services

I offer workshops, both online and in person, ranging from one hour to three days in length. Each is tailored to be relevant to your field and the specific challenges you face. Below, you’ll find descriptions of the content I provide. These sessions can be delivered as standalone experiences or combined and customised to meet your unique needs.

Systems Games

In today’s rapidly changing world, complex systems like organisations, social dynamics, and climate change cannot be fully understood using the traditional linear and mechanistic thinking prevalent in our culture. To truly grasp these systems, we need a shift in perspective—one that mirrors the interconnected, dynamic, and adaptive ways in which nature operates.

This workshop provides participants with an engaging, hands-on approach to understanding complexity. Through interactive modelling activities and insights drawn from the natural world, participants will experience and explore key principles of living systems, including self-organisation, emergence, feedback loops, and tipping points.

Throughout the session, we will connect these dynamic experiences to real-world applications in organisational change, economics, social change, and the climate system. By relating the group’s experiences to tangible examples, participants gain a deeper understanding of how these dynamics play out in practice.

By the end of the workshop, participants will be better equipped to:

  • Respond to disruptions or unexpected challenges with resilience.
  • Identify leverage points within the systems they are navigating.
  • Develop strategic interventions that create impactful and sustainable change.

Improvisation Skills for Uncertainty

How can we act effectively in a world that is inherently uncertain, without using dominating control? I use improvisational theatre games to help participants practice:

  • Failing with enthusiasm
  • Letting go of control
  • Being responsive to context and the moment
  • Building on what is already there
  • Collaborative innovation
  • Saying “Yes, and…”

In this session I present Improvisation as a way to act in a participatory, collaborative and flexible way in a complex world. We will go though a set of games and activities that introduce ways of being spontaneous, giving away control, responding directly in the moment, building on other’s work or the context you are in. All of this allows an emergent creativity of the group to arise in the form of surprising and entertaining scenes and gives participants the skills to work well together in an uncertain world.

Having improvisation skills gives you resilience to unexpected shocks and the confidence to step into uncertainty.

FishBanks: Ecological/Economic Simulation

Using a web-based simulation modelling the complex dynamics of fishing companies and fish stocks in the sea, I facilitate the group through a game where they take on the role of competing fishing companies. The game creates a striking experience where, even when fish stocks start to crash due to over-fishing, the teams find it very difficult to change quickly enough to save the fishery and therefore their livelihoods. Through negotiations between teams they often discover many real-life barriers to cooperating well in order to properly manage a shared common resource, whilst learning about how unintuitive complex systems dynamics can be. We end with some inspiring examples of well-managed commons – even if they’ve not managed to negotiate one for themselves in the game!

Deep Time Walk

Developed by my friend, teacher and colleague, the late Dr Stephan Harding. This is a 4.6km walk through geological time where each step represents half a million years. As the walk progresses I present:

  • The emergence of life
  • Planetary self-regulation
  • Lesser known forms of evolution (symbiogenesis and horizontal gene transfer)
  • Earth system processes

I include some interactive activities to explore and explain some of these concepts. We end with a profound finale where participants experience what a minuscule amount of time it has taken for us humans to radically alter the whole planet, and risk losing the wonders we are surrounded by.

Active Hope & the ‘Work that Reconnects’

Because of the pain of recognising our part in the destruction of life, we have many psychological techniques to avoid taking responsibility and having to change how we live. ‘Work that Reconnects’ exercises are well structured, safe ways to allow participants to express their emotions around issues like climate change and biodiversity loss, and transform those feelings into positive action. An example exercise involves participants role-playing a conversation with their seventh-generation grandchild, discussing what life is like today and detailing their efforts to ensure a liveable future for their descendants.

Biomimicry - Technological and social innovation inspired by nature

What can we learn from life’s 3.8 billion year research and development programme? I present three levels of biomimicry, taking inspiration from nature at the:

  • Form & function level
  • Processes & flows level
  • Whole systems level

Ant colonies, murmurations of starlings and even ecosystems have, over millions of years, mastered using distributed intelligence to respond with resilience to shocks and challenges. We can take inspiration to improve the way we operate and become flexible and adaptive in the face of uncertainty, in times of exponential change.

Why Systems Games?

Robin de Carteret is an experienced facilitator with decades of expertise in meeting groups where they are and guiding them to explore their learning edges, creating transformative learning experiences.

Interactive group activities provide an accelerated path to gaining a clear and practical understanding of complex systems dynamics that are otherwise challenging to grasp. These exercises offer a structured environment where key organisational issues naturally surface, fostering productive discussions and establishing a shared language that teams frequently continue to use into the future.

15 Years Experience

Fantastic Feedback

network

Scientifically Rigorous

Transformative

‘Blanche Illustrates’ beautifully represents a workshop I ran for en.v’s Awaken conference…

“ I really love it. You have such a clarity. You're connecting dots on a different level.”

Schumacher College Participant

“ I honestly was very impressed by your workshop on systems thinking, and I think I have learnt something very important, thanks to you.”

 Yoshi Nagata, Prof. of Education, University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo

“Your session was roundly celebrated as the highlight of the workshop! People were universally positive about it and also happy that you were providing suggestions for further reading. The most commonly heard comment was that it was “a real eye-opener”, which is precisely what I hoped it would be.”

Luke Disney, Executive VP at Rabobank