HOW IT WORKS
COMMONS!COMMONS! moves you through three connected chapters — each one building on the last, each one returning you to the real conditions of your place.
Everything inside COMMONS!COMMONS! — your gap analysis, your imagined projects, your commitments — is organised around the same five dimensions. They are not categories for their own sake. They are five places where the future actually gets decided, whether anyone is paying attention or not.
The physical systems your organisation depends on and affects: emissions, resource use, biodiversity, the boundaries research says we are already testing. This is the dimension most strategies claim to address. Few do so honestly.
Not just budgets and growth targets, but the deeper question of what your organisation values enough to pay for — and what it extracts for free. Rooted in Doughnut Economics and care economy thinking: an economy that meets needs without overshooting what the planet, or the people in it, can sustain.
The physical and social structures already in place — buildings, transport, housing, public space — and the question every piece of infrastructure eventually asks back: who was this built for, and who was left to work around it?
Every technology changes the people and systems that use it, not just the problem it was built to solve. This dimension asks what your organisation's tools are quietly doing to the people and places they touch — intended or not.
Most planning horizons stop at the next election, the next budget cycle, the next five years. This dimension asks you to hold a longer view: what are you building that someone else will inherit, and did you plan for them on purpose, or by accident?
Together, these five dimensions are what "systemic" means in practice — not a slogan, but five specific places to look, every time.
UNDERSTAND WHERE YOU ARE
You begin by uploading your organisation's strategic document — your comprehensive plan, your strategy, your vision — or simply pointing COMMONS!COMMONS! to your website. It reads what you give it and extracts your stated priorities, your planning horizon, and what your own strategy is silent about. This is the foundation everything else builds on.
You then situate your work within the WEF Global Risks Report 2026 — all 33 risks across five categories. For each risk that feels relevant, you note how you are currently working with it and which dimensions it connects to.
Next you map your current projects across five dimensions: Climate — the living world. Economy — how you relate to materials and each other. Infrastructure — what you have built and for whom. Technology — what we make that remakes us. Time — what you owe the future.
The chapter closes with a gap analysis — a combined picture of what your strategy covers, what your projects are addressing, and where there is silence in both. This picture is downloadable as a PDF gap report, ready to share with your team or board. A gap is not a failure. It's the first honest thing your strategy has said in years.
SET A 20-YEAR DIRECTION
Your gaps become the starting point for imagination. COMMONS!COMMONS! generates project suggestions specific to your organisation — rooted in Doughnut Economics, care economy thinking, and the sources that underpin the tool. These are not generic sustainability recommendations. They are proposals calibrated to your context, your sector, and what your strategy is missing.
You work through the suggestions, add your own ideas, and build an imagination plan — a set of possible projects spanning short, medium, and long-term horizons. A 100-year timeline shows you where your existing and imagined projects sit across time — and where the real temporal gaps are.
The chapter closes with a vision space — an open text field where you write, in your own words, what this place is becoming. No template. No format. Just the question: what are you working toward?
MAKE IT REAL
From your imagination plan, you choose what to commit to. A commitment in COMMONS!COMMONS! is not a target or a KPI. It is a promise made with awareness of what it will cost, who it will involve, and what it is trying to change. Each commitment has an owner, a timeframe, a success condition, and an equality check — whose labour does this depend on that is not yet in the room?
Your commitments live in a dashboard that you return to throughout the year. Update your progress. Add notes. Track whether the gap between where you are and where you want to be is closing. The dashboard connects your commitments back to the global risks and dimensions they address.
Once a year, you run a renewal session — a shorter version of the full cycle that updates your landscape, revisits your commitments, and lets your vision evolve. The cycle never fully closes. It deepens.
We don't think this question has a clean answer, and we're wary of anyone who tells you it does. AI has a real cost — energy, water, the extraction behind the hardware it runs on — and we don't pretend otherwise. We use it selectively, in specific places, because we believe the alternative costs more: organisations moving too slowly, on incomplete pictures, while climate risk compounds around them. That's a judgement call, not a certainty. We try to be honest about where we've drawn the line, and fast enough to redraw it as we learn more. What we won't do is let AI make the decisions that should stay human — what you value, what you're willing to give up, what you commit to. That part is, and will stay, yours.
Most of what you do inside COMMONS!COMMONS! — your scores, your notes, your answers — stays on your own device, saved locally in your browser. It is not stored on our servers.
The exception is the AI features: any strategy document or website you provide for reading, and the suggestions this generates, are sent to an external AI provider to be processed. That content is no longer only yours to hold once it's sent — it sits with that provider under their own terms.
We're still building a fuller, more formal approach to data handling as COMMONS!COMMONS! grows. Read more on our privacy page →
COMMONS!COMMONS! isn't a one-time diagnostic. Run it again next year — your gaps, your projects, your commitments all update, and the dashboard shows exactly what moved and what didn't.
Available for municipalities and public institutions, foundations, NGOs, and schools, and forward-thinking companies.