What if sitting on the front porch could change the world?

On front porch futuring, chaos commoning, and microdosing agency in stuck times

We know, this subject line sounds completely unhinged. We're living through a moment when systems that were already held together with tape are visibly breaking. When the gap between what we're told is working and what we can see with our own eyes keeps getting wider. When the responses to crises feel increasingly disconnected from the actual scale and nature of what's happening. When more and more people are feeling some version of "this isn't working, but I don't know what else to do."

And here we are, suggesting that the answer might be... sitting on your front porch? Just, bear with us while we don our possibility goggles for a minute.

Here's what we've been discovering through months of delightfully weird experiments: small actions become exponentially more powerful when they're also strange, and strange ideas become infinitely more accessible when they're also small.

So this isn't entirely about the porch itself. It's about what the porch represents — a methodology for change that works through invitation rather than persuasion, through emergence rather than control, through what we've come to call front porch futuring.

(We've been smitten with this idea ever since reading friend & RADAR member Olivia Vagelos's piece last year about putting your chairs in the front — it's been marinating in our collective imagination for quite some time.)

The journey: try things, notice things, try more things

Furniture. If you read our last piece, this will feel familiar — we'd been exploring how social structures are really just furniture, assembled one way now but always capable of being rebuilt differently. Our workshop took this from theory into practice, mapping what feels normal in our worlds and asking "Who benefits from things being arranged this way?" and "What if we moved it around?"

Learn. The breakthrough wasn't intellectual. It was visceral — that moment when something that felt fixed suddenly felt moveable. We discovered that strangeness works as a tool for change not by arguing people into new perspectives, but by demonstrating possibilities. By making current arrangements suddenly appear arbitrary rather than inevitable.

Shrink ray. From there, we moved into what became our most resonant experiment: "Honey, I Shrunk the Crisis!" We'd been wondering about scale — why do massive problems feel so paralyzing? What happens when you take those seemingly unchangeable global challenges and shrink them down to human scale? Climate change became neighborhood resilience. Democratic erosion became dinner table conversations. Global scale → Regional scale → Backyard scale.

Learn. Something about this approach was unexpectedly powerful. As one person reflected, it "almost made people feel comfortable with the idea of just discussing... able to play with the ideas of how terrible things are." The playfulness created enough safety to actually look at and work with difficult realities rather than just enduring them. Scale shifts, we discovered, break the spell of "this is just how things are" and make intervention feel possible again.

And then something happened. After the shrink ray session, Ben went home and suggested to their partner: "Let's sit on the porch." Not for any grand reason. Just because it felt right. Later, they shared that the moment felt "really really powerful."

Learn. That simple gesture got us thinking during one of our Friday collective digestion sessions. How does change actually spread? That porch-sitting left both physical traces (neighbors witnessing it) and what you might call cultural traces — the pattern becoming slightly more available, slightly more normal for others to try.

Cue your author falling down what can only be described as a full-on rabbit hole — or should we say ant hole? — connecting how Kim described morphic fields (energy and traces left over time that others can pick up on) to stigmergy (the way ants leave learning trails for bugs who come by later). Before we knew it, we were all deep in the theoretical weeds, mapping out how change actually spreads through collective fields rather than individual decisions.

Which is all to say: what if commons emerge not through planning, but through individual small strange actions that create traces others feel drawn to follow?

Commons! Which naturally led us to our "Let's Commons!" workshops, where we could test these theories through what we called chaos commoning — partly because we had no idea what we were doing, partly because of its beautifully unplanned, organic, emergent nature.

The process felt like pure improv: Add your thing. Yes and another thing. Claim nothing, tend everything. Follow the energy. Ta da commons! The whole thing was yes-and, which made us realize why corporations try to make people take improv classes for "innovation" — except that never works because people aren't actually free to be themselves and actually PLAY with ideas and each other.

Learn. What emerged wasn't just shared resources, but commons of methodology — collective understanding about how change actually works. Just like those ants we'd been theorizing about, commons can be attracted into existence through small strange gestures that invite more small strange gestures.

Of course, adrienne maree brown has been telling us this all along — that change happens at small scale, through emergence and adaptation rather than control. And we’ve been on this train — emergence theory is all over our Field Guide and whitepaper, not to mention sprinkled heavily throughout the #let’s-get-meta channel in the server. But sometimes wisdom needs to be re-discovered through practice rather than just intellectually understood. What we've been learning through shrink rays and chaos commoning is what emergent strategy feels like when you actually do it — when you stop trying to think your way into new ways of acting and start acting your way into new ways of thinking.

The methodology: small strange infrastructure for possibility

So what did we actually learn about how change works? A few key insights about sidestepping the immunity systems protecting stuck arrangements:

Real play creates safety for strangeness. Authentic playfulness unleashes imagination in ways that applying game mechanics to serious contexts cannot. The levity isn't just a nice addition — it's a necessary condition for people to actually engage with uncomfortable realities.

Embodied action precedes cognitive shift. You can't think your way out of stuck patterns. You have to act your way out, starting with small gestures that prove different arrangements are possible. Moving your body (sitting on a porch) shifts your thinking in ways that trying to think differently cannot.

Gesture over control. Rather than trying to name and claim specific outcomes (which, hello colonial energy), small strange things work through invitation and openness. They're gestures toward the better futures we want to create, not attempts to control the narrative or exactly what emerges.

"Lil glitches" reveal the arbitrary. Tiny disruptions make normalized arrangements suddenly visible. They're small enough not to trigger defensive reactions but strange enough to create new perception. Cultural acupuncture in precisely the right spots.

