Regeneration, in Nora Bateson’s words, is participating in life that makes more life. It’s what a meadow does, what soil and oceans do, what our own microbiomes are doing—relationships making relationships that make relationships. If the UN’s work is to meet systemic crises across human rights, food, energy, peace, then the work is to tend those living relationships—many of which you can’t name, can’t count, and can’t see—because they are exactly what make life.
What Warm Data actually is (and why “cold” data keeps missing life)
Nora began with a simple question: what information is guiding our decisions? Most of what institutions use is decontextualized—lifted out of the very interdependencies that produce life. You can gather streams of data on education, climate, health, finance, identity, technology, culture; but streams of decontextualized information don’t add up to systemic understanding. What matters is how the streams are changing each other—and that is moving, relational, alive.
“The information we need has to be as alive as the systems we want to generate life within.”
This is Warm Data: relational, trans-contextual information that lives between people, institutions, cultures, ecologies. It does not sit still to be pinned down. Attempts to freeze it into models and metrics come from an industrial/engineering logic—the very mindset that has been eroding the living fabric we claim to protect.
About the SDGs and KPIs (Nora’s radical pragmatism)
Nora names the core tension plainly: preloading projects with KPIs is a return to the system that produces the problem. If donors are pleased by dashboards and binders full of measurements, that should trouble us—because those very binders can distract from real change. Her proposal is disarmingly practical:
“Put the SDGs at the end, not the beginning.” Do what’s needed on the ground. Tend the relationships that nourish relationships. Then, afterward, tick off which goals were met. In her experience, projects that never set out to meet any specific goal often meet many—precisely because they didn’t disrupt the complexity with predefinition.
Entering rupture: how to begin in disaster and conflict
In emergencies, everyday patterns have been broken. That rupture, Nora says, can open possibility for new patterns of being—if we don’t arrive with ready-made ideas. Pre-assessment of “the right thing” for others is neo-colonial. The posture is simpler: “I’m here to support.”
Nora’s Warm Data Labs create multi-contextual conversations with no agenda, no flip-chart takeaways, no predetermined outcomes. People tell stories. Perception is the action. As perception widens, what is possible next shifts—without us manipulating the process or managing the people.
Don’t host a town hall if you want life
Town halls that ask, “What does your community need?” will reliably produce lists of what people think the UN can give. Competition follows: networking for funds, alignment toward existing power. That alignment is the last thing you want—especially when the existing power is the UN. The work is to help communities align to each other, not to you.
Often this means something very human: make space to be together, provide childcare and food, and let people re-knit the fabric that trauma has torn. From there, minutiae—small, everyday actions—begin to generate the macro: cohesion, mutual help, possibility from within.
An ecology of communication (how voices come through)
In Warm Data Labs, people speak through personal story. No one’s story is “more right.” Positions of influence are neutralized by the small-group ecology. There is no rule that everyone must speak for equal time—because managingthat ruins the learning ecology. People move; the quiet speak; the loud learn to listen. If you want “marginalized voices,” Nora cautions, notice how even the question can invite manipulation. Attend to the granular. Let the stories do the work.
“There is an ancient analog right to be together and tell each other stories for no reason whatsoever—without agenda, outcome, manipulation, or assessment.”
Every act of violence or polarization, she notes, justifies itself by eliminating context—by removing the stories that connect a river to a people, an ocean to oxygen, soil to culture and generations. Restoring context is already intervention.
If Nora were Secretary-General (the first 100 days)
1. Stop having people write reports. They are taking too much time and “don’t mean anything.”
2. Bring in people who learn from nature—people studying how living systems heal in multiple directions simultaneously. Shift the institutional habit from machine-thinking (linearity, causality, problem→solution→plan) to living-systems perception: patterns, relationships, emergence.
Because nothing we face now can be moved without deep practice in perceiving complex systems. Even fleas on dogs implicate pharma, temperature rise, diet, trust, culture. The same goes—magnified—for humanitarian response, peace, and climate.
A note to UN colleagues (in Nora’s tone)
If you want regeneration, let life through. Let the information be alive. Tend the relationships that nourish relationships. Don’t predefine. Don’t pit neighbors against each other for the shiniest project. Feed what is already emerging—the minutiae that produce the macro. And when you must “show results,” place the SDGs at the end. Let the living context teach you what was actually met.
Listen to the Full Episode
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1841851629
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0P0AuPL805jRdxLazjR4Sz
Key links
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Nora Bateson (LinkedIn): www.likedin.com/in/nora-bateson-b4a2456
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Warm Data Labs (Bateson Institute): batesoninstitute.org/warm-data/