What is Warm Data?

Warm Data is that other kind of information: the emulsifier at the unspoken levels of why anyone does what they do. To make sense of our world we need all of our senses in relation to each other. Warm Data is the messy stuff, the multi-contexted, non-measureable relations between those senses. It is the movement within a complex living system. Warm Data is information that is alive. Warm Data itches when it is confined. Warm Data is the kind of information that let’s you know when to tell someone you love them. Warm Data gives credence to the notion that a deeply human response to complexity is possible. We all have it. Warm Data is why setting up multiple committees to solve the world’s problems of ecological and economic disaster will never work. The issues can never be separated. Warm Data is not located in one spot, or definable from one context—it changes, it is paradoxical, it matters who is observing.

Warm Data is the relational information; it’s not about the family members, but the relationship between them; it’s not about the organisms in a forest, but the relations between them; it’s not about the institutions of a society, but the relations between them.

There are different ways of generating Warm Data. One is research on complex issues. This form of research generates inquiry that does not get caught in either time-frozen or decontextualized research projects. Another form of participation is the Warm Data Lab. But, since the Warm Data Lab is an in-person process, it is currently on hold for the time it takes before travel and group gatherings are allowed again. In the meantime, a community-based project, called People Need People (PNP) has begun. It was originally designated for helping communities begin to perceive and articulate the possible projects that would form responses to the complexity of the issues they are facing, as opposed to silo-ed solutions. In a hurry, this process had to go online. I was against it. I fought hard. I was worried that the tech would flatten the richness of the in-person labs. What would happen to the shared experience of the room, to the subtle cues of a group laughing loudly, to the nuance of body language? But I eventually found a design for the process, and with a few different teams around the world, we prototyped it in a rush. That process is now known as PNP Online, and it’s running in about 40 different places around the world now, aided by around 100 certified PNP hosts.

It is hard to say what it is, or why it is so profound for people, without a week of theory course and a lot of story. How does it work?

Each PNP online group includes approximately 20–25 people, and each PNP program contains a series of 5 sessions (which can be extended as needed), each with a different conversation that develops an increasingly transcontextual understanding. Using the theory and practice of Warm Data, these sessions have been designed to deepen the collective perception of interdependency, complexity (through personal stories), and professional expertise. Together these groups of people are building relationships that build relationships that build relationships—this is how systems change happens. A consequence of this mutual learning and Warm Data is the profound emotional, intellectual, and cultural healing that takes place in these sessions.

The questions of this moment are, How do we begin to make sense of the failings of the existing systems, and how do we, together, live into new systems that generate vitality to individuals, communities, and the biosphere? The Warm Data work, both as Warm Data Labs (the in-person group sessions) or as PNP Online (the online sessions) are designed to address the fractures steeped into the way the many contexts of day-to-day life overlap. Economy, culture, family, education, politics, technology—these things interweave into identity, goals, dreams, and unspoken assumptions about life. Warm Data is an offering to the communities that invites transcontextual sense-making, at very personal, and, simultaneously, societal levels. The carefully structured processes of Warm Data conversations are producing unprecedented insights, and unimagined possibilities where they are deeply needed.

What else could touch a screen door and taste lemonade?

— Andrea Gibson

There is more than the flat, more than the segmented, more than the decontextualized information to consider.

It is a serious matter that the deeper and untamed realms of information are not taken seriously. Especially when it comes to the everyday urgency of this era. Calls for change are everywhere, but the seduction to describe that change and to activate it—so that it repeats the patterns of the existing system—is so strong. The sort of renegade who is willing to hold the door open for the next system also must be brave enough to dissatisfy the hungry ghost of linear strategy. This is no joke, and it is not something to do alone. It is hard to stay warmly human in that sledgehammer moment in meetings when someone says, “What about the action, people are dying, we cannot do romantic complexity philosophy forever.” It is a shutdown, a toilet flush to the potentialities that are so delicately forming—informing.

It turns out, as we have discovered in the Warm Data Labs and in the new online PNP adaptation, that response to current complex issues need to address the relationships between contexts. The virus that has turned the world sideways did just that. It revealed the holes in the nice containers of economy, education, politics, culture, media, and technolology, and it showed us how those contexts gush into each other. What does a response to that gushing look like? Well, that is the question of the decade. We have learned this: The things we are looking for look nothing like the things we think we are looking for. The next system walks and talks very differently than the last system. In the next system, it is all about the relationships. At every moment, in every instance, the relationships matter. Relationships build relationships. People need people.

