To facilitate deep social and ecological healing, forward-facing leaders must develop the wisdom and capacities to collaborate across differences, see from and with other perspectives, and create space for more expansive logics to shape the future. This work invites leaders to engage in intentional development, incorporating inner and outer work so that we can act from a place beyond our conditioning. By actively discerning how we can be of service to a changing world, we can reclaim our aliveness and capacity for conscious growth, letting go of what’s no longer needed. This virtuous cycle allows us to re/discover the joy that fuels our vitality and builds the resilience necessary to hold the tension inside the transitions we’re amidst. 

Many believe that transformational change emerges deep beneath what we can see. Our beliefs shape our identities, just as soil health shapes plant life and culturally constructed paradigms shape social systems. However,’ systems change’ work often stops short of incorporating these invisible yet critical domains. This exclusion hinders our ability to leverage what we know about how transformation happens from diverse cultural and disciplinary perspectives. 

Efforts to advance transformational change must embrace what Kichwa lawyer Nina Percari calls “epistemic decolonization.” This act involves making visible and remediating the fundamental logics or ‘rules’ from which entire systems grow. Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o asserts that by controlling culture (how we perceive ourselves, our relationship to the world, and subsequently organize public life), colonialism dominates the mental universe of the colonized. And since our perceptions shape our sense of what’s possible, the deliberate undervaluing of people’s cultural logics restricts our collective access to other imaginaries, ways of being, doing, and knowing.

Therefore, it’s crucial to appreciate and amplify the role of culture in transformational change. Deep diversity (in identity, positionality, and lived experience) broadens the parameters of change, offering limitless ways to frame, understand, and learn how to respond to complex challenges. To collaborate across difference in this way and with care, future-facing leaders must cultivate inner resources, including emotional maturity, personal accountability, and the capacity to hold complexity and paradox. In this course, students will deepen their understanding of the relationship between lasting change’s inner and outer dimensions, enriching their sense of purpose and capacity to contribute to genuine repair.

Nature, of which we are an inherent part, exhibits these qualities elegantly, providing a compelling alternative for understanding change and time-tested design principles for fostering collective vitality. During this course, students will explore how this approach can enrich their work as leaders. In doing so, we will honor the wisdom embodied by many Indigenous groups and spiritual traditions and begin decolonizing the practice of ‘systems change.’ Students will identify creative ways to apply these principles to a personal exercise and collaborative community change project. 

Learning Outcomes

• Demonstrate an understanding of different problems (simple, complicated, and complex).
• Demonstrate essential fluency with different systems change frameworks and leverage points and their relationship to transformational change, exploring inner and outer dimensions.  
• Exhibit a deeper understanding of ways the arts, culture, and human imagination can facilitate emergence. 
• Distinguish between their personal identity and social identity and understand how this affects their worldview and approach to change work.
• Describe the worldview they operate from and ways they will exercise cultural safety as leaders of transformational change.
• Collaborate across differences more easefully and support others in doing the same using values-centered practices.