Last week, I facilitated a climate leadership event with a public agency. We’d spent the day working through the challenges of translating policy into action, navigating the gap between ambition and implementation. At the close of the session, one participant offered a reflection that has stayed with me. He said he felt “vexed“! He said he meant it as a compliment, not just to the event but to his colleagues and their contributions throughout the day.
When I asked him to say more, he explained he was feeling unsettled, unable to resolve things neatly, troubled by contradictions he couldn’t quite reconcile. And critically, he recognised that the answers he was looking for could only come from himself. He acknowledged this discomfort as a good outcome.
I’ve been thinking about that comment ever since. In a world saturated with urgency, where every strategy document demands action, every target requires acceleration, every meeting pushes toward resolution, what does it mean when vexation might actually signal progress? What if the unsettled feeling, the inability to resolve contradictions neatly, points toward something we’ve been missing in our rush to act?
The Architecture We Can’t See
If you’ve worked on climate action in any organisation, you’ve likely lived this pattern: a workshop brings people together, ideas flow, genuine energy emerges around what’s possible. Then, some weeks later, you check in, and somehow, it’s all landed back with the same person, usually in facilities or corporate services, while business-as-usual progresses exactly as it always did. The energy hasn’t disappeared; it’s been absorbed.
I believe this happens, not because people lack commitment or intelligence, but because of what the economist Hans Stegeman calls “the architecture of our thinking.” Stegeman argues that when it comes to climate, our challenge isn’t informational, it’s architectural. The difficulty is that when you’re inside an architecture, you can’t see it. Like wearing glasses, you see through them, not at them. The architecture shapes what we notice, what we prioritise, and how we respond, without us even realising it’s there.
Vanessa Andreotti, writing about climate and the challenge of modernity, adds that this architecture isn’t just structural. She argues that it’s relational, referring to the patterns of who gets heard, whose questions are taken seriously, how tensions are managed, and where responsibility flows.
And here’s what I’ve observed: urgency is often a prisoner of the architecture. When we’re racing against deadlines, we don’t have time to notice the patterns that hold us back. We reach for familiar tools because that’s what the system knows how to process. We speed up, work harder, add more urgency, and the architecture absorbs it all.
Which raises a question: if we can’t see the architecture, and urgency keeps us too busy to notice it, where does the possibility for different action actually live?
Where Cracks Appear
In my facilitation work, the architecture comes into view in specific moments. Someone says, ” I am worried that our climate report is just performative compliance.” Another: “We’re a tiny organisation – what we do doesn’t matter.” Another participant shared a story of an energy audit that recommended changing to more energy-efficient lighting. They requested a quotation from a supplier to discover that the change would cost €250,000.
When we don’t want to acknowledge the architecture, these moments can be quickly dismissed as being irrelevant asides. But they can also be critical moments in a learning process. Because they point to cracks in the architecture, the pressure points where conflicting ways of seeing fail to join up. Seen in this way, such observations can convey much more meaning.
A crack in the architecture offers us an invitation to reframe the issue and our options for the next move. It’s true, some climate action roadmaps might be exercises in performative compliance. But when hundreds of organisations publish reports, and everyone is reading everyone else’s, this is how the system sees itself as a whole, and that is how systems learn. And yes, many public agencies have a small footprint, but when public agencies go first, they leave pathways that others can learn from.
Staying with the crack means resisting the reflex to plaster over it. We’re trained to resolve, to move on, to get through the agenda and stay on script. We’re not trained to sit with sustained discomfort and with contradictions that won’t resolve neatly.
But without tension, there’s no possibility of a reframe. The participant who felt vexed at the end of a climate leadership event, unable to resolve contradictions, sitting with complexity, that might be where transformation potential actually lives. Not necessarily in our solutions, but in our capacity to stay with what doesn’t resolve.
What Becomes Possible
We’re being asked to deliver something unprecedented: a 51% greenhouse gas emissions reduction by 2030, likely 90% by 2040. The architecture we have wasn’t designed for this.
We don’t have the agency to redesign the architecture from the outside. But maybe if we can learn to notice it, different moves become possible.
It doesn’t mean abandoning conventional climate strategy tools. But if our reliance on such tools keeps us too busy to notice patterns of enclosure or pushes us toward the familiar even when it’s clearly insufficient, we will need to learn to see differently.
The work that creates possibility is often more subtle than we imagine: noticing when cracks appear, creating space for tension rather than smoothing it over, asking questions that add complexity instead of rushing to resolution, staying with discomfort long enough that something different becomes thinkable.
The cracks are there. They keep appearing. The question is whether we can learn to work with them.
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