A living systems approach to education - A Conversation with Carol Sanford

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

People call it purpose, but I think that leads people astray because it becomes my purpose. Essence is really like a value-added process. It's my work to do for the world, with the world, but I have to grow me to learn to do it.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me for this week's episode. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. It was such an honor this week to be able to chat with Carol Sanford. Carol is one of the most important thinkers and disruptors of the last decades. Like no one else, her incredible body of work calls out the deeply damaging effects of behaviorism on all aspects of our lives, especially learning and development. And she advocates for a living systems approach to business, education, and community. Carol's ideas have developed through a lifetime of practice in collaboration with every kind of organization from local community to global Fortune 500 corporations, as well as through her learning from various indigenous and wisdom traditions. In this conversation, we talk about the 7 first principles of living systems that Carol has outlined in her amazing series of articles on what a regenerative education system and practice might embody. You can find the articles on Medium or linked in the show notes if you're not a Medium subscriber. As someone living with ALS, Carol's voice can be a little hard to understand at times. So if you'd like it, you'll find a transcript linked in the show notes along with links to all of Carole's other work.

Perfect. Well, thank you, Carole. It's the greatest of pleasures to be able to talk to you. So thank you very much for joining, and I'm really happy to be able to hopefully introduce more and more people to your amazing work that you've been doing, I know, for a long time around regenerative business and regenerative education. And in many other ways, but the world needs more of it. So I'm so happy to be able to, to speak to you and share the work more.

I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Awesome. Oh, lovely. So what I thought we'd do with the conversation, just to orient listeners, is just, you've got this amazing series of 4 parts of a series around what regenerative education is. There's also obviously a wealth of amazing work in your books. Which I will definitely link to in the show notes. But perhaps what we'll do is just talk through some of the, the content in those articles first, and then hopefully then that will inspire people to go off and, you know, read your other work. But perhaps just to set the context for the articles, one of the things that you talk about in the first part is about the toxicity in the ideas and practices of the current old paradigm system. That's a quote from the article, and that definitely resonates with a lot of the conversations I have on the podcast. So how would you describe some of that toxicity? Like what are the things, the ghosts in the system that we're still grappling with?

Well, first you have to know where they came from. Right. The problem with modern education is it's based on a behavioral paradigm. You know, we've only had mandated education for a little over 100 years. Before that, kids learned on farms and in stores and small schoolhouses, which also grew their own food. And that's when behaviorism was created as a psychology. It was tested on school and education first and conditioning kids so they became, quote, "good productive citizens." What he did is stop teaching or having kids learn how to think for themselves. Instead, told them what to think. Someone else made all the decisions for what they should learn, and not even the teacher. It's based on Department of Education. And so children don't learn to think for themselves. And the second thing is, it's all very fragmented. So you have different subjects and different subjects is not how life works. It's all one thing. And so I talk about the idea of education should never happen outside of a value-adding process. And a value-adding process means the kids are adults. Yeah, kids can be in the business A value-added process means that they're doing something to produce value. It's why there are so many schools with gardens or farms around. My grandson went to one where they built things and had to get permits. And starting when he was 6 years old, he knew how to think through an entire value-added process. You learn math and English, Spanish and values, and the kids win the school's fault. And so the third thing is we genericize it and everything's the same, where kids are different, life is different, roles are different. So those are the first three things that I see as toxic.

Thank you. No, that's amazing. And I really like then what you say about the fact that they're, even then when we tried to start designing a new approach, which I see all the time in, you know, in many different places. But you talk about then trying to design the new with the old mind. And there's something, there's a really interesting trap there, isn't there? So, and that's again why I really want to share your work because you are really getting to the underneath layers of what is it that the old mind kind of keeps us trapped in, you know?

So let's talk about how that happens.

Yeah.

