“Living planning” is the alternative to dead planning, which gets stuck in formulating linear solutions to multidimensional problems and questions.

Living planning helps us follow the questions with new eyes and an insightful mind. It does not try to determine solutions with the same consciousness and attitudes that gave rise to the problems. It opens up pathways that follow the questions and needs. The plan emerges like an artwork. It evolves, shaped by insights along the path. The planning process becomes energising in itself.

Various connective strategies and formats are used to enable living planning. These include existing formats like ‘Earth Forum’, ‘Landing Strip for Souls’, and Working with Questions, and new formats developed to suit your needs.

CONTACT ME to find out more about the ‘living planning’ process, and how it could work in your organisation.

I work with individuals and groups to shift from where you are to where you want to be, by developing capacities for deep and grounded insight that inform new creative action.

Through specially designed ‘connective imagination’ and ‘expanded aesthetic practices’, we uncover ‘guiding images’. We follow unheard questions. We explore the ‘thought of the heart’ and develop ‘new eyes for the world’.

These ways of perceiving the everyday anew give rise to connective insights, mobilise agency and lead to more interconnected actions.

The insights, distilled through this mentoring helps you become a maker of ‘social honey’ that energises, illuminates and nourishes processes at both individual and collective levels.

Contact me info@shelleysacks.comto schedule a call to explore ways I might work with you, your organisation, project, or community to contribute to enhanced creative engagement and a living future for all!

An organisation, team or group is an organism. If not properly nourished and cared for it becomes weak, disconnected and distressed in its parts or the whole, and unable to fulfil its creative potential. The people in it get tired and weakened too.

Equally important is an organisation's relation to the wider context. If this is unconscious and unhealthy it leads to systemic disease.

I work with organisations, projects and groups - when they are forming and once they are running - to perceive the potential and spirit that gets veiled, overlooked and damaged, exploring opportunities for creative renewal, kindness and meaningful change.

I listen, co-create and develop inspiring connective processes and that take individuals and teams forward in relation to a deeper eco-social purpose.

Using processes that awaken moral imagination enables both individuals and the organisation as a whole to work with a sense of agency, and explore how it can contribute to shaping a living future for all.

My approach to consultancy enables recovery of purpose and discovery of life giving forces. It is responsive and aesthetic. Transformations arise from individual and collective insights.

I work with the organisation, project or group as one would work on an artwork: to find the right methods for perceiving what needs to be enlivened, and for allowing new forms to emerge.

I do this work face-to face in the UK and Europe, occasionally further afield, including India and China. To limit international travel, where appropriate, some consultancy work can take place online.

I work primarily in English and sometimes in German, but have also worked happily with teams in other language contexts if co-facilitators speak English or German.

Contact me:

info@shelleysacks.com

We can schedule a call to discuss ways I might work with your organisation, project, or community.

All connective practices link inner work and outer action and share a creative root methodology and approach that can be learned and scaled out.

They are not simply ‘tools’ with a purpose, but integrated theory-practice ‘instruments of consciousness’ that work on a mindset level and transform ways of perceiving, understanding and doing.

You can participate in an intensive Connective Practice Training Program or train to become a multiplier of a specific connective practice. Currently these include:

Earth Forum
FRAMETALKS for schools
Journaling for Change
Field of Commitment

To be trained as a multiplier, you need to have either:
i. participated in one or more of these practices
ii. assisted on one of my projects, or
iii. taken part in an intensive program.

CONTACT ME to discuss these training possibilities.

info@shelleysacks.com

I share my questions, experiments and ways of working through keynote presentations, talks, and lecture-actions as well as through in-depth public conversation or panels.

See ‘INVITED SPEAKER’ CV section for the extensive keynotes, public exchanges, and lecture-performances I have presented in diverse contexts.

Please contact me to discuss the different options.

I design and run workshops for citizens groups, educational and other networks, and organisations, that are interested in or committed to eco-social transformation and decolonizing the mind.

