Part 1/3: Unfolding Living Systems Thinking to Amplify Systems Change
Integrating crucial principles steeped in indigenous wisdom to increase the creativity, vitality, and potential of your work in systems change.
Welcome to our series around creating a living systems change strategy!
This series is for “Systems Change Agents”:
Purpose-driven businesses that see their profits as a tool for driving social change and want to go beyond transactional impact into shifting culture, policy, and resources flows
Non-profits that seek to expand the value they create for society and create deeper infrastructures and mental models through their work.
Funders who seek to leverage systemic thinking to activate their potential as conveners and design funding programs that add transformative value to projects and communities beyond just the money that’s distributed
We see potential systems change agents everywhere - in policy, education, the homeless population, the military, etc. However we are focusing our message to deliver value to these three types of people in this series.
Benefits of Living Systems Thinking
Through practice and observation, we’ve observed the following benefits of living systems thinking at Interform:
Enables spaces to bring diverse people together as collaborators around aligned goals, enabling greater scale, depth, and organic complexity of positive change.
Helps organizations understand their individual role, enabling them to align and grow their people, capital, and strategies with less waste, contention, and confusion.
Supports organizations in continually evolving their products, services, and programs to add new value, securing resources, and elevate the levels of energy within all of their people.
First: Acknowledgement
I (Adam) am writing this post from Phoenix, Arizona. Ancestral homeland to the Pipaash, O’ohdam, Hopi, Navajo, and Apache peoples. We recognize that much of this wisdom is sourced from their ways of thinking and being, not a “new” thing that we have discovered. We continue to learn from the current members of these tribes and seek ways to create value for indigenous communities through our work. We encourage you do the same so we can act from a space of rootedness.
Second: Gratitude 🙏🏼
We’d like to extend our gratitude to you for being here, reading this page. You’ve taken a step towards expanding your perspective so you might bring more value to the people and communities you serve. To care is an essential prerequisite for this work.
Third: We’re still growing together
Second, to quote John Harper in his wonderful keynote around systems thinking at Arizona Impact For Good - “This isn’t Bible”. The fields of systems thinking and systems change are constantly emerging, and we offer this information as humble explorers and practitioners of this work, not experts.
Fourth: Participate in Reflections for BEST experience!
Third, you will benefit most if you participate, in conversation. Each article will have some recommended exercises or reflection questions. To integrate this thinking and see the benefits, go through these exercises first by yourself, then with your team, then with your stakeholders.
Sharing your questions, reflections, and concerns on these posts helps us create more useful content, and creates tangible examples for the community - benefitting us all.
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Setting the Frame: Living Systems Thinking
What is living systems thinking? How does it differ from systems thinking and traditional approaches to social impact?
To answer these questions, let’s explore the current styles of thinking in the systems change space.
We dove into different paradigms of thinking in the Dancing with Paradigms post, so if you’d like a deeper dive into the aspects of each thinking paradigm please read through that post
Living systems thinking (closely related to Regenerative Design and Development), originated within Mohawk and other indigenous cultures, has been translated into frameworks for the modern organizational context by Carol Sanford and John Bennet. Living Systems thinking describes the process of consciousness involved in reconnecting, thinking, and acting as a whole within an infinitely complex and unique, living system.
Carol has observed 7 crucial principles of Living systems thinking. In this post, we’ll start with diving into the first 3: Wholes, Essence, and Potential.
Wholes
Note: I initially called this “wholeness” until Carol brought deeper context through a comment on one of my LinkedIn posts:
“My grandfather was careful to say, it is not the English term Wholeness. That is where people go wrong. It Wholes. Wholeness is a humanist idea, not a living systems Idea. Whole Systems are Living Systems, not the state of a part. Examples Wholes: one child, one life shed, one family, one company. You can tell it is a Whole, because it is engaged in a role in a value-adding processes (VAP). e.g. a farm serving restaurants, or a business serving a communities building democracy, a habitat serving animals in that habitat. You start with A WHOLE or you don't begin correctly. That is because Essence, the #2 Principle, is Essence of the WHOLE and how it serves the VAP. Essence is what you have to image it as alive. That begins as a Whole. Not wholeness, which is an idea, not a living entity.”