PNP is a collective process of sense-making. In that spirit, I brought on board a few of my collaborators to distill some of the essence of this relational work.

Ina Borovnik (Slovenia): What is being revealed through the process of PNP Online? This is a journey for life. Not just for me, but for many generations to come. Because it matters, it matters that we think less in silos, more in relationships. That is where life happens. PNP Online is an invitation to explore, think, and notice these relationships. That expands the mind, extends the possibilites towards a thought, an action, a person, a place . . . that was never there before. It is beautiful, it is healing, it is life giving. We fell in love with our rational, statistical, and historical data-based decision making. But that data is cold; it is a capture of a moment in time. But we are not cold, we are alive and warm beings. Our thoughts are alive and warm, and it is time to bring them into our lives, into our processes, into our sense-making, into our decisions. It is time for Warm Data to be noticed and invited. It is a process that asks to revisit essential questions, time and time again, with people as people. It is creating soil, from soil, for something different to grow. And we need different, because everything is different. Now is the time. 

Nora: It is through mutual learning (symmathesy) that the shift happens. Shift in perception is shift in action. Let me say that again. Perception is action. Perception changes everything. When I perceive the interdependencies that surround me, I behave very differently. I tend to the relationality. I do not go hunting direct correctives. I seek the many combining contexts and study the way they come together. I do this in one second, so do you. The changes that are needed now will not come from committees dedicated to solving well-defined and analysed compartmentalized problems.

Scott Williams (Switzerland): Starting a shared journey. Not a one-off meeting. A generative and generous space to explore with deep trust. Speaking from a place where I don’t know what to say, I feel it. In a world full of paradoxes and inconsistencies. Not solving them, exploring them. The tenderness in the vulnerable, in the curious. To shift to be in the present. Tending the soil to create the conditions for serendipity.

Intentioning not the trees, intentioning the nourishing of the soil.

Being trustful and in confusion is essential in life, to be awake, to be present, to be surprised. Having the courage to trust ourselves and to trust each other. The cloth we are weaving in PNP is profound. Participating in something not fully formed. To be in process of the process is perhaps the difference that makes the difference.

A beautiful, aware, trusting peloton of possibilities. Silence is very useful. Like wandering down a forest path. The revisiting of questions. The different light, the feel of the soil, the smell of the undergrowth, the warmth of the space. The weave of learning.

Nora: There has never been a more crucial moment to radically, unapologetically tend to the relationships that build relationships. This is how vitality is built, it is not a first order solution. It is the relationships that build relationships that build relationships, times a thousand. This is a third or fourth order response. The outcomes of this will not fit in the KPI. The deliverable is in another context. Warm Data is needed to build the soil in which such response can seed and grow.

April Crawford-Smith (Australia): At a time of serious social dislocation and lack of human connection, the PNP project is taking us out of our daily realities to a space of depth and connectedness. Through it we are learning to perceive the layered transcontextuality that we are all experiencing and share stories to keep the fire burning in our hearts. Listening to the news or scanning social media, whilst important to keep abreast of what’s happening, is overwhelming, and when coupled with being in isolation sends the mental landscape into disarray. PNP is countering that, enabling us to make sense of what is occurring and begin to rebuild the social fabric upon which we all depend. The thought of being alone or with just a few of the same people each day is daunting, but together we can meet the challenges we are facing and PNP is giving us the tools to stand tall and face what is coming. At time of deep crisis, humanity needs to be inventive and creative, which is what we are doing with PNP. A turning point in turmoil.

Nora: Beyond the worn and now over-scripted tropes of uncertainty and ambiguity there is another territory. It is the sea and shore of Warm Data, deep steeped in the invisible momentums of ways of knowing that are too intimate to fit on the stat sheets. What we are finding there is the treasure of unprecedented possibility. Not valued on the market, but in the underground, the possibilities are communities and families living in vitality with the land; the ultimate wealth.

