Beyond Collective Impact: What It Really Takes to Change a System | John Kania

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Work For Humans with Dart Lindsley
Episode: Beyond Collective Impact: What It Really Takes to Change a System
Guest: John Kania, Executive Director of Collective Change Lab
Aired: June 2, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores what it truly takes to create lasting systems change within social impact and workplaces. Dart Lindsley sits down with John Kania, a leader in systems change thinking and co-author of the seminal papers “Collective Impact” and “The Water of Systems Change.” The conversation traces John’s intellectual evolution—from operational models of collective work, through understanding systems complexity, to the current focus on personal, relational, and transformative dimensions necessary for deep, sustainable change. The discussion is rich with frameworks, real-world observations, and personal reflections—both on what works and where current efforts often fall short.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Difference Between For-Profit and Social Sectors

• Key Point:
  • The for-profit sector’s success is internal; in the social sector, success depends on engaging external organizations and stakeholders.
  • Social sector challenges (like education or housing) require collaboration—no single organization can solve them alone.
• Quote:

  “In the for-profit sector, you can pretty much think about your own company… In the social sector, your success is going to be based on engaging with a whole lot of other people and organizations.” — John Kania [03:53]

---

2. The Five Conditions of Collective Impact

• Background:
  • The 2011 “Collective Impact” paper described prerequisites for successful, large-scale collaborative change.
• The Five Conditions:
  1. Common Agenda — All groups agree on shared goals. [09:00]
  2. Shared Measurement — Tracking progress with unified metrics. [09:16]
  3. Mutually Reinforcing Activities — Differentiated but coordinated actions. [09:17]
  4. Continuous Communication — Regular, open exchanges between all participants (not just external PR). [09:38]
  5. Backbone Support — A dedicated team/organization for coordination and alignment. [11:14]
• Memorable Analogy:

  “As soon as you said backbone… I thought to myself, oh, you’re building an animal… It needs to have a central nervous system.” — Dart Lindsley [11:46]

---

3. Emergence and Complexity in Systems Change

• Evolving Beyond Linear Change:
  • Systems change is not a straight path; it requires regular iteration as contexts and environments shift.
  • Rigid plans fail; adaptability and emergence should be expected and designed for.
• Quote:

  “You want good enough to start, and then you got to start doing it, and then you’re going to change what you’re doing.” — John Kania [16:38]

---

4. The Water of Systems Change Framework

• Why "Water"?
  • Systems are often invisible, like “the water we swim in”—shaping and constraining our actions without us noticing. [20:01]
  • Many attempts at change fail because leaders do not see or address the full system.
• The Six Conditions:
  • Explicit (Structural):
    1. Policies
    2. Practices
    3. Resource flows
  • Semi-explicit (Relational):
    4. Relationships and Connections
    5. Power Dynamics
  • Implicit (Transformational):
    6. Mental Models (worldviews, values)
• Insight: Change at visible (explicit) levels alone leads to “snapback”—systems revert unless implicit and relational layers are also changed.
• Quote:

  “If you don’t change all of these things… the change just won’t stick.” — Dart Lindsley [24:00]
  “Those deeper levels are the real critical ones if you want to create long-term sustainable change.” — John Kania [25:48]

---

5. The Power and Complexity of Mental Models

• Defining Mental Models:
  • Deeply held habits of thought that shape action and policy; akin to “worldview.”
  • Changing mental models is challenging and often overlooked.
• Three Approaches to Shifting Mental Models:
  1. Cognitive reframing (new ways of thinking)
  2. Creating new relationships (shifting experience through connection)
  3. New experiences (transformative, often embodied shifts)
  4. (Added) Healing traumas (e.g., through storytelling) [31:15]
• Quote:

  “One thing to say change mental models, it’s another to change them.” — John Kania [28:52]

---

6. Transformational Change—Going Deeper

• Observation:
  • Even systemic change efforts that succeed (by the numbers) often yield only incremental shifts, not true transformation.
  • Deeper change requires affecting power, narrative, relationships, and healing.
• Motivation:
  • John founded the Collective Change Lab to advance understanding and methods for truly transformational change.
  • He studied Indigenous wisdom, spiritual traditions, and contemporary practices like restorative justice for clues on group transformation. [37:11]

---

7. The Relational Work of Systems Change

• Key Elements:
  • Interchange: Leaders (and all actors) must work on their own biases, traumas, and self-reflection.
    • “Leaders cannot transform a system if they haven’t examined their own biases, traumas, and mental models.” [44:54]
  • Relational Change:
    • High-quality connections—characterized by empathy, trust, and vulnerability—are essential. [47:01]
  • Shifting Power & Healing:
    • Real transformation relies on honest power shifts and making space for healing (including welcoming “the sacred”).
• Relational Framework:

  “This relational work of systems change is about the how.” — John Kania [44:05]

---

8. Islands of Coherence — A New Paradigm for Change

• Definition:
  • Small, cohesive groups (“islands”) can exemplify and spread new ways of being within a chaotic larger system.
  • Effective change does not mean trying to shift everything everywhere at once, but creating influential pockets of new coherence.
• Source:

  “Islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to elevate the entire system to a higher order.” — Ilya Prigogine, cited by John Kania [49:11]

• Crucial Idea:
  • True islands of coherence form around people who have achieved personal regulation (settled nervous systems)—not just organizational innovation.
  • Healing and co-regulation are central, not optional.
• Quote:

  "We are living in a world of unregulated nervous systems… By and large, most of what's going on in the western world... is urgency... because our nervous systems are all not regulated." — John Kania [51:14]

---

9. Healing, Conflict, and Deep Relational Change

• Conflict & Inclusion:
  • True transformation means engaging people with opposing viewpoints—not just rallying allies.
  • This relational healing approach goes beyond standard conflict resolution by placing healing at the center of systems change. [55:49]
• A Practical Insight:
  • Don’t take undue credit for collective wins—trust is fundamental (“give away credit”). [44:16]

---

10. Personal Reflections on the Work

• What John Hires His Work to Do:

  “I think my work could just continue to help me develop as a human being. … This is really about the evolution of humanity and the evolution of consciousness.” [57:20]

• What It Costs:

  “It’s opened me up to some vulnerabilities that I didn’t know I had before.…wading into trauma is never easy.” [58:16]

• The Paradox:
  • The greatest rewards and the greatest costs of transformation work can be the same—deep personal change.

