite ways, that your kind of knowing isn't quite rigorous enough. A bit too soft. Too relational. Too interested in the between-spaces, the connections, the things that only become visible when you hold the whole picture rather than optimising the parts. Too focused on how people feel rather than what the numbers say.

You were right. They were wrong. You get to sing the song.

The intelligences that modernity has sidelined are not one easy thing to point at. They are many, and they have been excluded with remarkable consistency.

Indigenous intelligence: the knowledge systems built over millennia of careful, reciprocal relationship with land, ecosystem, and community. Ecological intelligence: the capacity to read a living system the way a farmer reads weather or a river reads rain. Somatic intelligence: the knowing that lives in the body before the mind has caught up. Sacred intelligence: the wisdom traditions, the contemplative practices, the understanding that meaning and purpose are not soft extras but load-bearing structures of a life. Ancestral intelligence: what gets carried forward through lineage, story, and practice across generations. Collective intelligence: what emerges between people when the conditions are right, the thing that no individual mind can generate alone.

And holding all of it together: what the filmmaker and research designer Nora Bateson calls warm data. The kind of knowing that can't survive being separated from its context, and loses everything when you try.

You have probably been working with several of these your whole life. You just haven't always had the vocabulary, or the permission, to call them that.

The intelligence needed now is the one that can hold complexity without collapsing it into false certainty. This messy world needs people who understand relationships as infrastructure. Who know how to stay oriented toward possibility when everything feels like it's coming apart at the seams. Who know how to hold the wholeness when everyone else is reaching for the nearest simple answer.

That's not a soft skill. It is the skill. The one that's actually needed now.

Many of us have been practicing it for years, without institutional support, sometimes despite active discouragement. In the way we facilitate. The way we lead. The way we parent tyrannical tots and tweens. The way we refuse to let the most important questions get crowded out by the most urgent ones.

This is where the gems and richness for our next civilisation will come from. It makes me genuinely excited. To think of all the intentionality and systems awareness we get to bring to this next iteration of human flourishing. All the new models and wisdom, the care, diversity, and reciprocity we get to bake into our institutions.

The world doesn't need more of the thinking that got us here. When you see someone online banging on about taxpayer money being wasted on climate initiatives, just settle into the knowledge that this person (and the data suggests it is more likely to be a man) has lost his bearings. The ideas and certainties he built his life on have turned out to be bunk. He is lost, he is scared, and he probably can't see the next step forward.

But we can. Or at least we know the values and processes that will guide those steps. Collective, humble, relational, creative, generative, nurturing, and kind. These are the skills and aptitudes that have lived in the feminine domain, purposefully excluded from the culture-making and institutions that have held power for eons, at least in the western world.

To be clear: this is not a gendered domain. Feminine and masculine energies sit inside all of us in varying balance. But the feminine ones have not been valued. Now they are not only valuable, our very survival depends on our civilised world integrating these intelligences.

It is time to rummage around in our sacred feminine and bring those marginalised skills and awarenesses forward.

The world needs more of what you already know how to do. Taken seriously. Resourced properly. Brought into the rooms where the big decisions are being made. And that will only happen if those who intimately believe in the strength of these ways of being stand up and lead out on them.

This newsletter exists because I've always believed that's possible. The people who are going to make it happen are mostly already here, perhaps not yet recognising they hold some of the superpowers this world desperately needs, or waiting for the world to catch up with what they already know. I also think AI will expedite this shift. These skills, thankfully, are not the ones most easily automated.

So let's get to work. Stand up for these values, these ways of being and knowing. Express them in every workplace. Platform them in every public meeting. That is how they become part of the fabric of our society.

And because I love being on the right side of history, I find it helps to hum the song.

"I was right and you were wrong. I'm going to sing the I was right song. I was right and you were wrong."

It's very vindicating.

Megan

P.S. In the spirit of full disclosure: the song works both ways. “You were right and I was wrong…”. When you are the one who has royally f@cked up, turning it over to the other person with choral enthusiasm, fully committing to the dance moves dissolves the tension instantly and gives them tremendous pleasure. Highly recommended for marital harmony.

P.P.S. Here is the confronting but beautiful poem Mama Now by the Queen of Warm Data, Nora Bateson, which captures the anguish and the confusion of this time, not solving, just sitting with what is, and what lies between us and the next chapter of us.

P.P.P.S I deliver Strategy Communications Support services to leaders in the For-Purpose/Impact space. (Only one slot left this quarter - will it be you? 🤗)