What is systems thinking? How does one design interventions to influence a system? How do the systems underlying our socio-economic structures reflect our traumas, beliefs, and values?
In this episode, Marta Ceroni joins us to discuss systems thinking. The focus of our conversation is the life and work of Donella Meadows, a distinguished systems and environmental thinker in the mid-late 20th century. Ceroni stewards Meadows' archives and furthers her work as co-director at the Academy for Systems Change.
In our conversation, Marta and Jenny discuss Meadow's life, the key attributes of complex systems, and some of the leverage points to influence the outcomes of a system. They talk about the importance of information flows, being conscious of paradigms, and how we can move out of our heads and into our bodies to inform systems change.
Resources:
Notable writings and talks from Donella Meadows:
[INTRODUCTION]
"Marta Ceroni (MC): Sometimes I think about her attitude as courageous curiosity in the sense that she would use the analytical frames of systems thinking for as much as she could. And then she would know deeply in her bones that that would not be enough. But it's as close as it gets to having an understanding of what we are seeing what's happening and then kind of transcend to the next level, which would be the engaging non-rational dimensions. And that's where the dance comes in."
[00:00:37] Jenny Stefanotti (JS): That's Marta Ceroni, Co-Director of the Academy of Systems Change, reflecting on the iconic systems thinker, Donella Meadows. And welcome to the Becoming Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefanotti.
In this episode we discuss thinking in systems and the remarkable life of Donella Meadows. Meadows is one of the most influential systems and environmental thinkers of the 21st century. She was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant in 1994. She was a lead author of Limits to Growth, a landmark study published in 1972, which first bottled the implications of exponential economic growth on a finite planet.
She later taught systems analysis, environmental ethics and environmental journalism at Dartmouth College. Donella, or Dana, as her friends affectionately called her, was an avid writer, mostly articles and journals. But she did write a remarkable book. It was actually published posthumously called Thinking in Systems that I cannot recommend highly enough. It has significantly up-leveled my ability to think about complex systems and strategic intervention points, which is essential for the conversation that we're having on this podcast. Given the scope of Becoming Denizen, we'd be remiss to not introduce listeners to Meadows and her work.
My guest for this episode is Marta Ceroni. She's Co-Director of the Academy of Systems Change, an organization devoted to furthering Meadow's work. Marta is also an expert in forest ecology. She worked as a research professor at the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.
In our conversation, Marta and I discuss Meadow's life, key attributes of systems, some of the leverage points within systems that can inform how to influence their outcomes. In the book, Dana delineates a list of 12 intervention points in increasing order of how potent they are for influencing the system. We touch on a handful of those.
We talk about paradigms and beliefs in the complexity of shifting them. We talk about moving out of our heads and into our bodies in order to inform systems change. It's called thinking in systems. And we talk about systems thinking. But in the Becoming Denizen conversation, we're also talking about how we get out of our heads, and into our bodies and the wisdom in our bodies. That's something that we touch on in this conversation as well, including how trauma influences this type of work. And we talk about the role of vision.
Meadows gave an amazing talk at a conference in Costa Rica in the early 90s. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. I can't recommend highly enough that you listen to it. She talks about the role of vision and why we don't spend enough time envisioning and where vision comes from.
In addition to our show notes, we also published a summary of some of the critical insights we've gleaned from Meadows' work. You can find both on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com. There you can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we send out the latest content. We also partner with a lot of amazing organizations at the forefront of the topics that we talk about. We bring news from them to our subscribers as well.
One last thing before we dive into the conversation, I wanted to share a potent passage from an essay of Donella's called Dancing with Systems. And it highlights where most of us fall short in our efforts to address deep systemic challenges, like the ones that we discuss on this podcast. She says, "People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They're likely to assume that, here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control. But self-organizing non-linear feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionist science has led us to expect. For those who stake their identity on the role of the omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can't understand, predict and control, what is there to do? Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however. Waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do of a different sort of doing. The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled but they can be designed and redesigned. We can't search forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can't impose our will upon a system, but we can listen to what the system tells us and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone. We can't control systems or figure them out, but we can dance with them."
[INTERVIEW]
[00:05:35] JS: I'd love to start, Marta, talking about you. How did you first encounter Dana's works? And what led you to where you are now at the Academy for Systems Change?
[00:05:45] MC: Thank you for that. Well, it's been a tortoise way of getting to the work of Donella Meadows, because my beginnings were in forest ecology. That was how I connected to systems and systems thinking. And I didn't know at the time that there was anything called systems thinking or systems change. But the study of ecology was – the whole field of ecology, in fact, was based on systems thinking and systems work. And colleagues of Dana, or the previous generation I should say, which I didn't know, and I discovered the connections actually more recently. Like, people who were working on the energetics of natural systems like Odum or others.