---

Memorable Quotes

• On Change Failure:

  “If we have two sides, they need to work on the banks of the river and then step into the river together. But you just don’t want to throw them in the river first thing." — John Kania [56:38]

• On System Equilibrium:

  “Systems may not be good equilibriums, but they’re in some level of equilibrium. What you’re trying to do… is move them out into a different equilibrium.” — John Kania [24:00]

• On Emergence:

  “You want good enough to start, and then you got to start doing it, and then you’re going to change what you’re doing.” — John Kania [16:38]

---

Important Timestamps

• [03:53] – Social vs. For-profit change
• [07:46] – The five conditions of collective impact
• [16:38] – Emergence and complexity
• [20:01] – The “water” metaphor and systems frameworks
• [24:00] – Stickiness and snapback in systems change
• [28:52] – Mental models and how (not just whether) to change them
• [31:15] – Healing and embodied change
• [37:11] – Transitioning from incremental to transformational change
• [41:12] – The Relational Work of Systems Change (Inner/interpersonal/structural)
• [49:11] – Islands of Coherence concept
• [51:14] – Healing, nervous system regulation, and urgency
• [57:20] – Personal reflections on transformation work

---

Resources Mentioned

• Collective Change Lab: collectivechangelab.org — Papers, frameworks, and examples
• Seminal Papers:
  • Collective Impact
  • The Water of Systems Change
  • The Relational Work of Systems Change

---

Final Note

The crux of the episode: True systems change is less about manipulating obvious levers and more about engaging deeply—with self, with others, and with the underlying patterns and traumas of the system. Both frameworks and transformation are necessary, but transformation is relational, embodied, and often about healing. The work is never fast nor easy, but it is essential.

---

Transcript

[A]

In the for profit sector, you can pretty much think about your own company and how you make profit, and that's how you succeed. In the social sector or the nonprofit sector, your success is going to be based on engaging with a whole lot of other people and organizations that are outside your organization. And you start to realize that any particular problem you're working on, whether It's K through 12 education in Boston or affordable housing in San Francisco, any of these issues takes more than one organization to actually make progress. And what you find is you have so many organizations out there that are in fact addressing the same issues, but they're not necessarily engaging with each other and doing the work.

[B]

Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. We've had a series of shows on how to change large systems, and that's partially because making better work requires that kind of change, but also because many of the people who listen to this show are responsible for changing large systems. And it's not easy to do. My guest today is John Kania, Executive Director of Collective Change Lab, and I've wanted to have him on the show for a long time because I've been so inspired by his paper that he wrote with Mark Kramer and Peter Senge called the Water of Systems Change. And in that paper they describe all the parts of a system that need to change in a coordinated way in order for the change to stick. In this conversation, we follow John's evolution. First, he focused on how to bring together and organize diverse groups to create change together. But he found that wasn't the whole story. He turned his focus then to system change. That's where I got involved with his work. Most recently, he started asking how each of us needs to grow for change to be effective. John holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and a BA from Dartmouth. He's an adjunct professor at the Graduate Program for Social Innovation at Northeastern, and he's spent 30 years helping organizations and people create change together. He led FSG, a global nonprofit consulting firm, for 17 years and co authored the paper Collective Impact, which is the most read article in Stanford Social Innovation Review's history. His frameworks on system change are used by practitioners worldwide. John brings together strategy, leadership, and a deep spiritual practice to his work on how we unlock our collective potential. All right, if you enjoy the show, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I give you my conversation with John Kania. John Kania, welcome to Work for Humans.

[A]

Thank you, Dirk.

[B]

I've been wanting to have you on the show for a very, very long time. And you are one of the world's leaders in collective change. And so many of the listeners of Work for Humans are involved in collective changes or large systems change. And so we've been doing a series on the show about large systems change. But more recently I've been writing a book and I structured a lot of it around your paper, which is the water of Systems change and the conditions of systems change. So I reached out to you and you said, well, that's sort of the middle of my thinking. And I've advanced since then. And so this is a great opportunity to talk to you, to get chart the arc of your work and take at least me and many of my listeners beyond what we already know. So let's start at the beginning. When did you know that there was a need for a collective approach to impact?

[A]

Maybe to back up a little bit with my history and how I got to where I got to and where I've been. I think the thread throughout my professional career has been a real interest in understanding how change happens and trying to help other people see that. I started in the world of advertising. I like to say today that what I was really focused on then was narrative change. We talk about it as narrative change now. We didn't then. And then after that, I worked in business strategy consulting for close to 15 years. And our focus, the strategy boutique that I was a part of, was really, to use sort of the sports metaphor, let's get to where the puck will be as opposed to where it is. And how can we help companies get a sense of where they can make profit in the future? And I left that work in 2001 and helped start an organization called Foundation Strategy Group FSG, where our focus really was finding better ways to solve social problems. I would maybe modify that a little bit today, but that was also about really trying to understand change, but in this case, social change. What was interesting to me was moving from the for profit sector, where I spent the first 20 years of my professional career, to the social sector, the nonprofit sector, and what it is that brought about success. And one of the things you realize pretty clearly if you are effectively making that move, is that in the for profit sector, you can pretty much think about your own company and how you make profit. And that's how you succeed. In the social sector or the nonprofit sector, your success is going to be based on engaging with a whole lot of other people and organizations that are outside your organization. And that's a real difference that it takes people sometimes A while to get. But when you get that, you start to realize that any particular problem you're working on, whether It's K through 12 education in Boston or affordable housing in San Francisco or community development in Brazil, any of these issues takes more than one organization to actually make progress. And what you find is you have so many organizations out there that are in fact addressing the same issues, but they're not necessarily engaging with each other and doing the work well.

