Wendy, welcome to private practice in the WTF era. I'm Wendy Kendall, chartered psychologist and private practice designer. And if you're also waking up every morning going, WTF is happening now and then, trying to run your psychology practice on top of it, you're in the right place. This is episode four. So far in this series, we've covered a lot of ground. In Episode One, we looked at why everything that used to work in private practice suddenly doesn't seem to do so as consistently, and why that structural not personal. In Episode Two, we got into the economics of the one to one model, the triple squeeze and the red ocean versus blue ocean dynamics that are reshaping where psychological work is heading. In episode three, we explored the dual diagnosis of burnout versus bore out the time for money ceiling and why, the window to move into those blue ocean spaces is open now, but it won't stay open indefinitely. And today, I want to talk about something that I touched on in episode one, and promise to come back to because I think it explains a particular kind of exhaustion that's very specific to this moment and doesn't get talked about enough. And it's what I call the split screen chasm, which is the daily whiplash between the world we're being asked to operate inside professionally, and the reality that we're living and working in. And I want to explore why that disconnect is real. It why it's not about over sensitivity, and why I believe business as usual advice is in the direction of gaslighting us, and why integration, not more fragmentation, is the path forward, and what do I mean by that? So I also want to come back to a promise I made in episode one, which was to share in a bit more depth the work of Daniel Christian wall, who's an author, educator, activist and regenerative design thinker, and his development of a regenerative version of what's called the three horizons model, because I think it gives us some most, some of the most useful framing that's available right now for understanding where we are and what redesigning our practices actually means in this context. So let me start by describing the experience of the split screen chasm, because I think many of us recognize it, even if we haven't had the language for it. You open your phone in the morning, and first thing that comes up might be a news alert about climate fires or some kind of political upheaval somewhere, maybe another round of redundancies in a sector that you care about war, and even worse, you feel something, you notice something landing in your body, maybe a kind of weight, maybe a flicker of dread, maybe just that kind of flat hum of oh, here we go again. And then you open your diary, and there are back to back clients, or you open LinkedIn or Instagram and there's someone telling you to paint a picture of what's possible. Lean into your ideal client's pain points, create a high ticket offer, build your funnel. And all of that creates a very real whiplash, and it's this disorientating split between reality and the professional performance that's being asked of us, between a world as it actually is and A world where business as usual advice insists that we pretend we're still operating so I've called it the split screen chasm, because that's exactly what it feels like on one half of our screens. This continuing expectation that we run our practices as kind of business as usual, going concerns, we market ourselves, we fill our diaries, we grow our offers, we develop our reach, the social media strategies, the webinars, the niching, the pricing, the business as usual, but on the other half of the screen and sometimes outside our doors. Are the environmental disasters, the political instability, the wars, the economic precarity, the lived reality that our clients also bring into the room every day. It could be client climate grief. Your town has just been flooded, or there have been forest fires that have you know, damaged the the village or the town that you live in. There's political trauma families falling out, the fallout from Ai disruption, with breadwinners suddenly being made redundant and can't find jobs for months and months. There's the anxiety of children and young people, the bewilderment of people who've done everything right and still find their stability evaporating, and we're holding all of this, both professionally and personally and on the other side, a lot of business advice still treats this split as though it doesn't exist, or as though the answer is to just focus on what you can control. Niche, harder post, more consistently, sort out your SEO, you know, and the implication is whether stated or unstated. If we just got better at marketing and at pricing and at positioning, that chasm would be resolved. That's our professional execution. That's the problem, not the context that we're operating inside. And I want to say something direct about this, because, to my mind, at the moment, the business as usual advice in this current context has the effect sometimes of feeling like gaslighting. And you know, I'm not kind of using that word lightly. You know, gaslighting is when someone tells you that what you're perceiving isn't real, that there's a problem with your perception, rather than with what's actually happening. And so when we are being given strategies for for succeeding in a world that is passing out of existence, when the advice kind of dissociates from the climate grief, the political trauma, the