Anyway, from studying trees and forests, I got excited to a point. I love trees, and I still do, and I live in a very wooded area in New Hampshire. I'm in the middle of a forest. It's my dream life in a way. At the same time, I realized that it wasn't enough to study forests for the sake of understanding how they work. It's beautiful to study that. But I actually was interested in understanding what were the root causes of conversion of forest ecosystems. And so, why were we losing them, especially in critical areas of the world?
And so, that inevitably took me to economics. And I was actually blessed, I guess to encounter some articles at the time by Robert Costanza who is an ecological economist and a dear friend of Dana actually. And so, with some magic, and some spices and some hard work, I ended up actually working in the Institute that Bob Costanza created.
And so, through that work of ecological economics, I got closer to what Donella Meadows was actually interested in. And the whole premise of Limits to Growth, of course, stems from a deeply economic analysis of the world. Although she was not an economist.
And so, eventually, I discovered that she was based in Vermont. But unfortunately, I came to Vermont when it was too late. She died in 2001. I came to the University of Vermont in 2002. And I had heard about the institute that she had founded and was carrying on her legacy, and her work and her vision. And so, eventually I ended up working for that same institute, which became known as Academy for Systems Change just very recently.
When she founded it in 1996, it was called Sustainability Institute. It was part of a three-pronged vision of how she wanted to live her life. One was to do research. And we can talk more about that on systems. Another one was to live on the land. It really mattered to be place-based and to have to do with the physicality of nature and land. Part of that vision was a farm, a working farm, which became a dairy farm. Even more challenging.
And then she wanted to demonstrate a way of living sustainably and happily actually in the place where you are, and that's the intentional community and ecovillage that she founded in the early 2000, which is in Vermont. That was part of the three-dimensional vision.
And I ended up being part of that vision somehow working at the organization that she started and visiting on a regular basis the ecovillage, which is always kind of a pilgrimage to go there.
[00:09:22] JS: Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit more later. And that was an important piece of her work. I wanted to talk about her life first and her as a person before we get into her work, and particularly the thinking in systems piece. I know that she studied abroad when she was young. And that was a very influential experience for her. Can you speak some more to that?
[00:09:47] MC: Yes, you're right. She studied abroad. But that was to the school of life. Not to any particular institution.
[00:09:53] JS: Yeah, she traveled abroad.
[00:09:55] MC: Yes, she did. She was at Carleton College first as an undergrad. And then she was actually at Harvard in the biophysics program. And she finished all her graduate studies there. And then when she married Dennis Meadows, the two of them, who were just recent graduates, they took off. And they went to the Middle East and Southeast Asia with their Land Rover.
And so, for a whole year, they didn't do anything else but traveling across little villages. Getting into all sorts of troubles. And it's been really fun to find the postcards at the library where we hold her archive actually at Dartmouth College. There are postcards that she would send to her parents saying, "Everything is fine. You know, we just got stuck with our Land Rover a couple of times." She was always kind of reassuring to her parents. And then she also kept a journal, which was quite a treasure chest, as you can imagine, where she would actually say what really happened.
And so, that is – you said study. But it was true. Like, at first, it's very obvious that she was observing the world. She was enjoying the call, the different languages. They're from Afghanistan going to Iran and other countries and being able to really connect to the people and the culture. But then, also, more and more, really becoming aware of the deep poverty and some of the commonalities across the different countries. She became more and more intrigued about the causes. What was at play in these communities that were kind of making people really not advancing in their life of where they wanted to be? And so, kind of stuck in poverty cycles.
[00:11:49] JS: One thing that's really struck me is that she seemed to have touched so deeply everyone that she encountered. I remember Hunter Lovins, she said about the person who wrote her obituary, they wrote that Donella left a hole in the water. I feel like those attributes go back even further. Can you say anything about how she grew up in her childhood and her parents that might have just influenced who she was and how she was? I know Hunter had also mentioned just how welcoming her home was. And that she always had students who were living with her. And it just feels like she just touched everyone that she crossed pathways at such a deep human level.
[00:12:30] MC: Yeah, there's a couple of things that come to mind. One is there's a beautiful piece that she wrote about how she grew up in Illinois as a child of a middle-class family and where she was completely unaware of food options, environmental options. It's really a beautiful read because that talks also about the travels and how that affected the way she thinks. That's one piece.
And more recently, there's a lot of pictures, and I heard a lot of stories because I live in the same area where she used to live. And so, I meet a lot of people who have actually met her or lived in the intentional community, and done work with her. Her presence is actually still very strong here.
And so, one thing we know is that she was very pragmatic. And so, there're photos, for example, of colleagues, global colleagues. She had that whole entourage of global scientists. And that's another chapter of her life. She started this broader community to bridge the East and the West in the early 80s and talk about global issues.
She would actually receive and welcome friends to stay with her – it was the beginnings of an intentional community already in New Hampshire just in one farmhouse. And there're pictures of global and renowned scientists in the garden. Today, we probably would say she was living her identity fully, you know?