[B]

And it's a really fundamental difference, which is that if you're in a business, very often you're in competition with others in the environment around you. And so the dollar that you earn takes away from the dollar that I earn. But in the social impact world, we're both driving toward the same single impact. Well, often. And so the opportunities to join together are much greater.

[A]

I would agree with that. I would agree that business we typically think of as a zero sum game. It's not always the case, but I think typically by when you lose. But I think when you're in the nonprofit sector, social sector, if you think about education and you think about kids who are in the school system, there are a lot of different organizations that are supporting them. And some are supporting them in sort of the educational curriculum, others might be supporting them and making sure they have. They're arriving at school well fed. And if one is not doing their job versus the other, then it just doesn't work. And so if you're in a nonprofit and you pick your head up, you will realize that, and you realize that your success depends on others succeeding as well. And that creates a very different equation.

[B]

So in 2011, you published a paper called Collective Impact in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. And it is, I think to this day, the most popular article that they've ever produced in terms of citations. What was the overarching theme of that particular paper?

[A]

It's very much along the lines of what we're talking about. It's that no single organization can achieve large change by themselves and that we need to collaborate and work with others. I mean, what we were looking at was we had been consulting at the firm. I was at Foundation Strategy Group for, at that point, 10 years. We'd been around and we'd been consulting principally to individual organizations, individual foundations and nonprofits and government and business. And what became pretty clear to us in the work was that none of these organizations was going to be successful on their own. And they had to come together and align and coordinate their work. But we weren't seeing sort of great examples of that out there. I mean, collaboration has been around for a long, long time. Much of collaboration, at least as we had looked at at the time, fails to live up to people's aspirations for what they want to do. So what we wanted to do was based on research and looking at what was working around sort of large scale change in a collaborative way was to come up with some basic sort of what we called conditions. We called them the five conditions of collective impact that actually led to success together. And that's what we introduced in the article.

[B]

Now I'm going to speak to the five conditions and I probably have some questions about them. One of them is that all the groups have a common agenda.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And that that common agenda, this is the second one, can be represented as shared measurement.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

They don't have to be doing duplicate things. They can be doing mutually. This is the third one, mutually reinforcing activities.

[A]

Mutually reinforcing. Integrating and aligning their activities.

[B]

Yes, yeah. Integrating and aligning. They need to maintain continuous communication. This is number four across all players.

[A]

And when we talk about continuous communication, I think sometimes people's minds will go, oh, this is about like communicating what this effort is doing to the rest of the world. To the general public. No, it's really communication between all the players. Because what you typically find in the nonprofit or social sectors, there can be a tremendous amount of energy behind organizations who are involved in a given area coming together to actually sort of forward plan and say, yeah, let's all work together. But often what happens is that initial energy dissipates after they that sort of initial planning. And people go back to their work and they don't communicate. And so this continuous communication is what we're talking about. It's constantly being, okay, we've come up with a plan, we've come up with a common agenda, and we're starting to measure how we're doing. How do we continuously communicate amongst all the players so that we'll continue to make progress together?

[B]

What's interesting is so far this sounds very much like a project plan spread across multiple organizations. So what are we for? Who's responsible for what? How are we supporting each other? What are our dependencies? And you can't just kick off a project and walk away. When you kick off a project, you then have to have routine project meetings. They can be very tight, but they're about communication. Are you making progress on your thing? Am I making progress on my thing? And the fifth one is backbone support, which is that there needs to be a separate dedicated Staff to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative.

[A]

Yeah, you know, I think what we found when we did our research is that probably the number one reason that collaborations didn't live up to their aspirations was the lack of some level of sort of infrastructure support, which we ended up calling backbone. And in the absence of that, you know, again, you could start with an initial plan, but things change over time. Things are constantly moving and having a set of resources whose sole purpose is the alignment of everybody else.

[B]

And it's funny, as soon as you said backbone in that list when I was reading it, I thought to myself, oh, you're building an animal which is. It needs to have a central nervous system that is continuously monitoring health and coordinating the limbs and making sure that it continues to do whatever this new organism was built to do.

[A]

Yep, it's a very unique set of people that are working in the backbone. If the effort is working well, they have to be somebody who's very effective at supporting connections between organizations. They have to have some level of being able to lead. And by lead I mean bring people together. But it's absolutely, it's not a top down structure. It's more like they're in the middle of things, helping everything move along.

[B]

This is very intuitive to me, just because I've worked on a number of enterprise wide change teams and there needs to be a change team. Otherwise attention is so fleeting and there's so many things to pay attention to. We just end up paying attention to other things.

[A]

Everybody has their own job, they've got their day job, which is as it should be. But then it's this interstitial tissue that the backbone organization or set of resources provides that is absolutely critical. And again, as we looked at our research, and this was back in 2009, 2010, the number one reason we saw collaborations fail was that there wasn't the existence of a backbone system of resources that was supporting them.

[B]

How do these groups find each other? How do they become aware that there's an opportunity to do better together?

[A]

Typically, that's a great question. And I think the answer to that, at least as I experience it, is there's no one way, typically one or several people who have social and political capital. So it could be heads of nonprofits, it could be heads of foundations, even could be heads of business. Somebody will sort of convene and bring the group together. And this is invitational work. So it's really one or several people that are willing to sort of say, hey, we think there's a terrific opportunity with affordable housing in Chicago to do this. So we brought all of you together today to talk about that and have a conversation. Is this something you think we could do? And is this something you'd be interested in being a part of? So it could be a lot of different types of people that are bringing that together. I will say it's got to be somebody typically, in my opinion, who's a leader and does have social and political capital, but who leads adaptively, who is a servant leader and not somebody who's looking. Because a lot of times I have seen this, particularly since the article came out, some foundation will decide they want to do this work, and then they call all their grantees together and they say, this is what we're doing. And of course, that never works.

[B]

Well, that leads into the questions I was going to ask, which is, do you ever look at one of these convenings, one of these opportunities, and say, that's not going to work?

