A position on AI, built by you.
Six months, six sessions, one landscape map — built with the P&I team, not handed to it.
Your team spends its days on land coming back to life — the science, the learning, the policy that make restoration real. And you count inspiration as a return before anyone counts money.
What you're deciding is the question our whole space is wrestling with: what do people doing impact work do with these tools — without giving up the judgement, the plural knowledge, and the long horizons the work runs on. Working that out with a team inside the organisation aiming at a hundred million hectares would be a joy.
So here it is — with a little more in it than you asked for: six practice sessions instead of four or five, an opening workshop with Jo in Amsterdam, and a landscape map we start drawing before you decide anything. Read at your own pace, click into what interests you, and send us whatever doesn't convince you.
You've got a team split on AI — some of you on it daily, some keeping their distance on purpose — and one worry under all of it: that these tools cost you the thing your work runs on, your own judgement. By the end of this you hold a position on AI that rests on foundations chosen and built yourselves. Including a flat no wherever it makes sense.
Your framework, not ours.
Four Returns is your language before it's anyone else's. Inspiration, social capital, natural capital, financial capital — we're not asking you to adopt a new way of thinking about AI. We're asking where AI earns a place inside the one you already use, and where it doesn't.
Inspired by the 4 Returns Framework. For more information, visit www.commonland.com.
Hope & purpose
Giving people a sense of hope and purpose in their landscape.
Jobs & connection
Bringing back jobs, education, and social connection to communities.
Biodiversity & soil
Restoring biodiversity and soils for healthy, resilient landscapes.
Lasting livelihoods
Realising long-term, sustainable income for local communities.
Relevant tools and approaches are those that: support critical thinking rather than replacing it; are transparent enough to interrogate and question; preserve the team's analytical ownership; and are honest about their limitations. The process should also leave room for the conclusion that certain tasks are better done without AI.
How we work
Your ToR asks for a team that builds its own judgement about these tools, on its own terms. That is the work we do.
We prepare, we refine together, you decide. We bring the research, the map, the tools and the examples; you take them apart on your own cases and keep what survives. Nothing gets handed down — a good outcome can be “use this”, “use this with safeguards”, or “don't automate this”.
Your ToR already says what “better” means for this team: tools that support critical thinking rather than replacing it, transparent enough to interrogate and question, that preserve your analytical ownership, and honest about their limitations — with room left to conclude that certain tasks are better done without AI. Everything in this room is built on those five lines. Hold us to them too.
One more working rule, ours: plain language. Every AI term that enters this programme gets explained through your own work, or it stays out.
A course, if the work proves useful
Everything we learn over these months — the map, the practice, what works and what doesn't — can become a course Commonland keeps: one you could run across the whole organisation, or give to all your partners. Taught live online, or built out into something fully self-running you just hand over. The course question sits on the table from the start, not as an upsell later.
The map, drawn with you
A tool's place is set by what it's built for, who it really serves, what it costs to run, and whether it runs on fear or on something closer to trust. We come with our own scoring done — then we redraw it together, on the wall, with your own cases.
An instrument, not a score
Your own criteria, made clickable. Name a tool, mark where it lands, see the pattern — this is what a scoring pass in session feels like.
The charter, written as you go
Working agreement — draft
- 1.Score each tool against your own criteria.
- 2.Reach a real decision every time — keep, change, or drop.
- 3.Write your own view before AI touches the work.
- 4.Keep your sources straight.
And the lines you add — write them here.
Where it fails
A mock search — illustrative, not a live result. The shape of the failure is real; the specifics are invented for this page.
Who you'd work with
Schedule and fees
Six months from September — September matters, so the whole team can be in from the start. A call with the whole team, about a month out, comes first. One live session a month, six in all, with a small thing to try or chew on between.
Your doubts, first
All five of you. One line each — the thing you'd most want to be wrong about, or the reason this whole subject makes you tired. They become the first material of the opening workshop.