Like screen doors and lemonade—it is the synesthesia that marinates the connective tissue that forms Warm Data in the unauthorized and non-credible tonality that buzzes below the limits of meeting notes. But it takes practice to hear the songs there; it takes rigor to even see the outlines; it takes willingness to admit that the flat answer cannot meet the juicy question.

James Allen (Australia): In this time of untethering and unravelling, PNP provides the space for bearing witness, for noticing. In a kind of interdependent conversational meditation, it allows for the noticing, firstly, of what was wound tight in our world, for what comprises the global cables that seemed so mighty, revealing how fragile they can actually be. But more than that, PNP also offers the space to notice how those strands are recombining, to notice the harmonies and discord between our own lives and the lives of others, between our lives and the systems we depend upon for our wellbeing. And it’s a space to notice where is the good, the life-giving threads that connect us, and how the good can only ever be glimpsed in the combining of those threads, in their meshing and fusing.

Nora: I source my salt from My grandfather, William Bateson. He was a scientist at the turn of the last century, who became disgusted with the transcontextual interdependencies of the existing systems of politics, academics, economics, and journalism. He was such a (early 1900s version) punk rocker that when the King of England offered him knighthood he declined. He was working in studies of evolution and wanted to do research on how organisms change not only in linear ways, but more importantly in their environments, in relationship to each other, in their interdependency. But the world at that time wanted to use his work in genetics (he coined that word) to divide races through eugenics. But it takes courage, and a broken illusion, to see that no amount of credibility from the influencial aspects of a system based on exploitation can help in the effort to create a new system. That is why I tossed myself into the waves of a parallel ocean.

But I am not alone. People need people. Multiple description, paradox, contradiction, paradox, all of that is necessary to produce Warm Data.

One of the questions that the online PNP sessions use is, “What is being revealed . . . ?” I thought it might be intresting to ask a small selection of the 98 hosts of PNP Online what they noticed was being revealed through their PNP sessions.

Phoebe Tickell (UK): Warm Data is where you go when there is nowhere left to go. In a world where the stuff that makes up life has no place to go, where does it end up? A Warm Data Lab. In a world where your humanity has been betrayed and bruised and cheated and ignored where does it go? A Warm Data Lab. In a world where people need people but the way we do care and supporting communities is broken and sterile, where do we go? Warm Data Lab.

Warm Data Labs are where human hummus seeps up between the cracks to surface and where the stuff that makes us human composts into rich, warm, intimacy, layers that overlap and intersteep. Warm Data is healing. Warm Data is where the lines get blurred and you zoom the camera onto not the lines but the bits inbetween.

The filters and structures that filter out all that is vital, warm, moist, living, complex—these get slowly and kindly disassembled and melted in a Warm Data Lab.

The bits of you that are usually asked to stay nicely bordered and segmented and allocated and invited to shake the dust of their fur and scamper out to make friends with the others.

The tightness and straight-line strategising and forcing of ideas that have shape and warmth and tone and weirdness and inherent intelligence unforced by a top-down agenda—it all comes undone, and this is where the world gets rebuilt.

The world will change in the moist muddy cool and wet that you find under a rock. You won’t see it, because it can’t be seen.

Fred Brown (US): Life is always about choices. In the face of adversity each of us choose to do what we believe is needed. Warm Data is a choice. It’s an opportunity to allow yourself to be fully in the moment, vulnerable, held, heard, loved, respected, and yet innovative.

COVID-19 has forever changed the landscape of our recent past. In January 2020, I could not have imagined the reality we all face together as a result of this pandemic. Notwithstanding, exploring how we continue to think, experience, and thrive requires different mental agility today than it did several weeks ago. The evolution of the Warm Data Lab is necessary. People need people at every step of our existence. Because the world sped up, humanity capitulated in that moment, mimicking the trajectory and velocity of our new world order. The PNP Online Warm Data framework supports knowing at a much deeper level; giving way to being.

The world insist that we are. In these moments, we can choose how we show up. PNP creates the space to dig deeper into one’s secret self and share with the world your essence. In those moments we allow ourselves to experience being without knowing, embracing the void and honoring the chasm within our souls. This reckoning is the foundation of Warm Data.

Todays plight offers an opportunity to evolve, using technology to build relationships and not to control them. This deeply meaningful paradigm shift encompasses one of the arch’s in our spiritual journey; colliding worlds with infinite possibilities.