[A]

So if you do organizational change, which you do, you know that readiness is the thing, and that in some instances, people aren't ready for this. I mean, there's always going to be variable amounts of readiness to sort of engage together, to engage collectively. That's why this can't be forced on people. But it's typically one or several people bringing everybody else together and saying, here's a vision for how we might do this. And I think part of collective impact, we didn't invent something, we put a name to it. We put some conditions for success to it. And frankly, I think it gave a lot of people hope. And there are a lot of people who'd been trying to do this type of work who were very sophisticated in it, but they were hitting a stone wall because their bosses or their wards or other people would sort of say, this seems really squishy and stuff. So bringing out that article, frankly, the name itself, collective impact, Right. Who wouldn't want that? There is something in a name. And then the five conditions gave it some level of rigor. And then there was a larger set of people that could say, ah, I see what you've been saying all along, we've been told over and over again over the years, you gave language to what I was already doing, which, yeah, that was part of what we were trying to do.

[B]

Now, the way I see this is your initial paper was essentially operational. This is how to operate. But as we go farther into your work, we're going to find that you didn't find that saying how a collective impact would operate was enough, and that you felt that you needed to go deeper. And so one of your next papers, embracing emergence and how collective impact addresses complexity, was in 2013. In what ways did that advance the initial thesis, and what problem were you working to solve there?

[A]

I think the problem we were trying to solve is that much of the way work in the social sector can get done, and still is done today, is through a very linear model that sort of assumes we set our objectives at the beginning, we have our goals at the end. And the idea is, how do we move from A to Z? And we don't really account for how our context will change over time. And once the context changes, you need to revise what you're doing. And that doesn't happen an awful lot. A lot of the sector's initial thinking around change came more out of the programmatic side of things, where you set up programs and then you just went out and delivered against them. And I mean, even programs operate within a context. But I think when you're thinking more broadly about a system, you have to really focus on the context of how things are changing. So the problem we were solving for was to try to give some language and a vision to operating in a way that you are constantly in a mode of iterating and changing. I had a wonderful mentor. Unfortunately, she passed a couple of years ago. She's Canadian, Brenda Zimmerman, and she was a complexity theorist. And she used to say of strategic plans in highly volatile or changing environments, she said, you want good enough, you want good enough to start, and then you got to start doing it, and then you're going to change what you're doing. And so, in effect, that's what we were trying to do. We're trying to give some language in a way of understanding emergence and borrowing off of some of the great work that had been done over the years around emergence and understanding that you come up with an initial plan and there are parts of it that you jettison, there are parts of it that you keep, and there are parts that you didn't even know you needed to add, and you go ahead and add those. And we talked about that was, I think, a frame that we used in the article. So what we are really trying to do is move people into more of a. And again, in my opinion, this really isn't any different than change in almost any other context, but it's really moving people into a mode of just being comfortable and be on the lookout for what's going to change that you hadn't anticipated. And therefore, what do you do about It.

[B]

It's very interesting because I am fascinated by complexity and systems, and I'm always trying to figure out whether introducing that into solutions is just more than the solution needs. Let's say your first prescription in 2011 was, here's some medicine. And then to introduce something like complexity is to say, now let me tell you about the biochemistry of that medicine. And there's always this risk of adding a sophistication to the solution that the solution doesn't need. And. And that will just confuse people. But the way you describe it is very intuitive, which is the thing that you build when you bring the group together needs to be able to handle an evolving environment. If you're not building for that, you're going to get stuck. And so that makes a lot of sense to me. In 2018, you then went on and wrote the Water of Systems Change. First of all, why the water?

[A]

It's the water we swim in. You can't see it. So back the old joke about the fish, and, you know, two young fish are swimming towards an old fish, and as they pass, he says to them, how's the water, boys? They keep swimming in silence. And then one says to the other, what's water? It's the water we swim in. Right. So what we were trying to get at is systems. I'm happy to love to share with you the story of how we got to that.

[B]

Yes, please.

[A]

You know, we'd at this point, been doing collective impact efforts for six, seven years. For me, moving from working with individual organizations to working collectively. And being in the middle of that work, it just felt like, you know, this was the work I was born to do because, you know, you really saw real complex change and collective change in action. But it was interesting because we would work with 30, 35 people who represented parts of the system. I would say, if you want to change the system, get the system in the room. And it actually does work when you do that. So you have the representation of the system in the room. And the question was, okay, can we come up with some systems strategies or systemic strategies? That's what everybody's. Yeah, we got to do that. And people would work on that, and they'd come back. And what they came back with was essentially program strategies. And I was like, why are they doing that? And then I realized that just a few of them knew what the system was or what systems change was. They just really didn't have a vision in their mind. And that's understandable because most people don't spend their lives thinking about systems or systems change. So the fact that they didn't know, they didn't have a clear vision for what they were even trying to achieve was understandable, but also a little bit problematic. If your desired sight lines or system and your desired changes to systems change, and you don't really know what that is, that's a problem. We talked about it and my colleague Mark Kramer actually suggested, well, let's give him a framework, maybe that'll help. And so we looked around at the. There were systems change frameworks that existed, but there wasn't any that really resonated with social sector players. So that's what we set out to do. And it was Peter Senge, Mark Kramer and myself. We sort of pooled our collective expertise in systems and systems change, but we had a goal. I don't know if we articulated this way, but I certainly thought about it. This is the way I think about most of my work is Albert Einstein said this. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. So when you looked at a lot of the systems change frameworks that were out there, there were lots of arrows going every which way and people didn't really resonate with them. So that's what led to the development of the six conditions of systems change.

[B]

And this is the one that's been so influential to me. So let me say what they are and let me describe the structure for listeners. First of all, at the top, there's three. There's a total of six of them. The three at the top are explicit. They're the sorts of things you can see in the system. And then the middle ones are semi explicit. You sort of know they're there. But the last one is really implicit and really hard to see. And that's where the water is. The water of systems change to me really lives down there at this implicit level. And so the highest level, structural change. And it's got policies, practices and resource flows. Very practical, very visible. The second one is relational change. This is the semi explicit relationships and connections and power dynamics. And the third one is transformative change. And that's where the mental models live. So I'm going to have a lot of questions about this. Am I right in assuming, because this is what I've always assumed is that if you don't change all of these things, in many cases, that the change just won't stick. You know, you're trying to establish a new phase state of a system and if you only change half of it, it's likely to snap back into its Original shape. Is that an accurate understanding?

