Pontus texted me three days before this conversation to say he'd be in Malaga. Perfect timing. We've known each other maybe ten years, stretching back through Borderland and Burning Man, but even before that we worked together professionally. I facilitated a big group workshop that led to an IT strategy, and he was there. I was fascinated by something that day. I'd never done large group facilitation before, and I realized I loved it. One of my natural abilities. Pontus has become someone I genuinely admire... not just for his thinking, but for how embodied he is.
He's a psychologist, but he's also worked as a carpenter doing roofs in Stockholm, and he acts. He's a member of two Playback Theater groups where the work is improvised forum theater... playing back the real stories of people's lives. It's a community building methodology. There's no manuscript, no way to rehearse. You just meet whatever the audience brings. What threads through everything he does is a fascination with what lies between people, the relationships, not the individual heroics.
Facilitation and emergence
What Pontus is becoming curious about now is how to facilitate emergence. Most of our thinking is predict and control... set goals, create a plan, execute it. But reality moves faster than our plans. What he's exploring instead is how to sense into what wants to emerge and nourish that. He described it as putting a rubber band... a virtual rubber band... into the future somewhere, anchoring it where he wants to go. Then the tension holds him as he navigates and makes micro decisions that move him in that direction. It's like a compass, not a map. You don't need to know exactly where you're headed.
He works now at the IDG, the Inner Development Guide, identifying five core dimensions needed to move toward a thriving society: being, thinking, relating, collaborating, acting. Under each dimension, five skills. Twenty five in total. It's his answer to why humanity is moving slowly on the sustainable development goals. We're lacking the inner skills. We apply linear logic to non-linear problems and end up with stupid simplicity instead of elegant simplicity.
Micro experiments and embodiment
Pontus thinks of life as a series of prototypes. See something, find an idea, execute on it, learn, then spiral upward because you're constantly learning from those iterations. He mentioned a workbench he saw at a design lab in Stockholm with words engraved on it: Do something, learn from it, do it again. Because it doesn't start with what do you want to achieve. It starts with just doing something.
What fascinates him is that I rarely know what my desires are. I find it hard to articulate them. But he says the shadows... shame and fear... get in the way. They prevent us from sensing into what we actually want. He mentioned work he does called the Sacred Desire Playground, running it for the eleventh iteration now. The interesting question is how we connect to our deep desires, the ones hidden behind shadows. And when I asked about being more embodied, being more playful, he said something that stuck: I think I'm already playful. Just sitting here having this conversation from zero. We're playing with a really interesting conversation.
