“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
Our Approach
Five Overlapping Domains of Focus and Practice:
Ways of Doing.
This domain specifically addresses our capacity to embody, enact and bring forth the new—to generate, innovate, and manifest that which does not yet exist. Practice in this domain entails honing our capacity for courageous and skillful action and exploring the patterns of intervention required to successfully navigate hyper-complexity and disruptive change—which are often non-linear, non-forceful and may appear to flout conventional norms of leadership and advocacy. It also involves learning to keep moving cycles of experimentation, iteration and learning from our successes and failures. We practice moving with authenticity, audacity, creativity, and agency in ways that disrupt conventional patterns, shine a light on unhelpful consensus agreement, and open up constricting narratives in the direction of innovation and possibility.
Ways of Being.
The domain of ultimate concern that addresses the nature of self, consciousness, and identity—how we exist in the world and understand our own being. All systems shaping tools and techniques are harnessed to whatever state of being or structure of consciousness that is wielding them. Leadership that is rooted in complexity consciousness—a mindset rooted in a deeply embodied sense of interconnection with all life and systems that invites us to move with reverence, responsibility, and love – is qualitatively different than leadership rooted in a mindset of separation, fear, and control. Practice in this domain involves cultivating greater self-awareness, centered presence & complexity consciousness. It We engage in practices of awakening that enable us to see ourselves and the world a little more clearly and to move with greater awareness, presence and connection.
Ways of Knowing.
This domain addresses how we make meaning, process information, and understand complexity across time and systems. Not just what we know but how we know. Practice in this domain involves opening the many windows of knowing – seeing, sensing, imagining, feeling, thinking, dreaming, visioning, analyzing, somatically experiencing – and learning not only how different knowledge systems can work together and complement one another but how to practically integrate them into our leadership and decision-making. It also entails cultivating greater fluency with complexity principles and practices. To do so, we have to hold a keen awareness that certain issues are likely more complex than they seem, and may require critical thinking, a deep time perspective and an ability to hold multiple stories at once. Sometimes this may mean actively examining, or being gently challenged in perspectives that feel true —including the ones we hold most closely – while also being partial.
Ways of Relating.
All leadership is expressed through some form of relationship and this domain addresses how we connect and collaborate with others. Practice in this domain involves cultivating greater reflexivity, contextual awareness, power intelligence and the ability to navigate skillfully across boundaries of difference in complex socio-cultural networks. We learn the importance of building trust and psychological safety. Humility, curiosity, appreciation, an ethos of care, and fluidity in one’s position are critical building blocks along with the ability to sit in the fires of conflict and work generatively when it inevitably arises. And we develop the capacity to repair relationships after conflict or harm.
Ways of Belonging.
This domain speaks to our embeddedness within and accountability to larger systems—interior, natural, ancestral, and future-oriented. It offers a reminder to situate our self-understanding ecologically within the webs of life that sustain us. Practice in this domain involves cultivating a deep recognition of our interdependence with all living systems and developing a sense of responsible stewardship toward both human and more-than-human communities.
This domain also acknowledges that we exist within nested contexts—from our immediate communities to bioregional ecosystems to planetary systems—each with their own rhythms, needs, and wisdom. It calls us to honor our ancestral lineages while accepting responsibility as ancestors to future generations. This domain invites us to expand our sense of self beyond individualism toward a more expansive identity that includes our relationships with place, with other species, with generations past and future, and with the living Earth itself. In practice, this means developing ecological literacy, creating regenerative rather than extractive relationships with natural systems, and making decisions that honor intergenerational ethics. It involves cultivating reverence for the mysterious unfolding of life and finding our unique contribution to the healing and flourishing of the whole. Ways of Belonging challenges us to reimagine what it means to be human in a time of planetary transformation and to align our individual and collective lives with the larger patterns and purposes of Earth's living systems.