At the Turning Point: A Solstice Reflection
A Tale of the Season and Renewal
The ancient Germanic and Norse peoples marked midwinter with a festival they called Yule—not merely as a celebration, but as a strategic response to darkness. At the coldest, most uncertain point of the year, they gathered around fires, shared feasts from livestock slaughtered for winter, and offered toasts to gods and ancestors. They were acknowledging a truth that every strategist must eventually face: sometimes you can only move forward by first moving through.
Yule fell at the solstice, that precise moment when darkness reaches its maximum extent and light begins its slow return. The festival honoured Odin—called Jólnir, “the Yule one”—whose mythology is thick with themes of sacrifice, wisdom gained through hardship, and transformation. This wasn’t optimism masquerading as strategy. It was something more sophisticated: the recognition that systems contain their own turning points, and that renewal and decline are not opposites but phases in continuous cycles.
What strikes me as particularly relevant to our work in strategic design is how these communities responded to uncertainty. They didn’t deny the danger of winter or pretend spring had already arrived. Instead, they created infrastructure for hope—ritual practices, community bonds, shared narratives—that allowed them to act meaningfully even when outcomes remained uncertain. The feast wasn’t about having enough; it was about building the social and spiritual resilience to navigate scarcity.
When Christianity spread north, Yule wasn’t abolished—it was integrated. King Haakon I of Norway aligned Yule with Christmas, and over time the festivals blended so thoroughly that in Scandinavian languages, Christmas itself is simply called “Jul.” The evergreen decorations, the burning logs, the special feasts—these practices moved across a system change, carrying forward what served while adapting to new contexts. Not preservation or replacement, but evolution through synthesis.
This is the pattern that interests me most: how wisdom survives transitions by becoming embedded in new systems, often so seamlessly that we forget its origins. Today, when we speak of “Yuletide” or sing of “deck the halls,” we’re participating in a design that has successfully navigated more than a millennium of cultural transformation.
As we approach our own winter solstice, I find myself thinking about the strategies we employ when facing our darkest, most uncertain moments—whether in organizations, communities, or our own practice. Do we create infrastructure for collective resilience? Do we acknowledge where we are while holding space for where we might go? Do we build practices that help us act meaningfully even when the path forward isn’t clear?
The contemporary revival of Yule by Neopagan and Heathen communities represents another kind of strategic move: reaching back to reconstruct what was integrated almost out of recognition, seeking in older patterns something that speaks to current needs. It’s a reminder that no synthesis is permanent, and that what becomes embedded in one era may need to be made explicit again in another.
In the spirit of those ancient midwinter gatherings, I’m grateful for this community we’re building together—for your engagement with these ideas, for the conversations they spark, for the patience you show as we work through complex territory. Like those long-ago feasts, this newsletter is itself a kind of infrastructure: a commitment that we’ll continue meeting here, in this space, to think together about how we navigate complexity.
The light is returning. The work continues.
With appreciation,
Cameron
Censemaking will return in the new year with fresh perspectives on strategic design, systems thinking, and the art of navigating complexity. Until then, wishing you warmth, rest, and the particular kind of renewal that comes from moving through darkness toward light.
Image credit: Raimond Klavins on Unsplash