The Cycle of Kairotic Flow

At first glance, as you can see, the basic Kairotic Flow diagram is pretty simple.

There are 6 archetypes arranged in a circular flow. Pioneer, Cultivator and Regulator are on the right-hand ‘lit’ side of the circle, represented by orange, an active and attention-grabbing colour. (Note: Cultivator was previously called “Settler” and Regulator was previously called “Town Planner”. Simon Wardley changed names in his framework as well, so the divergence is now complete.) The three archetypes I added - Steward, Curator and Scout - are shown in purple, representing a quieter and less visible (‘shadowed’) left-hand side to the cycle.

Governing (steering) flows and forms of power

Power is not inherently corrupted or corrupting.

Power is simply energy in motion, doing work. Life needs power to act.

But to be healthy, it needs to be in the right place, at the right time, in the right form.

Power only corrupts an activity when it is ‘stuck’ in a form that does not suit that activity (or Archetypal Phase).

Kairotic Flow maps a kairos cycle of life

The ancient Greeks had three concepts and words for time: Chronos, Aion, and Kairos.

Chronos is clock time, evenly divided in hours, minutes, seconds. It shows up in words like “chronological” and “chronometer” and “chronic”. Aion (now “eon”) talks about very long cycles of time.

Kairos is living time, seasonal and cyclical, judged not by duration, but by its importance and value. Kairos is the opportune or defining moment, the time when conditions are right or ripe for something to occur.

The word “Kairotic” comes from Kairos..

Kairotic Flow points to the opportune moment for power to move (and transform) from one Archetypal Phase to the next in the sequential cycle, as determined by living context.

Humans can define Spring as starting on a particular day in the calendar (chronological) year, but trees and plants don’t care about what month or day of the year it is. They start flowering when their living conditions and their internal states show them it’s the ‘opportune moment’ for them to do so. Not a moment before, not a moment after.

The Kairotic Flow shows movement through the Archetypes occurring in the same way — at the opportune moment, in a necessary sequence of events.

Trade-offs (tensions) between opposing Archetypes

When we make choices, we’re nearly always making some kind of trade-off between opposites, which exist in a natural and inevitable tension. More of Option A means less of Option B and vice-versa.

In common parlance, we say we can’t have our cake and eat it too.

Do we buy a new car, or repair the one we already have? (Pioneer ↔ Steward)

Do we optimise a process we have tested a bit, or do we reconsider whether the process actually does what we want it to do? (Cultivator ↔ Curator)

Do we develop a routine around an approach we have been using for a while, or do we look for other approaches that might better meet our needs? (Regulator ↔ Scout)

The choices we make might be well-considered or simply habitual, but the trade-offs are always there. Being aware of those trade-offs in the context we’re in enables us to make wiser choices.

Orange and purple

You’ll see in the section above that the first option presented in all three tension questions is the one on the orange side of the Kairotic Flow cycle.

I’ve done this to demonstrate the bias of our current culture. Most power is stuck in forms appropriate to Archetypes on the orange side of the cycle, which we associate with economic growth. Our social institutions, and in particular, Market and State (e.g. government), were created to facilitate these choices and activities, all of which are in one way or another immediately and obviously important to getting us the resources we need to live.

I want to draw your attention to the critical importance of the purple side Archetypes, which our culture unfortunately (and most inaccurately) tends to dismiss as unproductive, laborious, and costly activities with no immediate or obvious value.

A personal story to illustrate:

For many years, up until maybe 10 years ago when I was in my late 30s, I seriously resented my body’s need to sleep. It felt like a waste of time. I did not like losing a third of every day to what felt like not living, not being awake and conscious, especially when I was also doing work during the day that didn’t feel fulfilling to me.

Anyway, it wasn’t unusual at all for me to get sleep-deprived, going sometimes 2-3 days without sleeping at all, and fairly regularly staying up late and waking up to an alarm 4 or 5 hours after I went to bed.

Needless to say, this wasn’t good for my health or, in all honesty, my daily life. Many of the choices I made weren’t great, and eventually I burned out from my career as a project manager. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I would have entered that career at all, much less stayed in it as long as I did, if I hadn’t been depriving myself of sleep at night and as a result, effectively sleep-walking through my days as well!

Our bodies need sleep; our minds too. Even though we’re not conscious of what’s going on, much of the repair (Steward) and clean up (Curator - e.g. autophagy) and generative (Scout) activities our bodies need to perform occurs only while we’re in a sleeping state. The sleeping activities prepare us for our waking activities. If we don’t make those preparations, our waking activities are adversely impacted in myriad ways.

We ignore or avoid the purple side of the Kairotic Flow at great cost, even peril.

I would suggest our world is in the mess it’s in now largely because, when it comes to our operating system of social institutions and the way they entice us to behave, we’ve collectively been doing exactly that — ignoring and/or avoiding the purple side of the cycle.

Kairotic Flow maps (proto/meta) patterns of life

If you look around at the natural world, you can see the Kairotic Flow cycle playing itself out everywhere, because life adapts to survive in its environment. There are inevitable consequences of the way our world spins on its axis and travels around the sun. There is no summer without winter, no harvest without pollination, and no pollination without the directing of energy away from the no-longer-viable structures (like old leaves and branches) and towards the building of new structures to suit current conditions.

Life changes continuously as it learns and adapts to its continuously changing environment. Nora Bateson’s word symmathesy describes this mutual learning beautifully. Whether we’re aware of it or not, reality is complex.

Maps and models and the institutions we create are often useful to us, but on the most fundamental level they are all wrong, all disconnected from reality the second we create them.

Kairotic Flow is a map of sorts, describing (what seem to me to be) eternal patterns of life that play out over and over again in multiple contexts. It is abstracted to the extreme. Applying it to any real-life situation rests on our human abilities to sense what’s going on around us (observing) and, using our pattern-matching abilities (orienting), respond accordingly, with choice and action, to what’s happening now and what’s needed next.

Kairotic Flow is not meant for pinning down to any specific context or territory. Kairotic Flow is meant to be applied as a lens and compass, for the applier to observe the situation and orient their own perceiving, bringing what is relevant and what matters most in that situation into clear view.