The workshops use aesthetic strategies and connective practices to uncover and engage with questions in profound, participatory and improvisational ways. This allows possibilities and ‘answers’ to emerge that cannot be predetermined.

Workshops are developed to suit the context and purpose. Duration can vary from a few hours to a day. They can take place at intervals over weeks or months.

CURRENT WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:

Drawing to Understand
Journaling for Change
3 Pots for the Future
Working with Questions
Landing Strip for Souls

CONTACT ME to schedule a call to discuss possibilities, duration & fees. info@shelleysacks.com

I design pedagogic approaches and programs that enhance individual and collective agency. They develop interdisciplinary moral imagination and facilitate connective ways of engaging with the world. I have been doing this for many years.

Pedagogical approaches and forms of learning, knowing, researching and enquiry build capacity. But they are not neutral. They contain values and attitudes. They create lenses with which we see the world. They shape behaviours, and play a huge role in determining what can be known.

Such ways of knowing and learning inform curricula I’ve developed over the past in: ‘creative strategies’; ‘art and healing’'; interdisciplinary arts practice, and ‘social sculpture’ and ‘connective practice’ at all levels of tertiary education including graduate research methodologies.

I have also brought these pedagogic insights into non-formal education and cooperative development programs in communities. These methodologies enable new organs of perception, moral imagination and more connective ways of being ‘artists’ in the world.

My creative strategies approach and radical interdisciplinary and connective practice curricula - developed for over four decades in different countries and contexts - inform my advisory and consultancy work in program and curriculum development.

The design of these approaches has emerged through the practice.

My pedagogic practice has affinities with Robert Fillou’s understanding of ‘teaching and learning as a performing art’, Paulo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Joseph Beuys’ declaration: ‘teaching is my greatest artwork’.

My ‘instruments of consciousness’ take many forms. These include PARTICIPATORY ARENAS and ASSEMBLIES in public contexts that enable inspiring ways of imaginal-thinking together, developing new narratives, and making ‘social honey’.

Museums and other public institutions can these ‘instruments of consciousness’, including participatory arenas like EXCHANGE VALUES and FRAMETALKS. They can also host EARTH FORUM processes and presentations of 7000(+) HUMANS.

Exchange Values on the Table has been used in 14 global venues, including national museums. Itcreates an interface between small farmers and consumers around issues of fair trade, the future of work, and racial capitalism. It can be used as focal points for thematic enquiries - like Racial Capitalism - or curated as part of group exhibitions and other public events.

FRAMETALKS is a mobile instrument used to explore the 5 Realities -Nature, Human Being, Love, Freedom, Future in ourselves and in the world. It can be used as a stand alone installation-participatory arena, or as part of a curated exhibition. The workbook that forms part of the process is in four languages. Arabic, German, Turkish and English. It has been in Museum-Fluxus, Potsdam; the Neue Galerie, Kassel - hosted by the documenta Archive, and was part of Citizens Art Days, Berlin. An adapted version of FRAMETALKS is available for use in schools.

EXCHANGE VALUES, EARTH FORUM and FRAMETALKS offer unique aesthetic processes for making social honey by enabling ethical imagination and forms of intuitive thinking-together. [See Research Excellence Framework].

HANDBOOKS & TRAINING accompany these instruments, enabling others to facilitate these connective practices.

CONTACT ME to discuss using EXCHANGE VALUES and FRAMETALKS in museums & other public contexts. The FRAMETALKS process can facilitate climate processes, citizens youth movements and schools. In 2025 and through 2026 it is being offered to trainee teachers as an example of divergent and grounded ‘imaginal thinking’, and an antidote to AI!

I welcome conversations about different kinds of collaborations.

I am currently working on several collaborative projects, including a publications project and an exhibition on ‘connective practice’.

I also curate enquiries in the field of connective practice, social sculpture, and the 'inner dimension of sustainability'.

Other current foci include:

Work
The Human Being and Machines
Guiding Images for a Living Future

Please contact me to discuss possibilities.