For so long, we in the western world have tried to look at our complex problems through only a rational lens, as if they can only be solved through linear policies or processes.
Often these “solutions” are built on evidence of the past, and by the time they are implemented, the problem has moved or was never going to translate to another geographic area in the first place. In other cases, the solutions reflect the same worldview or type of thinking that the problem arose from — thus simply addressing the symptoms and not the deeper roots.
We need humility to see that the very way we approach complex challenges is part of the problem itself. We need to develop a mindset and a heart-set of restoration rather than solving.
We need to move from being systems changers who are changing systems to being the system that is changing.
It is vital that we all see that we are the system — every person and every organisation. We cannot address complex challenges without bravely holding up the mirror, seeing how we carry the issues that society faces, and acknowledging how we must heal and change. If we wish to address climate change, we must heal our relationship with the planet; if we wish to address systemic racism, we must address the wounds we carry from colonisation.
Creating teams that can work in this way will allow us to implement inspired new initiatives and approaches and integrate the past as we go, rather than the past leading us to a predictable future.
Our model also aims to future build as we go
Our organisation is The Emerge Institute, which I founded with three young change makers who are up for empowering and equipping fellow changemakers to dismantle systems that no longer serve humanity’s flourishing, and creating a regenerative future from source and presence.
Our unique value is including the collective and intergenerational trauma that holds back human potential, and integrating and freeing it for new futures to land. We bring the inner and outer work together as one process.
Our systems model tries to capture a more holistic way to systems change. At its core, this model is underpinned by three concepts:
Radical collaboration — only by growing competent teams, organisations and ecosystems can systems change happen. We need multi-dimensional teams that can work in entirely different ways to create deep performing teams.
Restoration — if we do not heal and integrate the intergenerational and collective traumas of the past, such as that from colonisation and slavery, we will not free up human potential to be able to meet the current and future issues.
Re-connection — we need to work with our optimal place as humans, where we are connected with the quiet wisdom, presence, essence in each of us, and from this place create new pathways.
Resourcing — The medicine and the restoration lies in the trauma fields themselves, if we defrost them we release potential.
The model proposes that we work with all the layers all the time, and teams with skills in all these layers can come together so that the healing and integration, the presence, the flow are all part of the solution building. It is a process model as much as a systems model, where we work together to create, heal and integrate as we go, so that the pathways come out of these coherent spaces.
Let us look more closely at the model’s layers:
Symptoms
The top of the iceberg is what we can see, and here we really want to see transformation and harvest learning from all the layers, recycling it back constantly into the process of refining and aligning action in the world.
Structures
These are all the ways humans have decided to structure society: economies, institutions, agreements, law, policies, practices, rituals, processes. This is complex, as so much of it can feel “normal” or the “way we do things,” but it is in fact the way we have chosen, given our current mindset or worldview, to organise humanity. This area can feel very stuck and entrenched. We need to include more voices, share power, see the unconscious social constructs, change habits and change the ways we do things to allow creativity and potential to express itself from all places.
Paradigms and mindset
All our structures are built on paradigms or worldviews. We have been in a dominant, separation worldview in the west, and have organised things accordingly, which is why we are in such a crisis with the environment and with people who have not been valued in the current system. Humans are seen as rational actors driven to maximise their own short term self-interest. Our economy, education system, and even health system is built upon this worldview, and our structures and incentives reinforce it. We need to develop the dexterity and courage to see that this worldview has not fully served many or the planet.
Trauma – personal, collective and intergenerational
We define trauma here as any experience that creates a feeling of disconnection and separation. A trauma response is a process within us that we go through during an overwhelming experience. One of its key symptoms is separation; we feel separation inside and outside — that I am separate from you, from nature, from all life. There is a spectrum of trauma, from the small moments that “trigger” us and overwhelm us on a day-to-day or weekly basis, to the very deep trauma from events such as colonisation.
We know that traumas from one generation which are not processed pass to the next. In our nervous system, it is trauma that keeps us from our full potential, and just as it is frozen in our very bodies, so to it is also in the collective, and holds humanity back.
Many teams and organisations striving to have systemic change are acting from a layer of trauma, fuelled by unhealed guilt, anger and grief — all which needs integrating. To effect systems change we must heal and integrate trauma as it arises. Working with this layer needs a different pace. It is slower and requires us to intentionally recognise and heal that which holds us back from the past.
Presence - life force, mauri
There is place in us and in all of life that is always whole, connected, alive and vital. A space of deep intelligence, wisdom, creativity, stillness and inspiration that exists individually and collectively. Many indigenous and ancient wisdom traditions point to this essence within us. It is from here that we “download” a future. We need to build teams that can access these places, feel them, align with them and bring them into our efforts to address today’s complex issues. Just thinking a future will be different is not enough to make it different. We must consciously feel that future just as the Indigenous navigators did — they felt the island they were heading to until they could literally feel it in their very bones. It pulled them towards that island; they were in relationship with that future.
I can’t, but together we can
We believe that teams need to reflect this model and work as a system on the system. We need teams to develop the capacity to work across all layers. This is the work we have been doing.
We cannot have radical change without radically changing the way we work and organise ourselves. It is how people come together and then build connective tissue between us and the living planet that is the work.
We have identified a series of awakenings that one must experience in order to embrace this work:
- The way we are approaching problems is the problem
- Past trauma has a huge part to play in continuing detrimental outcomes
- The way we organise society is not ideal and has to change
- We are all the system and how we are being in the system changes the energy of that system — the system isn’t out there.
- There is a way humans can operate to change and heal the system as it creates.
- The only place to recreate the system from is presence or the essential.
