MEASURING LOVE in the JOURNEY for JUSTICE
Below is the preface to this week's featured resource: Measuring Love in the Journey for Justice. Find the link to download this Brown paper at the end of this post.
MEASURING LOVE
Preface: A Sovereign Perspective
As this is a Brown—not white—Paper, we want to give some perspectives before you dig in. In a sovereign, self-determining perspective, we see Two Spirit people as sacred gifts. Children are treasured. Elders are respected and privileged. Womyn are beloved and respected and have power and voice. Fathers, sons, and boys are lifted up as the warriors, believers, and loyal friends that they are. Mothers, daughters, and girls are as valued as life itself, seen and treated as blessings. And all relations are sacred.
To be sovereign and free, our people need policies made of love, forgiveness, and connections.
As oppressed, exploited people of color in this work of social and racial justice, we have seen — and are seeing—children separated from their caregivers, caged in concentration camps. We are living in another era of the systemic denial of democratic civil rights. To be sovereign and free, our people need policies made of love, forgiveness, and connections. Our communities deserve health and educational equity; land and housing justice; economic independence; living wages (as in universal minimum income). Our people want restorative justice practices to replace punishment and lockup. Our communities want community organizing and advocacy, block by block. Our people need community controlled governance and accountability systems. We want civic leadership everywhere, as the right to vote goes with the rights to drive, assemble, drink, and travel.
This Brown Paper flips the script of what is acceptable as a “Paper” on its head. It is not a “formal,” research-based, finished product of the traditional type. It comes from the heart and is meant to be used—like love. It is meant to spark dialogue and provoke.
In it, we are asking ourselves, “Are we loving bravely enough?”
And “How much am I loving?” “What else I can do to be in community from a place of love?” and “How am I wielding power fused with love?”
These are the essential questions posed in our brown paper. We are excited to bring this out into the world to provoke, connect, and build with you.
We have so much to love. We love YOU because we know if you’re reading this paper, you know what it’s like to be powerless and not feel loved—and are working on bringing about more justice in the world.
We release our intentions into the universe. We want to know what your reactions are. We thank you for honoring us by your comments and discussion.
Spread your love. And, we know we are rising as one.
Download Measuring Love in the Journey for Justice HERE
Shiree Teng has worked in the social sector for 40+ years as a social and racial justice champion – as a front line organizer, network facilitator, capacity builder, grantmaker, and evaluator and learning partner. Shiree brings to her work a lifelong commitment to social change and a belief in the potential of groups of people coming together to create powerful solutions to entrenched social issues.
*After the Measuring Love Brown paper was released, Shiree's co-author was arrested on allegations of child molestation. She addresses this in a "Letter to Beloveds" - an excerpt from her next collaborative paper, Healing Love into Balance. (which will be highlighted at NW in the coming weeks.
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We need to talk about leadership
Visionary collective leadership to build a world where everyone belongs
What is the quality of leadership we need to build a world where everyone belongs?
I’m specifically interested in that ineffable quality of visionary collective leadership: the rare capacity to inspire and transform a collective to whom you are not in direct relationship. I think here of social movements, especially those which transcend borders: the universal emerging from the particular (Occupy, the Arab Spring, #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, etc.).
It feels so important to me that we get this “right.” While there has been talk of a leadership crisis for decades, I’m particularly concerned with the contemporary manifestation that is undermining our movements for justice. In Moe Mitchell’s ground-breaking diagnosis last year he cited “anti-leadership attitudes” as a core impediment to the transformation we seek. We desperately need bold leaders capable of caring for the whole… what does that quality of leadership look like? How can we cultivate it?
Here’s where I’m coming out (TL;DR): Visionary leadership is the capacity to take responsibility for using power to care for the whole. It is the relational capacity to offer an embodied invitation and a unifying narrative, in accountability to the whole.
To exercise leadership is to offer a gift: a gift that seeks to unlock and channel the gifts of others. To offer that gift is to assume responsibility for the whole, and therefore to accept accountability to the whole.
“Leadership is connecting what was separated”
I love this definition from Marcella Bremer, channeling Otto Scharmer. This feels like a great starting point for leadership that builds belonging, which in my understanding is about restoring connection and returning to wholeness. This provides the prism through which I want to explore leadership today, and the central metaphor through which I understand this work: it’s about building bridges.
In sifting through the literature on leadership for a definition that resonates with how I understand it, I came across this from Kevin Kruse:
Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal.
I think this definition offers a solid foundation for our inquiry, and it’s worth unpacking; I’m including here some parenthetical notes about how this definition lands with me and the direction I want to take it:
- leadership is a process (not just what but how)
- of influence (it’s about power)
- it is relational (in service of a collective)
- it is about inspiring others to do their best (unlocking gifts)
- and it is in service of an outcome (pointing the way forward)
I will unpack each of these components in turn before offering four additional aspects that feel important to how I understand this quality of visionary leadership:
- not leading followers, but inviting co-creators
- leading as an embodied invitation
- offering a collective narrative
- in accountability to the whole
Admittedly, a definition of visionary leadership that includes nine components may be a little bold: too many ornaments on the tree, I fear. The point in enumerating them, for me, is to illuminate different domains of practice. I aspire to be the kind of leader who builds belonging, but I have so few models of what that looks like in practice that I often feel like I’m floundering in the dark. This is an effort to provide some light.
Visionary leadership is about process… and product
I struggled with this point for awhile, before finally arriving at this distinction: there is process leadership, and there is outcome leadership. They are different qualities, and each important in their own right; but the quality of visionary leadership I’m talking about requires both. [To be clear: there are many other types of leadership, all of which are vitally important; Alanna Irving offers a helpful overview here. For the purposes of today’s post, I’m focusing specifically on visionary leadership, as distinct from these other forms.]
Process leadership is goal agnostic; the goal is the process. This is facilitation, or mediation; Patricia Wilson defines it as a core attribute of the practice of Deep Democracy:
Process leaders create the container for building trust and shared understanding amid diversity and difference.
This work is necessary, but insufficient: we also need goal-oriented leadership. As Ericka Stallings recently put it:
Leadership is taking responsibility for getting things done.
This outcome focused definition to me is more akin to what I think of as management, or implementation. Also vitally important… but incomplete. Visionary leadership, as I understand it, must include both.
And: the means and ends must align. How we get to our goal is essential to getting there: we can’t strike the rock and hope to make it to the promised land.
Leadership is the right use of power
All definitions of leadership speak to influence: the ability to get people to do something. To me this is about wielding power. Cedar Barstow, who wrote a book on the “right use of power,” defines it like this:
Any use of power that does any or all of the following: prevents harm, reduces harm, repairs harm… to evolve relationships and promote sustainable well-being for all.
So that’s our baseline (power to a pro-social end, as distinct from power as domination). But the right use of power in visionary leadership I think requires four other components:
- It is about using your power as a leader to increase the total amount of power available. Power is not zero-sum: a core function of leadership is to generate new power, to unlock latent discretionary energy in individuals and the system. (I love Eric Liu’s work on the idea of power as abundant). This is the core work of organizing.
- It is about addressing how systems of oppression impact the existing power available to people. Oppressive systems harm both marginalized people by denying their intrinsic power, and dominant groups by granting them a toxic form of “power-over.” This is the core practice of what Change Elemental calls “deep equity”: working with privileged people to relinquish power-over, and supporting marginalized people to step into their personal power. Hahrie Han put it beautifully:
At the core of organizing is not just getting people to take action but instead it’s engaging people in a transformative process through which they develop their own leadership and their own capacity to make change.
- It is about channeling this unlocked power. Power is potential: nothing changes until that power is applied in service of something. This is where vision comes in, and direction (discussed below).
- It is about relinquishing your power. Ah, here’s the paradox: there comes a point where for the leader to continue to hold onto power can be a drag on the total power available in the system. Because once others have accessed their own power, they now need to influence the direction: they are no longer “followers” but co-creators… and the original “leader” needs to shift into a new role (not letting go of leadership, for which I think there is always a need, but for letting go of power as initially practiced). More on this below. I’ve been sitting with this line from Laszlo Bock, commenting on what it means to lead in the 21st century:
What’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.
Leadership is relational and collective
This is an obvious but under-emphasized point: to lead is to be in relationship to whomever you are purporting to lead. As the West Wing famously noted (I’m sad this video clip isn’t on YouTube, and HBO won’t let me upload it):
You know what you call a leader with no followers? Just a guy going for a walk.
Celine Schillinger goes so far as to describe leadership as a “collective capacity.” I take her point: all leadership is relational and shaped by the context we find ourselves in. And: the quality of leadership I’m focused on here is an individual capacity enacted in a collective context.
There are two extremes I’m reacting to here: one is the Western aggrandizement of the individual leader, the cult of personality that is the opposite of what I think is needed (see Musk, Elon). This approach to leadership centers the “I” of the leader (often in dangerously egocentric form), and the expression of that “I” through the organization they’ve founded… and either ignores or deprioritizes the needs of other people in the organization/world. But the other extreme is the often-lauded concept of servant leadership; the oppositional response the the apotheosis of the “I.” Where traditional American dominant culture leadership centers the “I,” servant leadership centers others, or the collective. Robert Greenleaf, who coined the term, explains:
The servant-leader puts the needs of others first.
The quality of relational leadership I’m seeking declines to accept this false binary. I don’t think we can be effective leaders if we aren’t in touch with our own needs and desires. Both because we will burn out (self-sacrifice is not sustainable), and because we are depriving the collective of our vision: we forget that “I” is part of “We.” Paradoxically, to not speak for our needs (servant leadership) is to undermine the collective. And of course we can’t be effective leaders if we are only in touch with our needs, without caring for others or the whole: that isn’t leadership, that’s narcissism.
I aspire to a form of leadership that is interdependent. It’s no surprise that our colonial language has words for selfish and selfless… but not self-full: the very idea of interdependence under systems of oppression is in a literal sense inconceivable. The quality of leadership I long for instead seeks to simultaneously meet the needs of everyone: what in Building Belonging we call I, We, World. In this understanding we don’t put anyone’s needs “first”; rather, we hold them all as equally important and not opposed. As nonviolent communication reminds us: needs are universal, and never in conflict.
Leadership is about unlocking gifts
This to me has always been the core of how I understand leadership. It’s related but different to the point around power: it’s not just supporting others into tapping into their power…. it’s about helping people identify and share their gifts. This to me is the subtle but important difference between “servant leadership” (which subjugates the self) and leadership that is of service: grounded in the I, connected to the We and the World. Rachel Naomi Remen has my favorite treatment of this distinction, explaining:
We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected… Serving makes us aware of our wholeness and its power. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in life.
The key point here: we actually can’t be of authentic service (we can’t lead) if we aren’t deeply connected to ourselves… grounded in the “I.” Dominic Barter’s exquisite meditation on empathy really captures this idea for me (thanks to Miki Kashtan for introducing me to his work). The whole thing is worth a watch: so much wisdom and insight packed into a few short minutes. The definition of empathy I want to highlight here:
Lending my sense of them back to them... that helps them connect to themselves in a deeper way… That inner connection is within myself, and that inner connection allows me to engage with someone else without me being submissive to them or attempting to dominate them.
