Listening sideways: What systemic design and design futures can learn from Gillian Tett

In the fractal swirl of collapsing systems and emergent possibilities, systemic designers and design futurists often find themselves toggling between control fantasies and chaos fatigue. But what if we tuned our instruments to a different rhythm altogether? What if we paused, not to fix, but to listen - sideways?

This is where the work of GillianTett offers an unexpected but potent medicine.

Anthropology in the boardroom: A quiet revolt

Gillian Tett’s Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life (2021) is not just a call for more ethnographers in finance - it’s a kind of cognitive aikido. Tett, an anthropologist-turned-editor at the Financial Times, argues for cultivating an “anthropological lens” that can reveal hidden assumptions within powerful institutions. She reminds us that meaning lives in the margins - and that the places designers often ignore (the liminal, the informal, the unspoken) are where systemic patterns reveal themselves most vulnerably (Tett, 2021).

This resonates deeply with the invitation made by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in Hospicing Modernity (2021) and Outgrowing Modernity (2025), where she writes that the problem is not just what we don’t know, but what we’ve been trained to not want to know - our denial of complicity, our addiction to control, our collective evasion of grief. Systemic designers and futurists would do well to heed this call: to disinvest from certainty and learn to dwell within complexity and contradiction (Machado de Oliveira, 2021; 2025).

From systems maps to story worlds

Systemic design often relies on abstraction: diagrams of loops, nodes, feedback arcs, leverage points. These tools are meant to reveal complexity, to render the invisible visible, to make sense of tangled processes. But there is a danger in mistaking the map for the territory, the diagram for the dynamic. Gillian Tett reminds us that beneath every map is a story - and stories, unlike diagrams, are alive. They breathe, they evolve, they carry sedimented histories of power, pain, and possibility.

When designers map a system, they do not do so from a neutral perch. They do it from somewhere - shaped by their own language, lineage, longings, and limitations. Tett’s anthropological lens urges us to ask: Whose story is this system map telling? Whose experiences are visible? Whose are peripheral? Who gets to define the nodes, and who becomes noise in the data?

These are not post-design questions. They are core design questions. Because every system story is already a political and relational act. Every boundary drawn is a decision about what matters, and what does not. Every labelled node reveals a worldview.

Tett’s trickster Wisdom: De-othering ourselves

At the heart of Gillian Tett’s offering is a subtle, mischievous invitation - a kind of trickster wisdom dressed in the clothes of an anthropologist. Her suggestion? Study the familiar as if it were foreign. Treat your office like a village. Listen to corporate rituals as you would to ceremonial chants. Watch the rhythms of meetings the way you’d observe a fertility dance or a storm warning. In doing so, she doesn't ask us to leave our world, but to see it sideways - to estrange ourselves from the norms we’ve come to treat as natural (Tett, 2021).

This is not just clever analysis. It’s a form of spell-breaking. A subtle un-gluing of the assumptions that hold modern institutions together. And for those working in design futures, it’s a superpower - not just for prototyping alternatives, but for defamiliarising what we’ve normalised into invisibility.

The meta-relational paradigm (GTDF, 2023) echoes this call, offering a deeper shift from the logic of transaction into the terrain of entanglement. It asks not only how systems work, but how we are worked by them - how our very impulses toward improvement, impact, and innovation are often complicit in the very patterns we claim to disrupt. This is not a condemnation, but a compassionately rude reminder: being well-meaning doesn’t insulate us from participation in harm.

And so, the question is not: What is the most effective intervention?The question becomes: What is this moment asking us to grieve, to compost, to surrender?

To truly design from this space is to be willing to let go of the fantasy that we are the authors of the future. It means treating our own habits, professions, and institutions not as tools to be optimised, but as sites of ritual, mythology, and metabolism - places where dead stories may need burying, where certain forms of knowing may need retiring, and where the humility to be changed must precede the desire to change others.

In this light, the designer becomes less a strategist and more a steward of endings. A midwife for uncertainty. A witness to what no longer serves. And perhaps - if the listening is honest and the pace is slow enough - a companion to the seeds of something we don’t yet have the language to name.

Studio Imaginal’s invitation

So, here’s our soft offering to systemic designers, foresight practitioners, and speculative futurists:

Listen sideways.

Let your maps blur. Let your scenarios stutter. Let your confidence tremble. Let Gillian Tett’s anthropological gaze - trained to notice the things systems thinking tends to skip - mingle with Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s invitation to metabolise modernity: not to transcend it with better tools, but to compost its logics of control, certainty, and separability (Hospicing Modernity, 2021; Outgrowing Modernity, 2025).

This is not about designing “better” futures - at least not if better means more optimised, more efficient, more resilient to collapse while still clinging to the structures that caused it.

This is about learning to die well with the present. To sit beside what is unravelling without flinching. To stay long enough in the discomfort that something more honest, more tender, more entangled might emerge - not as a solution, but as a rhythm.

We might take further guidance here from the work of Martin Shaw - myth teller and edge-dweller - who reminds us that stories, when carried well, don’t explain the world; they initiate us into its mysteries.

Shaw writes that some stories are not for comfort or clarity but for “breaking spells” - the ones that bind us to narrow scripts of mastery and certainty. Design, when stripped of its saviour fantasies, might also become a form of mythic literacy: a way to enter relationship with what is unfathomable, sacred, and still unfinished.

So, what might design look like if it were more like a funeral than a factory? A wake rather than a workshop? A ritual of reverence for what has been lost - and a small act of trust in what might grow through the cracks.

We are not being asked to save the world.

We are being asked to become compost for wiser worlds to take root.

And in that process, design might remember what it was never meant to forget: that it is not the architect of life, but a humble accompanier in its constant transformation.

References

GTDF. (2023). The Meta-Relational Paradigm and Meta-Capacities. Internal Working Paper, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures.

Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books.

Machado de Oliveira, V. (2025). Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion. North Atlantic Books.

Shaw, Martin (2020). Courting the Wild Twin. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Tett, G. (2022). Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life. Avid Reader Press.