The purpose of this paper is to show how we can combine and adapt methods from elite training, future studies, and collaborative design, and apply them to address significant problems in social networks. We focus on three such methods: we use Action Reviews to implement social perception, Causal Layered Analysis to implement social cognition, and Design Pattern Languages to implement social action. To illustrate the methods in combination, we first develop a case study, showing how we applied them to bootstrap a distributed cross-disciplinary research seminar. We then use Causal Layered Analysis to explore the ways in which the design pattern discourse has been evolving. Building on these analyses, we elaborate several scenarios for the future use of design patterns in large-scale distributed collaboration. We conclude that the combination of methods is robust to uncertainty -- by supporting adaptations as circumstances change -- and that they can help people coming from different backgrounds work together. In particular, we show how methods drawn from other domains enrich and are enriched by design patterns; we believe the analysis will be of interest to all of the communities whose methods we draw upon.
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