Field Notes on Changemaking (Q2 2026)

In this second installment of Field Notes on Changemaking, I again step back after a quarter of essays and conversations to reflect, synthesize, and help build shared memory for an emerging profession.These field notes serve two purposes. First, they provide an overview of the content generated during the quarter, helping you decide what source material is most worth your time.Second, they offer my reflection across that material to identify emerging patterns, refine working hypotheses, pose the next set of questions, and invite you to shape the coming quarter of inquiry.One unexpected gift of writing these notes is that they force me to examine not only what I published, but how my own thinking has changed.What has changed in how I understand changemaking?LINK to Notes from Q1: https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/field-notes-on-changemaking-q1-2026?r=1i4aw7Q1 ended with eight questions that I believed would shape the next phase of my work. They remain the living research agenda behind The Changemaker’s Handbook, my doctoral research, and the conversations within this growing global community.* What builds legitimacy at scale?* Can we create transformation without social movements?* How does power actually move?* How do we design for impact—not merely moral correctness or agreement?* Why do changemakers continue to serve, against all odds?* What would it mean to professionalize changemaking without flattening it?* How do we build the infrastructure this emerging profession lacks?* And how do we reduce the unequal cost of change?Q2 certainly advanced some of those questions. More surprisingly, it reorganized them.Regardless of whether I was speaking with Dr. Laura Mae Lindo about public service, Dr. Whitney Austin Gray about public health, Andrew MacLeod about trafficking and institutional courage, Dr. Dominique Hes about regenerative design and story, or reflecting on gender, mothering, fathering, and invisible work, I found myself pulled further upstream.Questions about legitimacy became questions about trust, standards, and story. Questions about social movements became questions about adoption. Questions about power became questions about relationships, institutions, and narrative. Even my longstanding interest in transformation infrastructure began to feel incomplete. Infrastructure, I realized, is itself dependent on something more fundamental: the conditions under which it can emerge, be maintained, and ultimately become ordinary.Rather than asking how we create change, these conversations probed what makes change possible. If we better understand the conditions that allow transformation to spark, spread, and endure, perhaps legitimacy, adoption, professionalization, and even power become more intelligible as consequences rather than starting points.That, I now believe, was the central discovery of the quarter. Q1 questions were pointing toward a more fundamental one.The quarter in reviewThe quarter opened with a milestone in my doctoral research into changemaking: three essays that captured some of my findings. What are changemakers for? Are all people changemakers? and How can we recognize one — or know that we’re “it”? introduce the function changemakers serve in society, the six attributes they appear to share, and why the world benefits from a diversity of contribution — not merely a diversity of people.LINK: https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/how-to-spot-a-change-maker-signs?r=1i4aw7LINK: https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/most-people-are-not-changemakers?r=1i4aw7LINK: https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/what-are-changemakers-for?r=1i4aw7I also revisited the origin story of my own work. Rather than recounting a biography, Why I Care explores why I have spent two decades trying to professionalize changemaking, and what experiences convinced me that the world needed better transformation infrastructure.LINK: https://changemakershandbook.substack.com/p/why-i-care-10e?r=1i4aw7For Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, I stepped outside my usua