The paradox of 'Life-Centered' and why I’m lying about being an Impact Strategist

Living systems have centers (they just won’t stay still)

I’ll admit, I fell in love with Human-Centered Design at my first UX research job over a decade ago. IDEO was my north star with their design thinking framework. I was blindly following along with the naive concept that everything we built should revolve around human needs, human behaviors, human desires. Put the user at the center. Design around them. Solve for them.

It made perfect sense. Until it didn’t.

Eventually, the conversation shifted. What about the other beings we share this planet with? What about the ecosystems our designs impact? Nature-centered design emerged as an alternative. Then came Life-centered design.

In the Quaker Institute for the Future’s framework, Toward a Life-Centered Economy, they describe a Life-Centered approach as one that “would nourish life, the lives of all people and the beings with whom we share Earth.” It reimagines the economic system as “a subset of the human social system which in turn is a subset of the ecological system.”

It’s a beautiful concept. But it’s also misleading.

Not because life doesn’t have centers, but because we imagine those centers like a bullseye. Fixed. Stable. Something to aim for.

What if the center is always moving? What if that’s what makes us so uncomfortable with the complexity, mystery, and uncertainty that actually defines life?

Dandelion logic

In my recent book IMAGINE: Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency, Steven Tooze, a journalist who spent five years as a street activist with Extinction Rebellion (XR), witnesses this center-lessness of living systems in real time.

April 2019: XR starts a joyous non-violent festival-protest in London, one that refuses to back down despite police intimidation. Parliament declares a climate emergency. Government ministers meet with XR representatives. For a moment, it seems like the center of power might shift.

Then comes the backlash. The billionaire-owned press vilifies protestors. Far-right lobbyists funded by fossil fuel companies brand activists as terrorists. Today, nonviolent activists are serving five-year prison sentences just for planning protests involving non-violent disruption.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the authorities utterly failed to envision what would happen next.

They thought they were attacking the movement’s center: arresting the leaders, dismantling the organization, squashing the movement. They “made a fundamental assumption: that movements work like corporations, where if you remove the people at the top, everyone else just gives up and goes home,” Tooze explains.

But there was no fixed center to attack.

“The movement resembled more closely a dandelion head. And when the hard hand of State repression slapped it, a thousand activist seeds drifted off into the air.”

The authorities tried to change the system. But living systems can’t be changed (contrary to what many of us, myself included, call ‘systems change’). Systems can only ever be disturbed, which is very different. They were looking for levers to pull, when they should have been paying attention to attractors and patterns of emergence. As a result, and over time, the system evolved toward a new state of being.

Before I tell you about what the dandelion became, join me on a short tangent.

Centers within centers within centers

I love to think about this quantum theory: before you observe a particle, it doesn’t have a fixed position. It exists in superposition; a cloud of probabilities, all possible states simultaneously. The moment you measure it, the wavefunction collapses. The particle “chooses” a single state.

The act of observation changes everything.

This is the truth about living systems: They have centers (lots of them), but no single, fixed center. The center shifts depending on where you look, when you look, and what level you’re observing.

Consider your own body:

• At the cellular level, each cell has its nucleus—a center

• At the organ level, your heart might seem central, or your brain

• At the microbiome level, the bacteria in your gut are running the show

• At the consciousness level, there’s no single neuron you can point to and say “that’s where you live”

Different levels of organization, different centers, all moving, all temporary, all real.

This is what Steve Tooze saw happen with the climate movement. Each arrested activist wasn’t a loss of leadership but a multiplication of centers. “Each seed was a potential organiser of a new movement or campaign, someone who had been encouraged and empowered over five tumultuous years to envisage, mobilise, and plan a rebellion.”

The movement didn’t die. It became what he calls “an everything movement” standing against genocide, amplifying rewilding projects, media revolutions, and grassroots land ownership. Not one center but thousands, each self-organizing, each responding to local conditions, each connected by understanding rather than hierarchy.

