Gautam John

Author: gkjohn

  • The Friction Economy and What We’ve Displaced

    Friction hasn’t disappeared from the economy. It has been redistributed — from the digital to the physical, from the individual to the collective, from the visible to the felt.

    The loneliness we call personal is often structural. The smoothness we celebrate in tech is subsidised by someone else’s exhaustion. And the curated worlds we retreat to are buffers, not solutions.

    There’s a sentence in here I keep returning to: “Friction is also where new systems can emerge.” Yes. That’s the hope! Bit only if we’re willing to feel it, not just route around it.

    Highly recommend reading the whole thing!

    Updated to add this brilliant piece by Indy Johar. [link]

    “I will not build my safety on someone else’s precarity.”

    Thx Rakesh!

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 9 June 2025. View original →

  • Leading Across Geometries

    Commons as Laboratory for New Leadership

     

    Note: I had been sitting with this post for a while now and chanced upon this article posted on Linkedin. It was the provocation I needed to hit the publish button.

    The river has no patience for frameworks.

    Picture a community meeting about water sharing along the Kaveri. We have farmers, companies, and government officials gathered by its banks. The water flows past their deliberations, circular in its seasonal rhythms, linear in its downstream journey, networked through tributaries, spiraling through landscapes and generations.

    Each group speaks a different spatial language.

    The farmers speak in cycles – of monsoons, crops, and ancestral water practices. The company representatives speak in lines – of quarterly targets, infrastructure, scalable interventions. The officials speak in hierarchies – of permits, policies, jurisdiction. And the tribal elders speak in spirals, of how water holds the memory of ancestors and the needs of children yet unborn.

    These scenes reveal how commons work surfaces geometry. Not the mathematical kind, but the cultural logic of how people relate to time, space, and relationship. And leading across these geometries, without flattening difference, is a distinct, multi-lingual form of leadership.

    In my earlier writing about connection and abstraction, I suggested that change work takes different shapes. But nowhere is this more visible than in commons governance.

    • Circular thinking is relational and seasonal. It is built on reciprocity. Taking water requires giving back, and leadership is collective, rotational, and rhythmic.
    • Linear thinking defines property rights, tracks progress, and seeks efficiency. Leadership here is about direction, control, and outcomes.
    • Networked thinking spreads power laterally. Think open-source protocols or digital commons. Leadership is facilitative; trust flows across nodes.
    • Spiral thinking integrates personal, communal, and spiritual dimensions. It holds memory and aspiration in the same breath. Leadership is ancestral and moral.

    Perhaps the real challenge is that most governance systems are designed for just one geometry and in expecting the others to conform, results in misalignment, mistrust, and missed opportunity.

    This is why commons work can be a powerful laboratory for new kinds of leadership.

    Where leaders learn to read the room, not just what people said, but the geometry behind it. When farmers were speaking in cycles about crop rotations and when bureaucrats were speaking in lines about budget deadlines. And to creatd spaces where the geometries could meet, like overlapping circles creating new forms at their intersections.

    This is “through me” leadership. Not imposing, not brokering, but enabling emergence. It’s less about reconciling differences and more about weaving across them.

    (more…)

  • The Wrong Geometry for Commons

    I totally get this frustration but am wondering if we approach commons challenges with the wrong geometric assumptions.

    Could an underlying driver be that we’re trying to create commons using one cultural logic (linear: design-implement-maintain-measure) in contexts where multiple geometries are colliding?

    The Miyawaki forests represent ‘modern’ ecological commons thinking – scientific design, government implementation, citizen maintenance. But the communities around them might operate from different spatial logics about shared spaces. Some might see them as circular – spaces that should evolve and be used organically by the community. Others might view them through network logic – as nodes in broader urban systems that serve multiple functions beyond their ‘intended’ purpose.

    What if the tragedy isn’t that people don’t value green spaces but that we’re imposing one geometric approach to commons stewardship and then wondering why it doesn’t work?

    What if instead of asking ‘How do we make people maintain these forests properly?’ we asked ‘How do we create forest commons that can thrive across different cultural approaches to shared urban space?’