I would echo Dominic and go further: we need others to help us identify and share our gifts. I don’t think—especially as we are socialized into cultures of domination—that we can fully grasp our own gifts without them being refracted back to us through someone else’s lens. Indeed, it is this act of what Dominic calls empathy and Rachel calls service that I consider the foundational act of leadership. It is to offer the first gift: to give others the radical gift of being seen and celebrated. I love Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing on the power of gift:
Leaders are the first to offer their gifts... leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom… This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?
Yes. Building on my last post: it is to make others feel like they belong. It is that felt sense of belonging (which includes safety) that allows people to unfurl, to blossom, to acknowledge to themselves and share with others their gifts. Thinking about this post I was pleased last week when picking up my kids from elementary school to see this poster in the cafeteria:
Yes. And it is a fundamental task of leadership to help people identify their unique gift and contribution.
Leadership points the direction…
Unlocking gifts is necessary but insufficient. To unlock gifts is the work of an educator. A leader goes a step farther, and channels those gifts in service of the whole. It is this aspect that distinguishes visionary leadership from process or facilitative leadership.
But: to lead in a direction is not to direct; there is a quality in visionary leadership that is distinct from the “goal leadership” of traditional management structures. I like this nuance from Simon Sinek:
I also like the implication here: it’s not about a destination (a defined outcome), it’s about a direction. There is something important about the ability to chart a course through complexity, to navigate uncertainty… a quality that some have called “emergent leadership.” This is the “visionary” part of visionary leadership: it is seeing a path that others do not yet see. In my last post focused on visionary leadership, I talked about visionary leaders as “human signposts” (following Vincent Harding): illuminating the path forward without necessarily defining where it ultimately leads.
There’s something important here about humility: the kind of groundedness that comes from embodied presence and clarity of vision… paired with the recognition that of course the “leaders” doesn’t have all the answers. Adam Grant calls this “confident humility.”
…and invites others to shape the path (co-creators, not followers)
We’re now expanding the definition of leadership that we started with. I’ve unpacked and added nuance to the five elements Kevin Kruse named, and now want to introduce four other ideas to complete my inquiry into the qualities of visionary leadership that build belonging. The first concept I want to offer here is the invitation to co-creation: it is the piece I struggle with the most.
True visionary leaders recognize that leadership is not about seeking followers, but about inviting others to share and shape the vision… and the direction. The goal is to build a movement, not an empire (a line I first heard from john a. powell). Visionary leaders may point us in the right direction, but ultimately we must walk the path. We cannot stay in the follower role. As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us: “we make the bridge by walking.”
This was the struggle I took up in my last post wrestling with visionary leadership: it’s that perennial tension between holding on (right use of power as leader to catalyze collective action: illuminating the path) and letting go (relinquishing that power to relax into co-holding and co-creating: joining others in walking that path, and together creating the bridge). Let go too soon, and no one sees the path, or feels emboldened to commence the journey into the unknown. Hold on too long, and people never develop the capacity to build the bridge and shape where it goes. And of course, the visionary leader cannot alone determine the destination; in this I differ from the Source work that Tom Nixon has been synthesizing, building on Peter Koenig (though I find it insightful!)
I recently came across a couple ideas that feel like they get at the quality I’m seeking here. I haven’t found a name for it, which is part of what makes it so hard to describe: it’s not quite co-visioning, but it’s something like that. adrienne maree brown recently explained:
There is a difference between inviting you to join my imagination, and sharing your own imagination to see where we might meet.
Yes. Richard Rohr expressed a similar sentiment in sharing his vision for the world, and for building transformative movements. I love this distinction between followers and fellow travelers:
Not people who love me, but people who love what I love.
I’ve had the experience a couple times now where the audacity of my vision is not only welcomed but reciprocated by fellow bridge-builders… and it’s nothing short of delightful. Where I can offer the fullest expression of my gifts, and experience the power of others offering theirs. This is Norma Wong’s invitation in action:
How do we stay in relationship with each other's gifts?
To do so well is an artform (work in progress for me!), and simultaneously incredibly difficult and incredibly liberating. This is what I think Miki Kashtan was getting at when she observed:
The deepest form of human wisdom is mutual influencing.
Visionary leaders tell a good story
The second thing I want to add to Kruse’s definition is the importance of telling a good story. Jay Van Bavel names this explicitly:
One of the most important roles of leaders is creating a narrative.
Yes: humans learn through story; we make sense of the world through narratives. Jacqui Lewis cites Howard Gardner’s foundational work, explaining:
Good leaders tell compelling stories that change the stories in the minds of followers.
Here Lewis conceives of storytelling as an act of transformation: it is the invitation into a new worldview, a new way of making sense of the world and our role in it.
I’ve come to believe that there are three components to an effective narrative, which guide my work in Building Belonging. First, it must aid with sensemaking: it must help the listener/audience understand the world as it is AND their role in it. Second, it must include an invitation to imagination: to temporarily cast off the shackles of the status quo to situate ourselves in a different and better future. It is to remind them (and ourselves!) of Paulo Coelho’s radical truth:
People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.
Third, it must offer a path from here to there: a bridge from painful present to delightful future. Writing on my personal blog way back in 2012 in an extended reflection on moral leadership, I said this:
A successful leader builds a narrative both around what is wrong (problem definition) and a path to a solution.
To build a narrative is to build a world: it invites people into a different understanding of reality. And most importantly: it invites them into agency around creating that new world and reality. I like this line from former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty:
Building belief is about moving people to embrace an alternate reality for themselves and others, and then to willingly participate in creating it. It’s the first major step if you want people to change, because they have to understand and believe in the change. (emphasis in original)
Leadership embodies the invitation
The third thing I want to add to Kruse’s definition combines two ideas. The first is to conceive of leadership as an act of invitation: if we are serious about building a world without coercion, we must practice it from the beginning… by inviting people into choice. I love Richard Bartlett’s simple offering here:
Leadership is the capacity to make a compelling invitation.
This to me is the central capacity of generating new power in the system, of what I think of as positive-sum leadership. Alanna Irving, a collaborator with Richard in the Enspiral project that has birthed so many lessons on emergent leadership, explains:
Invitations to responsibility can create space for others to achieve.
Second, that invitation must be embodied. This is so often what separates good leaders from great leaders, and remains a source of deep aspiration for me personally. I understand the need intellectually to embody the invitation. But as always, my cognitive understanding is far faster than my body’s capacity to integrate and embody… sigh, work in progress. Reviewing Howard Gardner’s work, Warren Bennis notes that one of the four distinctive qualities of leadership is:
A relationship between the stories leaders tell and the traits they embody.
Right. Humans have a deep and visceral ability to attune to body language and detect incongruence. This is why we are so drawn to magnetic figures like Barack Obama, whose public narrative was so powerfully embodied in his own story and body. This is the art of embodied leadership, and thankfully we’re slowly waking up to how fundamental this is to the entire enterprise. Places like the Strozzi Institute or generative somatics, and new offerings like Prentis Hemphill’s Embodiment Institute are seeking to meet this emerging demand.
To exercise leadership is to be accountable
One final idea here before I close. This to me is the natural companion to the notion that leadership is collective: to act on behalf of the whole is to be accountable to that whole. So often in dominant culture renderings of leadership there is no accountability, or if there is it only flows from those on the bottom to those on the top: did you meet your deliverables, did you do the thing I asked (or told!) you to do. To me leadership properly understood is mutual and accountable: the leader invites from a place of noncoercion, and in accepting responsibility accepts accountability.
This is partly why leadership is terrifying for so many: in our punitive carceral culture, we don’t have practice with accountability inside of interdependence. I loved this whole interview with Nwamaka Agbo, but this line in particular continues to resonate:
We don't know what it means to lead, until we have to make difficult decisions and take accountability and responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.
Here’s how I see the flow: first, to have a gift is to have responsibility to offer that gift. As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us:
Duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin… A gift is also a responsibility.
Second, because all gifts properly understood are in service of the whole, to offer that gift is to take responsibility for the whole. Miki Kashtan sees this as the defining characteristic of leadership:
The willingness to take responsibility for and care for the whole in interdependent relationship with others.
Third, to take responsibility is to invite accountability: in serving the whole, we become accountable to the whole. Peter Block calls this the foundation of accountability, explaining:
Accountability is the willingness to care for the whole.
Laureen Golden helped inspired this reflection in me with a recent post, where she offers this definition:
Leadership is a quality of presence that enables us to be responsible and response-able; it's a capacity to connect with and be guided by the animating force of Life. (emphasis in original)
This is subtle stuff: we are accountable both to the We (the collective to whom we are offering our gift of leadership), and to the World… in service of life itself. Ideally these are integrated and the same thing… but of course we humans have our own traumas, shadows, projections. So we must learn to discern between the invitation to appropriate accountability (in touch with source, attentive to impact) and the faux accountability that we rightly critique in “cancel culture.”
Brian Stout is a systems convener, network weaver, and initiator of the Building Belonging collaborative. His background is in international conflict mediation, serving as a diplomat with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington and overseas. He also worked in philanthropy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, before leaving in early 2016 to organize in response to the global rise of authoritarianism and far-right nationalism. He recently returned to his hometown in rural southern Oregon, where he lives with his wife and two children.
originally published at building belonging
featured art by Paul Akiiki: We Belong Together
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The DNA of Organizational Transformation—Structure, Relationships & Shared Purpose
In my role as an organizational well-being officer at IBSS Corporation, I was given a unique opportunity. As part-scientist, part-community builder, and part-alchemist, I was able to bring my personal and felt understanding of well-being and investigate the work environment to see what was missing and create experiments to address the gaps. With great interest and enthusiasm, I explored all facets of employee well-being and built, reverse engineered and validated those conditions and components that were needed for well-being to thrive.
I was excited and curious to learn how an organization would look and function that put the well-being first of its employees, customers, suppliers, community, and even the earth.
- How would people feel going to work? How would that impact customer relationship and loyalty?
- What would that mean to suppliers who work with the organization and would they begin to absorb some of that well-being into how they operate?
- How would the organization be viewed by local and other communities? Would they consider the organization part of the community or just another name on a building they see as they walk by?
During my 3-year tenure, I investigated and experimented constantly. At the end of that window, I finally began to uncover the key fundamentals an organization needs to support the well-being of its employees. Then the pandemic hit. I don’t know if it was all the medical talk about vaccines and DNA or that I just had more alone time than usual to contemplate organizational well-being and transformation, but about six months later I had an aha moment! My insight involved genetics—specifically, the DNA of an organization.
“Double helix” is the biological term for the instantly recognizable structure of DNA. Often visualized as a twisted ladder or spiral staircase, the double helix consists of two strands of DNA wound around one another. Each of these strands holds different information that, when combined, form the language of the genetic code. I applied the double helix analogy to an organization’s structure, starting with the idea that these two DNA strands represent the building blocks for deep change and transformation.
- Structure: I call one strand the structure. This is the backbone of an organization, and it consists of all the operating procedures and workflows that are used to create internal change such as policies, processes, strategies, org charts, IT systems, etc. These are often used as levers to create change in an organization because they are typically measurable, tangible, and easy to see.
