10x100: Collaborative Sense-Making for Coordinated Transformative Action

socio-technical designsystems thinkingcivic techsense-makingstrategic designmission orientationdata coalitionsproduct design

Collective sense making and pattern recognition for informed decision-making and coordination.

Project Overview

The Challenge

The 2022 IPCC report delivered a stark message: humanity had less than 1,000 days to peak greenhouse gas emissions and begin the transformation toward a livable future. The scale of change required was unprecedented—vast, systemic transformations across energy, food, governance, and economy. Yet despite mounting evidence and urgency, meaningful action remained fragmented, slow, and inequitably distributed.

The coordination problem was clear: thousands of changemakers—working in policy, civil society, business, and research—were acting in silos. Insights weren't translating to action. Learning wasn't scaling. Strategic alignment across sectors remained elusive at precisely the moment when it mattered most.

The question became: How could we create a framework that bridges insight and action, enabling diverse actors to strategically align, learn together, and drive transformative interventions within tangible timeframes?

The Solution: 10x100 as Mission-Oriented Coordination

10x100 emerged as a learning-centered mission management framework designed to tackle the polycrisis through strategic alignment and peer learning in concrete 100-day cycles.

Drawing from Nordic mission-oriented innovation approaches—particularly Danish frameworks for structuring societal transformations around shared missions—10x100 invited organizations and networks to commit to "giant leaps" toward transformative outcomes. Rather than abstract goals, participants defined specific, measurable interventions aligned with broader planetary missions, tracked and refined through structured 100-day cycles.

The framework centered on a three-phase protocol:

1. Looking Outward
Acknowledge complex urgency through collaborative foresight and continuous reflection on biophysical realities and systemic interdependencies.

2. Sensing Inward
Imagine transformative interventions beyond current practice through reflective leadership, focusing on planetary outcomes rather than incremental improvements.

3. Acting Forward
Organize for systemic shifts through ecosystem alignment, peer learning, and mutual accountability.

Every 100 days, participants gathered for Mission Quarterlies—public learning events offering steady rhythm for collective sensemaking, pattern recognition, and strategic recalibration.

Collaborative Data and Organizational Alignment

A core innovation was the approach to collaborative sensemaking and data pooling. Organizations participating in 10x100 would:

Align internal goals with 10x100 missions - connecting their specific initiatives to broader transformation objectives
Share learning data across organizational boundaries - contributing insights, blockers, and breakthroughs to a collective knowledge base
Enable pattern recognition at scale - identifying what works, what doesn't, and why, across diverse contexts
Support cross-learning and strategic coordination - helping initiatives in different sectors learn from each other's experiences

This required thinking through federated data governance—how could organizations share sensitive strategic information while maintaining autonomy and control over their data?

My Role: Data Product Strategist

I joined 10x100 during the second 100-day cycle in a dual role: strategic consulting and hands-on product development. Working alongside a multidisciplinary team led by Caroline Paulick-Thiel (Politics for Tomorrow) and collaborating with Dark Matter Labs and the Center for Complexity at RISD, I helped design and prototype the digital infrastructure to support practitioners navigating transformative change.

What I Built: The 10x100.cc Prototype

The core challenge was: How do we create a tool that supports continuous reflection, surfaces learning, and enables coordination across diverse change initiatives—without adding burden or noise?

I designed and prototyped a mobile conversational interface that:

Guided practitioners through the Looking Outward → Sensing Inward → Acting Forward protocol
Used AI-powered dialogue to engage participants regularly, surfacing:
- Key learnings and insights from their work
- Blockers and challenges they were facing
- Opportunities for cross-learning and strategic alignment
Applied Generative Transfer Learning (GTL) to:
- Identify patterns across disparate initiatives
- Suggest policy recommendations for governments and institutions
- Enable learnings from one context to inform solutions in another
Explored federated data architectures for:
- Collaborative data governance among participants
- Privacy-preserving sharing of insights across organizations
- Enabling collective intelligence while maintaining autonomy

The prototype was designed as a practitioner feedback tool—a companion for those working on the frontlines of transformation, helping them make sense of complexity in real time while contributing to collective learning.

