Image Description: An illustration of a person standing beneath a swirling, colorful sky filled with stars and layered clouds in shades of blue, white, tan, and teal. The person, seen from behind, appears small against the vast landscape. By karem adem via Unsplash+.
What does it really mean for a system to work? For years, I’ve sat in rooms full of passionate people wrestling with that question. And one quote still echoes for me:
“In a sense, it’s not a system until it’s working for the people on the front-line, and above all the parents who need services for their children.”
-David Nee, former Executive Director, Graustein Memorial Fund
The Beginning of the Work
Back in 2011, my dear colleague Melinda Weekes-Laidlow and I dived into “Right From the Start,” a large-scale statewide system analysis/change and network development effort in Connecticut to understand and change early childhood systems. The initiative was led by the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund. We had already been training their grantees and staff in Facilitative Leadership™ in support of their local community collaboratives, reaching about 400 people. To their credit, Memorial Fund leadership was interested and willing to invest additional resources to help members of their already robust network come to a better shared understanding of what was driving, as well as what might be done to address, persistent inequitable opportunities and outcomes for young children.
Uncovering the Roots of Inequity
As we peeled back the onion and got to the deeper levels of the “systems iceberg” (see image above), we uncovered mental models (individual and shared beliefs) that led to the “othering” of certain children and families based on race, class, and ethnicity. We also discovered certain resistance to change, feelings of overwhelm, and considerable risk aversion (“It’s a lot of effort to change the status quo!”). All of this was fueled by a persistent negative systemic archetype known as “Success to the Successful,” or “The Rich Get Richer” (see image below), held in place by a cultural narrative that convinces people that somehow this is all okay, or even playing out according to some kind of divine order. Wow!
Looking back, I’m asking myself, “Has any of this really changed?” One could argue that the underlying systemic dynamic and cultural narrative we found in Connecticut are the same and getting more entrenched across systems and scales – in other states and the country as a whole, even as there is more awareness of economic disparities and systemic racism. So what are we to do?
What We Tried: Ten Pathways Forward
At the time, we identified nine high-leverage interventions that felt both urgent and hopeful. Many were adopted by Right From the Start (especially awareness building, reaching out to political leaders, and integrating service providers):
Emphasize the importance ofnurturing relationships as early as possible
Focus on children most at risk, and the fact that we have a changing population in Connecticut
Engage invillage-building and local infrastructure strengthening
Make the economic case for investing in ALL children to the business community
Build awareness around inequities, specifically racial and socio-economic
Changethe mindset of the system to focus on the family experience first
Get to the heart of the Governor (who can make changes that help us all)
Change the rules of the system/state structures to be more equitable
Integrate health, education, social services,and family engagement
To me, all nine of these still hold true as valid and valuable strategies, and not just in Connecticut. Today, I would add a tenth:
10. Shift the narrative that lives inside so many of us, that convinces us that the current systems are in any way defensible or inevitable.
Because they are not. The vast majority of us know this, but some part of us may be preventing that truth from arising and really taking hold. Without this happening, the other actions can only get so far. And as systems continue to fail, we are all put at risk.
The Questions That Matter
And so I am sitting with these questions:
Why do we believe we are not worthy?
Why might we not trust the larger truth of love?
What do our hearts most yearn for that stands to liberate us?
How can we support each other to stand in our power and sense of worthiness?
How can we help people understand that “your success is my success” and vice versa?
Where We Go From Here
We need each other to affirm our worth, to hold hope, and to build systems rooted in justice, love, and shared power.
For more on recurring “negative” systems archetypes such as “Success to the Successful” and also a few countering “positive” archetypes, including the importance of status quo disruption, intensity of collective action,and regenerative relationships, see this resource.
As the fall season is soon to begin, I am about to mark the beginning of my (to this point) seven year journey since re-entering the “workforce” after experiencing clinical burnout and proceeding with an intentional rhythm aimed at more balance. This has entailed gradual, focused, and caring support from a range of healers as layers upon layers have sloughed off, revealing deeper wounds and cries for attention.
“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
All this said, as I feel that much “lighter” and learn-ed in my process, I am reflecting on seven steps that have been and will continue to be core to this journey, including the work that my colleagues and I do to help weave the more beautiful world we know is possible.
🌀 Re-cognize: bring awareness to the realities of dis-ease and dis-association
🌀 Re-lax: breathe into this awareness, let what bubbles up come up; keep breathing
🌀 Re-lease: let go of what may have served and no longer does and that which never did
🌀 Re-claim: start inviting back those parts/aspects that have been ostracized and ignored
🌀 Re-member: embrace more and more of our underlying, essential and limitless identity
🌀 Re-surge: allow what has been regathered to both guide and deepen trust in our core
🌀 Re-cycle: this process is not linear but more of a spiral that can encompass others
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And as the poets often capture it better than anyone, I will end with this from Danna Faulds:
“I need love Not some sentimental prison I need god Not the political church I need fire To melt the frozen sea inside me I need love.”