- Relationships The second strand, I call relationships This strand encompasses the individual work relationships employees have with the dozens of other employees they regularly interact with and the quality of those relationships.. Unlike structural elements, relationships aren’t something easily seen or measured, but it can be felt. It’s very similar to when a good facilitator can feel the group, or a performer can feel the crowd.
- The double helix’s twisted DNA strands are connected in the center by hydrogen bonding. This was the critical piece I soon realized was missing. The golden thread binding structure and relationships together is shared purpose. From an organizational standpoint, this third component may be the most important.
Aristotle famously said: “…the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts…” When the raw materials of structure, relationships, and shared purpose bond together they transmute into something very different, something far greater. This new harmonious state or way of functioning is experienced as emergence or flow. To achieve effective organizational change, all three of these fundamental building blocks must be present and working together.
I call this powerful trio of structure, relationships, and shared purpose the DNA of Transformation. It provides the unique genetic code that each group or organization needs to become a place of well-being, connection, care, compassion, empathy, and love while fulfilling its purpose. In my experience, this model can affect change on all levels—with people, teams, organizations, and systems. When organizations change at a DNA level the transformation becomes so deep that going back to the old ways of operating is just not possible. It’s like a butterfly trying to get back into its cocoon to become a caterpillar again—it just doesn’t happen! Does your organization know the right keys to nurture successful change and unlock well-being?
Derick Carter is a heart-centered facilitator, trainer, coach, and leadership consultant who guides organizations, communities, and emerging leaders to create social and organizational change, enhance well-being, and build togetherness. Having worked as a well-being officer for an award-winning government contractor, Derick is passionate about empowering organizational transformation, health, and wellness through his DNA Change Model, which binds structure and relationships with shared purpose. Derick also works at the forefront of heart-centered leadership development and is committed to collaboration and growing organic action from collective wisdom. With over 25 years of experience, Derick’s broad client base includes Fortune 500 companies to mid-size and small businesses, government agencies, non-profits, social enterprises and communities, and public works organizations. Additionally, Derick is a certified Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement instructor, Functional Integration practitioner, and Heart-Centered Meditation guide.
www.buildwithderick.com / email: derick@buildwithderick.com
featured image found here
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The Dots From Your Heart And Hand: Breathing Through Art
Like the fast-moving cars in cities, the fast-thinking minds of children throw smiles to my lips.
Building cars are complex – it takes a lot of creativity and expertise. On the flip side, kids crush complexities and build simple car toys that move – yet it takes their creative hands and expert minds to create.
So, what does it take to create the space for anyone anywhere to have the freedom to sparkle through their skills, gifts, stories and talents? Curiosity! The desire to see, think, hug, dance and work differently.
In the last 10 years, thinking about my network weaving journey – from dining with grassroots communities in African countries to virtually shaking hands with changemakers from 5 other continents of the world – one thing stands out: Humans are dynamic, gifts are uncountable, stories are limitless and creativity is endless.
I have seen the bright giggle, the reflective laughter, the inspiring aroma and spontaneous creations that people make in seconds, minutes and hours through their skills, stories and connecting with others.
Is that possible in an online space? You bet. Every word weaves into sentences, every silence makes sounds meaningful, every hello creates new possibilities.
Here’s an example. Sometime in April 2023 I facilitated a session about transformation with June Holley and Brendon Johnson, where we had over 30 people, mostly meeting each other for the first time, come together to use the zoom whiteboard to bring back their childhood painting power.
Everyone had just come back from a breakout room where they shared their personal or professional stories of transformation with 2 or 3 other people.
I gave an easy question: “what does transformation mean to you?” and turned on some gentle background music.
Participant could only reply by drawing, painting, colouring, building or breaking. Here’s the result, after 5 mins:
How did they do this in 5 minutes, turning an empty, plain canvas on Zoom to an amazing painting that reflects how we feel about transformation? I caught some words there: ‘Joy, spaciousness, courage, trust, new, aliveness’
It was a messy and intriguing experience that left everyone feeling inspired.
The whiteboard canvas became a piece of art – coming from the dots in people’s hearts, that ran to their hands and it popped as a beautiful design. Art accommodates all of us, despite being from different disciplines, communities, and networks.
This creation led us into many other conversations -- building relationships, exploring systems change, social innovation, complexity, indigenous practices, exchanging ideas, and learning from one another.
Read some of the reflection of participants:
Lucy Draper-Clarke: “It looks to me like the real, the humanizing qualities like joy, there was commitment, the heart and beauty, using those as the energy for transformation. So rather than focusing so much on what needs to be transformed where the problems are, it's like channeling the best of human qualities. into the process. So that's what came up for me through the stories and through all the hearts on the screen.”
Andy Stoll: “Well, it's messy. I think that's when you think about transformation. It's not a linear, easy one, two, three, four. Lots of different hands create a very emergent property of. No one had a plan for our picture, but here we are.
In communities, families, networks and life, there are several dots, in different forms, shapes, sizes, colors, contexts, carrying different potentials.
There are many tiny dots of sand supporting the ocean floor. The gentle kiss of the sand is part of the fun at the beach, in that same way, the small talk to build trust may lead to building a network edifice.
Everyone in a network has a need and we bring the gifts of our heart and hands to paint each other’s life with meaning.
For example, there are several dots of scrap metal that make a gigantic car. Beyond the money that engineers make, they put their hearts and hands to creating magic that helps us travel millions of miles.
Just as important, the dot of a smile can inspire a hopeless heart and that smile can cause a catalytic and daring embrace to a weak soul.
It was a dot – a curious step you took – to read this blog, but it may just lead to truckloads of ideas and opportunities.
There are multiple dots of virtues lined up limitlessly in your genes – what will you turn them into?
In the last 10 years, Damilola Fasoranti’s work has helped communities and networks turn their education, gifts, and skills into desired solutions. As a catalyst coach, network weaver, and social entrepreneur, he loves co-creating ‘chaos’ in learning, sharing, and communities to accelerate them towards creating positive impacts. In 2017, he created the first grassroots makerspace - a school without teachers - to trigger creativity and innovation in grassroots communities, as the Chief Listener at Prikkle Academy, Nigeria.
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We appreciate your support!
Governance for System Change
The Complexity Spectrum blog describes how clock and cloud (non-system change and system change) approaches require fundamentally different strategies and tactics. The same goes for the mental models and processes we use to govern system change work.
In fact, governance for system change may not look much like traditional governance at all. Webster’s defines governance as “overseeing the control or direction of something.” Because system change work is emergent, long term and comprised of dispersed and diverse actors, centralized control and oversight is unworkable if not impossible.
Rather, system change work requires distributed decision making in pursuit of a common aspiration and in response to emergent facts on the ground. While centralized control may be impossible, there are ways to bring coherence to this work, increasing the probability of shifting a system to a more desired state.
In this case, governance applies to anyone who makes important decisions that affect the probability of success of a collective system change endeavor, and not just to members of a board of directors.[1] This type of governance is difficult and often requires building a range of new practices over time. Here are a few practices that may help:
- Capitalize on uncertainty to lower risk and increase chances for success.
- Focus on creating the conditions for change over short-term outcomes.
- Liberate choice rather than trying to control it.
- Rely on multiple ways of knowing as you navigate the journey.
Practice #1: Capitalize on Uncertainty
“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” -Voltaire
Depending on where you engage on the Complexity Spectrum, uncertainty can be a problem or it can provide a valuable opportunity.
Targeted solutions require a technical approach where you move efficiently along a mostly known pathway from a known problem to a known solution. Take for example a population that has been displaced by a natural disaster. We have experience dealing with this type of situation (known problem) and delivering the targeted solution of emergency shelter (known solution) though various tried and true means (mostly known pathway). In this case, uncertainty can be disruptive because it creates barriers between the problem and the solution.
Solutions at scale usually require an adaptive approach (think Human-Centered Design).
For example, in California many more people were eligible for benefits to alleviate poverty and food insecurity than were applying for them. The reasons why the problem existed were fairly well understood (sufficiently defined problem). In response, Code for America talked to people to understand why they weren’t applying and how they could provide a solution. They built an app, iterated it, and eventually launched a product (GetCalFresh) that greatly increased the number of eligible people applying for benefits (iterated to find a solution that was initially unknown).
An adaptive approach requires a fair level of certainty about the definition of the problem and its causes — enough to support a process of managed uncertainty in which you experiment to find deeper causes and solutions to the problem.
System transformation calls for an emergent approach.[2] In an emergent approach, while you are likely certain about the negative symptoms of the challenge (e.g., high levels of poverty or inequality), the deeper drivers of the problem and reasons for its persistence are mostly unknown or misunderstood. Consequently, the ways to address these drivers are also mostly unknown (or unformed). The key is to nurture the conditions that will support the system healing itself (e.g., understanding the systemic drivers of the challenge and supporting the emergence of ways to address them).
In an emergent approach, uncertainty unlocks opportunity. When complex challenges persist over time despite efforts to address them, there is often a sense of frustration, even despair. However, this can lead to the realization that we don’t have all the answers, which can make us more open to thinking differently.
Some forms of systemic analysis, like dynamic system mapping or participatory futures, provide a structured process for thinking in new ways about an all-too-familiar problem. When doing participatory system mapping, aha moments often arise when participants identify a pattern that explains why change has been elusive. It is empowering to see an old problem from a different perspective and find a possible path forward.
Effective system sensing should lead to confidence that you have “good uncertainty” — or trust that there are good questions to explore and a way to experiment and learn more about the system and how to engage it. Think of uncertainty as a gateway to doing things differently and finding ways to unstick a stuck system.
Practice #2: Focus on Creating the Conditions for Change
Uncertainty is uncomfortable because it increases our fear of failure. It makes us anxious. One common but ultimately unhelpful response is to over-rely on short-term substantive outcomes that are a small piece of the ultimate outcome we want to see. [3] For example, if we are looking to end human slavery in global supply chains, we might measure progress by looking for annual percentage reductions in the estimates of slave labor by 5% or so each year.
It is wise to understand the impacts our work is having in the short term, if for no other reason than to detect and mitigate potential negative impacts. However, there is a danger of using pre-defined, substantive outcomes as waypoints to navigate our way on the journey toward long-term system change.
Specifically, there are two key dangers:
- Short-term outcomes dominate our time, attention, and resources and reduce commitment to long-term change. According to neuroscientist Ian Robertson, “success and failure shapes us more powerfully than genetics and drugs.” This means short-term successes can lead people to invest more time, resources, and emotional commitment in concrete short-term outcomes instead of longer-term, hazier systemic shifts. Moreover, grantees often need to trade annual impacts for continued funding, so pre-identified short-term outcomes take priority.
- Short-term impacts can be bad predictors of long-term, systemic impact. In complex systems, impact is not static. What may seem like a good outcome in the near term, might drive negative downstream impacts in the months and years ahead. Basing future investments mostly on short-term outcomes can lead to bad long-term investments.
The implication is an inexorable pull away from making the hard choices and risk tolerance needed for system change. As a result, the pursuit of specific substantive outcomes in the short term may make it more likely a system change effort fails in the long term.
Fortunately there is an alternative. Alice Evans, who in her time at Lankelly Chase helped build their systems practice, said a key enabler of their work was the realization that creating the conditions for system change should be their focus rather than targeting specific outcomes those conditions might produce.
