This post is a compiled snippet from a Twitter thread that I've transported over here for posterity. The original thread started here: https://twitter.com/b_cavello/status/1498907955114164224

Jamming on the idea of “proactionaries” (contrast with reactionaries) as a possible concept

Where reactionaries are status quo-seeking, proactionaries recognize the inevitability of change and focus their energies on adaptation, innovation, and inclusion.

Proactionaries may be experimentalists, wanting to simulate and explore possible futures to prepare and create. Proactionaries may be game designers, speculative fiction writers, and improvisers.

Proactionaries may also be good listeners, observers, and historians. Not predicting the future from the past, but learning and echoing its wisdom into the future so as not to repeat mistakes.

Proaction is pro-action. It recognizes our relationship with each other and with our environment is not passive. Healthy ecologies may require tending. Proactionaries embrace this cultivative effort.

Proactionaries may be #BeyondReturn, beyond normalcy. Proaction does not wait until things are “bad enough” to try to make them better.
beyondreturn.org

Proaction may be anti-hierarchical, anti-exclusionary, even anti-meritocratic. It aims to make it easy to change and adapt and learn and grow. It seeks to make it easy to be kind, be curious, be capable.

Proactionaries do not assume that was or what is are right simply because they were or are. Proaction is not about critique, however, but rather asking “how could we improve upon this?” & “what can I do to make this a better version of itself?” (…me a better version of myself?)

It’s late, but I just saw this thread boosted back into my feed, and it feels really serendipitous and resonant (albeit about something else, don’t want to put words in @BuildSoil’s mouth!), so I will leave you with this: twitter.com/BuildSoil/status/1138838973181120517

One of my fave things is trying to coin a new phrase or neologism and then searching for that phrase to see who else’s mind has been on a similar path (even if they take it in a different direction)!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proactionary_principle