Becoming Earthians

Question

How do collective systems maintain adaptive capacity under stress?

The central question of this inquiry — what enables systems to absorb perturbation without collapsing into rigidity or fragmenting into noise.

The question

Adaptive capacity is the ability to respond to changing conditions while maintaining essential function. In organisms, this is known as allostasis — stability through change. In ecosystems, it is framed as resilience. In societies, adaptive capacity is increasingly invoked, yet our ways of sensing, cultivating, and sustaining it — especially under prolonged stress — remain partial and uneven.

The question is more specific:

How do collective systems maintain the capacity to reorganise, respond, and transform — without losing coherence or collapsing into brittle uniformity?

Why it matters

Under conditions of planetary-scale crisis, adaptive capacity is not a luxury. It is the difference between transformation and collapse.

Most systems are optimised for efficiency under stable conditions. When stress exceeds their design parameters, they either rigidify (doubling down on control, eliminating variance) or fragment (losing coordination, each part acting alone). Neither response is adequate.

Individual

When overwhelmed, you either lock into rigid routines — refusing new information, shutting down emotionally — or you fragment into reactive chaos, scattered attention, no coherent response. Adaptive capacity means maintaining your core stability while reorganising in response to what life brings. It requires practices that help you return to yourself, not just push through.

Group

Teams under pressure either become rigid — sticking to the plan when it's clearly not working, punishing deviation — or fragment into everyone doing their own thing with no coordination. Adaptive teams can reorganise roles and approaches on the fly while maintaining shared purpose. They have ways to surface dissent without derailing.

Organisation

Companies facing disruption either rigidify — defending legacy products, doubling down on old strategy, silencing internal critics — or fragment into chaotic pivots with no coherent direction. Adaptive organisations can sense emerging changes, pilot alternatives without betting everything, and transform their core business while maintaining operational integrity.

Community

Communities under stress either rigidify — gatekeeping membership, resisting any change, enforcing conformity — or fragment as people retreat to private life and social fabric dissolves. Adaptive communities maintain the connections and shared spaces that enable collective response, while allowing for diversity and evolution in how people participate.

Society

Societies facing crises either rigidify into authoritarian control — suppressing dissent, enforcing uniformity, concentrating power — or fragment into polarised tribes with no shared reality. Adaptive societies maintain public spaces for sense-making and legitimate disagreement, institutions that can evolve, and mechanisms that distribute both burden and agency.

Civilisation

Planetary challenges like climate breakdown push toward either global technocratic control — one system, one solution, no alternatives — or collapse into nationalism and isolation. Neither can address problems that are simultaneously global and local, fast and slow, technical and cultural. Adaptive civilisational response requires coordination that preserves diversity and local agency — unity without uniformity.

What this inquiry contributes

Through agent-based modeling, this work has identified a specific mechanism:

Load concentration without relief pathways leads to cascade failure.

When systems coordinate through phase-locking (entrainment), the burden of maintaining coherence falls on whoever is most different from consensus. If these load-bearing agents lack independent recovery pathways, they exhaust — and the system cascades.

Systems that preserve internal reference points (coherence) provide relief pathways that prevent this cascade. What this means in tangible terms depends on context, but generally involves decentralised feedback loops that allow parts of the system to recalibrate without forcing uniformity. An example is diversity of thought in social systems, which prevents groupthink. Another related to organisational change is the ability to pilot new approaches in parallel without forcing wholesale adoption.

An example of relief pathways in ecological systems is functional redundancy, where multiple species perform similar roles. This allows ecosystems to maintain function even when some species are stressed or lost. In an organisational context, relief pathways might involve cross-training employees or decentralising decision-making to allow for more adaptive responses to change.

Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety states that a system must have sufficient internal variety to effectively respond to external disturbances. Relief pathways contribute to this requisite variety by enabling parts of the system to adapt independently, thereby enhancing overall resilience. But you can also think about this in terms of governance systems. So many of our current institutions are designed for control and predictability, which limits their ability to adapt to complex, dynamic challenges. By incorporating relief pathways, such as decentralised decision-making or participatory governance, these systems can enhance their adaptive capacity and better respond to changing and ambiguous conditions.

Key findings

Finding Source
Recovery time 12× longer under entrainment at high stress E003
Recovery cost 30× higher under periodic stress E005b
Relief pathways, not diversity per se, prevent cascade I001-I004