– Sam Phillips
Image by Luke, Ma, “Love by Nature,” shared under provisions of Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.
I started this year with a post focused on love, and this idea that 2018 would be the year of love. This thinking wasn’t offered through rose-colored glasses, but from a shared sense and conviction that love would be required to see the year through. And not just any kind of love. In that original post there were a few definitions and quotes that we have been playing with at IISC, including these:
“All awakening to love is spiritual awakening… All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic.”
– bell hooks
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
– Cornel West
“To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him [sic] an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.”
– William Sloane Coffin
“Love is seeing the other as a legitimate other.”
– Humberto Maturana
“The ultimate act of love is allowing ourselves and others to be complex.”
|Photo by ernohannink|http://www.flickr.com/photos/ernohannink/3931122112|
Last week’s post on “Negativity and Self-Limiting Advocacy” ended up setting off quite a conversation. In light of that, I thought I might further flesh out some of what Barbara Fredrickson recommends via her book Positivity in a chapter entitled “A New Toolkit.” Here she enumerates ways to enhance overall positivity, and therefore broaden our individual and collective minds, build resourcefulness and resilience, and flourish in the direction of our highest aspirations. Here is what she suggests, based on rigorous research: Read More
Tonye Patano, a black actor in New York City, was so consumed last year by reading a script about minstrelsy, she was late for an audition. The story had rattled and repulsed her. But she couldn’t put it down. The day when she finally headed to the audition, she heard a group of young black teens on the street riffing in racially charged language.
“It was their way of relating to each other,” said Patano. “My response in my spirit was: ‘Young man, do you hear what you’re saying?’ But they were owning who they were, not caring about anyone’s judgment. Even if I don’t agree with it, they had made the language their own.”
The most important tool in that leadership technology is the emerging Self – the leader’s highest future possibility. Theory U is based on the assumption that each human being and each human community is not one but two: one is the current self, the person that exists as the result of a past journey; the other is the Self, the self that we could become as the result of our future journey. Presencing is the process of the (current) self and the (emerging) Self listening to each other.
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This often quoted comment by Dr. King forms the foundation of Adam Kahane’s new book, Love and Power: A theory and practice of social change. Melinda Weekes and I attended a recent book talk by Adam, attracted to the topic because, at IISC we’ve been thinking through and practicing the connections among power, love, networks and collaboration for years now. Much of what Adam shared resonates with our thinking. The book builds on the thinking of theologian Paul Tillich. His definitions are worth taking a closer look:
I know I’m coming late to the party, but I saw the Vagina Monologues for the first time this weekend and I was blown away by it. Rather than writing yet another raving review of what evidently is a deeply moving work of art, I want to make a comment on the movement that it has unleashed.
I saw the play as produced by MIT undergraduate students who did it in concert with thousands of others around the world – I think it most appropriate to let V-Day speak for itself: Read More
“With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.” – Robert Cialdini
As Alfred North Whitehead once suggested, one of the main conundrums of our evolution as a species seems to be that it has largely depended upon our ability to engage in more and more activities without thinking about them. Hence a world built upon scientific discovery, full of ever declining numbers of people who are scientifically literate. Hence a world of increasing complexity that we often meet with relatively primitive automaticity.
In her book, The Canon, Natalie Angier provides an entertaining primer on the hard sciences for adult non-scientists and along the way makes a strong case for the need for more of us to bring greater rigor and discipline of thought to the day-to-day. She illustrates how we often operate with models of physical reality that are simply false. In many cases, these models were ingrained at an early age and remain stubbornly embedded, owing to certain neurological tendencies. Not understanding these tendencies, we remain convinced that we are more critical in our thinking than we actually are. Read More
Thanks to Sean Stannard-Stockton for introducing me to this video. He referenced it while writing about the risks of being outcomes-focused in philanthropy. It’s a great reminder to keep ourselves open to what we aren’t looking for. It may also provide some insight as to why networks bend our brains, at least those parts that are singularly focused on results of a linear cause-and-effect kind. The social capital and new forms of self-organized action that are the result of network building activity are not always the first things that appear front and center on our screens. Rather, they may appear in the background, on the periphery, or in the spaces where more concrete images meet. And yet, there is little doubt about the potential of net-centric approaches for social impact. Time to adjust our eyes from the isolated (old paradigm) prize.
When we throw it away, it doesn’t go away. This is an important lesson of both systems thinking and ecology. Fritjof Capra, physicist and founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, writes that we need to relearn the fundamental facts of life, including the fact that matter continually cycles through the web of life and that one person’s (or species’) waste is another’s food. If our awareness and actions shifted in accordance with these facts, how would we live and work differently?
The American economy wasn’t created in a race-blind way and the current recession isn’t race-blind in its impacts. It stands to reason, then, that we won’t get out of the current recession fairly without paying attention to the impact of race as we create solutions.
Listen to this summary of an Applied Research Center report on the issues of race, recession, and recovery.
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