Tomatoes, Options, and Free Will: Practicing Worldview-Agility

In most societies, worth is still quietly equated with work.

If you are employed, you are “pulling your weight”.
If you are between jobs, reorienting, or taking a break, you quickly absorb the story that you are somehow less valuable.

On paper, this looks efficient.
In lived experience, it is brutal.

Worldview-Agility invites a different way of looking at this story and at your place inside the systems you live in.

Two courts of judgment

When you are not in formal paid work, the official system tends to treat you as a problem to be solved:

• You are registered, categorised, and “activated”.
• You are encouraged, or pressured, to get back into the labour market.
• You are measured by how quickly you can be brought back into “normal operations”.

This creates an inner narrative: “I am a burden. I am not contributing. I am less.”

It helps to distinguish between two courts of judgment:

1. The system’s court
• Uses criteria like employment, income, and tax contributions to assess your value.
• Tends to see unpaid or informal activity as irrelevant.
2. Your inner court
• Can recognise the value of reflection, study, healing, and invisible contribution.
• May see a period of unemployment as highly meaningful, even if it is not recognised in statistics.

You live at the intersection of these two courts.

If you unconsciously give the system’s court absolute authority, you will experience yourself as “invalid” whenever you are not fitting its template. If you never listen to it at all, you may ignore real practical constraints.

Worldview-Agility begins with a simple but demanding question:

“Whose judgment about my value do I treat as ultimately true?”

Three positions relative to “the system”

Once you stop treating the system as infallible, another question appears:

“Where do I want to stand in relation to it?”

There are at least three distinct positions:

1. System-conforming
• You align yourself fully with the rules and expectations.
• You internalise the system’s definition of success and failure.
• You aim to be 100% “on line”.
2. Critically system-compatible
• You see the system’s limitations and can articulate them.
• You still remain connected enough that your feedback, decisions, and presence can be received.
• You are not fully conform, but you are still plugged in.
3. System-incompatible
• You step so far outside that the system no longer hears you or recognises you as part of itself.
• The extreme version is moving to an island or a mountain cabin and withdrawing as much as possible.

From a change perspective, these positions are not equal:

• If you are fully conform, you offer no real change impulse.
• If you are fully incompatible, your impulse no longer lands; there is no interface.
• The leverage point is to be critical but still compatible.

This is the uncomfortable corridor where you feel both:

• The pressure of the system to pull you fully back into conformity
• The pull of your own integrity to live from a different worldview

It is also the place where you can most effectively influence.

You are not outside the system

We often talk about “the system” as if it were an external machine acting on us from the outside.

From a Worldview-Agility perspective, this is only one angle.

If you zoom out far enough, you see:

• Policies and institutions
• Markets and media
• Families, communities, organisations
• Individual humans, including you

All of this together is the system.

You are not standing opposite a machine. You are one of its moving parts.

Recognising this is uncomfortable, because it pulls you into co‑responsibility:

• You are not only subject to system forces.
• You are also a participant in how those forces arise and are maintained.

At the same time, this view expands your perceived influence:

“If I am part of the field, then any change in me is not just private. It also changes the field.”

You cannot single‑handedly rewire an entire economy. But you can stop telling yourself the story that you are a powerless object being pushed around by something you have no relationship to.

Tomatoes, options, and the illusion of no choice

To understand how Worldview-Agility reframes choice, imagine a supermarket.

You walk in and, as far as you can see, there are only tomatoes.

You buy tomatoes, eat tomatoes, and complain endlessly about tomatoes. You tell anyone who will listen how tired you are of tomatoes.

In this metaphor:

• Tomatoes represent option B, the familiar way of living and working.
• Other vegetables represent option A, a different worldview and a different mode of operating.

The path from B to A is not a single jump. It passes through several stages:

1. Only B is visible
• You are convinced there really are only tomatoes.
• Anyone speaking about something else sounds naïve or delusional.
2. A and B exist, but A is “not for me”
• A neighbour mentions another aisle. You hear it, but internally you say:
• “That may work for others, but not for someone in my position.”
3. A and B are both recognised as real options
• You still mostly choose tomatoes, but you can no longer honestly say there is “no alternative”.
4. A conscious choice is made
• You decide where to invest your limited time, attention, and energy.

Many people are stuck between stages 1 and 2.

They have heard of other ways of working and seeing, but they have not yet granted themselves the right to treat A as a real option.