systemic collapse. And you know when it's when it pretends that those things aren't relevant to how we design and run our practices, when the entire framework assumes that the problem is us rather than the environment we're swimming in, then that's a form of perception denial, and it comes from somewhere we're going to talk about this what you know? What is that? But it's telling us that the chasm isn't really there, that we can succeed as long as we ignore it, and as long as we overlook it, and as long as we focus on, you know, the positive thinking, it's almost a kind of business bypassing. And I'm not saying that anyone is doing that to be malicious, because we're all trying to survive and win the day at the end of the day. It's just that these before times models no longer adequately account for what's happening, and they are models built from what's called Horizon one within this three horizon model we are currently living in horizon two, and what we need to do is bring horizon three to life in order to have a Livable Future. So that brings me to this three horizons model, which I've been wanting to share with you in more depth. In Episode One, I briefly mentioned it and said I'd come back to it. And so here we are. This three horizons framework was originally developed by the International futures forum, but it was then further developed in the context of regenerative design by a guy called Daniel Christian wall whose book designing regenerative cultures is, I think, one of the most important pieces of applied regenerative systems thinking that's been published in the last 20 years. I think it was his PhD
thesis, essentially that was that was turned into a book and released wall works at this intersection of. Regenerative design, systems thinking and cultural transformation. And he's also a protege of and collaborator with many of the thinkers whose work has influenced my own thinking deeply, including Carol Sanford and Fritjof Capra and his application of the three horizons to regenerative culture. Change is, for me, illuminating. So how does that relate to business culture? The framework, in its simplest form, works like this. Horizon one is the existing system, the dominant way of doing things business as usual, in walls framing. It's characterized by something called sustaining innovation, and that is a kind of innovation that keeps the current system going. It works on proven track record based on past experience. And this is the world that most of our practice models, our referral structures, our economic assumptions have been built inside. Now, just because it's horizon one doesn't mean it's wall to wall. Bad. It's kept things running. We are where we are, but the issue is that it's showing symptoms of decline. You know, shortening cycles of crisis, I mean, exponentially, shortening cycles of crisis and temporary recovery that never quite address the fundamental issues underneath, which is one of extraction over regeneration. Horizon three is the emerging future, a different set of values, structures and ways of operating that are trying to come into being. And Wall describes it as the viable world, the regenerative cultures that are capable of constant learning and transformation. And we may not be able to define this future in every detail, because the future is always uncertain, yet we can intuit what fundamental transformations lie ahead, and that's because, as science fiction writer William Gibson put it, there are already pockets of the future in the present, but they're not evenly distributed. So we can see glimpses of Horizon three in for example, regenerative agriculture in community led initiatives around us. In, for example, the practitioners that I'm working with who are building themselves living system practices in the cross sector collaboration that's emerging at the edges of these systems. Meanwhile, Horizon two is where we are. It's the chaotic, the uncomfortable, the often disorientating space between horizons one and three. It's the world in transition. The old system is visibly failing, yet the new one isn't yet established, and it's characterized by disruption, by entrepreneurial energy, by experiments that bridge the gap from business as usual to something regenerative, or that might get absorbed back into horizon one without leading to fundamental change. But it's this place of turbulence and disruption, as I mentioned in I think it was episode one about the VUCA world. That's what horizon two is. And this is what makes frame, this framework, this three horizons model, so useful for us in our private practices right now that disorientating split the split screen chasm that I've been describing is the structural experience and living and working in horizon two, the existing system, including the practice models, we have inherited, the referral structures, etc, the economic assumptions. It's doing what systems in decline do. It's producing exactly the instability we've been describing in this series, the referral cliffs, the squeezed rates, the burnout, the bore out, the feeling that the ground has moved beneath our feet, but at the same time, there's a kind of gravitational pull to perform horizon one. Horizon one doesn't want to pass into irrelevance. It wants to keep operating. As though the system is stable, as though business as usual is still a coherent instruction, and that pressure hasn't lifted, if anything, in conditions of uncertainty, that sense of