Panarchy or the Adaptive Cycle

A living systems theory inspired by the cycles and seasons of the natural world

Panarchy was first coined by ecologists Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling in 2002, combining Pan (God of nature) and archy (suffix meaning 'rule' or 'government'). The model they developed provides a powerful map for understanding how systems persist or adapt over time.

If you search online for Panarchy, you'll get several variations to this model. The labels I use below have come through teaching and utilising this across numerous contexts, especially in rural, regional and remote Australia. The way I describe the Adaptive Cycle and the stages will vary slightly to other versions. I hope to articulate why I speak about each stage in these ways.

The cycle can mapped across numerous examples from the natural world. In facilitating this, I often use the lifecycle of the snowgum and the Bogong Moth, and then bring those two together to explain how panarchy works in an ecosystem sense.

Panarchy can also be used as a map for understanding the natural cycles we move through in our personal lives as well as the cycles of organisational growth and change. I have found this particularly useful in working with regional communities to understand the dynamics of where they find themselves, and nonprofit organisations to support ways of mapping a strategic plan from an ecological perspective.

Activation is a particular term I use that doesn't appear in the original. It may symbolise the moment a shoot emerges from the earth or the moment a caterpillar begins another growth cycle. Humans experience these new beginnings on our first day of school or start a new job. There's a moment of beginning that activates a new cycle. But equally, like the moment of birth, there is a cycle of pregnancy that comes before it, which also makes it a renewal.

Growth is a season, and often positioned on the cycle towards the bottom of the map. I position it on the upwards incline in the infinity loop. It can be, in many cases, one of the most protracted parts of cycle. It's a season of connectivity and energy accumulation. In trees this is the act of photosynthesising that gives the tree its energy. For animals it is a season of fattening up for the season of release that will come. I experience the season of growth when my business is thriving and I'm fully of client work or it might be a nonprofit organisation that receives a big donation and has the capacity to increase the level of it's impact.

As we reach a stage of Maturity, and the season starts to shift, there is a natural tendency to want to conserve resources for the season ahead. In later stages or cycles, rigidity might appear. Trees become brittle and growth starts to slow. Organisational processes might become rigid after a period of intense growth. The snake may become too big for its skin and need to shed. This creates the necessary conditions for disruption and release.

Disruption often occurs when a change happens in the external environment. For trees this is when the sun starts to vanish on the horizon earlier than the day before, creating a threat to the ability of the tree to photosynthesise. It might be a decline in a food source for an animal or the withdrawal of funding for a nonprofit or being laid off from work. The disruption instigates a breakdown — a necessary but uncomfortable season.

Breakdown is perhaps the most difficult of all the seasons for humans, partly because the Western economical model has taught us the Growth will continue forever. Even look at self-help sections in bookstores -- they are full of personal growth books and less of books that help people move through stages of breakdown. And yet, breakdown is a wholly natural cycle. This is where a tree will draw the chlorophyl from the leaves to get its energy, leaving the leaves a vibrant orange or yellow or red colour. It also happens when the caterpillar enters the chrysallis and makes itself vulnerable.

Release is the central need of the breakdown phase. It doesn't serve the tree to keep its leaves once they have served their purpose. The tree requires that energy to start working elsewhere (more to come in reorganisation). Grief is one of the core emotions of the breakdown season, requiring us to eventually let go of whatever we were holding onto. Companies or nonprofits may find the need to release or let go of a product or service that had previously served them well but not longer is fit for purpose. This is very difficult, and attachment sees us holding onto things long past their due date, which constrains the energy required to move into the next stage.

Release may also be accompanied by the potential for Collapse. This may happen when numerous release cycles are colliding at once and the system cannot reinvent itself in the way it may have done before. In these cases, it opens up the possibility for something entirely new. Here, a transition becomes a transformation. This might be the organisation whose business model is no longer fit for purpose and they need to either shut their doors or merge with another to become something new. Or it might be a regional town that has been dominated by a single industry that closes its doors, catapulting a confluence of related collapses in employment, housing and wellbeing.

Reinvention is the stage, in my experience, that people, communities and organisations find most challenging. You'll likely know the organisation that hit a point of disruption and bypassed the phases of release (or letting go) and reinvention to jump straight to reorganisation. And then the they wonder why the restructure didn't work. Reinvention is not a top-down kind of activity. It is interestingly an inversion of the activation-growth cycle that starts small and becomes more sophisticated. In my work, I help teams and orgianisatoins find ways to prototype ideas and learn through emergence. Over time the lessons emerge to allow the re-organisation to reveal itself. In the natural world, an example of reinvention is the cellular work that happens in early stages of pregnancy, or the way a caterpillar is beginning its formation in the chrysallis.

Reorganisation works well when the parts come together into a unified whole. In the same way the human skeleton is developed over the lifecycle of a pregnancy, a reorganisation is a gradual process. In trees, the reorganisation often happens underground. It is in this season that the conserved energy is pushed downwards to create greater structure and stability for the next cycle of growth. Like pregnancy and the growth of root systems, this is often an internal season of lower external connectivity for an individual or organisation. It is indeed a challenging time when an organisation is running multiple cycles at once, to make space for the internal work required for reflection and reestablishing its root structure.

If, or when, this work is done well, it naturally invites a Breakthrough. New opportunities will emerge or start to open up, making way for new activations. This is a time of anticipation and excitement, a brewing of potential to embark on a new cycle again.

Pulling it all together

As mentioned, a person or organisation may be running several cycles at once. I might be in a growth phase in my career but a breakdown in my relationship. Panarchy has immense power to help us understand where we are at in any given cycle of our lives. Equally, it can be profoundly useful as a collective sense-making tool in organisations or communities, to make sense of where our context is at. It invites a space of compassion, connection and curiousity, where we can see ourselves no longer as individuals, but as part of a wider ecosystem.

I often map Panarchy spatially to provide a way to move around and share stories