[A]

Yeah, I think more or less. I think everything's always dynamic, so things are always constantly moving and parts of the system are going to move more quickly than others based on the context. I actually did write another article called Snapback. So when you introduce that language, and that actually came from, I mentioned earlier, Brenda Zimmerman, my colleague and mentor from Canada. It was a concept that she introduced and that she and I were working on. She passed away and I ended up writing the article afterwards. But the notion is exactly as you articulated at dart is that what we talk about in the article is that systems, they may not be good equilibriums, but they're in some level of equilibrium. And what you're trying to do as a systems change practitioner is to actually sort of move them out into a different equilibrium. Even if the article, we have a picture of a bowl with a ball in it, and your ball will often move up the side of the bowl, so to speak, and then it will roll back if the change isn't actually sustainable enough. So back in 2016, when I went out and talked to a lot of people about systems change, what's your definition of systems change? They'd say, well, it's policy. So if we change policies, that systems change. Yeah. Is that all? Or it's about scaling practices and that's really what needs to happen. And that changes the entire system. I worked with a venture philanthropy that when they talked about systems change, it was all around scaling practices. That was it. That was their definition of systems change. So I would say that by and large, perhaps even today, there are many, many people doing this work that think about systems change as changing policies and scaling practices and shifting funding. So really what we were focused on in that model was trying to help people understand that there are these two deeper levels of systems change, the relational and the transformational. And in fact, if you look at the most successful systems change over time, which I would say is actually movements like the civil rights movement, that movement to change the system comes from, in some respects, from the bottom up. It comes from shifting mental models and also shifting relationships, then shifting power dynamics, and that shifts structure. So I think, by and large, one of the mistakes that we make, mostly, I'll talk sort of Western modern world, is that a lot of the assumptions about doing systems change are about that top level. It's about if we can change the structure, the system will change. So, yes, and the yes is yes to all six. And the second point is that actually those deeper levels are the real critical ones. If you want to create long term sustainable change.

[B]

Now, I can speak from experience that if you try to move a system without moving the mental model, especially if it's the mental model of powerful people, it's like whiplash, that snapback. You get it way out of there and you're feeling really good about yourself and you really made a change and then wham, it's twice as bad as before. Everybody gets fired. Then the truth is that there's some instability that you hadn't resolved. There was resentment about it and all your changes demolished. And not only that, but the next time people are going to say, oh, that's never going to work because we tried it before. And so it is really insidious. And so in my current work, it all starts from mental model. And so I'm just going to say what the mental model is. We spoke about it a little bit ahead of time. But the biggest mental model is that the tradition of work has framed people as inputs to production. And we realized that that was a category error, that actually people at work are nothing like other inputs to production because they are have a first person subjective experience of being used and are free to leave if they want to. And so that describes a customer. And so we reframe the workforce, people at work as customers, and we reframe work as a product. And from there you could derive from there, if you really believed those things, you would derive the power dynamics, you would derive the relationship connections and you would build the policies and practices and resource flows. And so the question with a system like this is, where do you start eating this meal? Where do you start even talking about a system's change? Because whenever you go out to say, well, there's a system change that needs to happen, you could start at any point in this framework and you could say, well, let me tell you about how relationships are the core of this. So anyway, I really believe in it and I know we're going to go on from that and you're going to say, yes, but I've improved upon it, or I've modified it, but it's a very compelling model to me.

[A]

Yeah, well, thank you. It is interesting. People around the world are using it. We almost get emails weekly about it and it's 10 years out there. I think the goal was really to give people some clarity and some way into it. And yes, you know, I think there's some things that need to be improved upon. I mean, one of the things that we've been working on has been this sort of question about how you change mental models. Because one thing to say change mental models, it's another thing to change them. And I'll give you just the mini tutorial, and you can unpack this for days. But, you know, there is a sense, and even, you know, we're doing some work now, do we really even want to. Is mental model's the right way to call it? Because when we think about sort of our embodied selves, we're not just brains, we're bodies. And in fact, a lot of the way that we process information is through our bodies. And so what are the implications for that, for how we change mental models? Well, if there is more conventional thinking about changing mental models today, it's about just what you did. Sort of reframing a cognitive reframe employees or customers, that. That is super powerful if you can get that to stick. But what for about the times that it isn't working? And are there other powerful ways to help shift mental models? The three ways that I know about, in addition to cognitive frames, one would be helping people into a new relationship. So often when you find people that are in conflict with each other and you support them in building relationships, that does have a huge swing in terms of their mental model of sort of what the world is about. Helping people into a new experience. A doctor with no bedside manner gets really super sick, winds up in hospital, realizes what it's like to be not treated with compassion, and he comes out and he or she is a different person. So helping people into a different relationship, helping people into, you know, a different experience. And I can go further there. I think there's one more level that's really helping people to sort of heal. And things like storytelling and ways that people can heal from the trauma that they've had can actually radically shift their worldview. These are pretty dense topics. I recognize that, but just sort of thought I'd put those out there.

[B]

We've had some shows on some of these. And so we had Nate Kendall Taylor, he runs the Frameworks Institute, and he gave us a lot of wisdom about this. One of the pieces of wisdom is don't even talk about the old frame. Just start in the new frame. But if you get people into the new frame, it's like booting up a computer or something with a different operating system. And a part of his point was that until people are in that frame, lots of other things that you might say will just bounce right off. But if you can get people into that frame, they can hear you and they can listen. And so we also have had several shows on trauma and the ways in which trauma results in people essentially shutting off cognition and the need to work through that. What you were saying makes me realize that I don't really know what mental models are. And I use the word constantly. There's something in that. Whenever I draw your model, I always add something underneath mental models, and it's values. And I suspect that values is in the concept of mental models here. But a lot of times the most fundamental change is people are important. Like that's a value statement. And you can hardly judge the rest of the quality of your mental model until you know why it's for, you know what it's for and what the values are that drive it. But I don't really know what they are. Hey, everybody. On June 16th, I'll be speaking at one of my very favorite venues. It's the Future Talent Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. To get Tickets, go to futuretalentsummit.org that's all one word. And enter my speaker promo code elevenfold, which is one one fold to get a big discount. If you're in the area, I would love to meet you there. That's futuretalentsummit.org promo code elevenfold.