Every being exists as a whole, interconnected system, from the cells in your body to our entire known universe. This system contains specific processes, systems, characteristics, and structures that help it run. Wholes are partially expressed in the observations of Quantum Entanglement, recognizing connectedness between individual atoms through time and space.
As a purpose driven organization, seeing wholes enables us to witness our natural connectedness to the world, people, and places we exist in relationship with. This breaks down boundaries of “separateness” and allows us to activate our care and curiosity for new types of people and living beings, opening the door for creative ideas, refreshed energy, and alignment where conflict previously reigned.
One example of this lies within a story Angela Salazar told me about a man with political leanings on the far right who went through a DEI program she facilitated. At first, he was incredibly resistant to the whole process. As the program went on, focusing on the aim of human connection, he realized the ways racism and bias made it difficult for him to connect to the people around him and live a truly fulfilling life. He ended up being one of the most enthusiastic ambassadors for the DEI program. Without seeing the whole of this man in the whole quest for greater human connection in Phoenix, he may never have joined.
Pitfalls and reflections around wholes:
Hyper-fixation: Organizations get so hyper-focused on a single issue, metric, or population that it gets disconnected from it’s dynamic context - e.g. third grade reading getting disconnected from the whole of education systems that cultivate thriving kids and communities. FSG did a great job of avoiding this pitfall in it’s 3rd grade reading work by creating interventions that considered the wholeness of the support ecosystem around kids and families.
Stories of separation: In the DEI program example, Angela could have seen the man with racist views as her enemy, instead of a valuable partner within the whole purpose of driving human connection in Phoenix. Many of us (myself included) create walls of separation between us and others because we might not agree with their character or approach. This creates the context for ongoing resistance that isn’t integrated into our efforts, and therefore can stymie progress.
Reflecting for Wholeness
Where might our specific focus be disconnecting us from the bigger picture?
What would our approach look like if reconnected with the whole we exist in?
Who are we resistant towards engaging as collaborators?
Who is resisting or fighting the work we do?
What might be behind that resistance? What are the shared motivations we might have?
To whom can we connect to move towards “wholeness” and aligned effort?
Essence
Each whole being possesses a unique essence. Some refer to this as the “soul”. Others as the “spark”. Everything within a whole contributes to it’s essence. Essence defies every categorization, every attempt to generalize the energy that makes up a core of a being. Each person, flower, organization, bio-region, city, or any other whole embodies an essence that is the universally unique accumulation of everything within that whole.
“Seeing in Essence” enables us as systems change agents to consistently connect with the source of vitality and motivation in our work. It enables us to see beyond what exists on the surface into the deeper core of a person, place, or system. On it’s surface, the education system on it’s surface consists of public schools, charter schools, higher ed institution. Teachers are in classrooms that deliver content to students.
In it’s essence, the education system is about developing the potential of every human so they can contribute value to the world.
Did you notice that the essence description of the education system brought more energy into the mental image that came to your mind?
Essence cannot be fully captured in words, it’s an energetic presence that you connect with. It is the source of potential that allows us to actually change systems with higher levels of value creation, inspiration, and innovation instead of re-organizing the existing parts or fighting existence to the point of burnout.
Pitfalls and reflections around working with essence:
Best practices: Many times programs, products, and services aim to bring global “best practices” to a local system to improve it’s performance. An example of "best practice" thinking going wrong in the context of a social impact initiative can be seen in the case of the PlayPumps project in Africa. With a mechanism that pumped water through the force generated by children playing, it aimed to solve issues of water availability and lack of playgrounds for children. However, it wasn’t really used because the unique culture and social dynamics of that community weren’t considered. Additionally, pumping water is inherently unsustainable unless you’re supporting the ecosystem in better storing water through intentional landscape design.
A successful implementation example lies in the payment app used across Africa - M-pesa. By understanding reliance on text message for communication and coordination, the initiative launched a financial layer using text tech infrastructure to leverage existing behavior, habits, and capabilities to build new financial capability to members in rural/unbanked communities.
Reflections for Essence
Why would this specific practice or solution work in this specific context?
How much do we know about the social dynamics, resource flows, and mental models in this specific space and how can we build with these in the design of our solution?
Potential
Each whole, in it’s unique essence, contains potential to add increasing value to it’s greater whole. Many times, we only see problems within the fragments of an entity. A step beyond that is seeing the ideal version, but this “ideal” is usually projected by our own beliefs. Seeing true potential involves dropping your ego and witnessing the fullest expression of the essence in front of you. To see something in its truest potential, you must start by seeing it as a whole, as an essence.