Moving from B towards A requires energy:

• Energy to look beyond the shelf you usually stand in front of
• Energy to taste something unfamiliar
• Energy to withstand the looks of others who only ever buy tomatoes

It is easier, in the short term, to stay with tomatoes and complain.

Worldview-Agility does not deny that effort. It names it clearly and treats it as part of the path.

External shocks and internal signals

People move from B towards A for two main reasons:

1. External shocks
• Crises that make the old pattern unsustainable:
• Economic breakdowns
• Environmental changes
• Social shifts
• In our metaphor: a climate event that makes tomatoes harder to grow, forcing the system to look at other vegetables.
2. Internal signals
• A persistent inner question:
• “Is this really the best we can do?”
• A feeling of misalignment between what you are doing and what you sense is right.
• A refusal to keep pretending that the current arrangement is “good enough”.

Both triggers matter.

External shocks often get the attention of the system.
Internal signals are where your personal agency begins.

Worldview-Agility pays attention to both, and asks:

“Given what I am seeing, where can I make a real choice?”

Powerlessness belongs to the old script

One of the most draining experiences for leaders is a sense of powerlessness.

In the familiar B‑world script, this feeling is built in:

• You see yourself as separate from the system.
• You experience markets, regulations, and culture as forces that simply happen to you.
• You conclude that there is “nothing you can do”.

From an A‑world perspective, this script is not absolute.

• You still encounter constraints, but you no longer define yourself as a victim of them.
• Agency is not “I control everything”, but “I participate consciously in how things unfold”.
• Powerlessness stops being a fixed position and becomes a temporary perception you can examine and move through.

Ironically, the experience of powerlessness in B can itself become a signal that pushes you to explore A.

If staying in the old script repeatedly leads you to the same dead end, investing energy in a new script starts to look less risky.

Shifting your inner distribution

Transformation does not happen by declaring “from tomorrow, I will think differently”.

It happens through a slow rebalancing of your inner distribution between B and A.

At the start, you may be:

• 100% B, 0% A
• The world appears exactly as you were taught to see it.

Over time, you might notice:

• 5% A, 95% B
• Occasional moments where you react or see differently.

If you stay with it:

• 10% A, 90% B
• 20% A, 80% B
• …

At some point, you approach a tipping zone:

• 49% A, 51% B
• You still default to B, but A is no longer marginal or theoretical.

Then something important happens:

• 51% A, 49% B
• Your baseline shifts.
• You still have many B‑reactions, but they become exceptions rather than the rule.

Beyond that, you might move towards:

• 60% A, 40% B
• 70% A, 30% B

You are still living in a world dominated by B‑logic, but your personal centre of gravity has moved.

Worldview-Agility is not about erasing B entirely.
It is about tipping your own ground state so that A becomes the primary lens through which you live and lead.

Beacon vs rescuer: a different model of leadership

Leaders who start to live from A more consistently often ask:

“How do I help others without burning out or dragging them?”

Two simple archetypes are useful here:

1. The rescuer
• Feels responsible for pulling people out of their struggles.
• Jumps in, uses personal energy to solve others’ problems.
• Can be indispensable in emergencies, but is not sustainable as a permanent mode.
2. The beacon
• Focuses on being a clear, stable reference point.
• Offers orientation, language, and perspective.
• Allows others to walk their own path but with better information.

A rescuer operates primarily in B‑world logic: “If I do not jump in, nothing will change.”
A beacon operates more from A‑world logic: “If I stand clearly, others who are ready will find their way.”

Worldview-Agility, practiced as leadership, tends towards the beacon.

It does not deny responsibility. It redefines how responsibility is expressed.

Free will as allocation of lifetime

Behind all of this sits one practical definition of free will:

“How do I invest the limited time I have in this life?”

You do not choose the entire supermarket. You do choose:

• Which aisle you spend time in
• What you put into your basket
• Who you talk to while you are there

Worldview-Agility invites you to look honestly at your current allocation:

• How much of your day is spent reinforcing the old story of powerlessness and inevitability?
• How much is spent exploring, even quietly, a different way of seeing and being?

You cannot force an entire system to change overnight.

You can choose, repeatedly, to stop pretending there is only one shelf.

The first act of leadership is often simply to walk far enough down the aisle to see that another section exists, and to stay there long enough that it becomes real to you.

From there, the work of helping others begins to take care of itself.

(This article was inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 27th August 2025.)(ID:CO|AF)