gravitational pull intensifies. There's a deep desire to cling to what we know because the alternative feels terrifying, and that's why the business as usual advice is so seductive, even when we can feel in our bones that it's insufficient. It offers the comfort of a familiar script, and to name yet another highly salient and relevant experience of this tension between horizon one and horizon two, practitioners who are sometimes rightly concerned that if they try to break away from Horizon one and chart a new path, they will be publicly shamed, criticized, pulled down and for want of a better description, canceled by someone somewhere. For some reason, this also comes from the gravitational pull of business as usual being intention with the energy and the movement required to move through that chaotic horizon too and bring the future into being. So the chasm that you've been experiencing isn't a sign that you're too sensitive for this work, or that you're too political, or that you're too much of an activist, or you're too much of this, this, this, this or this, or that you're insufficiently focused on your business or that you should be more, you know, positive thinking. It's a sign that you're paying attention to the moment you're registering the structural reality of this transition. The chasm is real and the disorientation is structural. So what do most of us do when we feel this disorientating split? We kind of fragment, we compartmentalize, we try to keep the two screens separate. We put on our professional hat, and we run the practice as though it's business as usual during working hours, and we try to keep our head below the parapet, and then we Doom scroll, or we collapse into overwhelming the evenings, or, on the other side, maybe we become so consumed by what's happening in the world that we'll lose our capacity to show up for our clients, for our practices, for ourselves. And both of these responses are understandable. They're survival strategies, and I've done both of them myself at various points. I spoke about last year's freeze. You know, that's what kind of led to me creating this podcast series. The problem is that neither of them works for very long, because the two screens aren't actually separate. They never were. What our clients are bringing into the room is the same reality that's on the other side of that scroll, the climate grief, the political trauma, the economic precarity, the AI anxiety, the sense that the world that their children are inheriting is fundamentally unstable, and we try to hold that in a 50 or 60 minute session, and pretend that the professional advice telling us to build a funnel exists in a different universe. And when we try and kind of hold these things, something breaks, either we dissociate, or we burn out, or we start to feel a particular kind of hollowness or disillusionment that comes from performing a version of ourselves that doesn't match what we're actually thinking and feeling. And that's what I experienced between last year and this, and what I called my WTF era, because every morning I woke up and I had that moment. This is why I keep saying that this, there is the risk with
following the business as usual advice that we are getting pulled into that perception, that dissociation, that almost gaslighting of our own perception. And I want to be clear that you know, marketing matters, positioning is relevant and we need practical business skills. But the problem is that the framework those skills are being taught inside assumes a context that is passing out of existence. It assumes that horizon one is stable and it isn't so. More fragmentation, more compartmentalization, more trying to keep reality out of the room while we perform business as usual. That's not the answer, in my opinion, for. Fragmentation. Fragmentation is the symptom. It's not the cure, and what we need is more roots to integration of this reality. So this is where I think the regenerative version of the three horizons model becomes so powerful, and where it's where I want to connect Daniel wall's work to what we've been building across this whole series. In his development of the framework, he introduces what he calls a value bias into the three horizons methodology. Not all of Horizon two innovation is equal. Some disruptive innovations in this horizon two, in this moment, some people sticking their head above the parapet and saying things ultimately will get absorbed back by horizon one without leading to fundamental change. And they're what he calls an h2 minus. They look like they're doing something new, yet they're structurally supporting the old system. Sustainability was a great example of this. It looked for the longest time and was was kind of held up as the game changer, but ultimately it ended up being something that sustained business as usual. On the other hand, other disruptive innovations are genuinely bridging us toward horizon three. They may not be perfect, they're not yet fully formed. There's still probably a lot of controversy and and challenge around them, especially if they're disrupting old thinking, but they are potentially bridging us toward that horizon three. They're creating conditions conducive to life and establishing regenerative patterns, and that in walls terminology is h2 plus. Horizon two plus. And I think about this in terms of our practices. You know, as an organizational psychologist, I love to get geeky about this and really think about the