Christian Mauri (Australia): What I have found in this watery place is profound. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you. It is hard to register.

People make sense of the world by making assertions about it. We can’t really help ourselves—it’s a people thing. So it is that the single world is broken up into worldviews that reveal and exaggerate, cover up or overlook. It’s easy to be convinced by the stories of the loud and confident, for we live in a time that calls for right-minded people to listen to the experts and keep an eye on the spectacles. At the same time, it’s easy to become filled with anticipation as we wait for facts and evidence, as well as with doubts as to which facts are most important and what the evidence might mean. On Tuesday it may look like the world will never be the same, while last December the world may have appeared hopelessly stuck in its ways. Perhaps last spring a new job or hobby was your world. So it is that we develop new ways of making sense of the world around us and our place as part of it. We cannot help ourselves from spreading around and sharing such sense-making. It crumbles off old habits and it bubbles up from new interests. It is the natural discharge of beings in complex systems. This is why people need people: Because being part of something—being heard—is a human need.

For my part, I will share a thought on what seems to be continuing and what seems to be changing. Looking out from my woefully thin sliver of light within the dark labyrinth of history, it seems the art of thinking is having a crisis. Every day I see people—most of all my own students and the authors of their readings—defining critical thinking as the ability to objectively refer to the facts and evidence. This indicates a shift away from the Enlightenment ethos of daring to think for yourself, toward the tutelage of depending on the experts to inform us of the facts and, following that, proper conduct. On the one hand this is a fine thing, for it is quite responsible to accept the wisdom of the specialist in a complicated and increasingly high-stakes world. On the other hand, I am unsure if this return to self-imposed and socially imposed tutelage is best described as Enlightenment or as Endarkenment. While I cannot speak for my students or the authors of their university readings, I can certainly admit that I am often suspended between waiting for information to react to and acting on my own volition. This is a tension that seems to be expressing itself in many places—in relations to politics and science, to schools and work, to how to greet and talk with neighbours. Earlier I described thinking as an art—perhaps we are seeing changes in the dynamics between the practitioners and the critics—just one man’s thoughts at a moment in time.

Derailing from the main line of norms, we are seeking and exploring. I love that. It feels good to have open sails. Unfurled, surrendering to the movement. Relinquishing the need for anchors. Seeking and searching in the sea of endless possibilities. Unconstrained, building on what has come before, deepening relationships. Gratitude, inspiration, constructive. Paying attention to your own complexity and all your contexts.

With care and love, with vitality, intimacy-in-isolation, separating from separation.

Nora: Isolation and independence are dangerous; people need people. The more contact, interaction, interconnection, interdependence you are entwined in—the healthier, happier, and safer you are. Especially in times of upheaval.

Frodo: I am going alone.

Samwise: Of course you are, and I am coming with you.

Anukesh Sharma (Australia): PNP is revealing what is essential. It is bringing us against the edge of our assumptions. It is bringing us closer to what matters. It is not revealing the image of what we want, or what is expected, but what is needed most. PNP is healing our wounds. It is revealing our grief, which is hidden in the disconnection, loss, or change of the myriad relationships in our lives. It is taking the pain we feel individually and showing us we are not alone, that your pain is mine, and mine yours.

It is revealing a warmth, like warm chicken soup or a cosy fire, that cannot bind the wound, or fight the disease, but nevertheless, makes all the difference for the way we recover. PNP is illuminating a future that is already here. It is finding a way through the screen to help us rethink what is possible digitally and in real life. It is helping us revel in revelation that everything, from tiny viruses to mega cities are interdependent. It is helping us work from that place of holism and guiding our movement through the change that is already here.

Kate Geneviève (UK): The Warm Data Labs developed by Nora Bateson are a way of activating ecological thinking in communities and sharing knowledge from many angles. Inclusive and welcoming—the practice places trust in the capacity of the collective and lets the wisdom of lived experience lead. But I really had no idea before March 2020 that the Warm Data process could work online. In January the element of “live” presence felt integral to what Warm Data was. The gravity of the lockdown proved many assumptions to be wrong, and one of the happier revelations of this grim phase is discovering that digital versions of Warm Data conversations can indeed create life-lines of support and sense-making.