We applied for Mozilla funding to develop this further. While the funding didn't materialize, the design work demonstrated a viable path for AI-assisted coordination and peer learning at scale.

Project Context & Partners

Initiated by:

Politics for Tomorrow – A non-partisan initiative advancing public sector innovation for transformative change
Dark Matter Labs – Exploring alternative pathways for organizing society and stewarding planetary commons toward "Life-Ennobling Economies"

Launched at:
European Forum Alpbach (September 2022) with thought leaders from academia, civil society, business, philanthropy, law, politics, and public administration.

Community Infrastructure:

Public Substack for updates, scientific backing, and practical tools
Notion knowledge base for shared resources
Slack workspace for practitioners beginning their 10x100 journeys
Quarterly public gatherings for collective sensemaking

Reflections: Design Tensions and Learning

This project surfaced important tensions in how we approach transformation work.

The "Designing For" vs. Delivery Reality

One significant challenge was navigating the tension between participatory design ideals and practical delivery constraints. We wanted to design with practitioners, not for them—to co-create infrastructure that genuinely served their needs. But we also faced deadlines, funding applications, and the urgency of getting something built and tested.

This tension is familiar to anyone working in civic innovation: How do you honor participatory processes while also moving quickly enough to be useful? How do you balance emergence with structure? There's no clean answer, but acknowledging the tension helped us stay honest about the trade-offs we were making.

Fear, Urgency, and Strategy

I found myself questioning the framing of urgency through countdown clocks and crisis messaging. Yes, the situation is urgent. But fear-based motivation risks replicating the very patterns—top-down control, domination, extraction—that contributed to our predicament.

How do we motivate transformative action while also transforming how we organize? This remains an open question for me, and one that shapes how I think about designing for change.

What This Taught Me About My Practice

This was my first major project in peer-learning and civic technology after training with Huddlecraft and completing the Co-operatives UK Unfound Accelerator. At the time, I didn't immediately see the connections between these experiences, but in hindsight the patterns are clear: emergent learning, collective sensemaking, and coordination infrastructure are the challenges that animate me.

I learned that I'm drawn to building infrastructure that enables without controlling—digital scaffolding that supports practitioners in making sense of complexity together, rather than imposing solutions from above.

I also learned that working at the intersection of planetary urgency and practical delivery requires resilience. This work involves seeing patterns that feel too large to shift while continuing to build anyway. It requires holding both the gravity of our moment and the possibility of transformation.

Key Learnings

On Product Design for Transformation:

Tools for collective sensemaking must be lightweight, embedded in practice, not additive
AI can support coordination, but governance and trust frameworks are the real challenges
Federated architectures matter when building for equity, autonomy, and cross-organizational learning

On Mission-Oriented Innovation:

Mission frameworks provide strategic focus while allowing diverse tactical approaches
Aligning organizational goals with broader missions requires translation work—connecting local context to global imperatives
100-day cycles offer a pragmatic rhythm for learning and recalibration

On Working in Civic Innovation:

The gap between insight and action is as much cultural and emotional as it is technical
Peer learning scales better than top-down coordination
Participatory processes and delivery timelines exist in constant tension—acknowledging this helps navigate it

On Collaborative Data Governance:

Organizations want to share learning without losing control of sensitive data
Federated approaches offer promising paths but require significant trust-building
Data governance is ultimately about power and relationships, not just technical architecture

Project Outcomes

Designed and prototyped a mobile conversational interface for practitioner reflection and peer learning
Developed federated data governance frameworks for collaborative intelligence
Contributed to a growing community of practitioners committed to transformative change
Applied for Mozilla funding (not awarded, but refined the vision significantly)
Gained deep experience in civic technology, AI governance, mission-oriented design, and collaborative sensemaking