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 25 May 2025. View original →

  • Consulting Firms With Better Branding?

    For someone who has had the good fortune of working alongside India’s samaaj, it feels like the imagination has been drained out of the room. If all we’re doing now is designing for what governments can pay for then we are consulting firms with better branding.

    For someone who has had the good fortune of working alongside India’s samaaj, it feels like the imagination has been drained out of the room. If all we’re doing now is designing for what governments can pay for then we are…. consulting firms with better branding?

    Agree with Rakesh here, the shift from “transition to government” to “they should own it from the outset” feels oddly binary with no space for co-creation or for imagining and building together.

    Where are the people in all this? The communities, the movements, the folks inside government who aren’t just implementers but thinkers and dreamers too? It’s one thing to ask what’s affordable but who is going to ask what’s dignifying? What builds belonging? What opens up new possibilities?

    Tired of new solutions. We need new questions. And, most importantly, new ways of listening.

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 23 May 2025. View original →

  • What Kind of Change Are We Nurturing?

    Over the past year, I’ve been sitting with a question that keeps surfacing in different forms: What kind of change are we nurturing? Not just the outcomes, but the texture of the work. The relationships, the ways of seeing, the defaults we slip into when complexity knocks.

    In my previous piece for the India Development Review (IDR), I examined the tension between connection and abstraction. That framing opened up a rich set of conversations about frameworks and fungi, language and leadership, the risks of simplifying what’s meant to stay complex.

    This new piece is a continuation of that thread. But it’s also a deepening. It’s about how connection and abstraction are not opposites, but interdependent. About how trust shows up not just in people, but in patterns. About what it means to lead through us rather than by us. And about what changes when we stop reaching for control and start leaning into the relationship.

    Would love for you to read and share your reflections:

    Featuring Rajesh Kasturirangan, Socratus Collective Wisdom Corporation, Socratus Foundation for Collective Wisdom and learned wisdom from Bamboo Being, Sue Adams, Jim Dethmer and Karen Kimsey-House

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 16 May 2025. View original →

  • A question for all of us who care about change

    How do we resist the pull towards control and instead lean into the messiness of connection?

    In an earlier piece on IDR, I explored connection and abstraction as two distinct approaches to systems change. That framing was meant to start a conversation, to ask what it takes to build what I call a rainforest of change in a world so often drawn to the efficiency of plantations. A rainforest conjures images of abundance, resilience, and diversity—a thriving ecosystem in which each element plays a role in sustaining the whole. A plantation, by contrast, symbolises uniformity, control, and extraction, where the goal is not thriving but harvesting.

    Since writing that piece, I’ve been reflecting on the ways connection and abstraction interact, not as binaries but as polarities. They’re not opposites; they’re interdependent. The tension between them doesn’t have to pull us apart. It can hold us in balance, like the dance between the roots and branches of a tree.

    This follow-up piece builds on that idea. It draws on recent conversations and experiences to look more deeply at the relationship between connection and abstraction, the role of trust and language, and what it means to lead in a way that honours both.

    Systems work as rainforests

    The rainforest is the model we often hold up as an ideal—diverse, resilient, and alive with connection. But saying we want to create rainforests of change means little unless we understand what it actually takes to nurture one. Rainforests are the result of countless unseen relationships of roots, fungi, and microbes all working together in ways we cannot always observe or control.

    Contrast that with a plantation. It’s certainly efficient, but only in a narrow sense. It replaces diversity with monoculture, relationships with extraction, and adaptability with rigidity.

    In a recent conversation with Rajesh Kasturirangan at Socratus, I spoke about the concept of terroir. It wasn’t his framing, but it became a starting point for our dialogue about connection, abstraction, and systems change. I used terroir to describe how deeply place matters—how the soil, history, relationships, power dynamics, and culture of a community create a unique context that resists replication, and how this context must be understood and respected. Just as wine reflects the terroir of the vineyard, change reflects the terroir of the community—and in systems change, we cannot treat every community as a blank slate.

    Rajesh pushed back not to dismiss the value of connection or terroir, but to emphasise that abstraction matters too. His point was that we shouldn’t think of them as oppositional. Rather, they are part of the same ecosystem, each enriching the other.