As systems change agents, working with potential first, problems second brings a huge shift to the level of creativity and energy available to us in our work. For example, thinking about the framing of “climate change”. It’s been oriented as a problem, specifically a problem within the specific space of “atmospheric carbon”. This has led to immense amounts of fragmentation within the climate space and heavy resistance from all existing systems.
If we framed our climate work as “discovering the potential in reconnecting with the earth” we open up an infinite design space that everyone, not just climate scientists, can lead and contribute to. We focus on the potential for more resilient, vibrant, and abundant energy, education, and cultural systems that provide value for all that interact with it. It’s a lot harder to say “no” to this vision, and could provide the motivation and collaboration pathways necessary to start shifting the trillions of dollars going into extractive oil-based systems, through voluntary and inspired action within those systems.
Here’s a bit more visual representation of what we’re missing by not allowing ourselves to dream beyond “problems being solved” into “potential being manifested”.
Pitfalls around working from potential
Working from problems: This, more than anything else has been the denigrator of hopeful systems change movements. Working from problems immediately positions us against the current systems, instead of with. Many of us see the complexity, destruction, and resistance of the existing systems and get so overwhelmed that we limit ourselves to simply stopping the bleeding. However, if we focus on seeing the unseen potential within our current infrastructure, deeper motivations of the people within them, and the emerging seeds on the cutting edge of innovation, we might see a greater image of hope, where systems change initiatives can practically service existing actors while shifting the overall system.
For example, regenerative agriculture only covers around 2-3% of growing lands in the United States. The vast majority of farmland creates pollution from fertilizers + pesticides, suffer from declining farmer mental health, and are financially on the edge.
However, if we focus first what is emerging - connective organizations such as Think Regeneration, champion farmers like Cate Havstad-Casad, government programs for regenerative food as medicine, and groups of investors like MAD capital with explicit mandates to provide farmer-friendly capital for regenerative transitions, we start to see the seeds for regenerated infrastructure that already exists and needs support to manifest the incredible value it has to offer with larger resource flows.
Reflections For Potential
What is the collective vision for success in this system, from the perspective of the people who operate within it?
Where do their goals intersect to support solutions that bring out the best in people, place, and build infrastructure?
Take a second to integrate this.
If you’ve gotten this far and done the reflection questions, congratulations! We’re halfway through the living systems principles.
If you’ve uncovered insights around how you can elevate your specific project or position through living systems thinking, please share in the comments!
We’re going to do this as a multi-part series so you can actually integrate this information to amplify the amazing work you’re doing right now.
We’ll come back next week with the remaining principles of living systems thinking: Development, Nestedness, Nodal Interventions, and Field Building.
Your last reflection (you can put it in comments to create more value for the community)
How are you already using this thinking in your work?
What principles do you already see in how you think about and implement your solutions?
Diving deeper with Interform
If you enjoy the unique perspective that Interform takes on this work, there are a few ways to engage with us. Through engaging with us, we’re more able to share this work far and wide to accelerate the creation of systems that benefit all life 💚.
If you’d like to dive deep into applying living systems thinking to your specific project, I’d like to invite you to a Living Systems Strategy session. In this session, we’ll spend two hours expanding your perspective on a project and leaving with nodal interventions and inner shifts that will support the fulfillment of it’s potential.
Book a Living Systems Strategy Session
You can also join us in our group sessions each month in the Evolution Space, where we explore living systems thinking and apply it to our work together.
If neither of these speak to you and you want to explore a partnership, book a call with me (Adam) here:
Until next time!
Adam & The Interform Team
Though I have been in Regenerative Practice for a decade now, every time I read or discuss these principles with others, I get something new and deeper. In this case, reflecting on an experience I had in my first ever NVC workshop which happened to be the weekend after the 2016 elections. I was so distressed ruminating on the white supremacy underlying the election result that year and through the framing of NVC I had a heart opening breakthrough about the fundamental needs of all people, and the misplaced strategies to fulfill those needs that often arise in this country. That reframe helped me so much, and I believe has helped my work and capacity to engage challenging conversations across lines of intense ideological difference. Seeing this dynamic framed through wholeness, essence, and potential helps to anchor it even deeper.