Introducing the Blue Swan Collective
If you spend enough time thinking about humans – our brains, our stress responses, our tribal instincts, our talent for short-term wins and long-term messes – a pattern starts to emerge. We are extraordinarily good at solving certain kinds of problems. Immediate ones. Local ones. Problems with clear villains, clear timelines and visible payoffs. We are much less good at grappling with slow-burning, systemic problems that sprawl across generations, ecosystems and cultures.
We are primates with smartphones, and with Stone Age nervous systems wrapped in high-speed economies. That mismatch matters. A lot. It helps explain why, despite unprecedented data, modelling capacity, technological prowess and intellectual horsepower, many of the biggest challenges of our time continue to deepen rather than resolve.
Climate breakdown. Biodiversity collapse. Social fragmentation. Burnout. Inequality. Loss of meaning. It would be easy to say these are problems of ignorance. And perhaps there’s some truth to that… But they’re also problems of complexity, cognition and culture. They are wicked problems – deeply interconnected, value-laden and resistant to simple fixes. And wicked problems rarely yield to linear thinking, five-year plans or technocratic optimisation alone. In fact, they often get worse when we insist on treating them as if they will.
In response to these complex, interconnected challenges, and following 4 years working with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), my colleagues and I recently formed the Blue Swan Collective. Our team is global – with representation in Fiji, Mauritius, the UK, Australia, Egypt, and Brazil.
It began with the uncomfortable feeling that many of the systems we rely on are not failing because of a lack of intelligence or effort, but because we keep trying to solve new realities using narrow, industrial-era mental maps. In doing so, we overlook new – and often old – relational ways of thinking. We stay inside the same conceptual rooms, rearranging the furniture, while the foundations shift beneath us. The Collective exists to step outside those rooms.
We are an international ‘think-and-do tank’ for planetary solutions, but we are just as interested in how people think, feel and imagine as we are in policy, science or innovation. Because beneath every system sits a story. And beneath every story sits a set of assumptions about how the world works, what matters and what is even possible. Most of the time, we don’t realise we’re operating inside them.
One of our core ideas is that imagination is a form of infrastructure. It shapes what societies can imagine doing at all. But without the cultural, educational and institutional infrastructures to support it, imagination rarely reaches its full potential or is translated into real-world change. A society’s capacity to imagine alternatives strongly shapes its ability to adapt, regenerate or transform. When imagination collapses, systems ossify. When it expands, new pathways appear. This is why we are working to build imagination infrastructures: the tools, practices, spaces and languages that help people see beyond ‘the way things are’ and begin to explore ‘what could be’.
This work includes developing a ‘myths and metaphors’ database. And it may sound abstract, but it aims to be deeply practical. Metaphors stealthily run the world. We talk about ‘natural resources’, ‘human capital’, ‘growth’, ‘efficiency’, ‘resilience’ – often without noticing how these words shape behaviour, policy and power. By surfacing the diverse stories we live by, and experimenting with new ones, we can loosen the grip of narratives that no longer serve life on this planet.
We’ve also spent time seeking out Bright Lights – people and ideas already doing things differently. Many innovations already exist. They’re just fragmented, under-resourced or invisible to dominant systems. We help connect them, learn from them and give them the attention they deserve.
In the future, this work will come together through Transformation Labs. These are designed as deep, relational spaces where people can slow down, think systemically, challenge assumptions and move from insight to action together. Because transformation happens when people experience new ways of seeing and working, in their bodies, relationships and decisions.
The Blue Swan Collective does not pretend there is a single solution, silver bullet or master plan. We hold uncertainty openly. We work across disciplines, cultures and worldviews. We care deeply about evidence, but we also care about meaning. We recognise that planetary futures are shaped as much by imagination, trust and values as by technology or economics.
The blue swan is a symbol of the improbable – futures that seem unlikely until, suddenly, they aren’t. Our work is about making those futures more imaginable, more tangible and more reachable.
Stay tuned for updates throughout 2026. The Blue Swan Collective website will be live in the coming months.
Please get in touch if you’d like to work with us.
For more on this interconnected thinking, check out my books: www.jakemrobinson.com/books