    This brought me back to a widely used metaphor when comparing systems work with project-based approaches: the rainforest versus the plantation.

    The more I think about it, the more I see how much of our work risks becoming plantation-like when we lean too heavily on abstraction. Frameworks can flatten the complexity of the systems we’re working in, turning vibrant ecosystems into neatly pruned rows—useful, but also brittle.

    Rajesh offered an important clarification here: patterns, he said, are not the frameworks themselves, nor are they abstract blueprints. Instead, they are regular, repeated forms that emerge from the underlying structures, whether in nature or communities. They arise when the conditions of connection, trust, and collaboration allow something meaningful to grow.

    This idea of patterns as a bridge between connection and abstraction is powerful. It suggests that while abstraction helps us recognise patterns, it is connection that makes those patterns meaningful and rooted.

    How we lead

    Two podcast conversations I listened to recently, one with Jim Dethmer and another with Karen Kimsey-House, offered language that deepened the idea of leadership for me. They discussed different ways of showing up: ‘to me’, ‘by me’, ‘through me’, and ‘as me’. It struck me how closely these ideas map onto the tension between connection and abstraction.

    ‘To me’ is an approach of helplessness where life is something that happens to us. There’s little agency here, only reaction. ‘By me’ is where most of us spend our time as leaders. It’s about taking charge, creating outcomes, and owning our role in the process. It is empowering, but it can also lead to overcontrol and trying too hard to shape the world to our will.

    The shift to ‘through me’ feels like the key here. It’s a practice of letting go, not of responsibility but of attachment. Karen expresses this well: when we lead ‘through me’, we allow the frameworks to recede into the background. They don’t disappear; they’re still there, but they no longer dictate the moment. Instead, we make room for what’s emerging. This requires trust, not in the sense of blind faith, but in a kind of grounded confidence that the system knows what it needs, that the connections will hold.

    What stood out most to me was this idea of invisible networks. In a rainforest, the mycelial web is what connects everything, shuttling nutrients and information between species. In systems change, those networks are the relationships, trust, and shared purpose that hold a system together. The networks are not always visible, but they’re essential. And they can’t simply be transplanted from one place to another. They have to be cultivated, nurtured over time. Trust plays a key role in this—it is not a soft variable, but the primary infrastructure of flourishing, resilient systems, as relational theorists suggest. However, for trust to thrive, belonging alone is insufficient; action is necessary too. Belonging is foundational, but it cannot substitute for action. Trust deepens when it is made visible through showing up, following through, and co-creating the future together.

    Donella Meadows touches on this in her reference to Wendell Berry’s concept of ‘tyrannese’—language that abstracts so much it loses its grounding in lived experience. Meadows, echoing Berry, warned that “our words, if we’re not careful, can become tools of control rather than connection.”

    But language can also be expansive. It can help us make the invisible visible and give shape to the networks we sense but can’t always see. This ties back to Rajesh’s emphasis on trust as a foundational virtue, one that not only connects people but also allows the emergence of empathy, justice, insight, and complexity.

    The idea of trust

    The podcasts also touched on something else that feels relevant here: the idea of trust. To lead ‘through me’ is to trust not just the system, but ourselves. Jim talked about the work it takes to get there, the inner stability we need to stop outsourcing our sense of ‘okayness’ to external markers of approval or control. That’s not easy. It means letting go of certainty, of the need to be right, of the urge to cling to frameworks as a safety net. But it’s also freeing. When we trust, we make space for something new to emerge.

    This is where connection and abstraction can meet—not as opposites, but as complements. Abstraction helps us see patterns, while connection reminds us that those patterns are rooted in place, in relationships, in the invisible networks that sustain life. The art lies in holding both, in knowing when to let the framework guide us and when to let it go.

    This isn’t just a question for leaders; it’s a question for all of us who care about change. How do we resist the pull towards control and instead lean into the messiness of connection? How do we create systems that honour the terroir of each place while still learning from one another? How do we trust in the mycelial web of the rainforest, even when we can’t see it?