And when I talked to former students of hers, they say that she was very inspiring as a person and also very challenging. She would ask very difficult questions. She would use a loop of why? Like, say, "Why is this happening?" And really go deeper in the second why, and then the third, and maybe a fourth why. And we know that she left a tenure position at Dartmouth to actually be able to actualize her vision and be able also to write. That's another important dimension of her work. But she never gave up teaching. Teaching for her remained an important thing. And so, that's the accent of her dedication to the future generations essentially.
[00:14:48] JS: She went to MIT and went in with this expectation that she would learn systems thinking and understand how to predict and control complex systems. And she came out understanding that that's not possible. Radical shift in her thinking about how to interact with and influence systems.
She, as I mentioned, was the lead author on Limits to Growth, which is a really seminal and impactful study that sold over 9 million copies around the world. And as you mentioned, she taught systems, environment and ethics at Dartmouth. And I think she was also one of the very first female professors there. Is that correct? I think that came up when we talked before.
[00:15:25] MC: Correct. Yes.
[00:15:26] JS: That's right. Love, to your point, about how she was really living her values with the intentional community and living with the land and an intimacy with the land and animals on the farm.
All right, let's get into the meat of the systems thinking a little bit. It's such a short book. She wrote it and sent it to a publisher who said no one's going to want to read this. And then it was discovered in her desk drawer posthumously and was subsequently published. It's a very potent and valuable little handbook. I hope everyone reads it. But I also just wanted to touch on some of the really key things that she talks about. It's really influenced my own thinking. It's fascinating to apply these models to how I might think about the system of my own body or the interrelationship with my husband and myself. And also, thinking about the big systemic things that we talk about in Denizen like the interplay between social media and democracy.
I'm just going to say a few things. And then the really remarkable chapter in the book is where she delineates intervention points, leverage points in the system. We'll get into that in a little bit more detail. And I'm not going to go through all 12 of them. But I will highlight a couple of key ones and give some examples. And Marta, I know there's a lot to talk about when we get into that.
Just very quickly, what is a system? It's an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. There are three essential components: that there are elements, that they are interconnected, and that they have a purpose.
She talks about the importance of diagramming systems, because words are linear and systems are not. And a reminder, of course, that models and diagrams are simplifications of the real world. But the key attributes of a system are important to understand, and it's valuable to think about this in the context of some of the systemic things that we talk about here.
Stock is the foundation of any system. It's the element that you can see, feel, count and measure at any given moment. And then the flow of an element changes a stock, which can increase or decrease. A simple example of this is a bathtub. The human mind tends to focus more on stocks than flows and more on inflows than outflows. Of course, it's really interesting to start to define these key system attributes and then layer on the human psychological limitations when we talk about assessing them.
Feedback loops are incredibly important. They are a function of the magnitude in stock. And there are two types. One is a balancing feedback loop, which seeks stability and regulates. As the flow decreases, the stock increases and vice versa. An example of that is a thermostat. You set a temperature when you go above or below it. The heat or the AC kicks in to go back to the target state.
On the other end, there's a reinforcing feedback loop where it amplifies. It's self-reinforcing. It can snowball. The flow increases, the stock increases and vice versa. An example that I like to talk about here is power and wealth accumulation. And you see this – one of the biggest failure points in the current economic and democratic institutional structure is that wealth begets more power, then influences the governance and regulation of the system. And then wealth continues to accumulate.
And often, you have the presence of both types, and one of the other may be dominant. And the other thing that's important to understand is that there are often delays between when the stock hits a certain level and the feedback loop adjusts. And these information delays lead to oscillations, which is the reason why markets are fundamentally cyclical because of these delays and information flows.
She also delineates the valuable properties of good systems. They are resilient. They have multiple balancing feedback. Sometimes meta feedback loops. Feedback loops can become un-resilient when they have to pass through a lot of layers. Example of this is a bureaucratic government, which leads to ossification of public institutions. They're just not able to adapt fast enough. Or sometimes systems are un-resilient if they are optimizing for other variables. We really saw this in the pandemic. The optimization for profit just led to not a lot of capacity to adapt to that shock.
Good systems are self-organizing. They learn, diversify, complexify, evolve. One of the things that's really interesting about this is that it requires freedom, experimentation and some degree of disorder, which is scary for individuals or people in power structures, but particularly hard to do in the public sector. And then it's also hierarchical. There are systems and subsystems.
And then a couple final points and then we'll get into the leverage points. That's when things get good. Why do systems surprise us? Because of human psychology. A great little quote of hers is, "Our knowledge is amazing. Our ignorance even more so."
She says she's constantly reminded of these three truths of model limitations. Everything is a model. It's never the real world. Our models have a strong congruence with the world. But our models fall short of representing the world fully. And she talks about how we tend to overemphasize events. Most analysis is on events. Maybe events over time. But they rarely go deep into the system structures that give rise to those events.
