“Partiality is at the root of our lack of visionary leadership.”
— Meg Wheatley
Just as complexity requires a different kind of leadership, cultivating systems leadership requires a different kind of learning.
We don’t believe it possible to develop systems leadership capacities by simply taking notes in a lecture hall. It requires a multi-modal pedagogy that addresses the whole person.
A genuinely whole person pedagogy has to recognize that ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ skills and qualities are like two wings of a bird; both are needed to fly and each must develop in balanced relationship with the other.
Cultivating systems leadership requires a broadly integrated learning approach – one that develops both competence and capacity.
Competence Development
Competence development refers to the knowledge and skills - theoretical models, analytic tools and intervention strategies - needed by systems leaders. Such knowledge and skills are typically cultivated through conventional learning methods – sometimes described as informational or horizontal approaches.
Capacity Development
Our capacity for systems influence arises from a distinct constellation of behavioural competencies, mindsets and sensibilities which mediate the efficacy our various intervention tools and strategies. Capacity development focuses on the cultivation of these ‘inner’ qualities leading to greater interior complexity. Such cultivation requires developmental learning methods – sometimes described as transformative or vertical approaches.
Bringing Wood to the Fire
The Wolf Willow Approach to Systems Education
“We must restore that sacred feminine, predicated on kindness and compassion, caring, love that’s the real impetus of change. If systems theory and practice can conscience us to that way of understanding the world then we’ll see some really fundamental change but unless it does that, it will be the same old same old.”
Dan Longboat, Haudenosaunee Elder & Scholar
We follow four guiding principles that shape our approach to educational design for systems leadership.
1. In systems learning, context is as important as content.
We approach systems learning with a systems lens and begin with the assumption that the answers to critical challenges are already alive in some way in the socio-cultural systems they impact. Systems learning happens over time and in relationship. A relational systems approach is alert to the risk of replicating patterns of harm and orients us to the potential for radical collaboration – however unlikely. It supports learners to build a richer relational ecology that can support them and their work long term. And it reminds us that living systems and communities are invariably our best teachers.
2. Systems learning is catalyzed through transformative learning.
Capacity development is accelerated through our conscious and sustained participation in transformative learning – the processes that we use to examine and expand our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Such learning is multi-modal and requires sustained practice. We also believe that a truly transformative learning pedagogy is one that places Mystery at the centre. We understand ourselves not as educators with all the answers, but as co-guides with the unknowable, profound nature of change.
3. The future of systems learning is both high tech & high touch.
We have to remember that nature is the greatest teacher even as we learn to use digital platforms more creatively. We intentionally design learning experiences where the natural world can be both classroom and teacher. Land-based learning not only grounds our practice in place; it offers a direct experiential window into the complex relational systems we seek to engage. At the same time, emerging technologies – from systems mapping software to the potential for AI and quantum computing to offer predictive insight in complex fields – along with the rapid convergence of the human and digital worlds, are part of the landscape that systems leaders must navigate.
4. Effective systems learning is radically holistic.
It is a mutual journey that necessarily blurs the distinction between ‘learners’, ‘practitioners’, ‘communities’ and ‘educators’ - and invariably requires elements of unlearning from all. It integrates multiple modes of learning to catalyze multiple ways of knowing. And it recognizes that healing is often a vital element of element of learning. It engages the imagination, heart, body and soul just as much as the cognitive mind. As such, our pedagogy evokes all four sensibilities and incorporates elements like somatic coaching, contemplative disciplines, expressive arts, consciousness-shifting practices, deep imagery and nature-based learning with more familiar leadership and system change pedagogy.
The Many Ways We Know.
Neuroscience and Indigenous tradition alike remind us that we have multiple ways of knowing - streams of intelligence that have been described as sensing, imagining, feeling and thinking. Yet, hyper-rationalism is invariably privileged in most contexts, maiming our capacity to take in the fullness of a complex story. Opening to and refining underdeveloped sensibilities as a form of intelligence is a critical task for most systems leaders and a focus in our learning outcomes.
Skillful Action.
A leader’s capacity to influence a field arises from a distinct constellation of behavioural competencies, attitudes, ways of knowing, body-mind state regulation, mindsets and sensibilities which – when expressed in action - we call metaskills.
Wolf Willow programs are explicitly intended to cultivate nine distinct metaskills exhibited by transformative systems leaders:
Trust
The capacity to tolerate uncertainty, to remain open and centered with access to our deepest creative intelligence in the midst of chaos, personal turmoil, conflict and ambiguity.
Open-Heartedness
Our capacity to access and respond from a place of compassion, humility, vulnerability, non-judgment, kindness and acceptance. Open-heartedness is love in motion.
Commitment
The tenacity and resolve to keep moving toward desired futures. Commitment to a bigger story allows us to make the difficult decisions and sacrifices change invariably demands.
Audacity
Our capacity to take bold action and to seize opportunities. Audacity allows us to risk impact, to engage conflict generatively and to step into places otherwise claimed by our fears.
Curiosity
A quality of openness, freedom and comfort in not-knowing. It fuels the journey of learning, adaptation, sense-making and pattern-tracking at the heart of all change processes.
Dissent
A capacity for mature non-conformism that asks destabilizing questions, fuels innovation, unlocks free thought, invites creative expression and liberates us from shallow consensus.
Fluidity
The capacity to follow nature, to release outworn forms, to experiment, to improvise creatively in the present and to access and work from optimal or flow states of consciousness.
Perspective
The capacity to see many sides of a story at once - to hold our certainties lightly, to engage with empathy, to embrace paradox and to expand our habitual ways of knowing.
Reflexivity
The capacity for self-awareness in action - to understand our internal states, mindsets and patterning and to consciously choose more skillful responses and effective actions.