    These aren’t easy questions, but they’re the ones I want to sit with. Maybe it begins with simply noticing when we reach for control, and when we might lean into trust instead. And today, as large-scale technologies increasingly abstract people’s lived realities, the need to restore connective language and practice feels even more urgent.

    Because the more I think about it, the more I believe that the work we’re trying to do—whether it’s in leadership, systems change, or simply in being human—can’t be done without them. Connection and abstraction, roots and branches—what grows between them is what we call change, and like any living thing, it needs care, attention, and time.

    Originally published at India Development Review on 16 May 2025.

  • Why the Development Sector Doesn’t Need Corporate Salvation

    Dismantling the myth

     

    I came across this post on Linkedin reviewing the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa that promised to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farmers while cutting food insecurity in half.

    It does appear that AGRA fell short in precisely the way many development efforts fail when they borrow too much from the corporate playbook. Agriculture, like education or justice or health, isn’t just a system to optimise. It’s a relationship to be tended. And this is where so much of the venture-philanthropy, impact-investing, startup-accelerator logic falls apart. It’s trying to steer a sailboat by owning a larger share of it, rather than understanding the wind.

    This essay is a reflection on why the development sector doesn’t need corporate salvation. In fact, it may be time we asked why corporate sectors keep failing at social change, despite the capital, tools, and confidence they bring. I’ve sat in too many conversations where venture capitalists earnestly suggest that NGOs just need better dashboards or tighter management systems. And while some of that is true, the deeper question is: what worldview are we importing when we adopt those tools? And what are we unconsciously pushing aside?

    The Myth of Corporate Superiority

    The idea that non-profits should be more like businesses has become oddly persistent. It usually starts with a conversation about efficiency and ends with someone quoting Drucker. But this mindset mistakes the logic of return for the logic of repair.

    Corporate success is structured around extraction and acceleration. Development work is structured around complexity, consent, and collective well-being. These are not just different strategies. They’re different worlds.

    I’ve even heard this logic up close. On a flight, I found myself seated next to a group of venture capitalists who were excitedly discussing their forays into philanthropy. Their conversation was peppered with terms like “metrics,” “scalability,” and “return on investment.” When they learned I worked in the development sector, one of them leaned in and said, “Have you considered running your organisation more like a business?”

    It was well-meaning. But also wildly misplaced.

    VC vs Philanthropy: A Window Into the Divide

    Venture capital is about placing high-risk bets in search of exponential financial return. That means time horizons are short, ownership is central, and control is non-negotiable. Founders often have to trade autonomy for capital, and investors focus on pattern recognition, growth curves, and exits.

    Philanthropy, when it’s at its best, operates differently. It works on timescales that make 10-year funds look rushed. It deals with interdependent systems, not isolated products. It listens more than it directs. It works in relationship, not just in return.

    And yet, over the past two decades, we’ve seen a growing push to make philanthropy act more like VC. Outcome-based funding. Accelerators for NGOs. ROI-style language about “impact per dollar.” The result is that we’re now rewarding interventions that scale neatly, measure cleanly, and photograph well, while deprioritising the slow, deep, often invisible work of shifting systems.

    (more…)

  • Shamnad

    Shamnad Basheer (1976–2019) was an IP law scholar, activist, and institution-builder whose reach far exceeded his 43 years. An NLSIU Bangalore graduate with an Oxford MPhil, he founded SpicyIP in 2005 — India’s first serious blog on intellectual property law — and IDIA, which created pathways into elite legal education for students from marginalised backgrounds. He intervened in the landmark Novartis Glivec patent case on behalf of cancer patients and rewrote what public interest lawyering could look like in India. He passed away in August 2019 in an accident near Chikkamagaluru, where he had gone on a silent retreat.

     

    Often, when we remember someone we’ve loved and admired, it’s through stories, little moments and vivid fragments. A conversation here, an act of kindness there. But there are some people for whom this kind of accounting never quite adds up to the whole.

    So it was with Shamnad because every story wasn’t just a moment to recall, but a portal to transformation. Because with Shamnad, every interaction carried his deep belief that connection and care weren’t footnotes to change but were the very texture of it.