And also, that we just tend to think linearly in a non-linear world. And finally, she talks about non-existent boundaries. There's no single legitimate boundary to draw around the system. We have to invent boundaries for clarity and sanity. And they can produce problems when we forget that we've artificially created them. She has a great quote. She says, "There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion, right? Boundary or thinking about a problem rarely coincides with the boundary of an academic discipline or a political boundary."
And this really reminds me of another really important thinker of the 20th century, Buckminster Fuller, who really lamented specialization. And also, a more contemporary thinker that we've had in the conversation, Forrest Landry, talking about governance. And when we – all of the spillovers and externalities are associated with the decisions that we make because we don't understand and have the right boundaries around the system.
Let me just say one more thing, is that the systems thinking really is valuable because it helps us address the central question of where do we want to intervene in a system? Where will we get the most impact from an intervention? And this is a lot of what we're thinking about, about economic transformation, cultural transformation. Before we get into leverage points, I'll stop there and just see if you want to add anything, Marta?
[00:21:53] MC: No. This is spot on. And it makes me think a lot about the power of feedback loops in particular. But please continue on.
[00:22:00] JS: Okay. Great. This is the chapter that's really just worth its weight in gold. Dana delineates leverage points. Points of power. And I'm not going to get into all of them, but I'm going to talk about a couple of them. The first one that she talks about is numbers. And this is one that we often go to. Constants and parameters. Things like subsidies or taxes. She says that these are dead last because they rarely change systemic outcomes.
Getting more towards the middle list, she talks about balancing and reinforcing feedback loops. But I think it gets really interesting when we get to the next one, which is information flows. Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of systemic malfunctions. And we can think about how information flows interact with balancing and reinforcing feedback loops.
And so, one example that I really like in talking about governance and improving governance is sometimes you can create a new feedback loop. For example, freedom of information acts around the world, which gives citizens and journalists access to information. Improves accountability of governing systems. But then we can also look at assumptions about the value of information flows when it comes to the internet and social media and how that has really gone awry particularly when you have a very rapid proliferation and misinformation. Human psychology is baked into that and our penchant for the salacious and the sensational and how that has led to such a significant disruption on democratic institutions.
Do you want to say something about information flows? I know we talked about it a little bit more last time.
[00:23:31] MC: Yeah, that's one of the really important pieces of how Dana Meadows really thought of the world. That, essentially, she would say that systems go nuts if you constrain or artificially alter the information. And that power of who has information, and who can access it and who can decide on the flows is real power.
And so, she said, if I could add an 11th commandment, if you will, I would add, “don't distort information flows”. And so, you're touching on something that is super, super important here.
[00:24:11] JS: Yeah, it's also very important when we think about just the human psychology component of it and the fact that we're not the rational actors that economic models assume that we are. We can't actually process all that information and all the cognitive biases that come into play in our ability to internalize and act on the information that comes to us.
She talks about rules and incentives. And I just love this quote from that piece where she says, "If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of a system, pay attention to rules and who has the power over them."
And then we start to get to the last couple where things get really interesting. She talked about goals. This is obvious, right? The purpose or function of a system. The goal that we are optimizing for with the economy is really profit and growth.
She says “the first commandment of economics is to grow. Grow forever. Companies get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percentage each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, ever more. The first commandment of Earth is enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything is born on the Earth, grows to its appropriate size and then stops.”
And then I think really importantly is she talks about systems and goals, and again, these are things that we can define and measure. She says, “No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point towards their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”
Okay. Now we come to kind of the best part. And I know you've got a lot to say about this one, Marta, which is paradigms. And Tristan Harris, actually, I was at a conference with him a couple of weeks ago. He spoke about Donella Meadows' work. Marta, I didn't know if you know that's very much integrated now into the Center for Humane Tech's rhetoric. He spoke about paradigms.
And they are the deepest sets of beliefs about how the world works. And they're unstated because it's unnecessary to state them because everybody already knows what they are. There's nothing physical, or expensive, or slow with the paradigm change. You can do it in an instant. In terms of how to do it, Dana said “You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures. And the old paradigm keeps speaking and acting loudly and with assurance from the new one.”
A lot of this is easier said than done. And so, so much of what we talked about in terms of the necessary systemic transformation is about the stories that we tell, the paradigms that we believe and its underlying narratives. And some of the paradigm shifts, for example, from scarcity to abundance, from independence to interconnectedness, from dominance to partnership.
Let's say more about this. One of the things that you had spoken to last time, too, was paradigms as an emotional investment. There's something about, one, uncovering the paradigms and then some of the challenges in shifting them.