For example, there are a few generic conditions that will apply, in some form, to most system change initiatives. These include the degree to which important system actors can:
- See their context as a complex system and use that shared understanding to inform action and increase the potential coherence of distributed action.
- Identify and engage patterns that people believe will unlock change (e.g., weakening patterns that sustain the problem or strengthen bright spots that can shift the system).
- Build or strengthen connections, networks, and information flows across the system.
- Build an infrastructure for learning and, as Marilyn Darling says, “return that learning to the system.”
Elaborating these and other conditions that might support system change requires a participatory process that prioritizes the voices of those closest to the day-to-day operations of the system.
As we look at the conditions we are trying to cultivate, we must also look at those in ourselves and in our organizations. We are all part of the respective systems we are engaging and it’s critical to contend with power and who is making decisions both within an organization and in a broader system impacted by those decisions. If you haven’t already done work on your own relationship to power and how it impacts your work, now might be a great time to dig in. Consider asking:
- How are we showing up in the system? What feedback are we getting about how we’re showing up? Are we working in a system-informed way? How do others experience our presence?
- What is the quality of our relationships with other key system actors? How have we prioritized the voices of those closest to the context?
- How do we understand our own power in the context we are working in and the people we are working with? How do others perceive it? How can we engage others in an honest conversation about our relative power?
Fortunately, changing how we show up in a system shifting initiative is a condition over which we have the greatest control. Unfortunately, many of us, especially funders, show up in ways that replicate or entrench unhelpful power dynamics that constrain choice and make distributed decision making impossible. This means a critical early condition for system change is understanding and adapting the ways in which our organizations — and even ourselves — work. For more thoughts on internal organizational conditions and how to work toward them, see Building Emergent Organizations.
Practice #3: Liberate Choice
Successful system change requires those closest to the day-to-day operations of the system to be highly adaptive over time in response to emerging realities.[4] However, this is hard to do with traditional governance processes that seek to maximize control and minimize risk.
For example, a standard grant agreement trades funds for outcomes identified by the donor, which replicates the power dynamic of “those with resources call the tune.” This dynamic too often prioritizes donor interests rather than those most impacted by the funding, removes agency from those closest to the context, and creates highly transactional relationships.
If funders behave in ways that reduce the agency of these actors, they inhibit their ability to work for system change.
The alternative to donors limiting choice is to use what Cyndi Suarez calls “liberatory power,” or the ability to “create what we want” by transforming “what one currently perceives as a limitation.”[5] A key question for donors wishing to support system change is, how can we increase the ability of key actors in the system to effectively connect with each other, sense, sense-make, act on, and learn from their system?
Each level of actor in a system change initiative can liberate the choices of actors in the system. Liberating choice is not the same as giving more choices — it requires both the presence of choice and the agency to act on it. A board of directors needs to liberate choice for organizations they oversee; leadership of an organization needs to liberate choice of its program teams; program teams need to liberate choice of grantees and partners; grantees and partners need to liberate choice of stakeholders and community actors; and based on how information flows in the system, stakeholders can liberate choice for program teams, etc.
This is not the same as simply giving money and getting out of the way. Liberating choice does not mean removing all structure. Many argue there is no such thing as structurelessness when it comes to any kind of group activity, especially when one actor is providing significant resources to support the work of other actors.[6] Donors need to provide enough structure to enable choice, but not so much as to prematurely curtail choice.
The key is to create minimally sufficient, helpful structure. For donors supporting system change, there are some key components to creating minimal structure, which include:
- Articulate a common aspiration or guiding star.[7]
- Clarify boundaries by articulating key interests and values.
- Establish an infrastructure for learning.
- Invest time in building trusting relationships among system actors.
Of these four points, clarifying boundaries or guardrails may be the most difficult. An unhelpful but familiar way of doing so is to provide directives to either do or not do something. A more useful approach is the “even-over statement” as developed by Tom Thomison and popularized by Aaron Dignan.
The benefit of even-over statements is that they share how different actors in the system might make tradeoffs between key interests and values. The statement consists of two “good things” and says, “if confronted with a choice, I would choose this good thing over that good thing.” However, it aims to preserve the agency of an actor to make a decision in light of the specific situations that they find themselves in.
Some generic even-over statements that liberate choice for system change include:
- Prioritize responsible, smaller experiments even over concentrating resources on large-scale bets.
- Invest time in building trusting relationships even over delivering on preset timelines.
- Value responsible learning even over clear-cut wins.
- Foster regular, honest feedback across the network of actors even over preserving harmonious relations.
Whatever boundaries you try to set, and however you set them, they will be wrong in some respect. This is where a dynamic learning process is essential. Part of that learning process needs to ask to what degree are the boundaries and common aspiration helpful? In what ways are they affecting people’s thinking and behavior? Are they strengthening agency of system actors or reducing it? What might we do better?
And none of this works if the relationships between actors in a system change initiative are mainly transactional. Because system change work is highly emergent, it requires real time and honest communication and the ability to work in a decentralized way. All of this requires high levels of trust between actors, and this level of trust does not happen unless they invest time in it. This can be particularly difficult for funders who see investing time to build trust as simply increasing overhead.
Practice #4: Rely on Multiple Ways of Knowing
“There is a strong bias in the U.S. dominant culture, one that shows up in the nonprofit sector as well, to value only one way of knowing, the one grounded in data, analysis, logic, and theory — a rationalist’s approach to truth.” -Elissa Sloane Perry and Aja Couchois [8]
Working effectively in complex systems requires strengthening our ability to use multiple ways of knowing. It is essential for implementing the practices described above. Unfortunately, as the quote from Elissa Sloane Perry and Aja Couchois indicates, the default capacity for many in the West is to privilege only one way of knowing — a cognitive, analytic approach.
This is not to say we should devalue rational analysis. Rather, it means putting a high value on the ways others understand their world and make decisions about how to act.
There are various ways to define multiple ways of knowing, from Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences to the model of five minds described by Tyson Yunkaporta.[9] A simple way to look at multiple ways of knowing is: thinking, feeling, and intuiting.[10] At a minimum, it means asking: what do you think about the situation, how does it make you feel, and what is your gut telling you to do? It means listening to how others think, feel, and intuit.
Listening to feelings and intuitions is not the same as following them. Rather, it means understanding how information, situations, and decisions make us and others feel; allowing our intuitions to come to the surface; and not automatically subjugating these to what we might judge as rational or rigorous analysis. It means sitting with differences and uncertainty and valuing the important stories people tell about their system, and not just the numbers they can fit on a spreadsheet.
For many, this is the most disruptive practice for system change governance. It requires us to change how we think about and develop strategy, how we evaluate our effectiveness and that of our grantees, and how we make decisions. It means that good questions are often more useful than seemingly good answers. Fundamentally, it changes how we know what we know (e.g., how we weigh a quantitative analysis versus the lived experiences of partners on the ground).
But as disruptive as it can be, cultivating multiple ways of knowing is worth it. There are several reasons why: from the neuroscience that shows the role of emotions in decision making to the necessity of multiple ways of knowing for advancing equity.
In addition, there are simple, practical arguments for cultivating multiple ways of knowing from a system change perspective:
- If shifting systems involves diverse actors spread across geographies and cultures, different ways of knowing will always exist in the network. This means effective system change work requires the ability to understand and work with those different ways of knowing.
- And, because complex systems are murky and constantly changing, it is naïve to rely on only one way of knowing. Each way of knowing has limits but, together, multiple ways of knowing increase our effectiveness.
- Lastly, multiple ways of knowing are essential because we can’t just reason our way to system change — rather it requires a dynamic connection between head, heart, and gut.
One accessible way to start bringing multiple ways of knowing into your work is to play with meeting structure. Try starting meetings with a check-in question like “how are thinking and feeling coming into the meeting?” Or you could ask something more playful like “what was your favorite movie character as a kid?” A more serious question could be “can you describe a time when you felt truly happy?” Think of it less as an icebreaker and more of a space for people to welcome in their whole selves and deepen relationships. It also helps to build in time for silent reflection in the room, have people journal, or to pair up and process the meeting while taking a walk.
Many people have built more in-depth ways to incorporate multiple ways of knowing. A few I suggest are: the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, for using multiple ways of knowing to build more equitable evaluation processes; Relational Systems Thinking: That’s How Change Is Going to Come, from Our Earth Mother by Melanie Goodchild, for how to realize the benefit of differing world views and ways of knowing; and Theory U by Otto Scharmer, for a comprehensive approach to system change that has multiple ways of knowing at its core.
Next Steps
Learning to use a different frame for how we govern system change is a practice, and it takes time to develop. Devoting time to consciously changing your governance practices is the first challenge you will confront. But remember, systems seldom change on a dime, and neither do we. You might want to start with the system you know best and are closest to — you and your own organization.
One way to start is to use these governance practices as a set of prompts for your own self-reflection and experimentation, such as:
Using the Complexity Spectrum. How are we differentiating among our organization’s approaches along the Complexity Spectrum? Are we developing different mindsets and practices for clock versus cloud initiatives (e.g., solutions at scale versus system innovation or transformation)?
Capitalize on uncertainty. How are we cultivating good uncertainty and capitalizing on it? Are we resisting the urge to create certainty when there is none?
Liberate choice rather than trying to control it. Do those closer to the context feel they are able to make the choices needed to engage the system effectively? How well are our aspirations, guardrails, and learning processes helping us learn from the choices we make? What levels of trust are we able to build?
Focus on creating the conditions for change. What are the conditions that will support change in our organizational system? How well are we supporting them? How might we revise them? How are we understanding what others in the system feel are the conditions that will drive change?
Rely on multiple ways of knowing as you navigate the journey. Are we getting in touch with our own ways of knowing and cultivating openness to others? Are we trying both small and large experiments? (e.g., creating space in meetings for check-ins and reflection time? Building a more equitable evaluation practice or sitting in the tensions between different world views?)
Lastly, give yourself and those around you room and permission to change. Rather than expecting to get it right, focus on getting it better. Together I think we can do just that.
Download a PDF of the blank worksheet
Download a PDF of the example worksheet
Acknowledgement: While I take responsibility for the words used in this blog, the ideas come from dozens of colleagues, hundreds of conversations, and thousands of hours of experimenting and learning by many.
[1] I will often refer to the work of a foundation board because this is the context I know well.
[2] I am using the terms technical, adaptive, or emergent approach instead of technical, adaptive, or emergent strategy to avoid confusion with established writing on these types of strategy. There is a fair amount of commonality of usage of the terms technical, adaptive, and emergent between this piece and earlier works, but there is not 100% overlap and I want to avoid confusion or to imply that I am redefining these types of strategy. For writing on the subject, see the works of Ron Heifetz, Adrienne Marie Brown, and Henry Mintzberg.
[3] In this case, substantive outcomes mean measurable changes to the symptoms of the problem we are concerned with, as opposed to the process by which we work.
[4] This is particularly important when working with complex systems where those closest to the context need the ability to respond to what they are learning. This is what Gen. Stanley McChrystal found in doing counterinsurgency work and wrote about in his book, Team of Teams. McChrystal saw the need to empower choice from units on the ground by creating more distributed decision making.
