Everything we believe, how it works, and why — the full picture for practitioners, funders, and deep collaborators.
Most organizations ask: what do communities need? We ask a different question — what do communities already know, and how do we create the conditions for that knowledge to become the work?
Limicelia is a regenerative organizational transformation consultancy and network. We are not a consulting firm in the traditional sense. We are a coordinating body — a living network of practitioners, researchers, and convenors who work alongside organizations navigating the edges of what's possible in how we work, how we govern, and how we care for one another.
Our clients don't just receive strategy. They enter a web of relationships — with Limicelia, with the network, with ideas still being formed. When we work with an organization, we bring not just expertise but the living inquiry happening across our community.
Limicelia grows from a broader field called The Present of Work — a global conversation about what good work actually looks like beyond extraction and endless growth. The Present of Work has no entity, no board, no budget. It's a community of practice. Limicelia is one expression of it — the one that faces organizations directly.
The network is not the audience. It is the author. Practitioners don't receive our programs — they shape them.
By 2035, regenerative organizational models are the default — not because legislation mandated them, not because a consulting firm packaged them, but because enough organizations proved that models designed to replenish capacity outperform models that deplete it. Practitioners led this transition from the edge. Commons pools made it accessible beyond those who could pay.
You cannot redesign governance structures while the people inhabiting them remain in survival mode. You cannot hold hard conversations with your board if your nervous system collapses under pressure. You cannot ask an organization to become more relational than its leadership has learned to be.
This is not a soft observation. It is a structural one. The quality of presence a practitioner or leader brings determines the quality of contact possible — and contact is where transformation actually happens. Technique alone, however sophisticated, cannot substitute for it.
We hold both axes simultaneously. The inner work and the outer work are not sequential — first tend yourself, then change your organization. They are interwoven. Each engagement carries both, whether or not they're named as such.
The practitioner who cannot be present to their own experience cannot be present to the experience of others. Transformation doesn't flow from technique — it flows from the quality of contact between human beings. Building that quality is not soft work. It is the prerequisite for everything else.
Our approach is informed by contemplative and somatic lineages (embodied presence and regulation), liberation pedagogy (Freire's conscientization and frontline epistemology), living systems thinking (Nora Bateson's symmathesy and ecological intelligence), emergence theory (adrienne maree brown's fractal change), The Work That Reconnects (Joanna Macy's grief work and restoration), and indigenous ways of knowing (reciprocity, place-based wisdom, relational epistemologies).
These aren't frameworks we apply from outside—they live inside how practitioners read a room, what we notice when nothing seems to be happening, when to press and when to wait. The quality of presence a practitioner brings determines the quality of contact possible, and contact is where transformation actually happens.
Restoration doesn't arrive through more technique. It arrives through tending — the patient, reciprocal, ongoing care of the conditions that make vitality possible. In teams, in organizations, in practitioners themselves.
Most organizational transformation work is serious to the point of grimness. The stakes are real, the problems are urgent, and somewhere along the way play gets treated as a reward for finishing the hard work — or a frivolity that serious people don't need.
We disagree. Play is not a luxury or a mood. It is the nervous system's primary mechanism for rehearsing uncertainty in a low-stakes register. Jaak Panksepp's affective neuroscience established PLAY as one of seven primary mammalian emotional systems — hardwired, subcortical, shared across species — and it is the first system suppressed when organisms are under threat. People in survival mode don't lose their playfulness because they're stressed. They lose it neurologically, which is why no amount of team-building retreats restores what economic precarity, job threat, and chronic organizational pressure take away.
Johan Huizinga wrote in 1938 that civilization doesn't contain play — it arises in and as play. Law, ritual, governance, inquiry: all carry the play-element at their origin. Cultures lose their playfulness as they "mature," and Huizinga was clear: this is not growth, it is decline. What replaces genuine play in bureaucracies is false play — the forms without the spirit. A meeting that looks participatory but arrives at a predetermined conclusion. A strategic planning process where no one believes the plan will be followed. The structures of play without the animating condition: freedom.
Winnicott called it potential space — the intermediate zone between inner reality and external world where genuine creativity, therapeutic change, and cultural experience all happen. It requires felt safety to emerge. A false-self orientation — compliance, impression management, survival — closes it entirely. You cannot design for genuine participation or adaptive capacity without first creating the conditions in which potential space can open. This is why tending matters not as self-care but as organizational infrastructure.
Wonder — which at its heart is love — is the foundation of our ability to shape change and create the world we want.
The practices we draw from — regenerative gaming, Open Space, Warm Data Labs, harvest ritual — work in part because they restore what genuine play creates: permission to not know, delight in what's unexpected, the willingness to follow what's interesting rather than what's required. From the Tao Te Ching to indigenous learning through story and ceremony: wisdom traditions across time have understood that insight arrives in a different register than analysis. The contemplative practices in our toolkit are, among other things, invitations to return to beginner's mind — to approach the organization you've been in for fifteen years as if you've never seen it before.