[00:27:04] MC: Yeah. One important observation or reflection comes from Dana, and not just her, but this idea that the reason why paradigms are difficult to shift is that there is an emotional or identity investment in them. They're never just kind of value-neutral type of positions or beliefs. And so, there's something about, first of all, being able to see them that one holds actually a paradigm or a belief. And so, that self-awareness is just one big piece of it.
But then once you actually recognize what kind of belief systems you're loyal to, it is really at that level of identity. We might be identifying with a certain belief system. And at the time, she wasn't really kind of analyzing this idea of paradigms from, I would say, like a socio-political analysis. And so, that's something that I always try to remark when they talk about her work, that she had a functional and a spiritual view of how systems work.
And at a more universal, kind of also a global level, what really impressed me in her work is that she could view an example from a small system, that could be a family system, to like a thermodynamics example or an economics example. And so, each of these examples or each of these systems would have deeply held beliefs that would need to be uncovered.
To me, the more work I do in the context of my organization and the organization that her incident has become is about how to best integrate that understanding even of the intangible structure of systems, which is basically habits of thought. Because that's what beliefs are and how they intersect with values. And even more importantly, what kind of spaces for change do we need to hold? What kind of conversations?
The conversations about paradigms are challenging and could be vulnerable. It could be infuriating or divisive. We are seeing the play out of divisiveness around paradigms. And so, one thing I always wonder is like what are those spaces where it makes sense to have conversations about paradigms? And where it makes for a safe conversation or safe – we could also talk about brave conversations, but within our context where there's nuance around belief systems. That's where the other layer of the systems work is around self-awareness and awareness of socio-political forces that have played out over decades of the structures that we are born into.
You were talking about goals just a moment ago, and it's hard to recognize goals in systems because we are born into them. And so, I really appreciate that Denizen asks the core transformational question around what is an economy for? Who is it for? Which is not something that conventional economics or neoclassical economics has done.
[00:30:21] JS: Yeah. And it's also when the conversation spans a handful of pillars, and one of them is culture. And I know Dana was very much attuned to the cultural context that she inhabited. And we talk about the different factors for cultural change and how they might complement each other, from music, to visual art, to documentary film, to film, to social media.
This one is such an important and critical piece of the puzzle. But then there's a limit. And this is just where I think Dana shines most brightly, where she says, “There's one leverage point that's even higher than changing a paradigm. And that is to keep oneself unattached to the arena of paradigms. To stay flexible and to realize that no paradigm is true. That every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own world views, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to get at a gut level, the paradigm that there are paradigms. And to see that itself as a paradigm, and to regard the whole realization as devastatingly funny.”
And from there, she concludes, “Magical leverage points are not easily accessible even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it. Whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not knowing. And in the end, it seems mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go and dancing with the system.” And this I think is one of, if not the single thing I love so much about her, is the humility that she brought to her thinking and her work.
[00:32:07] MC: Yeah. And I would entirely agree on that. And I don't know, sometimes I think about her attitude as courageous curiosity in the sense that she would use the analytical frames of systems thinking for as much as she could. And then she would know deeply in her bones that that would not be enough. But it's as close as it gets to having an understanding of what we are seeing – what's happening and then kind of transcend to the next level, which would be the engaging non-rational dimensions. And that's where the dance comes in.
[00:32:45] JS: Right. Exactly. And this is where it gets kind of spiritual and moves beyond the intellect. She says, “The tools of system thinking born out of engineering and mathematics, implemented in computers, drawn from a mechanistic mindset and quest for prediction control. These are practitioners and actually confront the most deeply human mysteries. System thinking makes it clear even to the most committed technocrat, that getting along in the world of a complex system requires more than technocracy.
System thinking leads to another conclusion, however, waiting, shining and obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by illusion control. It says that there's plenty of things to do. Just a different sort of doing. The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and lovingly brought into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can't impose our wellness system. But we can listen to what the system tells us. Discover how its properties and our values can work together and bring forth something much better than it can ever be produced by our will alone. We can't control systems or figure them out, but we can dance with them.”
And then finally she says, “Living successfully in a world of systems” – and this is really essential – “requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity, our rationality, our ability to sort truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, our morality.”
And I want to talk about this because this is such a key piece of the puzzle and what we've been talking about and working on and want to give direct opportunities to do this within our community, which is moving beyond the intellect and into the body and the intelligence of the body.
[00:34:19] MC: That's something that I am personally very passionate about, that kind of embodied dimension of systems change and systems thinking. And to me, something that is – I don't know. I don't want to use the term spiritual necessarily. But what I'm really passionate about is the nexus between the individual narratives that I believe live in the body a lot, besides the mind. That's inseparable. But that nexus between individual narrative and systems narrative.
More recently, I'm doing the work on systems approaches to address homelessness, in particular in Italy at the moment. And it's been quite interesting to understand how a lot of people that my colleagues in Italy have been working with who are unhoused would have language of self-blame and self-judgment around their own personal failures.
