Imaginal Cells: What a Caterpillar Taught Me About Building a Festival

Two years ago I walked into a room of 400 strangers in Oslo. By the end of the week I had shared meals with people from 23 countries, debated regenerative finance over homemade pasta, and watched a retired hedge fund manager and a 22-year-old ocean activist discover they were working on the same problem from opposite ends.

That was Katapult Future Fest 2024. I had joined to help run the community dinners — my favourite part of the festival then, and still. It changed how I think about what a conference can be. This spring, I got to find out what happens when you take that belief and make it your job.

The biology lesson

When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it doesn't grow wings on its old body. It dissolves. What survives the dissolution are small clusters called imaginal cells — cells that carry the blueprint of the butterfly. The old structure's immune system attacks them at first. But they persist, find each other, connect, and eventually the entire organism reorganises around what they already knew it could become.

I think about that constantly when I'm around the Katapult community. The investors funding ocean restoration. The founders making regenerative agriculture viable. The artists turning systemic change into something you can feel. Imaginal cells, all of them — and mostly strangers to each other until someone builds the chrysalis where they can connect.

Amsterdam: the festival leaves home

In 2026 Katapult Future Fest left Oslo for the first time in seven years. The theme was Enter the Metamorphosis, and the venue made the metaphor literal: Ruigoord, a fifty-year-old artists' village on the edge of Amsterdam, where the old world and the new one overlap in a way that's hard to describe until you've walked through it.

My role, through Thrivbe, was Community Participation and Activation Lead — the dinners, the unconference, the volunteers, the spaces in between. Over three days in May, more than a thousand people registered and 874 walked through the doors, 56 percent of them international. But the number I'm proudest of isn't the attendance.

The dinner table does the heavy lifting

The night before the festival, 67 hosts opened their homes and tables to 524 guests across 48 community dinners — strangers matched deliberately, seven or eight to a table, good food, no agenda, no small-talk escape route.

Strangers at sunset, collaborators by midnight. The most important conversations at any gathering don't happen in panels. They happen when people feel safe enough to drop the professional mask — and nothing dissolves a mask like passing someone the bread.

Fifty-nine people who weren't attending

From 85 applicants we selected a corps of 59 volunteers — chosen for values alignment, not CVs — who covered more than 120 shifts in rotation groups, so everyone worked two days and lived the festival on the third.

They didn't check badges. They facilitated conversations, connected people who needed to meet, and held space when things got emotional — which they did, often. This isn't volunteering in the traditional sense. It's co-creating. The festival doesn't belong to the organisation; it belongs to the people who build it.

The AI crew behind the curtain

Here's the part nobody saw. Alongside the human team, I ran a roster of named AI agents — a Festival Commander orchestrating, a Community Weaver, a Volunteer Coordinator, a Comms Crafter — each with its own directives and tools. One skill created 25+ fully configured WhatsApp groups for the dinners end to end: names, descriptions, avatars, host and guest invitations. The festival app precomputed 15,199 introductions from 650 attendee profiles, scored on six compatibility factors. A voice agent answered festival questions from 1,326 chunks of festival knowledge.

The principle behind all of it: push complexity into deterministic pipelines so humans can make the decisions and be present. The same team that wrote the software also stood in the field making the community work. The AI didn't replace the human warmth — it bought us the time to provide it.

Metamorphosis as an operating model

The caterpillar's lesson isn't that transformation is magic. It's that transformation is infrastructure: the imaginal cells were always there, waiting for the conditions to find each other. A festival — a real one — is just a chrysalis built on purpose. You don't attend it. You help build it, and it reorganises you on the way through.

The metamorphosis isn't something that happens to you. It's something you participate in. So: who are the imaginal cells in your network — and what chrysalis are you building for them?