Authored by: Miryam Artola Dendaluce, an external witness at the June 2026 GFN Gathering in the Basque Country.

Nora Bateson calls it tracing a small arc of a larger circle: we never see the whole, only our part, and we trust the rest is there.

For three days in the Basque Country, the Governance Futures Network traced one such arc: visible, dated, alive. I came to see and give it shape.

In two decades of reading rooms for a living, I have rarely seen a network whose relationships were already load-bearing on the first morning. People arrived from across the world and, within the hour, were inside the hardest questions ( grief, inflection, hope…) and no one flinched. The gathering had opened with a txalaparta, a Basque instrument two people play on a single beam, impossible to play alone. The whole network, in one sound. This is not a contact list. It is a practice of being in relationship across difference.

My task across those three days was to make the system visible, to translate a moving, many-voiced conversation into one structure the network could stand in front of and think with. By the end, three panels covered the wall. But the most important thing never reached it. Bateson calls it warm data — what lives between people, not in them — the conversation on the bus to Arantzazu, the silence after someone says something true…. It cannot be measured. It is what this network produces.

At the close stood a baobab, the tree that stores water through the drought and gives life when everything else dies. Its trunk is hollow: a shelter, a place where communities gather to decide together. That is the Governance Futures Network. Ancient roots. A trunk open to the world. Branches reaching toward futures not yet named.

And the leaves pressed to its bark are seeds: commitments, new relationships, questions still held open. Not conclusions. Beginnings.

The seeds have left the tree. What comes next is where the real work begins.

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Miryam Artola Dendaluce is a Strategic Consultant and Visual Narrative Practitioner with over twenty years of international experience at the intersection of strategy, complexity and collective intelligence. She is the creator of the Dibuja tu Estrategia® method and the IECV framework (Collective Strategic Visual Intelligence), teaches at Deusto Business School and the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), and gave the 2022 TED Talk “If I Don’t See It, I Don’t Move.” She was the strategic visual narrator for the GFN Basque Country Gathering, June 2–4, 2026.  miryamartola.com