Gathering as technology. Bringing people together in slightly different ways is itself a powerful, if lo-fi, technology for change. What Priya Parker calls "temporary alternative worlds" where people can experience different ways of being together.

This is how cultural change actually happens: through individual actions that leave traces others can build on, through morphic fields that make new possibilities feel increasingly natural and available, through stigmergy — complex, intelligent structures emerging from simple rules and accumulated small actions. Each small strange action makes it slightly easier for someone else to try something similar, creating a powerful commons-building cycle.

Two paradigms: strategic theatre vs. microdosing agency

This all feels like a fundamental alternative to what Zoe Scaman calls out as the "strategic theatre" that dominates so much change work.

Keynote futuring serves the status quo. It's about standing on stages, claiming to know what's coming, performing expertise about complex systems from a distance. It's strategy that's become "a performance of intelligence rather than an instrument of it." It assumes change happens through persuasion — that if you can just explain the future clearly enough, people will choose it (er, buy it).

Front porch futuring serves the emergent. It happens when you sit where you are and invite neighbors into conversation. It creates openings for possibilities you can't predict or control. It's microdosing agency rather than strategic theatre — making change feel possible at human scale rather than overwhelming people with the magnitude of what needs shifting. As Ben reflected during our labs, "How can a system be made with listening at its core? Can we make listening a practice of agency?"

The difference isn't just methodological — it's paradigmatic. Keynote futuring reinforces existing power structures by claiming to know what's coming, packaging the future in controlled narratives that serve the status quo. Front porch futuring opens into 'what if' — questioning whether current arrangements are anything more than moveable furniture.

Breaking through the hypernormal fog

We're living through an era of hypernormalization — that eerie sense where obviously broken systems feel simultaneously inevitable and unreal. The normal feels increasingly strange, but we're told it's the only option. As Murray Bookchin observed, "the belief that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking."

This creates a particular kind of paralysis. Many of us know things are deeply wrong, but the distance between how things are and how things could be feels simultaneously tiny and infinite. Hypernormalization also isolates us, making us feel like we're the only ones who see the problems. Traditional approaches to change — through institutions, campaigns, rational argument — feel increasingly inadequate for the scope and weirdness of our challenges.

Front porch futuring offers a different way through. Not through grand strategic plans, but through embodied practices that prove different arrangements are possible. Not through convincing people rationally, but through creating tender structures where new possibilities can be felt and experienced together. Breaking the hypernormal spell requires collective witnessing — multiplayer experiments that show us we're not alone and change really is possible.

How it spreads: parties and porches as boats

This brings us back to RADAR's core metaphor for the year: bridging the yearning gap. Sometimes you need to get in a boat. Sometimes you need to find a tunnel. Sometimes you need to invent new modes of transport altogether.

What we've discovered is that parties and porches can be boats — vessels that carry us across the seemingly impossible distance between the futures we dream and the futures we build. They're gathering technologies that make crossing feel possible by doing it together, at human scale, with real play and authentic invitation.

Of course, one porch sitting alone doesn't change the world (even if you are wearing your yearning hat while you do it). The magic happens in the movement between porches — the connecting space where individual gestures become collective patterns. When you imagine not just one porch, but a whole street or block of front porch futuring, what makes it interesting is the connecting of dots that give way to lines that form pictures we haven’t dreamed just yet.

This is how change actually scales. Not through replication of identical models, but through fractal resonance — the same essential pattern expressing itself differently in different contexts. A front porch in Chicago looks different from a balcony in Lagos, but they share the pattern: making space for serendipitous encounters, creating porous boundaries, practicing futures at human scale.

The beautiful thing about front porch futuring is how it spreads — not through campaigns or curricula, but through what one participant called "the magic of unexpected, delightful encounters." Each time someone sits on their front porch with intentionality (literally or metaphorically), they strengthen the field around small-scale collective practice. They make it slightly easier for someone else to try something similar. They contribute to a growing understanding that the furniture of our world really can be moved.

The invitation

So what if sitting on the front porch really could change the world?

What if the answer to our stuck moment isn't more keynote futuring but more porch sitting? What if the infrastructure we need isn't new frameworks but new practices? What if the bridge between yearning and building is paved with small strange gestures that invite the futures we want?

The experiments suggest the world is ready to be changed. Not by the stoops themselves, but by what they represent: the courage to make space for emergence, the wisdom to work through invitation rather than persuasion, the understanding that sometimes the smallest gestures create the largest openings.

The question isn't whether sitting on your front porch will change the world. The question is what happens when enough of us f*ck around and find out?

Speaking of our favorite test + learn methodology, here's what's up next:

This piece emerges from RADAR's Strange Ways & Small Things lab, where we've been experimenting with chaos commoning, shrink rays, and furniture thinking.

Our next lab — Hospicing & Midwifing — launches in September to explore what needs to end and what wants to emerge. Our hypothesis: we struggle with transformation because we don't know how to properly tend to both endings and beginnings. Through hospicing and midwifing practices, we'll learn to hold space for both death and birth, developing skills for working with the messy middle of change rather than rushing to premature resolution.

It's the culmination of our three-lab journey: first we built capacity to name and enable futures differently, then we learned to see and act at human scale, and finally we'll develop skills for larger transformation.

August is our slow month, but do keep an eye out for news of drops, experiments, and events. In the meantime, if you're keen to try out some front porch futuring of your own, here's something you might try:

Spend one evening on your front steps/porch/threshold of your choosing
Bring tea and something to do with your hands
Practice being visible and available to your immediate neighbors

What emerges when you try it?
Come back here and let us know — or better yet, join us in the community!