Living Groups
Groups are alive
Your exhaustion is not personal failure. It is your body recognizing extraction.
Living Groups is a field of study examining what makes human groups regenerative versus extractive.
Not organizational development. Not management theory. A new frame for recognizing when groups are alive, and when they are performing life while the bodies inside them are exhausting.
THE RECOGNITION
You have walked into rooms that were alive. You know the feeling.
You have walked into rooms that were dead but still moving. You know this feeling, too.
The difference was not the people. The difference was whether the structure allowed the group to breathe, rise and fall, compose and complete — or prevented these movements and exhausted everyone inside it.
This is what Living Groups studies. Not what groups are for. What they need in order to remain alive to the humans who pass through them.
CHOOSE YOUR PATH
Discover the Work
The three foundation works and the other transmissions — mythological witnessing, underground practice, accessible entry points.
Start here if: You want to understand what Living Groups is as a field of study.
Practice in a cohort
Leadership in Motion is a validated methodology for practicing leadership as participation in the three movements. Not a traditional leadership program. Leadership evolved to match the demands of humans working in complexity.
Start here if: You want to experience this work in your body, alongside others, inside a bounded container.
→ Leadershipip
Carry the practice
KOANS for living groups. 108 field observations in deck form. The oracular companion to the trilogy. The books are for study. The deck is for practice.
Start here if: You want a practice object for the spaces where you already gather.
RECENT FIELD NOTES
ABOUT THIS WORK
I'm Matthew Dunn. I've been doing this work for twenty years—first as a collegiate soccer coach trying to optimize performance, then as a consultant helping organizations "rise," then as someone who had to watch his own practice dissolve to understand what organizations actually need.
They don't need another framework. They need someone who can witness what's actually happening and help them feel it too. They need human-level work—not more tools for optimizing machines, but presence for remembering they're made of people.
That witnessing has become:
Nine books exploring organizational consciousness
Facilitated sessions where teams feel what they already know
Koans—100+ distilled recognitions
The theory and practice are inseparable. The books emerge from the field work. The field work is grounded in the books. Start wherever the work finds you.