[A]

Well, it was actually sort of coined or invented by a Scottish psychologist and philosopher back in the 1940s. And I think he put it out in a book. And the premise was that our brains, we have sort of many models, right? Things are coming together so that give us not the opportunity the really help us make decisions and act. And in water systems change, we used Peter Senge's definition, a great systems theorist, an actor, and we talked about it as habits of thoughts that influence your actions and behaviors. So that's sort of the definition. It's not the original definition, but that's the definition that we were going with. But I think the merit of the term and I think the reason it's 100 years later or what have you, 80 years later and it's still being used, is it sort of gives you a mind's eye picture of what's hard to think about, which is how do we make decisions and take action?

[B]

There's a book that really influenced me called Mental Models, and it has a paper in it. I'll send it to you afterwards. It's all about the difference between Western navigation techniques and Micronesian navigation techniques. And it shows the real differences between Western and Micronesian navigation. They both solve the problem, but they do it with a completely different way of thinking about the world. Westerners Always start with the world, turn it into something digital, they instrument it, they turn it into something digital. They make decisions based upon digital information, then they turn it back into actions. And the Micronesian navigators were doing none of that. They had no instruments. This is more than we need for this show. But I'm going to keep going because it's super interesting. They imagined themselves on the surface of the ocean. They didn't move. The stars were fixed and the world moved around them while they were moving across the ocean. So they didn't move across the ocean. In their mind, they got in a boat and the world moved. It's so fundamentally different, so wildly different, and yet could solve real world problems as well as the Western navigators. So it makes me wonder if there's not like a mental model zoo out there. Like, has somebody collected mental models? Because I guess this book was about that to some extent. But seeing how you know what the components are, I'm going to have to look into that.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, the way that I think about it could be not the right way to think about it, but another word that I use is worldview. What's your worldview? And that is so context driven. So even the example that you gave is very, very context driven to a place and what their ancestors did. And so I think we all are influenced by so many different things in our environment that lead to our worldview. And I think values is definitely part of that. And where did you get your values? Well, you've got them from the people who raised you, your ancestors and the people that you're around and the communities that you're a part of.

[B]

The person who wrote that article on Micronesian navigation, whose name was Ed Hutchins, he actually, in the discussion of that paper, he said, who knows how many species of cognition have been lost because the context in which they evolved has been eliminated. So he's exactly aligned with you on that. That context really matters. So what we have on the table is this model which the conditions of systems change that shows the explicit, all the way down to the implicit mental model. Why wasn't this enough? Where have you gone since then? And what problem do you still see on the table that needs more?

[A]

Well, after doing collective impact work, which to me was the most fascinating, most interesting work that I'd done in my entire career, you know, collective change work, what I was seeing was that, as I said earlier, if you want to change the system, get the system in the room, that actually does work. I'd seen it work numerous times. We in that time period commissioned a third party research to address the question of is collective impact having an impact? And two different research firms together worked on it. One that was hugely skeptical and the other neutral. And they came back and said, yeah, collective impact was having an impact. I think they basically looked at 25 communities in the US and Canada. So there you have it. We have very few examples in the world of impact models or approaches that have achieved population level change. So we should be satisfied, right? Well, when I considered the efforts that I'd been involved in and the ones I'd researched and other ones I knew about, I guess what I saw was even when we were achieving population level change, we were still creating incremental change in the system. And by that I mean, and think back to the six conditions that while we were achieving population level change, the power dynamics hadn't changed, the narratives and mental models hadn't changed, the relationships and connections, and who knew whom hadn't changed all that much. And what we had was people started to talk more to each other and that made things more efficient. And I'm being a little bit reductionist because these efforts were amazing and amazing work was being done, but in essence, we weren't transforming the system. So that was the really interesting question to me was how do you bring about transformational change in the system where you can actually achieve change at those deeper levels? I started doing work, I actually brought in Peter Senge, I mentioned Peter earlier, and his group into some of the efforts that I was working with at fsg, but then ultimately decided that to do the work that I felt needed to be done, it was probably different work than we were doing at fsg. And so I left FSG and started up Collective Change Lab. And as I was founding or just bringing to being Collective Change Lab, we started working on what's a way into this? How do we think about transformational change? And so, you know, I said, well, there have been people in some cases for thousands of years, even 10,000 years, who have actually thought about what it takes to transform an individual or to support transformation in an individual and to support transformation in a group. This is not a new question. So let's just sort of look at the world there and see if we can draw some conclusions. And again, the question is transformation, and what supports that for individuals and groups? So it was things like what happens in certain indigenous groups, what happens in. And what do we learn from the spiritual and wisdom traditions over time, and what do we learn from more current ways of transformation, like restorative justice or peace and conflict resolution. And so what do these all have in common? And so that was the framework that we started Collective Change Lab with.

[B]

One of your most recent works in 2022 was the relational Work of Systems Change. And I don't know how daunted to be by it. So you bring people together, they're all now working together toward a common purpose using your original ideas. They know that they need to work at both the explicit and the implicit parts of the system. And yet it's not enough for a couple reasons. But one of the reasons is the relational work of systems change. What is that?

[A]

The relational work of systems change. The article came out of the framework that we developed, which again was asking the question, how has humanity individually and collectively supported transformation? And I think what we were seeing in collective impact efforts around the world was we were seeing great progress and people can be proud about many of the efforts out there in Collective Impact. But really there was a need to actually go to deeper level of engagement from a relational standpoint. Another way to put it is, as we sort of thought about, what does it take to do transformational change? It wasn't necessarily, you're never going to get to transformation out of change in the structure. You just aren't. You're going to get transformation out of evolving the relational parts of a system.