And then this is when systems thinking becomes transformational at a deeper level. Because then if someone actually sees how it's actually the system that has created the conditions for someone to fail, so to speak, according to those criteria, that's what society puts out. Then it's a different narrative. Then it's more empowering. And so, for me, that's one dimension.
The other dimension is the awareness of the body. And so, the way that I approach systems work through the body is by enabling the body in the room and being able to actually build structures with bodies. I was studying briefly with Arawana Hayashi, who collaborates regularly with the Presencing Institute. And collectively, they have developed ways to actually create social presence in theater in the sense of using bodies, aware bodies, to create current understandings of what is keeping us stuck, whether it's personal narratives or more contextual systems narratives, and create something new or experience something new.
The body as the first vehicle of shift. And sometimes when I use these approaches with groups, it's quite interesting because you ask folks to reproduce with their bodies a shape, a shape of “stuck” with what it feels like to be stuck in a particular moment of their life on anything in their life that they don't have to share. And then let the unsustainability of stuck take you out of it.
And there's something powerful about noticing where the movement that takes you out of stuck, which could be, again, individual or systemic stuck. And where is that energy impetus for the movement change coming from? And when that is processed in groups, it really creates without sharing your personal story or reasons for being stuck. It really creates a way of nuancing the observation or the way that others look at you and your body in relationship with other bodies. That I find very, very powerful. And so, that's one example of bringing their body in in addition to being aware of what's happening in the body at any given particular time.
[00:37:52] JS: You also talked about trauma and the role of trauma and how that's stored in the body.
[00:37:57] MC: Yes. Well, it gives me goosebumps what you just mentioned. Because, oftentimes, trauma, I mean, we know that it resides and leaves scars in their body. And one of my quests in understanding why it is so hard to actually shift mental models, but also in a community, society, why is it so hard? And what makes people deeply care?
Throughout my life I change multiple approaches. I was thinking, "Oh, I love forests. Therefore, I should study the forest." And I need to understand economics in order to really understand what's causing deforestation. And so, I try to adjust all the time. And ultimately, I was chasing after the question of what makes people care deeply at a deep level? So, that you don't have to hyper-regulate or renegotiate constantly the conditions for keeping life on Earth essentially.
And that's when I encountered trauma. Meaning, that I realized that a lot of people in this society, in the US. I come from Italy. I mean, it's not a very different society. But I was noticing by comparison how prevalent trauma is in this society. And so, how trauma actually is a condition of a disconnect, of a dissociation. And therefore, it actually fragments the sense of identity and a sense of power, the empowering of being able to be an agent of change for our own lives and beyond, right? And so, that disconnect, that disintegration of the connection to most fundamental roots is in the way, of course, of being able to bring all of our powers together, if you will, to enact change. And sometimes it has to do with maybe choosing only one part of yourself that is acceptable that you can enact in a system that doesn't take you fully in. And so, that is exacerbated at the systems level because it's a fragmented view of human beings.
And so, can you imagine traumatized fragmented individuals within a fragmented traumatized society? Oftentimes, my dear colleague, Melanie Goodchild from the Turtle Island Institute, would talk about systems healing. Healing self and healing systems. Because whenever we talk about system change and systems thinking, we're invoking solutions that are deeply transformational if we really act on them. And those are needed at times of deep suffering, deep pain.
Whenever we talk about system thinking, we just have to acknowledge the pain that exists. And Dana talks about the pain. The pain that exists that we need to endure between current reality and vision. That pain.
[00:40:49] JS: It's a perfect segue to the next point that I wanted to make. This really amazing talk that she gave on envisioning, which is not where she spent most of her time. I think she actually went down to this conference in Costa Rica with a different talk prepared and then realized that that wasn't the theme of the conference. The night before, she changed it.
And she talks about how we spend time doing strategy and execution, but we're often missing vision. And she talked about how she went to a conference on world hunger. And she asked why the vision was missing. The first response was we're pointing to what's wrong. And that's enough. That should be enough to convince people to act. But when she dug in a little bit more, she uncovered that it was just too painful for people to envision a different reality relative to the current reality.
She also said in her talk, she said “envisioning is not a left-brain activity. It doesn't come from the part of me that does rational analysis. It comes from whatever part of me informs my values, my consciousness, my sense of morality. Call it heart. Call it soul. Whatever it is. The source of the vision. It's not the rational mind.”
And then she goes on to talk about how visions become responsible when they're shared with others and it's incorporated into a shared vision. Also, she talks about how it should be judged by the clarity of its values. Not the clarity of its implementation. Then this is where we get into the dance or the iterative way of operating that the path is never clear at first, she says. “It reveals itself step by step as I walk along it. It often surprises me because my computer and mental models are inadequate to the complexities and possibilities of the world. Holding the vision and being flexible about the path is the only way to find the path.”