    He built his world not through power or position, but through presence. Through listening. Through making space. Through asking what justice could look like if everyone felt they belonged.

    I was lucky to know him, to be changed by him, and to share a few memories of him in this film. But like all lives lived with depth and purpose, no collection of stories can fully hold the whole.

    Still, I’m grateful we tried.

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 15 May 2025. View original →

  • What We Seed, Scales

    Trust is a seed. What grows mirrors it.

     

    This is the third in a quiet thread of reflections I’ve been following. First came this piece which traced the evolution of my practice from programs and platforms to trust.

    Then this a piece on how The Matrix shifted how I think about change and revealed the layers of reality we work across.

    This one returns to an earlier moment. what happens before anything begins. At the seed stage.

    Lately, I’ve been thinking about how change starts. Not when we name a vision or launch a plan, but earlier. Before anything becomes visible.

    I keep coming back to this idea: seed conditions shape what grows.

    Not metaphorically. Structurally. What you plant in the beginning shapes the form and behavior of what follows. The pattern of a thing often mirrors its origin.

    When I look at the work that held up under stress, be it projects, institutions or relationships, the common thread wasn’t clever design. It was the conditions they started in. Most often, they began with trust.

    Trust changed how those efforts moved. They scaled more smoothly. They bent instead of broke. When mistakes happened, the center held. People stuck around. Course correction became possible.

    Trust isn’t an outcome. It’s a condition. You don’t measure it after the fact. You feel it at the beginning. It’s what sets the tone for everything else. Think of it like a seed crystal that is small, often imperfect, but powerful enough to shape the entire structure around it.

    This plays out far beyond individual relationships. When trust forms the foundation of a team, a network, or a funding model, it creates a different system. One that behaves differently. One that doesn’t need as much control or oversight to function. One that can recover from shocks.

    Of course, other seed conditions shape other systems.

    Seed with control, and the system becomes ordered. But often brittle.

    Seed with fear, and it might produce compliance. But not creativity.

    Seed with scarcity, and you might drive speed. But lose depth.

    Seed with shame, and you might achieve performance. But not safety.

    What you seed determines how the system responds under stress. It shapes whether people show up fully or hold back. Whether collaboration comes naturally or feels forced. Whether energy flows or stalls.

    You see this most clearly when designing something new: a grant, a partnership, a team. We tend to focus on the structure and the roles, process, governance. But what often shapes the outcome more than anything else is what’s seeded before that.

    How did people arrive?

    What assumptions sat under the surface?

    Did anyone feel heard before decisions were made?

    These quiet conditions decide what scales.

    I’ve seen beautifully designed efforts fall apart because they seeded suspicion. And I’ve seen messy, improvised efforts hold together because they seeded trust. The architecture matters. But the conditions matter more.

    (more…)

  • Agency Is Not Enough

    Gian Segato’s recent piece, “Agency is Eating the World,” perfectly distils the current tech mood: AI lowers the cost of doing, so now it’s all about drive. Agency. The will to act without waiting for permission. The age of the high-agency solo founder is here.

    It’s bold, confident, and deeply familiar. The Matrix-as-startup-manifesto version of reality. Or trope.

    But it also made me wince. Because I’d written my own piece back in February, also inspired by The Matrix, and it landed somewhere very different.

    Where Segato sees a world to hack, I see one to hold.

    Through the lens of Ken Wilber’s integral philosophy, The Matrix isn’t just a parable about breaking free from illusion. It’s a gestalt. A layered whole where truth lives in the interplay between immediate needs, systemic patterns, and deeper, often invisible beliefs. Neo doesn’t become powerful by moving faster. He becomes powerful by seeing more, by learning to work across levels without collapsing them into one simple fix.

    In the world I work in, social change, systems work, long messy arcs of becoming, the hardest shift isn’t from inaction to action. It’s from certainty to curiosity. From control to relationship. From “I’ll fix it” to “what wants to emerge here?”

    I’m sharing both pieces in the first comment. He argues that AI has made willpower the new differentiator. I think we’ve misunderstood the point of waking up altogether.

    Originally written for LinkedIn on 22 April 2025. View original →