underlying structures and the models of what we're doing when we organize our economic activity like this. A lot of the business advice out there, even the stuff that sounds forward looking, is actually h2 minus if it's reinforcing the same extractive logic underneath it doesn't question what the practice is for who it serves, whether the underlying model is regenerative or extractive. They're tactics that just make extraction more efficient. And I see practitioners, practitioners come to me having implemented these models, and finding that they are still depleted at the end of the day, or that they just run out of runway, and they can't, they can't bring themselves to keep pushing them regenerative practice design. The work we've been building toward across this series is h2 plus. That's what we're designing towards. I'm not saying it's all perfectly formed right now, but it's a genuine bridge between where we are and where we need to go. It asks different questions, not just, how do I fill my diary? How do I build a practice, but how do I build a practice that's community infrastructure? How do I build a practice that builds the psychological capacity of the people and places around it? Not just how do I earn more, but how do I earn enough to feel safe and reinvest in restoration, in my own healing, in community resilience, in ecological repair, not just consumption now, not just how do i diversify my offers, but how do I create a coherent living system practice that can hold what's happening and respond to it intelligently? And the thing I find really exciting about this and why I think we as psychologists are so well placed for this morning, for this moment, regenerative design is capacity building. That's what it is. When you strip away the language and look at what it does. It builds capacity for life in you, the practitioner, to sustain yourself, to stay present, to do the work without being destroyed by it. It builds capacity in your clients and their communities around them through practices designed as living systems that actively resource the people and places around them, it builds capacity in the wider world, because when our practices are regenerative, they contribute to the. Conditions for a Livable Future, rather than extracting from them, that means also letting go of business as usual, not just continuing to be held within its gravitational pull. So regenerative practice design is a business strategy, yes, and it's also a response to these three horizons. It's how we navigate horizon two, the disruptive innovation with intention, building what wall calls the pockets of the future in the present, our practices, when they're designed regeneratively, become exactly that small scale practitioner led experiments in what it looks like to work, earn, serve and contribute in ways that create conditions conducive to life rather than depleting them. Now I want to bring this back to something very practical, because I can hear the question for me. Well, you know, this all sounds very important. Wendy, it sounds like the right analysis. But what do I actually do with this in my practice on Monday morning? And so those of you been listening to this series will know we've talked about the concept of a distinctive edge, that essential story in your practice, the way of seeing and working that is uniquely and irreplaceably Yours. In episodes two and three, we started to explore what it means to move from that red ocean, commoditized. Level two work into Blue Ocean Territory, level three and four work. Perhaps you know, when we think about Mowbray's levels of psychological work and the regenerative extension that I added on to that where your professional judgment, your distinctive lens, your years of deep thinking, your client experience, become the offer. And I want to add here that in this VUCA context, this volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous landscape that defines the WTF era, this distinctive edge is even more important, and here's why, when everything is volatile and uncertain, when complexity is overwhelming and ambiguity is suffocating, What cuts through is not false certainty. What cuts through is clarity. And we're not talking about simplistic clarity, this, this kind of false clarity, false certainty, if you like someone telling you, just niche down and everything will be okay, because that kind of clarity collapses the moment that reality pushes back on it. I mean the kind of clarity that comes from knowing who you are as a practitioner, what you see that others don't, and what you're here to contribute the quality of that clarity that comes through from having done the developmental work of discovering your methodology, naming your lens on this, understanding the transformation that you facilitate, and continuing to evolve and develop that with Your clients and community, that kind of clarity is magnetic. It helps people to steer a course, even when we don't have certainty.