I highly encourage listeners to listen to her talk. We'll link to it in the show notes. At the end of it, she takes the audience through an envisioning exercise. She has you sit and close your eyes and turn inwards. And she asks a series of questions about envisioning a sustainable world. And we've done some experiments with this with the Denizen community. It's very interesting to see what came up. Very clarifying. Very interesting to see what that looked like collectively. Marta, the moment we did this, do you remember what came up for you?
[00:43:03] MC: Yes. I was always, always impressed by how easy it was for people if guided and supported well in that process of envisioning. It also spoke to the container that you created for that. And I wonder what happened when Dana did that guided exercise. How was it received in a community of scientists?
[00:43:26] JS: I found that to be yet another very potent piece of her work. And I very much enjoyed our experiments and in doing those collective envisioning exercises.
Let's talk about her ecovillage a little bit. And then I want to talk about the work that you're doing now at the Academy.
[00:43:42] MC: Yeah. The ecovillage just came out of a visioning process as well. Because then, Dana, she would use visioning as a practice. It was one of her practices. Essentially, whether she was planning a garden, a book, a talk or, in fact, seeing herself 10 years down the road, she would do a visioning exercise.
And so, there's actually a beautiful piece by her 10 years prior to the actualization of her vision where she sees herself with gray hair and surrounded by people who share her love for the land. I mean, it's quite interesting to see that.
And so, the ecovillage, she had some early experimenting. This idea of living collectively was something that was important to her. She had some experiments in the farm that she co-owned with Dennis Meadows in New Hampshire, in Plainfield.
And I hear all sorts of interesting stories about that farm from people who knew her, like challenges and trying to be sustainable with the oil tank and all sorts of things, I'm hearing. But the interesting thing is that Dana received the MacArthur Genius Award. And with part of that money, she actually was able to really make her vision actualized and true. And then at some point, she's looking for land. She first looked in New Hampshire near where she co-owned a farm. And they didn't actually give her permission to build an ecovillage there.
She started to look at Vermont as a possibility of Vermont that it would be more open. And they already had the movement of back to the land much more strongly than in New Hampshire. There was more openness for experiments of this nature. And many were in existence already. But this was a little different.
And so, because as I mentioned, it was part of these three-pronged vision. And so, there was the idea of actually having it centered around an actual farm, a dairy farm nonetheless. It was intriguing and it was a challenge. But Dana at that point was so well-known in circles of sustainability, that when she put the word out there and she used to have a monthly letter that she would send out to hundreds of people in her circle, like a blog of these days. But it was called The Dear Folks Letter. And so, we have that. Well, all of them, on our website, donellameadows.org.
The design worked with an architect locally with all the permitting. Vermont is very strict on permits. So, this whole piece. And to me, what's interesting is that there were discussions at the time about not only how sustainable and ways to be sustainable for the community, but also affordability. And how much space should be common space versus individual homes? Ultimately, it boiled down to becoming 23 or 24, if I'm not mistaken, individual, pretty large, like a large-sized homes and a communal building with smaller apartments. And then a community kitchen where there would be daily meals. And that is still very active. And the whole community still exists and is super active.
And not long ago, I was actually cooking there for 75 people in the evening. And what's interesting to me is that in a way she was trying to model a finite system. She was just kind of – from the learnings of Limits to Growth, she was actually applying it to a real place. And so she had only a certain amount of land, only a certain amount of cows, only a certain amount of homes. She was obviously creating a finite system.
And what's interesting is that, over time, there was the economy of milk that really created a challenge. And she lived enough just to begin to see this really. But unfortunately, she died at the time when they inaugurated the initial excavations for the foundations.
But I can mention what happened next. And despite being like a system that was grounded in sustainability with a heating system that is like a district heating based actually on wood and a system that requires a lot of participation from people who lived there who set aside time to actually do consensual decision making. There is no majority rule. But actually, you have to take the time to really work with consensus. And there's also tasks that you might want to volunteer for. And there's a beautiful website that describes life at Cobb Hill. That's how it's called.
And where I was going is that the milk economy is interesting. Because if you add value to milk and produce, for example, cheese, and they're producing some of the most amazing cheeses in the region, that's a good source of income. And it's a way to be living financially sustainable, in a financially sustainable way.
But if you sell 50% of the milk, as it's happening, or it has happened, to the regular market, then you are deeply underpaid. And that can cause poverty. And so, there were some of the dynamics that we were seeing in the larger systems that were at play even in this most well-intentioned system. We're creating inequality because of the commodity market for milk in particular. They were penetrating into this system and creating a differential.
And so, it's extremely interesting to see how even if you put all the levers in place to actually have a sustainable system, it doesn't mean that it can be necessarily just because of the interconnectedness with the larger economy.