[B]

Well, and I think this is one of the key things, and I guess when I was reading it, I might have misinterpreted it, which is there's a system over there across the street, and I'm working to change that system over there, and I need to change the relationships in that system over there. That's actually one of the. The middle parts of the parts of systems change. But the way I read this was, look, there's other things that the people doing the change need to take on. And so one of them is interchange, which is the individual. This is working on self. One of them is relational change, which focuses on the space between people. And one of them is shifting power. Now, interestingly, 2 and 3 showed up in the conditions of systems change. To what extent are these three things about the organizations doing the change versus the change that they are manifesting in the world?

[A]

Both. And I think. Thank you for pausing on this point because I think one of the big challenges that we have in the Western world is that there is this assumption that people are separate from systems and they are. You are part of the system, you are the system. And so this is very much this frame. And you mentioned three of the five qualities. So we talk about interchange, we talk about relational or generative, creating relational containers so people can do the work. And then we talk about sort of making spaces for healing. We talk about transforming power, and then we talk about welcoming in the sacred. And you know, I think one of the also things that one of the differences between this framework and you mentioned powers in both places, the order of systems change is about the what of systems change, and this relational work of systems change is about the how.

[B]

That's right. That's why I feel like this relational part of systems change applies more so to the organizations that are coming together to create the change.

[A]

Yes, absolutely.

[B]

And the water of systems change is about there's a system, we could potentially be independent from it, I suppose, and we're going to change it over there. But this is more internal. And I'll give you just a very practical example that came out of this was don't take credit for the whole change if you were a part of it, give away credit, which, I mean, it's certainly fundamental to trust, which is that you can't be stealing the credit. But let's go through each of these. Let's just talk first about interchange. Leaders cannot transform a system if they haven't examined their own biases, traumas, and mental models.

[A]

Yeah. And I think that it's a simple statement. I think it's not one that is broadly in the zeitgeist. I'll say. You know, having said that, I think, you know, there are so many leadership programs out today, and that's a lot what they're about. Right. I think it's been a really interesting shift in what leadership program offerings are in the world and what people are doing in them. I see much more of a focus in leadership programs on the inner work that leaders need to be doing. And so that's essentially what we're saying here in that particular, I mean, we're suggesting is everybody who's involved needs to be focused on their inner work. But I think leaders in particular often get a passion, whether or not they're giving themselves a pass or others may be giving them a pass saying, oh, Susie is the leader and she doesn't have to go through this. But in some respects it's a statement that's maybe more and more obvious to people, but I still think it's one that we often forget and needs to be at the center of the work.

[B]

Yeah. Talk about implicit. As a leader, I know I myself don't have any biases or trauma. I can Certainly understand why other people need to work on that.

[A]

Right. You're perfect.

[B]

That's why I'm telling other people what to do is because I know. And so I can certainly see. And it's hard to do that work. It also feels like it might be slow to do that work and I'm in a hurry. You know, there's lots of reasons not to do it.

[A]

Exactly. Lots of reasons not to do it. But it's absolutely essential. When you see a leader who's done their inner work, you know them over several years, you can say this of anybody. So I don't want to just say, oh, it's leaders. But it is amazing to see certain leaders that shift how they lead because you can see that they've done. They're doing their inner work. In inner work, it's about self reflection and it's about understanding your biases, your traumas, et cetera. And there are all different sort of ways to do that, but it really is a sort of ongoing act of self reflection and how that connects to your environment.

[B]

Relational change. This is in the organizations that are executing the change. High quality connections characterized by vulnerability, empathy and trust.

[A]

Yeah, I don't think you can get to real generative, innovative answers collectively unless you do just as you described. And it requires the people who do this work, facilitation work, use the phrase container, creating a container within which the work can be done. So that may not work for everybody, but it's what it's about. You're trying to sort of facilitate a way that the group can collectively get into it. You know, I often talk about it as flow. Some people are familiar with that. It's. It's just you're getting into a mode where people kind of forget who they are and you're coming up with something that truly is, you know, collectively created. And it doesn't happen a lot. And even, you know, as we've talked about the nonprofit sector and gee, people are much more willing to collaborate than the for profit sector. Well, everybody's there. You know, the nonprofits there have to raise funding and there's still competition in the room, there's still dynamics, there's still power. So how do you create an environment where relationally people are able to let go? Inner work is part of that, but it's the facilitative capacity to support that level of relational work.

[B]

Yeah, it takes time and lots of exposure and lots of working together to reach that point. And so there's two things that you mentioned when we were talking Ahead of this show that I really want to make sure we get to. You said two of them and both of them just kind of spun my head around. And so I'm going to say them both together because I don't know if they are related to each other or they're independent. One thing you said is I've sort of given up on companies. The second thing you said is I am increasingly believing in islands of coherence. Okay, let's start with islands of coherence. What is an island of coherence and is it I can imagine giving up on global change? What is it?

[A]

Islands of coherence is a recognition and for me is really a belief in how change happens that isn't based on a model that says large scale change, change everywhere, all at once. It's basically saying that's a model that isn't going to work for us. I don't think it's ever worked, but it seems to be the prevailing model. And it's replacing that with something that is more reflective of the way that nature and humanity work. In my experience, the term comes islands of coherence term comes from a chemist, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigozhini, who said that islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to elevate the entire system to a higher order.

[B]

That's very meaningful to me. So first of all, it's certainly true that you start a little bit of a crystal in a solution and sometimes the whole solution will crystallize and that I can imagine a chemist saying that, which is that it doesn't take very many molecules snapping together into a crystal lattice and then it catalyzes the whole thing into a crystal. I also have often thought about islands. So I would argue that what we're suggesting is a different business model. It's a different business model. It's a business model that recognizes that all companies are multi sided. Employees are customers, workers are product, and that a company like that can out compete other companies and as it becomes competitive can start to transform other companies. And that companies will see those companies are really way more successful than we are and we're going to have to move to keep up. And that's the sort of thing that could be exactly that kind of crystallization. And so first of all, you don't get the value until you at least have coherence on an island. It seems to me if you can create coherence in a community or in an island, you get value.