The clarity is your compass in horizon two, when the old maps don't work anymore, when the business as usual navigation is pointing to a destination that no longer exists, your distinctive edge is the pointer that tells you where to go and how to go about it. It tells you which opportunities are yours to pursue and which ones are someone else's. It tells you who you're here to serve and how it cuts through the noise, the overwhelm, the paralysis that comes from trying to respond to everything all at once. And I see this again again with the practitioners I work with, the ones who've done that work of surfacing their essential story, who've discovered and named the methodology, who know how to articulate that distinctive edge. They're not immune to the disorientation of Horizon. Two, of course, they're not, you know, they're human. They're paying attention. They feel the weight of what's happening. The difference is, they have a direction. They're not spinning in circles. They have a practice that's designed around who they actually are, that tells them from the inside and out, that their work matters, that they belong in their unique essence, rather than having built a treadmill that could belong to anyone. So here's something I really want you to hear you don't have to choose between flourishing in your practice and building a better world. That is a false binary, that horizon one thinking produces. It tells you that business is business and purpose is just a form of idealism you indulge in in your spare time, that earning a living and contributing to livable futures are separate activities, but they're not. They never were, really but in the WTF era, the separation is no longer just philosophically questionable. It's practically unsustainable, a regeneratively designed practice, one with a clear distinctive edge, a diversified office suite, a safe base underneath it, that practice is simultaneously your livelihood and your contribution. It's how you sustain yourself financially and emotionally, it's how you serve your clients and communities at the level they actually need, and it's how you participate in the creation of something that moves all of us toward horizon three, the flourishing and the contribution of the same work. They're not intention. They are integrated. So where does this leave us? We've been on quite a journey across these four episodes. We started with the structural reality of why everything that used to work in private practice has shifted, and why that's not personal. We moved into the economics of the one to one model, the triple squeeze, the red and blue ocean dynamics, we explored burnout and bore out as design problems and the Jevons paradox that simultaneously commoditizing level two work and creating new demand that only human practitioners can meet. And now we've named the split screen chasm, explored the three horizons framework that explains it, and started to see how regenerative practice design is the bridge from where we are to where we need to go. What I hope you're starting to feel, if it's still forming, is that the response to all of this isn't more hustle, more denial, more fragmentation, more trying to make horizon one work when the ground beneath it has shifted, the response is redesign, genuine, integrated, regenerative redesign of how we work, what we offer, who we serve, and why that redesign starts with safe base, building enough financial and emotional and practical stability, resource and structure so that you're not making decisions from scarcity and fear. It moves through to your distinctive edge, the discovering of the essential story of your practice, the methodology that's been emerging through your years of work and the lens that only you can bring it becomes brave practice, stepping into your leadership, building in public, showing up as a practitioner with a distinctive point of view on what psychological work and can do in This moment. And these aren't sequential steps necessarily that you tick off in order. They're interwoven developmental threads that mature together because you can't separate the financial redesign from the identity work, the methodology development from the safety building. You rediscover who you are as a practitioner, as you redesign how you work, the three horizons tell us the future is already here, just not evenly distributed. I see that future every time I work with a practitioner who's made the shift, who stepped off the treadmill and into a practice designed as a living system, who's found their blue ocean and is building something that's genuinely non displaceable, who's earning enough to feel safe, doing work that lights them up and contributing to the psychological infrastructure of their communities in ways that one to one treadmills don't. Allow that future is available. It's real, and it's already being built by practitioners in our community. It's being built by people around us. The question is whether you're ready to start building it too, if you are, the WTF era practice redesign sprint is running this month, five days, not solid days, of course, but working through the actual design sprint together. You'll have material in the mornings, live sessions. In the afternoons, we work through the safe base, the distinctive edge, the Office Suite architecture and the beginning of your braid practice roadmap. The links in the show notes alongside a practice design and it will be alongside a practice design diagnostic to help you see where you actually land right now. In the next episode, we're going to look at what's at stake if we don't shift and what becomes possible when we do the strategy that can hold all of this safe base, integrated development, essential story, living system design. That's the full framework for practice redesigning the WTF era. I'm Wendy Kendall. This is private practice in the WTF era. Thank you for being here, and I'm glad you're here. I'll see you in the next episode. You.