[00:49:41] JS: Of course. It's great to see that that's still happening. I'm sure there's a lot to be learned from that experiment. I want to talk about the work that you're doing now, the Academy for Systems Change. I love that your first guiding value is love and care.
[00:49:56] MC: Yes, which definitely was a word that, Dana, they are to use in her circles, which she was kind of bringing to that world of scientists. And she actually paid consequences for that in the Environmental Science Department at Dartmouth College. She was considered not necessarily a hardcore scientist because of that. And there is a little bit of that kind of negative aura, if you will, that I sense at Dartmouth College.
[00:50:26] JS: Interesting.
[00:50:26] MC: Yeah. So, love is a loaded word especially then. And the connotations of being a woman and using that word in a highly patriarchal system. The work of the Academy for Systems Change stems from Dana's work. But also, from some of the work of organizational learning. So, Peter Senge was a dear friend of Dana Meadows. They took completely different paths towards the end of Dana's life. Actually, she reconnected with Peter Senge in significant ways addressing change in big corporations, which she had intentionally avoided for most of her life.
And so, there's that part of the work that comes into the Academy for Systems Change in terms of lineages. And also, to my surprise, recently, I discovered a lot of the work convenience spaces for systems change comes from actually psychotherapy and systems approaches in psychotherapy with a constructivist lens that I can tell more about. But I just recently discovered this connection, which is interesting. Which brings into this space of change tools for actually catalyzing conversations that need to happen. Whether it's using, for example, the iceberg model where you highlight the difference between events level and a deeply held belief level. Whether it's the use of other frames to really understand what it takes to be able to envision further.
We essentially apply tools that were developed in the context of systems thinking and apply it to spaces for change in communities and in organizations. We have had, so far, the understanding that it doesn't matter what system you're trying to change. Some of the resistance that you will encounter when trying to change the system, you will find a cross. There will be kind of almost universal, if you will.
We have found that through our fellows program, which is the flagship program for a while, we would convene people from different sectors from different systems that they were trying to change. Whether it was indigenous economies or the use of English as a second language as a way to connect migrant communities to resident communities. There were different systems being at play. And we found that it was a beautiful ecotone, if I can use an ecological term, of rich conversations and rich relationships.
I just want to mention again Melanie Goodchild, who is one of our faculty, who she's coming from having experienced both the analytical lens of systems thinking and the indigenous [inaudible 00:53:09] type of lens from a spiritually, deeply grounded lens.
And so, you will find her work fascinating I think because she also talks about the relationship between different bodies of knowing and knowledge. And she talks about the sacred space in between where we can be in a relationship that is respectful. That doesn't induce epistemic violence. It has to do with not just avoiding appropriation, of course, or adaptations of indigenous thinking that don't make any sense. But it's more like the relationship, that is a respectful relationship between epistemologies and their ways of knowing.
And so, the ecotone in the space in between different experiences even at the individual level I think has a lot of value. And that's a lot of the work that we're currently doing actually at the Academy for Systems Change. Because one of the critiques in the systems thinking field has been that, well, first of all, thinking excludes the body, as you were talking about, right? And so, there's been a lot of different ramifications a couple of generations down now to really take what's super useful in system thinking and then enriching it. And so, that we're not stuck in that same paradigm that Donella was actually trying to change, the mechanistic control.
And so, that is taking the form of creating new relationships with groups who are doing systems work. They might not call it that way. And they're learning different ways. And so, given that we really need a whole continuum of ways of knowing, for this really challenging intersection of issues and crises that we are a part of. And so, that we are trying to navigate exactly that space, the sacred space in between, so that we can be in relationship with the challenges at times. An enriched way of showing up, it works at the deeper level of collaboration. That sometimes systems thinking, it's being in the way of because it has been seen as too analytical and all of that. And so, we're trying to work around this edge, this boundary around the systems way of knowing.
[00:55:30] JS: Thank you so much for this conversation. Her work is so important. It's been so influential. I just want to thank you so much for taking the time and for your broader partnership in this work.
[OUTRO]
[00:55:41] JS: Thank you so much for listening. In addition to this podcast, you can find additional resources on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com, including transcripts and links to additional background materials for each conversation.
For our most essential topics like universal basic income, decentralized social media and stakeholder capitalism, we also have outlines summarizing our research, which make it easy for listeners to very quickly get an overview of these really essential and important subjects.
On our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter where we bring our weekly podcast to your inbox alongside other relevant Denizen announcements. We're partnered with a lot of really incredible organizations on the forefront of the change that we talk about. And so, we're often bringing you announcements from them.
And finally, this podcast is made feasible by the Denizen community and listeners like you through our gift model. Denizen's content will always be free and accessible. We believe that it's just much more aligned with the future that we seek to embrace this gift model. It's through the reciprocity of listeners like you that we are able to continue producing this content. You can support us or learn more about our gift model on our website. Again, that's www.becomingdenizen.com.
Thanks again for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
[END]