In my previous piece I wrote about standing on touring skis in the Carpathians and feeling something crack open. A Dutch pilot raised in landscapes engineered against nature, suddenly feeling at home in a place that was anything but controlled. I described it as a relational shift; understanding that I am part of my environment and not some outsider.
That moment started a quest. It did not give me a map. So I started doing what I had learned to do in my aviation safety studies; I started listening to stories.
What the flightdeck taught me about acting in uncertainty
For my Master’s research at Lund University, I conducted participant observations and mapping interviews with airline pilots to understand how diverse crews coordinate action in a volatile environment. The cockpit is an instructive place to study this. Airbus writes procedures for linear, predictable and controllable operations. Reality is none of those things. Weather changes, runways change, information arrives late or not at all.
What the research revealed, grounded in Neisser’s perceptual cycle and the Distributed Situation Awareness framework of Stanton and colleagues, is that no two pilots see the same situation. Each brings a unique set of schemata; the organised patterns of thought and experience that direct what information we notice, what meaning we assign to it, and what action we take. There is no such thing as a shared picture. There is only compatible or incompatible action.
What holds a crew together is not standardisation. It is the continuous exchange of what Stanton calls transactive tokens; small pieces of information that allow each pilot to see what the other is working on, and adjust. When those tokens flow, the operation is fluid and adaptive. When they stop, the crew becomes two disconnected individuals reacting to each other instead of to the situation.
In a paper I wrote with anthropologist Dr. Tina Harris, we extended this argument beyond the cockpit. The Boeing 737 MAX disasters were not caused by a single failure. They were caused by the absence of transactive tokens across an entire system; between pilots, engineers, regulators, and manufacturers who rarely met and rarely exchanged the small pieces of information that hold a system together. The same siloing that causes aviation accidents, we argued, holds back progress in any complex system. Compatibility across difference, not further standardisation, is what makes a system resilient.
From cockpits to communities
The question I carried out of that research was: what does this mean for how we build a regenerative future?
A regenerative future will not emerge from a single grand plan. It is already emerging, in fragments, from thousands of actors in different places working from different schemata; farmers, rewilders, community builders, social entrepreneurs, organisational practitioners, people inside extractive systems experimenting with different choices from within. Each holds a partial view. Each is taking action from their own past.
What is largely missing is the exchange of transactive tokens between them. The glue that makes awareness compatible across the system.
That is what I am attempting to build through a series of mapping interviews with people working on regenerative futures; locally here in Transylvania and globally. Not to extract best practices or build a curriculum, but to understand how people act towards a regenerative future from their own context, and to let those perspectives meet each other.
Both stories of regeneration and stories of exploitation are part of the map. In aviation, most operations go well, yet formal investigations tend to focus almost exclusively on the small percentage where something went wrong, which means a great deal of insight from everyday successful adaptation is never captured. The same applies here. Events where regenerative intentions are realised and things work are just as instructive as those where extractive patterns persist. Seen through Neisser’s perceptual cycle and DSA, every event, “good” or “bad”, reveals how schemata select information, create meaning and direct action in context. Where regenerative intentions still produce extractive outcomes, or where old schemata run quietly in the background, those stories show where compatibility is still fragile. Where things go well, they show how more compatible ways of acting are already possible, and what conditions make them so.
Why this connects to Cobana
Cobana exists because of that moment on the hillside. Because of the feeling of being a node in a system that was running long before you arrived. It is a place where different perspectives can meet in a shared environment and where, through honest exchange, something more compatible can emerge.
The interviews feed directly into what happens at Cobana. They shape the conversations, the projects, the gatherings. They bring global voices into contact with what is happening in Transylvania, instead of keeping those worlds separate. From those exchanges, things emerge; residencies, collaborations, the Cobana Summer Open Season.
This is also what the summer at Cobana will be shaped by. People willing to not know, and curious about what emerges when different schemata meet in a place like this.
An invitation
This project is still taking shape. I am looking for people to talk with; anyone working on regenerative futures in any context, anywhere in the world. The conversations are simple. We talk, I listen, and together we try to see what your story reveals about the larger system you are part of. With your agreement, parts of that story may become part of the public map.
If something in this resonates, reach out.
The ground is uncertain. That is not a problem to solve. It is the condition we are working with.