Papers, essays and notes from an unfinished inquiry into transformation.
Papers are the numbered working papers. Essays are longer, personal and argued. Principles are the twelve principles of RIfT, published one at a time. Notes share what is emerging in the research, to invite others to think along.
We’ve spent decades developing better ways to change organisations. Better leadership, better dialogue, more participation, greater psychological safety. And yet, institutions can become remarkably good at changing how they operate while leaving untouched the arrangements that determine who holds power, whose knowledge matters, and what can be questioned.
In my latest essay, The System That Learns Not to Change, I explore why this happens, why institutional preservation isn’t always about resistance or bad intentions, and what it might mean for an institution to become genuinely capable of being changed by the people whose lives it shapes.
We often talk about changing systems as though we stand outside them. But what if the systems we want to change have already helped shape our ideas of who we should become?
We talk a lot about changing systems: changing education, organisations, our economies, government, and the systems contributing to ecological breakdown, inequality and exhaustion. Usually the question is what needs to change *in* the system: its structures, incentives, behaviours, leadership, policies or culture.
But there is another question I keep returning to:
How do we change systems that have taught us who we should be?
David Hoogland · 1 October 2026 · Working Paper No. 1
Organisations routinely describe change programmes as transformational, yet influential theories of organisational change offer limited agreement about what transformation is or how we would know whether it has occurred. This paper argues that part of the problem is a missing theoretical object: institutional formation. Institutions do not merely provide settings in which people change; through repeated relationships, permissions, obligations and patterns of participation, they participate in forming perception, identity, agency and responsibility. The paper develops Relational Architecture as a way of examining these formative conditions and proposes that institutional transformation requires not only changing people or practices, but altering the relational conditions through which an institution forms people, distributes agency and becomes answerable to those affected by its actions.
We're living in times of information, knowledge, science. We take everything literal, we trust only the mind, and through that we lost our path to wisdom.