The contradiction at the heart of “Life-Centered”

Here’s what the authorities in London missed and what “life-centered” thinking sometimes obscures: Living systems don’t need a permanent center because they self-organize.

The Regenerative Investing Institute explains that the essential understanding of life is that it exists as a “networked structure, a web of life, characterized by patterns of behavior rather than fixed forms.” In complexity science terms, living systems are complex-adaptive and autopoietic: they create and maintain themselves, they evolve in response to their environment, all without central command.

The mycelial network shares nutrients and information without central command. The forest regenerates without a CEO.

This is a paradigm shift: everything is interconnected, distributed, and there is no single center or inner core. This is where “life-centeredness” contradicts itself. To design something as “life-centered” in the traditional sense, with a fixed center, fundamentally misunderstands how life actually works.

The collapse of my strategies

A vulnerability sidebar: I’ve lived with high-functioning anxiety most of my life. For decades, I tried to manage it by finding its center, the root cause, the core trigger, the ‘one thing’ to fix.

But my anxiety doesn’t have a fixed center. Sometimes it lives in my chest. Sometimes in my thoughts. Sometimes in my gut. The center keeps moving. To top it off, my Western education background encourages a type of reductionist thinking that makes me believe there should be a reason, a central root cause to this anxiety.

When I try to intellectualize my anxiety (a pastime I don’t recommend), to understand its patterns, to map its triggers, to strategize my way out, it comes in full force. Like a wave crashing over my carefully constructed sandcastle of coping mechanisms.

It only settles when I stop trying to force it into a framework. When I ask, in this exact moment: What do I need right now? Not what worked yesterday. Just: What. Right. Now.

It’s maddening for someone who gets paid to create strategies and frameworks.

The revelation came when I stopped trying to observe my anxiety from outside, as if I could be separate from it, and instead recognized: I’m always already in the system. We’re in superposition together.

I’m lying about being an Impact Strategist

I still call myself an Impact Strategist on LinkedIn. But that’s increasingly inaccurate.

Strategies assume you can map a path from A to B. They assume the center stays put long enough for you to aim at it. They assume you can predict outcomes based on inputs.

But what actually works with living systems is emergence.

We love to predict. We love to rely on something working. We build elaborate mental models of cause and effect because it makes us feel safer.

What I actually do isn’t strategic in the traditional sense. I pay attention to patterns. I look for the invisible forces shaping how a system might evolve. I disturb things artfully, mindfully, and then watch what emerges.

What I know for certain is that my ‘strategy’ isn’t to find the center. It’s to follow the centers as they emerge, shift, dissolve, and re-form. It’s to create conditions for emergence rather than forcing predetermined outcomes.

The revolutionary act of accepting moving centers

Life-centered design isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete if we imagine life’s center as fixed.

Life has centers, millions of them, at every scale, constantly shifting. The revolution isn’t finding the right center or rejecting centers entirely. It’s accepting that centers move.

Here’s what nobody tells you about letting go of the center: It’s terrifying. Without a center, who’s in charge? Without a framework, how do we know if we’re doing it right?

But the center was always an illusion anyway. A story we told ourselves to feel safe in a centerless universe.

So what now?

Stop looking for the fixed center. It was never there.

Don’t try to observe from outside the system. You’re always already in it.

Meet what’s here. Ask what’s needed now. Trust that emergence knows more than our strategies ever could.

Start calling what you do something other than “strategy” if strategy implies you can predict and control outcomes in living systems. (Maybe a frivolous exercise in semantics, but I’m curious about this nonetheless!)

Life isn’t centered on one thing. It’s centered on everything, temporarily, simultaneously, impossibly, beautifully.

My anxiety doesn’t like playbooks. Turns out, neither does life.

Maybe that’s been the strategy all along.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

PS. A thank you and shoutout to Genevieve Nathwani, author of the Systems Changers Substack, one of my favorites. In a virtual coffee chat with her last week, she reminded me that there is depth and beauty to layering our inner and outer work. Thanks for inspiring me to write this one!