[5] See The Power Manual by Cyndi Suarez, p. 13.
[6] See The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman who wrote about organizing the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. Here is a relevant passage: “Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power, and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved.”
[7] For guidance on developing a guiding star, see the Systems Practice Workbook.
[8] Multiple Ways of Knowing: Expanding How We Know, April 27, 2017, Non-Profit Quarterly.
[9] Here is a quick description of the five minds.
[10] Here a quick explanation of the science of intuition: “Intuition is a form of knowledge that appears in consciousness without obvious deliberation. It is not magical but rather a faculty in which hunches are generated by the unconscious mind rapidly sifting through past experience and cumulative knowledge.”
Rob Ricigliano is the Systems & Complexity coach at The Omidyar Group, where he supports teams as they engage complex systems to make societal change.
originally publshed at In Too Deep
featured image by kazuend on Unsplash
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We appreciate your support!
The paradox of transformation: acceptance as a precondition to change
The radical potential of healthy shame... to return us to belonging
This is the paradox: to reach transformation, we must let go of the aspiration for transformation. As psychologist Carl Rogers put it:
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.
While I accept this truth intellectually, and it feels doable when it comes to my self-transformation work… I haven’t yet figured out a way to embody it in integrity and authenticity when it comes to my work for social transformation. David Kelleher names the tension I feel:
If you’re going to work with people for change, you have to love them… I’m still stuck with the contradiction of loving someone and making demands on their behavior in the name of justice.
It feels like I’m being asked to let go of my commitment to justice… in order to honor my commitment to justice. I don’t know what to do with that. So today I want to explore a controversial idea: the concept of “healthy shame.”
TL;DR: Toxic shame tells us we don’t belong, and offers no path back to belonging. Healthy shame reminds us that we belong, and warns us when we transgress a social norm that threatens the collective: it invites us to change our behavior, not our core sense of self. We need to cultivate the capacity to heal from toxic shame, and build resilience to tolerate healthy shame… and take action to repair harm and return to belonging. There are four steps: show up with compassion for the other; help them practice self-compassion; co-regulate to feel safe in their bodies; support the practice of new behaviors. To come into right relationship with shame is to exercise power: a tool we can use in service of justice, and to create a world where everyone belongs.
Transform behavior, not people
This feels important to underscore: by virtue of the miracle of our existence, like all beings, humans are perfect exactly as we are. It’s our behavior (at an individual, collective, and systemic level) that needs to change.
When I first started writing this post I paused for a couple days to do another deep-dive into the literature on shame and guilt (building on this post, where I first named the acceptance/transformation paradox, and this one, exploring more collective accountability questions). I want to update/amend my previous conclusions to explore the transformative potential of healthy shame.
To be clear: the way our dominant culture wields shame is incredibly toxic: any shame that contributes to paralysis, that inculcates in its target a fundamental sense of unworthiness harms our goal of enabling transformation. That is NOT what I am talking about here. There is shame that is associated with trauma, and there is shame that is associated with healing and resilience… it is this fraught latter terrain I want to explore today.
Because shame (and guilt) are social emotions that have to do with our sense of (and right to) belong, the core difference that distinguishes healthy shame from toxic shame is whether there exists the possibility of returning to belonging. If the purpose or function of shame is to exclude without offering a path to redemption, it is toxic. If instead the purpose is to illuminate a harm and invite repair… it can serve a healthy function. I appreciate Joseph Burgo’s treatment of the subject, where he explains:
Helpful shame always leaves room for improvement rather than making someone feel fundamentally worthless, with no hope for growth.
This to me is the difference between feeling shamed (you are making me feel something, which may or may not register as fair) and feeling ashamed (I internalize the assessment and agree I have done something I regret; a third party may not need to be present or aware of my transgression in order for me to feel ashamed). Annette Kämmerer explains:
We feel shame when we violate the social norms we believe in.
In this rendering, to feel ashamed is to feel the pain of finding ourselves out of integrity with our own values. As Mark Manson notes:
Our values determine our shames.
Shame defines the conditions of belonging
Shame is a social emotion: it is the enforcement mechanism for belonging. Burgo again:
Human beings developed the ability to feel shame because it helped promote social cohesion.
Social norms define the boundaries of belonging: they are the set of agreements that allow us to function and live in community. In its social expression, shaming alerts community members that they have transgressed a social norm, and invites them to take corrective action, to repair the harm. I love Miki Kashtan’s explanation of how shame functioned in pre-patriarchal societies:
When the behavior of an individual threatens the ongoing cohesion or functioning of the group, and only in those circumstances, that’s when shame emerges as a mechanism for protecting the group from the threat of an individual taking action that might endanger the group.
Burgo agrees:
Our evolutionary ancestors used shaming and shunning to encourage change, to help tribal members reform their transgressive behavior and then reintegrate.
I think of it this way: love is unconditional; belonging is not. Love (for your self as a simultaneously perfect and flawed human) is unconditional; belonging (which includes how you behave in a collective) is conditional on you adopting the pro-social norms and behaviors that allow the collective to thrive. I loved Naava Smolash’s comment on my last post taking up this topic, where she named this tension inherent in the promise of belonging:
The one condition of belonging that makes true belonging possible, is the willingness to excise those who genuinely do not care about others or are unwilling to challenge their own conditioning into dominance.
It is perhaps easiest to understand the value of shame by imagining its absence: to be “shameless” is not a good thing; it’s associated with sociopathy. I’m reminded of that classic line in the McCarthy hearings, which I hear as another way of saying: are you impervious to shame?
Using—and choosing—healthy shame
I believe there is a role for healthy shame to help encourage people to adopt these new norms… but it’s a delicate dance. Take for example the emerging awareness around micro-aggressions: misgendering or deadnaming someone for example, or inadvertently deploying a racist stereotype. I think it’s healthy and necessary to feel that initial sting: it’s to become aware that I have caused harm, and to feel shame. And of course I don’t want to stay in that feeling: it’s deeply uncomfortable. We tend to respond in one of three ways (and let’s assume for the sake of argument that the norm is a positive pro-social norm, as I believe these are):
- Internalize the shame without self-compassion; this transmutes healthy shame into toxic shame: I’m a terrible person, I don’t belong. This not only misses an opportunity for transformation, but it also leaves the harm unrepaired as I retreat into myself and disassociate from the person/people experiencing the impact I caused.
- Reject the new norm and refuse to feel shame: I don’t believe in pronouns, and I refuse to take accountability for my impact. Often this strategy is accompanied by blaming/attacking the person who made visible the transgression: instead of attending to impact, we cast ourselves as victim for not having our intention seen/honored (Jennifer Freyd coined the term DARVO to describe this approach, often used unconsciously). This too misses the opportunity for transformation and for repairing harm. I resonate with Heather Plett’s description of what’s going on here:
People who’ve convinced themselves they are good people… are suddenly sent into spasms when their biases and blindspots are revealed. They can’t fathom the fact that they are capable of causing harm. They haven’t been equipped to hold space for their own shame. Subconsciously, they’re terrified that they will be abandoned and, at worst, banished from the kingdom.
- Accept the new norm, move from feeling shamed to feeling ashamed, and try to do better. To practice self-compassion (now I know, I can do better) and to exercise responsibility for impact (I’m sorry) and accountability to repair (how can I make it better and avoid causing harm in the future?)
Our goal, of course, is to support people in choosing the third path. And: we also want to exercise individual and collective discernment about which norms we want to embrace/internalize, and which we want to rightfully reject.
There are many existing social norms that I think are harmful and incompatible with a world where everyone belongs: in those cases, I think it is incumbent upon us to reject the norm and decline to feel the sting of shame. For example, should a man choose to wear a dress, in a world where everyone belongs that’s a perfectly valid and beautiful choice: he should refuse to be shamed for it (and we should refrain from shaming him). Because I’m a nerd, I made up a 2x2 matrix trying to illustrate this.
In this understanding, guilt only occurs when you already accept/agree with a norm: by definition, you can’t feel guilty for something you didn’t know was harmful, because you couldn’t have acted differently. In the case of encountering a new norm, the initial feeling is shame, which you can then transmute into guilt by accepting the norm and committing to repair. Shame researcher Dr. Stephen Finn summarizes his findings:
The goal is to help people tolerate shame and move to guilt… healthy shame is guilt.
Four steps: from shame back to belonging
I love Stephen Finn’s reminder here:
Shame is a social emotion; it can only be healed interpersonally.
If toxic shame tells us we don’t (and will never) belong, then a culture of belonging is one without toxic shame… and one that supports people in processing their healthy shame into guilt and repair and a return to belonging. Matthew Gibson puts it bluntly:
We cannot face our shame alone, certainly not the toxic form of shame that is not ours.
I think there are four steps to supporting transformation, which I want to unpack here.
- Show up with love and compassion: The first step has to do with the motivation and attitude of the supportive partner: if we are sincere about supporting transformation, we must come from a place of love and compassion. Here’s Father Richard Rohr:
What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.
- Practice self-compassion. The purpose of this compassionate witness is to provide a safe environment for them to practice self-compassion. For the vast majority of humans who struggle with self-compassion, the radical act of offering compassion to ourselves is itself the first act of transformation… and those of us who are interested in social change need to support, recognize and celebrate it as such. I credit my wife Jennifer for helping me understand how foundational self-compassion is to the entire enterprise of transformation: it helps us ensure that shame stays healthy and doesn’t turn toxic; it motivates repair instead of paralyzing us into a trauma response. Emily Nagoski is clear on this:
The antidote to shame is self-compassion.
- Feel safe in our bodies: so many of our defenses, particularly around shame, operate at the level of the sub-conscious, and are deeply shamed around trauma. Healing from shame, therefore, is not a cognitive process: it’s somatic. Our bodies need to learn that it is possible to feel safe in the face of shame… to feel at a physical embodied level that there is a path back to belonging. As change agents we can offer the gift of co-regulation: allowing them to experience our own calm nervous systems as an embodied experience of safety. Stephen Porges has a beautiful line here:
If you want to make the world a better place, make people feel safer… the first step is to develop a sense of self compassion in our bodies.
- Practice new behavior. Finally, we need a new strategy to adopt… and it has to be accessible to us. Lisa Lahey had a great two-part interview on Brené Brown’s podcast where she explains:
Motivation is a necessary but insufficient condition to actually change… People won’t make a change unless you find another mechanism to meet the need that the maladaptive behavior is currently serving.
Right. It’s not enough to let go of the old behavior; that is necessary but insufficient. We also need a new behavior to replace it; one capable of meeting the same need. If shame is fundamentally about belonging… this means supporting people in feeling like they belong. Friend and somatic coach Jesse Marshall summarized the research this way, reminding us that this sense of belonging must also be felt in the body:
The body will only let go of the old strategy if it is offered embodied experiences of the safety and efficacy of other strategies.
Mastering shame is a claim to power
Toxic shame is the master’s tool: we must reject it. More: we must work hard to refuse to succumb to it, and to support each other in healing from present and intergenerational trauma and the shame that accompanies it. As Daniel Schmachtenberger notes:
Unhealthy shame has been one of the most powerful tools for systemic control and oppression throughout history.