[A]

Yeah, the company example is interesting and it may in fact be true. But that is not what I'm talking about when I say island of coherence and not what we collective Change lab are talking about. I mean we are talking about something that centers around people being able to co regulate their nervous systems. Because that is in my opinion, the largest challenge that we have as a world right now is that we are living in a world of unco regulated nervous systems, of unregulated nervous systems. And when we're acting from a space of trauma or fight or flight, we are not at our best. We are never at our best when we're acting from that place. And that's by and large what we see in the world today. We talk about sort of a are you operating from a fix it mentality or worldview or a healing worldview? And I think by and large most of what's going on in the western world, at least in the modern world, is we've got the urgency that you spoke of earlier. So we have to fix, fix, fix. And that's because our nervous systems are all not regulated. So we are talking about a concept that basically says people are willing to come together and to actually work on getting to a point where they are not operating out of fear or out of anger. Yes, they may be fearful and they may have anger, but. But they're not operating out of that. And so to get a group of people to that, it doesn't happen overnight. So I do agree. I think the island of Coherence is the concept. It's a concept, at least for me, that's energizing. But I think at least the way that we're using it is a very specific use.

[B]

Do you feel like a lot of your work you are within an island of coherence?

[A]

I do think our group is, yeah. And it didn't, you know, we didn't start there, but I mean it's like any change, and I'm sure you've seen it as well, that when people are in it for a while, they get to a different place. Not always though, right? So this is about a very intentional way of being within that group that I do think can spread. Resemba Menachem, who is a really great practitioner and writer and therapist, talks about settled bodies. Settled bodies, settled bodies, settle bodies. I think we're in that mode. If you're around settled bodies, it can actually settle you. So that's what I'm talking about. I mean there are probably lots of different uses of Islands of Coherence.

[B]

There's a speaker I Heard once who said that calm is contagious.

[A]

Yeah, that's beautiful.

[B]

And then he said, and the corollary to that is all emotions are contagious, right?

[A]

Anger, the whole spectrum.

[B]

And so there's a way in which when you say Islands of Coherence, you're talking a little bit about relational change, which is we've got high quality connections, we have safe spaces where opposing sides of systems can see each other's humanity and acknowledge shared pain. Okay, so that's an example where it's not a bunch of pre existing allies finding each other and coming together and creating some change in the world. It's actually pre existing enemies, or at least opposition coming together, finding common ground, moving forward. Was that idea in the very beginning, this idea of, no, we need to bring people together who disagree? Or in the very beginning, did you see collective changes being bringing people together who fundamentally agreed?

[A]

Well, it's a really good question. The short answer is I don't know that we certainly wrote about it one way or the other. The assumption was that these were places that you could hold some conflict. And I think over time, that's the way they've evolved. In some instances, in other instances, no, they've been more people that are closer to one certain point of view. That's why in some respects, where I've gone with my work and now our work is really about placing healing at the center of systems change. Is, does that address polarization? Yeah, I think it does, but it's a different orientation than, okay, let's just do conflict resolution. So I think in the beginning we didn't sort of have a fully fleshed out perspective around how these efforts deal with conflict. I think we've gotten better over time.

[B]

I just ran a meeting in Washington for the American, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and I realized, reading your work, that we were bringing together multiple sides, but they were sides that more or less agreed with each other. We didn't invite in to that room sides that might really disagree. And I feel like it has to do with the stage of the project that we were working on, that it wasn't ready to be exposed, that we hadn't formed the relationships inside one part of the group before introducing very helpful divergence. So I don't think it was a bad thing. But I did notice it that it's a lot safer and a lot to not invite the people who disagree with you into the room.

[A]

I think the more you want to bring in very conflicting perspectives, the more work you have to do. Up front if you want to be effective at it. If we have two sides, they need to work on the banks of the river and then step into the river together. But you just don't want to throw them in the river first thing.

[B]

So I have a few last questions that I ask everybody. First of all, very much like the water of systems change, this has changed the way I think about systems change. So thank you. It's really great. But I do have a few questions I ask at the very end, and one of them is, what do you, John, hire your work to do for you?

[A]

Oh, gosh, I learned so much. And I feel like the work that we're doing now to me is the deepest change work that I've done. And I have so many questions about what we're doing with very few answers. And yet I know that it's the old live the question. I think work has helped me. I talked earlier about how do we move from mental models to more embodied models or understanding. I've still got a ways to go on that. So I think my work could just continue to help me develop as a human being. Because at the end of the day, I think that's where I'm headed. This is really about the evolution of humanity and the evolution of consciousness. And that may sound like, oh my gosh, could you work on that? I don't know if I can work on it, but what I'm trying to do is my own little part. But my work could certainly help me continue to develop.

[B]

What does your work cost you?

[A]

I would say my work costs me the same thing as I said when I said what I would hire the work to do. Just a specific example would be it's opened me up to some vulnerabilities that I didn't know I had before. And I think those are good. But wading into trauma is never easy as just one example. So yeah, I guess I'd say that it's opened me up. And that's both good and also painful.

[B]

It's very interesting when people say that the thing that they have their job to do for them is also the thing that it costs them. In fact, it's true of transformation work in general. Transformation work is always hard. It's always co created. But I had one person on the show who said, I hire my job to belong. And I say, well, what does it cost you? And he says, belonging. I was like, so it's probably what happens when you get to the very edge of things that, you know, it's almost like terminal velocity when you jump out of an airplane and you hit this speed where you're not accelerating anymore because air friction is the same. It's like you're just right there on the surface of it. That's great. Thank you. Like I said, I really appreciate you joining the show. Where can people learn more about your work?

[A]

Thank you. Collective Change Lab All1Word CollectiveChangeLab.org is our website address.

[B]

Let me say some things about these There is a great place to get most of John's work, so there's a lot of work that is paywalled, for instance at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, but it's freely available at the Collective Change Lab, so. So that's one thing to know. The second thing to know is we didn't get into it today, but there's tons of examples in there of successful collective change in really important parts of the world. So juvenile justice in the New York area, housing in Chicago. These are concrete examples of how when people come together, they can make the world better. And so I really recommend folks going to take a look at it. It's a good place to learn and it's a good place to feel encouraged. So thank you.

[A]

Thank you Derek. I really enjoyed this.

[B]

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.