The intent of your intervention is to shift system heading – to move the landscape toward your alt-present. But complex systems do not yield to grand plans. They respond to small perturbations in ways that cannot be fully predicted, sometimes absorbing them without trace, sometimes amplifying them into consequential change. Foments are how you work with this reality: introducing something small, designed well enough to generate something big.
The word ‘foment’ suggests stirring something up, instigating change – and that is exactly the intent. A foment is a small, discrete, time-bound intervention introduced into the landscape as an experiment. It is concrete where strategies are open-ended. Your Theory of Change contains strategies – hypotheses about how to influence target groups’ practices. Foments are how you enact those strategies: the specific workshops, demonstrations, connections, or conversations through which a strategy is tested. Each foment embodies a piece of your strategy in assessable form.
This distinction matters. Strategies can drift into vague intentions – ‘build capacity’, ‘strengthen networks’ – that resist evaluation. Foments discipline your thinking. They force you to translate intentions into concrete actions with clear hypotheses: if we do this, with these people, in this place, we expect this response. When the response comes, you learn something specific.
Designing effective foments
A well-designed foment meets five criteria:
- Small. Modest enough to be safe-to-fail, unobtrusive enough not to trigger resistance.
- Experimental. A hypothesis to test, not a commitment to defend. Held lightly.
- Diagnostic. Designed to reveal where the system has give and where it resists.
- Disruptive. Creates productive misalignment in existing practice configurations.
- Generative. Carries potential to take root and grow if conditions are right.
What foments do for your intervention
Foments serve your intervention in several ways. They probe the system, testing where change is possible. They perturb existing arrangements, creating openings for new practices. They plant ideas, relationships, and possibilities that may flourish. They generate learning – from both success and failure. And because they are held lightly, they can be released when they are not working, freeing resources for more promising directions.
Critically, foments interact with the system’s own dynamics. Some will be dampened – absorbed without visible effect – and that is useful information about where the system is resistant. Others will be amplified, picked up and carried further by stakeholders, triggering changes beyond what you directly initiated. This amplification is the mechanism through which small interventions generate large-scale shifts. Your task is to watch for it, nurture it when it emerges, and learn from its absence when it does not.
This logic reflects a fundamental principle of complex systems: change is generated through the accumulation of micro-level interactions, not through singular decisive acts.
kim geheb
In nature, systems optimise through precisely these small exchanges – because there is no single directing force, adaptation emerges from countless local adjustments. A foment operates at this micro-level: it introduces a small perturbation, observes how the system responds, and amplifies or dampens accordingly.
The cumulative effect of multiple foments, running in parallel across a landscape, can shift the system’s disposition in ways that a single large intervention cannot – precisely because each foment is too small to trigger the defensive responses that larger, more visible change efforts provoke. Thinking in foments changes how you plan and how you implement. You are not rolling out a programme; you are releasing a portfolio of experiments, each one a question posed to the landscape. The answers will reshape your strategies, your priorities, and sometimes your alt-present itself. This is not a loss of control – it is how you work skilfully within complexity.