But healthy shame is one way those with less institutional/structural power can push back: to wield healthy shame skillfully is to exercise power. Jennifer Jacquet contends that shame can be a powerful tool of nonviolent resistance. She explains:
Shame gives the weak greater power.
In researching this piece I found myself returning to the literature (and Buddhist practice) of fierce compassion. The difference between healthy shame and toxic shame (for those of us trying to use shame in service of justice, to challenge entrenched systems of power and oppression) is the target. As Kristin Neff reminds us:
Call out the harm, not the people. Good anger prevents harm; bad anger causes harm.
(I would replace good/bad with healthy/unhealthy, and here anger is the expression of the “fierce” part of compassion that is calling power to account). This is one of our greatest strengths: one I have elsewhere called the righteous anger of hope we feel at injustice. This is to return shame to its pro-social role: as a tool to promote social cohesion in service of the whole, not the narrow interests of those in power (credit to Miki Kashtan for this insight).
One of my favorite contemporary examples that explicitly embraces shame as a tactic is the Swedish-initiated “flying shame” movement. It’s been personally effective in my own life: where even five years ago I wouldn’t have given much thought to air travel and its carbon footprint, now I think about it… and it’s influenced my behavior. I don’t like the sting of shame I feel at the disconnect between my values/beliefs (need to end carbon-intensive industry) and my actions. It’s an example of how a few individuals (including Greta Thunberg) can catalyze individual change by challenging an institutional/systemic practice… by appealing to our own values and exposing our already-existing but not-often-acknowledged dissonance. That feeling of dissonance motivates a reparative impulse. Koshin Paley Ellison explains:
Shame is what we feel when presented with evidence of our own hypocrisy... You’ll never be free until you can feel the pain, feel the sting of the ouch that inspires you to do better.
It also points to a key lesson: we must have alternative ways to meet the underlying need. Flying shame has been far more successful in Europe where there is a well-connected, fast, and reliable rail network… and much less successful in the car and plane-dependent U.S. It’s a fine line to walk: Cathy O’Neil argues that it’s an inappropriate use of shame if it’s not meaningfully possible to change behavior (e.g. shaming rural Americans for using pickup trucks, when they rely on those gas-guzzling vehicles to do heavy work and there aren’t available alternatives). She explains:
The principle is you shouldn’t shame somebody who doesn’t have a choice, and you shouldn’t shame somebody who doesn’t have a voice. If you do one of those things, that’s punching down.
She also cautions us against targeting individuals for systemic problems: the purpose of shame is to transform systems (and yes, the people who make up those systems), to make it easier to live in a world where everyone belongs. Jacquet explains the transformative potential:
Shame’s performance is optimized when people reform their behavior in response to its threat and remain part of the group… Ideally, shaming creates some friction but ultimately heals without leaving a scar.
Co-creating new conditions for belonging
The good news: I think there’s a roadmap to coming into right relationship with shame, to navigating the paradox that kicked off this post. I now feel more grounded: there is a way to show up with love… without letting go of the need for change. I think there is a necessary role for judgment and the skillful wielding of healthy shame: not of people as individuals, but of behavior and systems that are at odds with justice, with the demands of a world where everyone belongs.
Where increasingly I see mindfulness/social justice spaces arguing “stop trying to change people,” I want to offer a more nuanced response. Yes, stop trying to change people… but don’t give up on trying to change behavior. Justice insists that we stay in the struggle, that we continue the difficult work of inviting people—and supporting them—to transform.
The bad news: it’s a tall order. The first step alone may be insurmountable for many of us in the work of social justice: showing up with love and compassion for those whose behavior we wish to transform… is asking a lot. And it reinforces a core truth: we have to show up for ourselves first, and extend the very self-compassion we are inviting others to step into. That is the first act of transformation (I credit this framing to a conversation with Aisha Shillingford).
From that place of self-compassion, we have more agency to transform ourselves and the world. As bell hooks observed in her classic All About Love:
The more we accept ourselves, the better prepared we are to take responsibility in all areas of our lives.
Indeed, this is one definition I like defining the purpose of social change efforts generally, and the invitation to social movements in particular. adrienne maree brown puts it this way:
The invitation to create sanctuary and welcoming movements is to constantly grow people’s responsibility to transform the world for themselves and their people.
We desperately need new norms. Pro-social ways of living and relating that are conducive to a world where everyone belongs. And if we are serious about transformation, this means both co-creating and identifying those news ways of relating… and supporting others (and ourselves!) on the difficult path from here to there. To let go of old norms is to refuse to be shamed by them… to adopt new norms is to feel the sting of shame as we realize we have caused harm.
Of course this all begs an obvious question: how do we decide/agree on these new norms? As friend, collaborator, and parenting expert Jen Lumanlan put it in her in-depth module exploring shame:
If we can’t agree as a society what are the attributes and activities that should be considered shameful, how can we argue in favor of the continued use of shame?
I’ve intentionally sidestepped that question here, because so much of my other writing tackles this question directly (here, e.g.) I wanted to take up shame specifically because so often it is the biggest impediment to the kind of radical imagination I’m longing for. Too often we use it the way it’s been used against us… and it hurts our movements. This post is an invitation to step into right relationship with shame, and therefore to entertain the tantalizing possibility of returning to belonging.
As always, I’d love to hear what lands, what doesn’t, and how you’re making sense of a difficult and fraught topic. I’d love to join you in dialogue around it, in the comments below or in our next subscriber gathering.
Brian Stout is a systems convener, network weaver, and initiator of the Building Belonging collaborative. His background is in international conflict mediation, serving as a diplomat with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington and overseas. He also worked in philanthropy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, before leaving in early 2016 to organize in response to the global rise of authoritarianism and far-right nationalism. He recently returned to his hometown in rural southern Oregon, where he lives with his wife and two children.
originally published at building belonging
featured image taken by author : "My kids enjoying the bliss of a summer afternoon along a Norwegian fjord"
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Five Calls-to Action from the 2022 Facing Race Conference
What happens when thousands of racial justice leaders and practitioners come together after a pandemic? So much power and knowledge-sharing – and plenty of dancing and hugs, and even a few martinis!
At the 2022 national Facing Race Conference in Arizona, sponsored by Race Forward, participants were graced with gratitude for their work for racial justice, invited to be even bolder in our approaches, and instructed to avoid internal implosions at a time in which our organizations and the movement are needed the most.
I heard five important calls-to-action:
- Backlash Means We’re Winning. Keep Going!
We’re winning! The number of people of color leading and pushing change in institutions is at its highest levels. We see movement wins such as the growing people of color electorate and the halt of the Keystone pipeline. The use of the word “systemic racism” is now commonplace. We were encouraged to keep pressing forward and harder to break through on our biggest ideas. Opening plenary speakers said, “Fight for your impossible idea… and let us dream and fail.”
- Get out of Isolation. It’s Time for Reconnection!
We’ve become accustomed to quarantine and staying close to home but we were encouraged to move out of our comfort zones. Specifically, we were reminded to talk to people at their doors and to bring them back into protests and visible organizing. One speaker said, “we have to retrain people, including ourselves, to interact again, especially in person and in public.” At IISC, our mission is creating skills for collaboration and interaction. We’re exploring how we can enter and hold physical spaces with care while still centering those at risk from COVID through an equity and disability access lens.
- Don’t Underestimate White Nationalism. Expose and Bring it Down!
As distinct from the ideology of white supremacy, white nationalism is coordinated and direct action fueled by hatred and violence. Organization-building to support white racist and anti-semetic attacks and violence is on the rise and getting very sophisticated. From Boston to Michigan and Florida, leaders pointed to overt and well-organized actions in their communities from white nationalist organizations. They encouraged us to work with community organizations, government leaders, and neighbors to develop strategies to prevent their inroads and to frame messaging to drown out their discourse.
- Stop Internal Organizational Implosions. Build Organizations on Soul Work!
We heard a loud and clear call for each person inside an organization to take responsibility for extinguishing the internal fights we are waging against each other so we can focus on the external fights for justice. No organization, person, or leader is perfect so we can’t cast each other to the curb in punitive and harmful ways, stay in victimization, attack each other, and fall into gossip. They asked us to build our organizations so people can do their soul work and be liberated to do work with joy and happiness.
- Move Forward. Live into Possibility!
I was struck that you barely heard the name “Trump” around the conference. The focus was on moving and organizing for what we want and imagine. Not that we don’t pay attention to the war on our democracy and progressive values but that we go in the direction of creating even more conditions for change and living good personal lives as we do it. IISC held a workshop at the conference on fighting the return of the old normal by envisioning and leading for liberatory systems and racial justice transformation. We produced a resource guide to help you and other organizations do that while attending to the current challenges before us. Check it out.
In summary, we have power, we’re winning, and we need to reconnect and get our own house in order. Now that’s a push we at IISC appreciated and definitely needed, and maybe you feel that way, as well. We hope to see you at the next Facing Race conference in 2024.
As president, Kelly Bates (she/her) leads the strategic direction of Interaction Institute of Social Change and supports its dynamic and diverse team of consultants and trainers to meet the organization’s highest aspirations for social change and racial equity.
Kelly is a social changer, nonprofit civic leader, and lawyer who for more than twenty-five years has led advocacy, organizing, racial justice, and women’s organizations promoting collaboration, equity, and civic engagement, both locally and nationally. She strives each day to develop and embody the heart, skills, and mindset of a facilitative leader and civic innovator for progressive movement building across the country and in communities.
originally published at Interaction Institute for Social Change on December 13, 2022
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Ceremony: Reyoking the Sacred with Our Social Justice Work
“Disability is an invitation to relationship…It’s that opening that creates the whole ecosystem.”
– Sophie Strand
“Poetry is the language of the apocalypse.”
– Bayo Akomolafe1
As the newest members of turtle island, two-leggeds have always relied on ceremony for connection with, and for instruction from, older forms of sentience and the divine. Ceremonies are an essential part of all cultures across time. It is the absence of such sacred practices that results in disharmony, imbalance, and collective dis-ease. But what ceremonies and by and for whom? As social justice practitioners who come from a broad range of communities, cultures, and traditions, we often have few, if any, shared approaches for bringing together people, place, and spirit. This challenge has only been compounded during the pandemic, which has shifted so much of our work to a video screen.
While there are a number of rituals—often used by social justice practitioners—to help people connect across the virtual landscape, these tend to have more intellectual and emotional dimensions than spiritual. The increasing attention to somatic practices is expanding how we engage with one another in healthy and embodied ways, but our connection to the sacred, to sentience in its myriad of forms, to place—whether it be turtle island as a whole or a particular place on the carapace of her shell—is largely absent in our cross-cultural social change work. And it is this absence of ceremony that is impeding our ability to radically transform, as people and as a complex and interdependent ecosystem as a whole.
Members of the Change Elemental team and many others have written about the importance of inner work, of attending to the interiority of the intervener. But this work is often done separately, as individuals, or in our own spiritual communities, and not centered as much in our collective change efforts. There are exceptions of course, but these only make more stark the general absence of collective practices.
