At IEC 2025 we heard many voices exploring how transformation unfolds in the face of our global metacrises. Two perspectives seemed to mirror and amplify each other: Karen O’Brien’s invitation to see ourselves as fractals of change and my own exploration of AQtivating Soul Power for cities in crisis. Though spoken in different idioms, both approaches remind us that the patterns of change are both deeply personal and profoundly collective.

Karen O’Brien described how every individual matters more than they think. Drawing on her decades of climate and social research, she invited us to consider the fractal nature of change — how small shifts at the scale of values, relationships, and intentions replicate outward across families, communities, nations, and systems. Through a quantum lens, she emphasized that we are “walking wave functions of potential,” always patterning and mattering in the moment, whether we acknowledge it or not.

My own contribution asked a parallel question from the perspective of the city as a living system: What if the fundamental cause of urban metacrisis is disconnection from Soul? Using Integral City frameworks, I proposed that reconnecting to Beauty, Truth, and Goodness — and living Gaia’s Master Code of Care — can restore coherence where fragmentation, conflict, and despair now dominate. Cities can heal when they remember their role as Gaia’s Reflective Organs, consciously participating in the evolution of life.

When we place these two lenses side by side, a powerful resonance emerges. Fractals show us how patterns replicate across scales; Soul Power reveals why we must cultivate life-affirming patterns in the first place. Together they invite us to recognize that every individual and every city is a node in a larger murmuration — a living fractal of potential — where the choices we make today ripple outward to shape futures we may never see.

You Matter, Cities Matter
Karen’s exploration of fractals in her book “You Matter More Than You Think” connected the individual capacity to make a difference to the multiple efforts that many individuals acting in workplaces and communities can contribute to their impact in cities.

Revealing how we are all interconnected in repeating patterns of development and evolution – changing in ego, ethno, regional and global fields – fractals of change translate into Soul Power in the quest for wholeness.

Seeing ourselves as more than individuals isolated in the turbulent world of change that confronts us all, gives us the strength to live and work in collectives that can make a difference to how we make decisions, choose behaviours, express our creativity and contribute to systems that generate (and regenerate) aliveness.  This fractal quality of life may be the repeating pattern (DNA even?) that enables not only development on a local scale but evolution on a global – even cosmic – scale.

This can move us from feeling like we are single drops in a massive ocean – seemingly of little importance – to recognizing that the fractal patterns of lifecycles are like wave functions that ripple across and through our daily experiences in family, work, community and city life.

And these ripples of change act as feedback loops that amplify and strengthen our choices and thus our agency in the city and in the world. They become currents and groundswells that can sweep the course of city life forward in a mighty surge. (We are seeing evidence of this as I write, where young people in cities across the world are stepping out in protest to the autocracies who have been suppressing their freedoms.)

Fractals of Soul, Patterns of Care
If Karen O’Brien reminds us that we matter more than we think, the Integral City perspective shows that our cities matter more than we know. They are the habitats where Soul Power can be cultivated and amplified into systems change. Every act of care, every courageous conversation, every fractal pattern of justice or compassion that we seed in the present becomes part of the living architecture of the future.

The invitation, then, is twofold: to recognize ourselves as fractals of change and to see our communities as reflective organs of Gaia. By aligning universal values with Gaia’s Code of Care, we begin to re-pattern fragments into wholeness. By joining the three spheres of transformation with the cycles of Action Research — What, So What, Now What — we can design practices that heal the brokenness of our times.

Looking back, future generations may ask: Did they see their interconnection? Did they act as if they mattered? Did they reawaken the Soul of their cities? Our task is to ensure the answer is yes. Each of us is already a pattern-shifter. Each city is already a murmuration in motion. Together, we can weave fractals of Soul Power strong enough to carry us through collapse into coherence.