Practically, this means: we design for delight alongside rigor. Regenerative gaming that makes systemic feedback loops visible through play rather than lecture. Warm Data Labs where the structure is deliberately strange so the usual grooves can't run. Harvest rituals that make ending something feel like a beginning. A culture of genuine inquiry — the question held with curiosity, not the answer delivered with authority.
The most serious thing we know about organizational transformation is this: the organizations that make it through are the ones that don't lose their capacity for wonder. It is the immune system of a living culture. We tend it accordingly.
These aren't frameworks applied from outside — they shape how practitioners read a room, what they notice when nothing seems to be happening, when to press and when to wait. They are wells to draw from, not boxes to check.
Practices of embodied presence — learning to regulate, to slow, to sense what is actually happening before acting. The practitioner's body is an instrument of organizational diagnosis. What collapses in the room, what tightens, what opens — this is information. Somatic awareness makes it legible. vitality · regulation · restoration
From Freire and the long tradition of consciousness-raising: people closest to a problem hold the most accurate picture of it. The practitioner who listens from the frontline up is being epistemically rigorous, not just humble. Knowledge is always situated. Power determines whose knowledge counts. repair · voice · practitioner ground
Joanna Macy's framework: transformation has an emotional arc — gratitude, honoring the pain, seeing with new eyes, going forth — that cannot be bypassed. Grief is not an obstacle on the way to solutions. It is information about what matters. Organizations that skip this step produce change that doesn't hold. tending · grief as information · regeneration
Knowledge lives in relationships, in places, in the accumulated attention of people paying close watch over time. Reciprocity is a practice, not a value statement. Robin Wall Kimmerer's grammar of animacy: the world is full of subjects, not objects. reciprocity · tending · belonging
Organizations behave like living systems — they learn, adapt, develop patterns that made sense once and may no longer. The question is never "who is broken" but "what does this system want to do?" Permaculture's principle: waste becomes fertility. Maps to organizational harvest, commons infrastructure, what gets passed forward. resilience · vitality · return to the soil
What wants to emerge cannot be designed from the past. Complex systems cannot be fixed — only tended toward different attractors. adrienne maree brown's fractal logic: how we are together in the small mirrors what the whole will become. Small is not preliminary. Small is where it lives. emergence · fractal change · discernment
The consulting industry treats practitioners as interchangeable. The result: burnout, shallow engagements, and high turnover. Clients feel it — even when they can't name it.
Our model is built around one idea: the quality of the work depends on the health of the ecosystem behind it. Every engagement sustains practitioner development, peer supervision, and access for organizations that couldn't otherwise afford this kind of help. The ecosystem stays diverse. The practitioners stay sharp. The work stays deep.
We are a post-growth organization from day one. Steady state: 15 practitioners, 30 clients, $1.4M. Written into the co-founder agreement before we started. Growth is a tool, not a goal.
The tier structure keeps the ecosystem healthy. When well-resourced organizations pay full rate, they're sustaining the network of development, supervision, and practice that produces the quality of work they receive — and making that same quality accessible to organizations that couldn't otherwise afford it.
We never mark up practitioner labor. What a client pays a practitioner is what that practitioner receives. The stewardship fee (20–25% of total project) covers relationship-holding by core stewards, quality assurance, commons coordination, and ISI fiscal administration — not a margin on people.
Core stewards draw $120k annually plus profit share. No equity, no exit incentive. Ownership is stewardship — which means the incentive structure points toward the work, not toward an exit event.
Limicelia operates as a fiscally sponsored project under Inquiring Systems Institute (ISI), a 501(c)(3). Client fees are tax-deductible. Engagements are grant-eligible. Unburdened by standalone incorporation overhead and free to evolve as the work requires.
When surplus exists, it becomes access and practitioner vitality — not retained earnings. We measure what matters: are practitioners thriving? Are organizations more resilient after we leave? Is the commons growing?
The Liminal Web is the connective tissue of Limicelia's work — a living network of practitioners who inhabit threshold spaces between disciplines, between sectors, between what is and what wants to emerge. Not a contractor pool. Not a vendor list. Not a certification program.
Liminal: because most important work happens in the between — in transitions, threshold moments, the space where old forms are composting and new ones haven't yet solidified. Web: because mycelial logic governs here — distributed, resilient, no single center, nutrients flowing where needed, strength emerging from connection not hierarchy.
When you work with Limicelia, you enter this web of relationships — practitioners who share practice, accountability, and the patient work of organizational restoration. Trust is built inside the web before any client engagement happens. That's not gatekeeping. It's how quality gets protected without hierarchy.
Practitioners grow through a living development ecosystem, not training programs. Each tier builds the ground the next requires. The progression is not certification — it is accumulating the actual capacities that hard organizational work demands.
If any of this resonates, we'd love to hear from you. Every engagement starts with a simple conversation.
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