What is needed, what has always been needed, for transformational change, is ceremony—ceremonies in which we reconnect deeply with each other, with great spirit, with all of creation. In God is Red, Vine Deloria, Jr. describes the importance of ceremony for Native peoples. “The task of the tribal religion, if such a religion could be said to have a task, is to determine the proper relationship that the people of the tribe must have with other living things…” As all of creation is sentient—lizards, rocks, trees—then proper relationship is necessary with everything. And how that relationship is learned, celebrated, and restored, is through ceremony.
The healing of injustices and the restoration of aki, of the earth—including all of the creatures who depend on her and on whom she depends—requires restoring indigeneity—that is a deep connection to place, to its sacredness and interdependencies, to cultural sensibilities that are shaped by these.2 This is an individual, collective, and planetary necessity. The restoration of indigeneity requires reconnecting to indigenous practices, whether those practices are indigenous to the Americas, Africa, Asia, or Europe. For those who are not connected or actively reconnecting, this then is your task—and yes, it can be complicated, painful, and messy. It is an extension of inner work, of cultivating the ability to be present to what is and was and then draw on this ability to help create what will be.
And too, when we come together as change makers, we must hybridize and invent new ceremonies to support our current collection of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic beings—all while centering the primacy of the indigenous world in which we are currently walking. It is a potent task, but not without antecedents.
The evolution, resistance, and resilience of indigenous spirituality in the face of settler colonialism and the middle passage provide some clues for how we might accomplish such transgressive divination. And while these adaptations were the result of subjugation and duress, our current times—the extraordinary amount of injustices we are quite literally buried in—necessitate another sacred leap in order for us to work collectively together.
So, how do a diverse group of social justice practitioners develop and practice ceremonies together? One answer can be found in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer:
I knew that in the long-ago times our people raised their thanks in morning songs, in prayer, and the offering of sacred tobacco. But at that time in our family history, we didn’t have sacred tobacco and we didn’t know the songs—they’d been taken away from my grandfather at the doors of the boarding school. But history moves in a circle and here we were, the next generation, back to the loon-filled lakes of our ancestors, back to canoes…. When I first heard in Oklahoma the sending of thanks to the four directions at the sunrise lodge—the offering in the old language of the sacred tobacco…the language was different but the heart was the same…. It was in the presence of the ancient ceremonies that I understood that our coffee offering was not secondhand, it was ours…. That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane with the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.3
We find ceremony and we create it together. The languages may be different but the heart is the same. And in that collective mingling, we weave relationships with ourselves and each other, with spirit, and with all other sentient beings.
Learning the grammar of animacy [and here this means recognizing the sentience and aliveness of “things”] … reminds us of the capacity of others as teachers, as holders of knowledge, and as guides. Imagine walking through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world….imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, and the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, and teachers all around us.4
We are living in places flush with sentience. Whether we are working together in person and are able to root into the same soil and arc into the same sky, or we are connecting virtually from across the continent, we can be present to place, to plant and animal teachers, to the places and wisdom of our ancestors, as well as to the divine. In either circumstance, what matters is this presencing of sacred relationship, that we make our interconnectivity the space from which we do our social justice work. Not for reasons of emotional stability or creativity—although it does support both—because the problems we are trying to solve cannot be solved by human beings alone. Both Albert Einstein and Audre Lorde have told us this in different words. Einstein informed us that, “you cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” And Lorde located this understanding alongside its concomitant history when she wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Human beings do not, in isolation, have the ability to solve the problems we have created. A recent example of this can be seen by the effect a simple virus—one of the oldest life forms on the planet—has had on every nation across the globe. The response to this virus has been utterly human-centric, and in the US, utterly middle-class, housed, professionalized worker, and male-centric. And it has been to the peril of every social system, which by their design for and maintenance of inequities then resulted in cataclysmic harm to Black, indigenous, brown, immigrant, female-identified, disabled, refugee, poor—the list is endless—communities across the world. All of creation, whether we look to the big bang or to sky woman falling5, teaches us that we are wildly connected and interdependent, and without our devoted attention to this truth, we will, and do, continue to find ourselves tilting precariously over the edge of a cliff.
The way we presence this connection, the way we center its fundamental truth, is through ceremony. Ceremonies born of our disabilities, our differently-abled abilities, which, as Sophie Strand says, create the opening that enables an entire ecosystem to unfold. This opening too is ceremony. Ceremony is the poetry that languages a new way of being and ways of doing such that the apocalypse can utter its death rattle, be composted, and make way for the regenerative growth of the post-apocalyptic, indigenized, recombinant world in which all of creation can face one another, bow, and begin the dance anew.
1Quotes from their shared talk “New Gods at the End of the World” hosted by Science and Nonduality (SAND)
2“Indigeneity assumes a spiritual interconnectedness between all creations, their right to exist and the value of their contributions to the larger whole.” LaDonna Harris, Founder and President of Americans for Indian Opportunity
3Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.” Milkweed Editions. Minneapolis, MN. 2013. Pg. 36-38
4 Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.” Milkweed Editions. Minneapolis, MN. 2013. Pg. 58.
5 There are many written versions of this creation story. One of my favorites is `“You’ll Never Believe What Happened” is Always a Great Way to Start’ by Thomas King from his collection The Truth About Stories, House of Anansi Press, Inc. Toronto, Ontario. 2003.
Aja Couchois Duncan (she/her/we) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based leadership coach, organizational capacity builder, and learning and strategy consultant of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent. A Senior Consultant with Change Elemental, Aja has worked for 20 years in the areas of leadership, equity, and learning.
Header image credit: Taylor Wright
Originally published at Change Elemental
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The Complexity Spectrum
Systems change is not for everyone, but making a good choice is
Philanthropies are increasingly becoming key players in the field of systems change. As organizations grow more innovative and risk tolerant, they are logical partners to those working to shift systems for the better.
In addition, the work many philanthropies are doing to reckon with drivers of inequities and racism — which very often contribute to their accumulation of wealth — requires many of the same changes that systems work calls for. In fact, breaking the deeper patterns that drive racism is itself a system change effort.¹
Systems change, however, requires philanthropies to operate in ways that are often unfamiliar, even counter to traditional ways of working. While we all need to see the world through a complex systems lens, systems change is not an approach that every philanthropy can responsibly pursue.
Clock vs. Cloud
Systems change is a “cloud problem” that exists in a world built for “clock solutions.”
The clock vs. cloud (or complicated vs. complex) distinction is based on the insight that most challenges lean toward two distinct types:²
These two types of problems require two fundamentally different approaches:
Like most organizations, philanthropies traditionally focus on a clock approach: solve problems, fix what’s broken, and get it done as quickly as we can. But that’s not how systems work:
- Systems don’t get solved. At best, we hope to shift systems to a healthier state.
- Systems don’t just need things fixed. They need healing — healing of relationships, historic inequities, destructive patterns, and the environment.
- Systems are infinite. There is no finish line that can be crossed in days or even a few years. Maintaining healthy systems is an ongoing task.
Damage can be done when we try to fix what needs to be healed or think we can solve that which is unsolvable. Rather we must apply the appropriate approach to the type of problem being addressed.
“We shouldn’t try to fix what needs healing or heal that which can be fixed.
- Dr. Failautusi (Tusi) Avegalio, University of Hawaii
Philanthropies interested in pursuing system change should avoid thinking of mission in terms of solving problems — or worse, thinking they can fix in a matter of months or even a few years that which needs healing. In contrast to a mission statement that is some form of “we exist to solve the world’s biggest problems,” systems change needs a different formulation. Something like:
As a philanthropy, we make good use of our resources to support the well-being of people, relationships, processes, and ecosystems as they grapple with complex and dynamic challenges.
Why “good use” instead of “highest and best use?”
Philanthropies often think being good stewards of their resources means putting those resources to their highest and best use. But highest and best is an impossible standard when dealing with the uncertainty and unpredictability of cloud problems. Moreover, highest and best implies an expectation of perfectionism which, while a conceivable aspiration in the clock world, can be counterproductive, even destructive in the cloud world.³
Why “support the well-being” instead of “solve problems” or “create impact?”
As outsiders, as opposed to those living in the system, a system is not our problem to solve. In cloud environments, change often takes time and has multiple influences and repercussions. Tying something you did to a specific, sustainable, and systemic impact is nearly impossible.
Why “people, relationships, processes, and eco-systems?”
These are the sources from which system change emerges. It takes a system to change a system. Lasting change is more likely to happen if those in the system, as well as their relationships with each other and with the wider environment, are healthier.
A Spectrum of Choices
The goal in exploring systems change for philanthropies is not to argue that everyone should be doing this type of work. The goal is to help philanthropies make good choices about how to use their resources (financial, people, social, network, etc.)
The choice of systems change is not a binary one. Rather there are distinct types of problems and interventions that exist along the spectrum from clock to cloud.
To illustrate the Complexity Spectrum, take the issue of houselessness:
The key to understanding the Complexity Spectrum is understanding differences in clock and cloud problems and approaches. The defining characteristic of a cloud approach is that it targets the underlying patterns of behavior that make up a system and drive the outcomes the system produces (e.g. underlying patterns that drive levels of poverty and make it difficult to “fix” the impacts of poverty like lower life expectancy, increased stress levels, etc.) If an approach aims to just lessen the extent of a problem or ameliorate the impacts of it, it’s more clock than cloud.
The murkiest part of the spectrum is the difference between Solution at Scale and System Innovation. This can be confusing because the same tactic can be a Solution at Scale or a System Innovation depending on how it is implemented. Take for example Housing First in Salt Lake City and Calhoun County, MI.
In Salt Lake City, Housing First was used to remedy the problem of the chronically houseless, defined as houseless people with histories of substance abuse or mental illness. As a Solution at Scale, it was effective. Chronic houselessness was cut by 90% for the target population over a ten-year period.⁴
This success was hailed as an example of how Salt Lake City had solved houselessness. But over the same period, the number of people living in houseless shelters doubled. Why? The program was designed to solve a widespread need among a portion of the city’s houseless, but it was not designed to address the many complex and interconnected forces that drive houselessness and make it difficult to emerge from.
In Calhoun County, in a project supported by noted systems change practitioner David Stroh, they asked a different question. What was keeping the network of actors in the houseless system (providers, houseless, government, advocates, community groups) from being more effective at dealing with houselessness? They found these actors were being incentivized by a variety of sources to choose short-term fixes to houselessness rather than work on the more complex reasons driving houselessness in the first place.
The key actors in the system worked collectively to interrupt the pattern of short-term incentives and create a new pattern of relationships and processes by which they would work to deal with houselessness. They too started with the Housing First program, and it was effective. But Housing First was an outcome of a System Innovation approach — it changed key relationships and patterns that drove houselessness in the County.⁵ When the Great Recession of 2008–2009 hit, levels of houselessness did not spike even as there was a major loss of jobs in the area. In this case, a key pattern in the system changed and, as a result, the problem of houselessness was also changed.
Note the type of activity can be the same in a Solution at Scale and System Innovation. The difference is that System Innovation targets a persistent pattern (the incentive structure). The choice of Housing First in Calhoun County was a result of changing that pattern. Conversely, as a Solution at Scale, Housing First in Salt Lake City was used as a direct intervention and did not aim to change the underlying patterns driving houselessness in general. In this case, Housing First succeeded at meeting the needs of a significant population, but it did not change the system itself.
