ABOUT

I'm Matthew Dunn. I study what makes human groups regenerative versus extractive.

I hold a doctorate in Organizational Leadership Psychology. But my actual education came from a lifetime of watching groups — what happens when they can breathe and what happens when they can't. What extraction does to the people inside systems that have stopped serving life. What bodies know that expert frameworks miss.

The Path Here

I spent a decade as a collegiate soccer coach before understanding that teams move as living systems, not collections of individuals performing roles. That recognition led me to organizational psychology, then to consulting work, then to something I didn't expect: watching my own practice dissolve in 2020 and learning more from its completion than its success ever taught me.

What emerged wasn't a better consulting practice. It was a field of study.

Living Groups — the emerging discipline examining what makes human collectives regenerative versus extractive. Proving through geometric demonstration that groups require three movements: gathering and dispersing, rising and falling, creating and dissolving. Documenting what happens when those movements are systematically violated. Training perception of what bodies already detect.

Not organizational development. Not change management. Something more fundamental: recognizing when groups can breathe and when extraction is suffocating them.

What I've Found

Three movements must exist for groups to sustain life. Not preferences observed in healthy organizations — geometric necessities, like triangles requiring three sides.

BREATH — gathering and dispersing

PULSE — rising and falling

TIDE — creating and dissolving

Most organizing systems force the first half of each movement only: chronic gathering, forced rising, and prevented completion. This is extraction — and it's geometrically unsustainable. Bodies detect the violations as exhaustion, chest tightness, or the sense that something is fundamentally wrong. That detection is accurate.

I've spent twenty years documenting these patterns across teams, organizations, families, and communities. The patterns are consistent. The violations are predictable. The body's perception is reliable.

The Transmissions

This work takes the form of books, each serving a different entry point into the same recognition:

Foundation Works (proving the patterns, training the perception)

• MOVEMENTS — geometric proof that living groups require three movements (in development)

• THE FIELD — phenomenological training for perceiving regeneration versus extraction (in development)

Transmissions (applying the patterns to specific domains)

• The Rhythm of Us — recognizing aliveness in everyday groups

• We Gather But Do Not Meet — mythological diagnosis of organizational life

• Testimony — voices from inside the breaking

• Here, Remembered — the quiet after

• The Field Manual — underground protocols for those holding groups through transition

Optional Cosmology

• Organizational Metaphysics — for those wanting a philosophical framework

Ongoing

• Field Notes — monthly observations on patterns as they emerge

• Koans — over 100 distilled recognitions

The Stance

I don't arrive with solutions. I don't diagnose and prescribe. I don't optimize systems or improve performance metrics.

I witness what's actually happening in groups — the patterns, the violations, the life trying to emerge through structures that may no longer serve it. I create space where bodies can be trusted, where what everyone already senses can be named, where recognition replaces performance.

Sometimes this happens through writing. Sometimes through sitting with groups. Sometimes through simply being present while something completes.

The work doesn't change organizations. It helps the people inside them recognize what their bodies already know.

Contact

info@performancerising.org