Hello! I'm Phoebe. 

I'm a renegade scientist, systems thinker and social entrepreneur, passionate about creating opportunities for transformation of people - and through that, transformation of society and the planet. Here are some things that have guided my work for the past 10 years:

• Experiments are central to everything I do

• Holding space for paradox and complexity

• Playing with language to re-define the way we think about the world

• Bridge-building between worlds (e.g. technology and farming)

• Looking to nature for patterns in how to organise

• Understanding what it means to be human in this technological age

• Helping build new systems which empower and transform 

You can read about my journey of throwing myself into a life of purpose, value, social & environmental change and adventure. I think of life as an experiment with no 'wrong' answer. Find out about the projects I am currently doing and the fields I am exploring. Over the last years I’ve worked as a molecular biologist, advised organisations and government on new forms of decision-making and governance, the future of technology, I’ve worked in designing new food systems, and shifting perception by teaching and working with people using biomimicry and systems thinking.

I am interested in what it takes to create a truly ecological society of the future, today.

In a world that is increasingly volatile, unpredictable and complex, it’s essential to maintain a level of discernment: holding both sides of a story, acknowledging more than one opinion, not fully rejecting or accepting one notion, as we will not find our solutions in extreme answers. We must learn about and integrate ways of doing things and thinking that are different to our own, and stay alert to situations and fields as they continually shift, and the game rules change again. To cling onto dogma or fixed opinions is to get left behind.

Current projects

• Moral Imaginations, an organisation which is helping bring about an ecological society of the future using imagination powered change.

• RenaissanceU, a digital-first better-than-free university teaching courses about regenerative leadership. Read about our flagship 6-week course “Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance” and read about the experience of one of our students here.

Advisory boards I sit on

I hold a number of advisory positions, limited to four per year:

• Discover Forgiveness Advisory Council at Templeton World Charity Foundation

• Advisory Board at The International Bateson Institute

• Advisory Board at The Consilience Project

Contact

Here are some ways you can get in touch with me if you’d like to start a conversation:

• If you would like to invite me to an event or book me as a speaker, please use the contact form under ‘Contact’ on this site.

• If you need to hire a consultant or designer for your organisation or programme, please email me at phoebe.tickell@gmail.com.

• If you want to interview me for an article or podcast, you can book in my calendar.

• If you just want to have a chat, try sending me a message on the Contact page of this website, or ping me on Twitter.

 Follow me on Twitter @solarpunk_girl

👉Read my story as an EHF Fellow

👉Read my profile on Emerge

About me

Phoebe is a biologist and systems thinker developing methodologies and approaches suited for a better world. She works across multiple societal contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and has worked in organisational design, advised government, the education sector and the food and farming sector. Until 2021 she was working in philanthropy at The National Lottery Community Fund to implement systems-thinking approaches to funding and and leading insight and learning in the £12.5 million Digital Fund.

Phoebe has been a scientist, educator and systems entrepreneur. Since the age of 22, she has co-founded a series of organisations dedicated to systems change via innovative approaches. She has a first class degree in Biological Natural Sciences from Cambridge University, and she brings this training in understanding biological networks and systems thinking into governance, organisational structures, narratives and imagination.

Her passion for reinventing and innovating the education system started at Cambridge, where she felt that as a society, we could be offering people a richer, more relevant, holistic and innovative education. After university, she joined the founding team of 225 Academy, an organisation which delivered 5-day transformative experiences for young people aged 11-18 globally - taking the team to high schools in Dubai, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Singapore among others. She also worked for two years as a Research and Teaching Assistant in Biotechnology at Imperial College London, mentoring over 160 undergraduate students in the first year of University, delivering lectures at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Arts, and designing interdisciplinary learning programmes. Her second organisation, Future Farm Lab, created systemic interventions to the food system in the form of workshops, strategic consulting and unique learning programmes bridging food, farming, and technology. Future Farm Lab created the Our Field Project — an experiment in a group of citizens co-owning and co-governing a field of grain in Hertfordshire.

Since then, she has been designing and delivering learning programmes worldwide, as a freelance facilitator, learning designer and educator. She brings her training in systems and networks into the areas of sustainability, re-thinking business and work, and personal development. She is part of the design and delivery team of a cutting-edge Master’s programme at Schumacher College, UK, which trains and prepares students for a complex world with a basis in systems thinking, network science, complexity, and earth systems science.

She is a highly experienced and trained facilitator of groups, and regularly works with organisations, conferences, decision-making committees and distributed teams to facilitate coherence and collective intelligence. Phoebe is often hired to seed, catalyse and build new networks and communities of sensemaking and intelligence, utilising her skills in digital organising, facilitation, complex pattern matching and highly networked and trans-contextual sense-making.

She was certified as a Warm Data Lab host in 2019 and works closely with Nora Bateson as an advisor to the International Bateson Institute to bring this work to the world and create new ways of shifting perception of interdependency. She has also been trained by Joanna Macy in the deep-ecology and systems-thinking methodology The Work That Reconnects and continues to be mentored by her.

She is a co-founder of the DGov Foundation - a community of distributed governance practitioners and Member of Enspiral, a community that innovates in decentralising power and developing decentralised tools and technologies to do so.

Phoebe has been invited to share on her diverse projects and experience and unique perspectives on the world as a lecturer, workshop facilitator and keynote speaker globally. She has taught and presented in India, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and North America, and has been called a “voice of the emerging future” and “one of the most important systems thinkers of her generation”.

She writes widely on the topics of perception, culture, technology and society.