So what’s the main distinction between System Innovation and System Transformation? A system has interconnected patterns that drive the system and its outcomes. A system can have any number of patterns, depending on how deep one wants to go in understanding the system. System Innovation targets one or two of these patterns and its success depends on whether changing a specific pattern is sufficient to create a sustainable, positive change in the overall system. System Transformation, on the other hand, aims at changing the system itself by changing multiple patterns as well as how those patterns affect each other. So the key difference between System Innovation and Systems Transformation is the number and extent of patterns that are being affected.
Making a Good Choice
As the houselessness example portrays, challenges have both clock and cloud dimensions and have the potential for Targeted Solutions, Solutions at Scale, System Innovation, and System Transformation. The point of the spectrum is to show us that, in every situation, we have a choice as to where and how to engage.
Systems change is not right for everyone nor is it necessary for every problem. While the renewed interest in systems change is promising, it has a downside. The popularity of systems change almost certainly means that people and organizations are choosing it when they shouldn’t. They may lack the capacity to do the work, or only do it because they feel it’s what’s expected. Or worse, they may label an initiative as systems change when it isn’t.
Making a good choice is a function of three critical ingredients:
- Your Mission and Values. The expression of who you are, what you care about, and how you want to be in the world
- Your Capacities. Skills, relationships, practices, structures, and mental models at multiple levels (individual, organizational, network)
- Your Context. The ecosystem in which the challenges you care about exist and that affects how they may change into the future (e.g. people, structures, attitudes, narratives, trends, patterns, the natural and built environment, etc.)
Ideally, an organization aims to find the sweet spot where mission and values, context, and capacities align; a particular approach will allow you to effectively serve your mission in a specific context using your distinctive capacities.
Let’s take a hypothetical organization whose mission is to reduce houselessness in a major US city. Assume that organization takes a system-level view of what drives houselessness in their community. As noted above, they are likely to find some version of each of the four challenges (urgent needs to a complex system) and the potential for the four approaches. But assume their analysis also shows:
- The system overall is moving in a positive direction and many novel and promising approaches are emerging.
- Recent policy changes mean there are many new benefits for those in or emerging from houselessness, but there are many obstacles to applying for and receiving those benefits.
- This “benefits gap” creates a widespread need among the houseless.
- There is still uncertainty whether these emerging trends will continue in a positive direction and if policy changes will help, or if old patterns that drive houselessness will re-emerge.
- There are still many houseless who will face urgent needs for shelter when the weather turns cold, and there are many chronically houseless who are still underserved.
The organization is tech savvy, has strong capacity in product development, and solid relationships with local government and houseless providers. They do not have experience in doing systems change explicitly and lack the monitoring and evaluation capacities that highly adaptive system change work requires. And because the organization found solid indicators that the “houseless system” in their community is generally moving in a positive direction, they saw less of a need for the organization to invest in some form of systems change (Innovation or Transformation).
They decide their resources would be best used in pursuit of a Solution at Scale — an app that connects houseless and providers with benefits and simplifies the application process. But they will need to monitor whether urgent needs in the system will grow and make longer-term work much harder, or whether old problematic patterns will re-emerge and potentially undermine even an effective Solution at Scale.
Governing Amidst Complexity
The Complexity Spectrum and the mission-context-capacities framework are designed to help make a hard choice a bit easier — but it is still a difficult one. Of the three variables, capacities pose the biggest challenge:
- Your mission and values are in your control. While they may be ill-defined or out-of-date, you still have control over them.
- Understanding a complex system is difficult, but it is still possible. There are a wide range of systems and complexity tools and practices for sensing systems and how to engage them.
When it comes to capacities, however, I am not aware of any organization pursuing system change that feels they have it all figured out. In fact, I’m certain they never will — because systems are dynamic, as are the capacities needed to engage systems.
Philanthropies, like most organizations, will take time to become agencies of system change. Effective governance — the ability to make a steady stream of decisions in the face of complexity and outside of just the board room — will allow philanthropies to become effective contributors to system change efforts. Governance, in service of being agile and adaptive, is the key capacity that philanthropies must develop to be effective at system change. The next blog in this series will explore this idea further.
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Note on definitions: the use of the term “system” in this piece refers to an aid for learning or discovery — a helpful way to understand reality. In particular, the word system here refers to a complex adaptive system, meaning it is ever evolving and made up of many patterns of behavior that persist and change over time, and which interact with and affect each other. In this sense, system, as used here, is not a real thing; it is a mental model. A complex adaptive system, as used in this piece, is distinct from seeing just the tangible elements of a system (e.g., seeing a healthcare system as consisting of patients, providers, insurers, first responders, nurses, doctors, regulators, etc.) versus seeing the dynamic patterns that drive the level of health in a community (e.g., a poverty trap where people who are poor can’t afford sufficient healthcare; but because their health suffers, their earning potential is limited). The theory behind using the complex adaptive system is that understanding patterns of behavior and affecting them is the way to change such systems over time.
[1] See Systems Change & Deep Equity: An Interview with Sheryl Petty and Mark Leach; And the work of Jara Dean-Coffey and the Equitable Evaluation Initiative; Also Dean-Coffey, J. (2018). “What’s Race Got to Do With It? Equity and Philanthropic Evaluation Practice.” American Journal of Evaluation, 39(4), 527–542.
[2] Clock-Cloud are terms coined in the 1960’s by Karl Popper; Complicated-Complex have been described by Dave Snowden (in the Cynefin Framework) and Brenda Zimmerman.
[3] Okun, T. “white supremacy culture.”
[4] Hobbes, M. “Why Can’t America Solve Homelessness?”
[5] Stroh, D. P. (2009). “Leveraging Grantmaking: Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Social Systems.” The Foundation Review, 1(3). 109–122.
Rob Ricigliano is the Systems & Complexity coach at The Omidyar Group, where he supports teams as they engage complex systems to make societal change.
originally publshed at In Too Deep
featured image by Wolf Zimmermann on Unsplash
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What happened when we made space for harvest
As the pandemic(s) continue, and in the midst of the great resignation, global unrest, and the unfolding of the anthropocene, we are still here. Like so many of you, we are still working. Still worldbuilding.
And like so many of you, we’ve been doing this work alongside colleagues we haven’t hugged in years. Some of whom we’ve never even met in real life.
We’re doing our best to build connection and humanity through Zoom screens, phone calls, emails, and DMs. All the while, doing our best to support one another through the urgencies of life — elder care, child care, health emergencies, grief, and loss. And celebrating the beautiful moments too — life milestones, celebrations, small and big joys.
Last fall, our team members called for a season of harvest. An intentional period of reflection and beingness — being with one another and what we’ve learned over these last two years.
We knew that these learnings did not just exist in Google docs, meeting notes, and post-event surveys. What we’ve learned also lives in our bodies and in our collective memory. And needed space, time, and intention to surface.
And so we did. Our team set a number of objectives for this harvest: investing in the interpersonal relationships on our team with spaciousness and care; taking in the worldbuilding lessons and impacts we’ve been experiencing in our selves, communities, and systems; and in this process, building out a map of what is next for Resonance.
We have surfaced so much already — and the learnings are still coming, but these three are the most vivid in this moment:
1. Being with what’s real (instead of just pushing through)
In the fall of 2022, we began planning an in-person team gathering for October. After two years of being unable to be together in person, we painstakingly chose a location based on our team members’ care needs and travel abilities. We discussed COVID protocols and settled on a time, place, and flow that felt right to everyone. Several team members took the lead on developing an agenda that prioritized ease, joy, and togetherness–and also planning and visioning for the new year. (The kind of work that happens best in 3-D, with access to post-its and art supplies, dry erase boards and tea.)
We were so eager to gather.
Then, less than two weeks before our departure date, two of our team members had family medical emergencies. Caretaking responsibilities would likely prevent them from traveling. The agenda team re-convened. We adjusted the flow of activities, and with the consent of our team members, we decided to move ahead with gathering. Then another team member had a family emergency.
We adjusted once again, wanting to remain in the energy of what was possible. We explored ways to weave in team members as they were able. But one by one, life intervened until, days before we were meant to depart, only 3 of us were able to attend in person. And it became clear it was time to shift course.
And just like that, we found ourselves back on a Zoom screen. In some ways, the mutedness of online space felt even harder after the prospect of in-person connection.
But this whole experience was a vivid lesson in being with what is real. Every step of the way, we adjusted to meet ourselves where we were, and to be with what was possible in each moment. In the end, that meant shifting our plan entirely. And we were holding disappointment and grief at not being able to gather — but we also still had work to do.
And in the ensuing weeks and months, that work has taken shape — in small groups, and in a different flow than we’d planned, but it’s happening. Much of it online. Some of our team members are close enough to gather in person, so that happens sometimes too. We’re meeting each other where we are, and finding flow where we can.
2. Working with the seasons
Last year, the Resonance team embraced a rhythm of work and rest that parallelled the flow of the natural world. A way of being, once again, with what is real — the energy of the seasons — rather than the notions of capitalist production that invite us to sacrifice our wellness and connection for our work.
Above all, we remain committed to our individual and collective wholeness.
We know that rest is necessary to be in integrity with ourselves–and the world we’re building. And there just isn’t space for rest in the dominant worldview. But there’s something that feels right about taking a cue from the seasons.
Our bodies are already a part of nature; we are already feeling the energy shifts of the seasons. This has simply been a practice of honoring that. And what we’ve been reminded of in this practice is that — there are different kinds of work. And being in the flow of the seasons makes space for all of them.
The spring was bright and full of energy, activity, and programming. There was a buzz to that time that began to ease slightly into the summer and fall. And now, as the days shorten and winter draws in, it feels right to be slowing down. The earth (in the Northern Hemisphere where most of us are) is supporting us in that.
Colonial capitalism tells us that production is the only kind of work that matters. We know that’s not true. And giving ourselves space to feel into the other kinds has been a gift. This fall and winter has met us in a depth of reflection — individually and together — and investing time and care in relationship.
Trusting that we have everything we need is a practice of being with what we have, what is here — and trusting in the wisdom that lives in the moment, and everything that conspired to bring us to it.
Being in our harvest period this fall…felt right. Fall is a season of harvest. And our team was able to be together (albeit virtually), and harvest from the richness we’ve cultivated together over the last two years. (Metaphorically) making jam. And being in community.
This is a part of the work that requires space and intention. And will enrich what comes next.
3. We have everything we need
Our beloved co-director, Alexis Flanagan said these words on a staff call a few weeks ago, and they were met with silence as we all took a moment to receive them. In full transparency, this is a lesson not that we’ve learned, but rather one that we are learning and leaning into, individually and together.
Trusting that we have everything we need is a practice of being with what we have, what is here — and trusting in the wisdom that lives in the moment, and everything that conspired to bring us to it. It is a practice of looking within, rather than seeking ‘more’ outside of ourselves.
In a culture that says we can never have enough, trusting that we have what we need is a bold transforming of the scarcity and lack in capitalism and white supremacy.
It is a practice of trusting that we are enough.
At the end of the day, what else do we have but ourselves and each other?
We are enough.
What would it feel like to trust that you have everything you need?
originally published at The Reverb
Resonance Network is a national network of people building a world beyond violence.
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