As a host, I’m always also a participant. The conversations push me beyond my edges, open up fresh understandings, make binary thinking and fixation impossible, and bring tears and laughter, cold sweats and incandescent confusions, and moments of deep enriching empathy.

It is the atmosphere of generosity, curiosity, and concern within the sessions that holds open the possibility of moving beyond what we already know together. This invitation to get out of our own “knowing” feels truly important now, not least because it is hard, perhaps even impossible, to really make room for multiple and contradictory perspectives from isolation. And yet our best chance for supporting collective creative response is to nurture the capacity of communities to stay with the complexity and act from subtle accurate perceptions of the mess we are in.

As an artist and mother working alone in my studio in the countryside, I’ve found it a vital and humbling process to learn together during COVID-19, through this time in which our ordinary ways of life and means of production are in free-fall.

Matthew Schutte (Puerto Rico): With sessions that stretched across the early days of COVID-19’s rapid overwhelm of countries in Europe and across the Americas, the difference in perspective from various PNP participants was profound, yet followed the same pattern. All of us were adapted to ways of living that, we were being told, would soon not hold. And for almost all of us, cultural changes happened at a pace that we had ever witnessed in our lifetimes—and yet, with few exceptions, such changes were still not fast enough. What seemed “prudent” or sufficiently diligent shifted with every interaction with people from places that had already been hit hard. “Wait, you’re really inviting your Bible study group to get together at your house?” “I couldn’t live without going for a bike ride every day.” “I’d go crazy if I had to stay in the house.” “Don’t go visit your grandmother in the nursing home.” The interactions were revealing of the different reality that we were quickly being forced to confront.

The realizations seemed to surface far earlier within our community conversations than they did in the conversations happening on TV and in the news. Those who had experienced the impacts directly, or who had relatives stuck in a spiraling outbreak, were able to shake the magical thinking of others who were still clinging to claims that this was “basically just like the flu and what was the big deal anyway.” Through the rich and repeated interactions with one another, we have extended our ability to sense, to prioritize, to respond—and it is all simply through the sharing and hearing and holding of our stories—of what is real for each of us, and the noticings of how our stories dance together, both the fracturings between them as well as the mirrorings of reinforcement. My ability to sense gets augmented with every session—in unanticipated dimensions. And in this moment of uncertainty, that shift has proven a gift you couldn’t gift wrap—it grows with each session in ways that are not “controlled” and that I am quickly realizing I wouldn’t want to constrain to the edges of my present awareness—it is the stretching of those edges that is itself the gift.

Göran Janson (Sweden): People need people, isn’t that obvious? Maybe not always, sometimes I just want to be alone—but not being left alone—only when I have decided I want to be alone. Even then, after a while, I want to be alone with someone else, nothing else would make sense to me. People need people to make sense: It’s a relational process that cannot be done alone, not in isolation to other people.

I was taught that being a strong and successful individual is what matters, but even then, in those moments of perceived success, I knew, and I saw, that what really matters is thriving relationships with other people. In my personal times of distress, the caring relationships I was fortunate to have with people around me, enabled me to make sense in a way that otherwise would not have been possible.

So, for me it’s obvious, people need people in good times, in bad times, in all times, that I know. Particularly now, in times of crises and upheaval, in times of self-isolation, people need people more than ever, and this is what the PNP initiative is all about. The mutual learning that happens, the intense listening, the discovery of transcontextual interdependencies, the personal stories that go across borders, cultures, and languages are truly amazing. I have consistently heard from people who have been in these conversations that they want more of this, that they finally could speak and there were people who listened, that they discovered patterns of interdependencies that they couldn’t see before, that they felt the conversations to be healing.

Reunion

A thickening of the unsaid integrity—

Starting in small fringes that link and recircuit

finding unfound mixtures.

Re-soaking the past.

Marinating memories

Until their softness

is sticky vitality.

Like the richness of soil,

the ensembling is teeming with nuances sticking to other nuances.

Following entirely undrawable paths.

The unusual textures, the surprises,

—in the wordless sea of how we are.

The resonances and rhythms have their own current.

In the rich probiotics of fresh tones.

Made together, without goals.

This is not collaboration, this is composting.

This kind of new life is not a restructure.

It is a reunion.

It is not a plan.

It is a nourishing.

— Nora Bateson