Renewal: A Missing Piece in Systems Leadership

By Heather Cetrangolo

16 October 2023

Have you ever found yourself having the same conversation with yourself, your partner, or your child … again?

I don’t mean ‘clean your room’ or ‘brush your teeth’ or ‘why hasn’t anyone emptied the dishwasher?’ I’m talking about those places where we find ourselves landing over and over and over again, and wondering why we seem to be making no progress at all.

Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, recently reported that after eight years of working towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, 15% of targets are on track and many are going in reverse.

Bear with me while I simplify this situation, before I complexify it …

On one level (and this will sound a bit crazy), the reasons why we don’t stick to yet another exercise regime, or why we keep cancelling on that friend that we actually do want to see, or why we find ourselves recoiling in the same situations at work, or why we are having yet the same argument with our teenage child … are the same reasons why we are still living in an unsustainable economy, built on unjust flows of resources, and why reconciliation between nations is starting to feel like the lyric to a song that will never be realised.

Quick fixes work for surface level problems. A new personal trainer, new coach, new friend, new diet, might be the secret sauce to balancing an area of our lives that needs a little tune up.

But if the real reason I can’t change my drinking habits goes back to childhood trauma; or if the real reason I shrink every time that person at work dominates the meeting, is because of learned behaviours that go back to my first marriage; or if the real reason I keep cancelling at the last minute, is social anxiety …

The only thing that is going to change these patterns, is facing

that

hard stuff.

It will take therapy, and not just any therapy; not a ‘listening ear’ or band-aid solutions in a bottle; not the kind of clunky CBT that once dominated the field. I’m talking about the kind of excellent therapy that doesn’t waste my time, gets to the roots of the issue, and understands how the brain can heal and rewire.

Here is the premise of my practice, my research methodology and my life’s work …

Whole systems are the same as individuals when it comes to changing mindsets.

Whole systems have mindsets. These are hard-wired by repeat experiences, deeply ingrained patterns, generational reinforcements, locked in by the kind of historical traumas that make it impossible to treat the wound without opening it up.

I believe we are at a moment in history when it’s time to learn how to provide therapy to whole systems. The global equivalents of booking a new personal trainer, changing a haircut, or registering for speed-dating … are the countless conferences and roundtable conversations that we keep having about the same things.

Round and round we go. The quick fixes, pledges, transition plans and agreed targets do set meaningful, shared goals, but these alone won’t change the mindsets that underpin repeat patterns of deeply ingrained behavioural norms, that have bled their way into every complex layer of the physical, psychological, and socio-cultural systems that form the whole.

‘Therapy for a system’, if I can put it that way, doesn’t mean sitting in a circle singing Kumbaya. Nor does it mean abandoning the macro-level initiatives that hard-working experts from across the globe have put in place to resource sustainable development, rebuild the global financial architecture, finance disaster relief, or facilitate international dialogue.

What it does mean, is becoming even more evidence-based than we have been to date, by interrogating reality at every level: the macro, meso and micro.

All levels.

Continuously.

At the same time.

This doesn’t come naturally, which is why I’ve spent the better part of my life studying and practicing the pedagogies and historical patterns behind changing group-think and group-act. I call it Systemic Renewal.

In a nutshell, Systemic Renewal is a methodology for changing mindsets that works at micro, meso and macro levels, simultaneously.

We practice four disciplines.

First, we establish patterns of engaging in experiential reflective practice, by attending to individual experiences, our own and others. We don’t merely do this because it is good to be self-aware as a leader. There is a far deeper pedagogical reason. My research has found that since it is individuals who house the shared assumptions and norms that shape whole societies (in their minds), the key to unlocking the mindsets of whole systems, is to closely observe the experiences of individuals. We become artists at this practice, engaging ongoing action research rhythms, and then use this data to engage deep problem-solving processes at the meso and macro level. These are drawn from the Deweyan reflective experiential learning process (Dewey, 1900, 1916, 1938), David Kolb’s Learning Cycle and Learning Modes (1984) and Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland, 1981; Checkland and Holwell, 1998; Checkland and Scholes, 1990).

Secondly, we intentionally gather ‘Communities of Practice’. This term, first theorised by Etienne Wenger (1991, 1999), has multiple interpretations and reincarnations today, but what I mean by it, is that you think about who the three to twelve best and most committed people in your field of work are, who have shared goals to lead systemic change, and you invite them to gather (confidentially) for four sessions a year. This must be a voluntary, but committed process for a minimum year at a time, where participants work at interrogating reality and co-create problem-solutions. The process is isolated from anyone’s work environment, is always partly social, and engages principles like situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991), flexible learning spaces, experiential reflective practice, active inquiry, and communicative action (Habermas, 1962).

Counter-intuitive though it may be, history has proven that this ‘middle ground’ where people can be known and loved, and where trust is built, is exactly where the magic is. It is always where global change starts.

The abolition of slavery started with a conversation between friends from university, that led to a dinner, that led to a parliamentary campaign.

The Suffragette Movement started as the Kensington Society; a home gathering in London where women could meet in safety, to freely, confidentially discuss the issues that were most important to them.

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was scaffolded by the training Martin Luther King Junior experienced at the Highlander Folk School, at Standford University. It was one of the few places in the south where integrated meetings could happen, which Rosa Parks attended and which initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The activities of these groups didn’t stay in small-group discussion, but always pushed into practical action for social transformation at the macro-level, once the constructed and objective realities of individuals, organisations and whole societies were holistically interrogated and understood.

Once the group has done this work, it is ready to begin to play with system mapping and whole system analysis. In addition to exploring levers for change (Meadows, 2008), we also look for ‘platforms’. These are the natural points of influence that are the most malleable to change and where there is already favour to pilot and demonstrate alternative ways of being.

Once we have discerned these narratives and platforms, we are ready to co-create meaningful solutions. Our fourth discipline is to plan and ‘perform’ alternative narratives, drawing from storytelling, restorative justice and conflict transformation theories that engage truth-telling, lament, redress and constructing transformative narratives. We strategise to do this at the level of mindsets, relationship patterns and systemic functions, such as stocks and flows. We are influenced by Paulo Freire’s theories of liberation as reflection and action, which engages truth-telling and collaborative, educational projects (1968).

In 2024 I look forward to launching the Academy of Systemic Renewal for leaders of change in humanitarian work and sustainability.

References:

Checkland, P. B. Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. Chichester: Wiley, 1981.

Checkland, P. B. and Holwell, S. Information Systems, and Information Systems. Chichester: Wiley, 1998.

Checkland P. B. and Scholes, J. Soft Systems Methodology in Action. Chichester: Wiley, 1990.

Dewey, John. The School and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1900.

Dewey, John. The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press, 1916.

Dewey, John. Experience and Education. New York: Kappa Delta Pi, 1938.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Classics, 1970.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of a Bourgois Society. Translated by T. Burger and F. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962.

Kolb, David A. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984.

Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems: a Primer. London: Earthscan, 2008.

Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Wenger-Trayner, Etienne. “The Practice of Theory: Confessions of a Social Learning Theorist.” In Farnsworth, V. and Solomon, Y. (Eds.) Reframing Educational Research: Resisting the “What Works” Agenda. Routledge, 2013.