That's an Einstein quote, by the way, not mine. We use it old mind to design the new. The problem is partly our science. Everybody thinks of science as scientific method where you fragment a bunch of stuff, hold everything still except one thing which you move around. It's what I call the science of fragments. The science of wholes, which you find in indigenous cultures and quantum science and in wisdom science, always works with the whole, like evaluating process for one child. You don't grade them on their math and attitude and everything, the separate things. You work with a different kind of science to see things. And so right now when we design, we pick up the science of fragments and use it to design the new subject. Then we add on a few things. We ameliorate a few. We try and make it slightly better than the old version. But we're using the old science fragments.

Yeah.

And that's, I mean, that's actually your first element in the 7 that you lay out in the 7 kind of premises of regenerative education, right? Engaging with wholes. So how do you see that as an educational response, I, I hear what you're saying about the science, but also then educationally, how might we engage with wholes in a way that doesn't just stay in that trap of fragmenting, right?

Yeah. So in those articles, I use the Seven First Principles I learned from my grandfather, who's part Mohawk, and, um, they're not a list, although people treat them that way. They're a system. Yeah. And the entry point is whole. Not whole is, whole is confusing because it's a humanist idea, not a regenerative one. The way you do it, and I do it with companies, with organizations, with youth groups, wherever I'm working, you start with having the school get involved in evaluating process. Now it's whole because humans are always seeking to contribute. But we stopped that with behavioral ideas and say, here, you do this and you do that, you do that. And we'll do it at different times. We'll have math and then physics and then we break it all up. So the only way you can stop that is have the kids or employees or people work on contributing something So running a business is perfect. It's why I work with businesses a lot, because they're already in the value running process, although they fragment it and are not running it that way anymore. And when I work with the school, obviously I don't work with them anymore, but when I did, it was started with the Alice Waters model of what are you going to do for your community? For something that matters. And kids have learned everything they need to learn by building a small entity that serves something, serves their community. Like in Alice Waters, the kids were— they had a 4-acre farm in the middle of Berkeley, and I went to Berkeley and we looked at what we could build and decided it would be senior homes, although later they did business with kids from 4 years old through high school, provided food and literally ran a business. And they had no trouble seeing the value of math or physics or chemistry because they were working on being a service. So you make it a whole by looking at the context it's in and what it shows.

I love that. Amazing. And it's so interesting, isn't it? Because we are— it seems like we're so averse. It's not even a question that comes up often in schools, like, what's meaningful? What matters? What's of value? It's like we, as the adults in the room or the curriculum designers or whatever, we get to define what should matter to you as an individual rather than saying what actually matters here.

Yeah, you know what the most frequently asked question is by students? Do you know what that is? Why do I need to know this?

Exactly.

Will I ever use it? Of course they will, but they're learning it out of context, so they can't see that value in the meaning. That may be the most damaging thing. It's a fragmentation, right?

Yeah, but it's not because sometimes the response to that is, well, you'll need this later on in your life. Well, you know, there's an instrumentality to the response of like, oh, well, you will need this, but you don't know why yet. But actually, this is a whole different thing that's happening when you're saying what is of value, what matters now in this context.

And you have to be producing something to do that. You can't say, let's play like we're a farm. You have to actually have a client. You have to have a restaurant or a farmer's market or a senior living home. And that's the only way you have to make it live. So they have to learn. And I teach teachers how to build schools the same way I teach businesses. You better know the people who are going to eat what you make or use what you make, not through surveys, but through direct connection. And then you have kids promise to do something for them that will make a difference, and then they're tying their own development and their own learning, right, to what people really need.

Yeah, it has to actually matter, doesn't it? We're not— not in a simulated way, because sometimes we do that in education. It's like, I will— we'll play at doing an authentic—

it cannot be simulated. It has to be more like action.

Learning. Yeah. And so, okay. So then, and I fully hear what you just said about this is not a list, but I do, I would like to go through them if we can. The next principle you talk about is evoking essence, and this is one maybe it's a little bit more, little bit more abstract than some of that practical meaning.

It's only abstract because we've never heard of it.

Right.

If you think about you, Tim, would you say you're distinctive? From me, are we different people? Do we have at our core some different meaningful value we're trying to bring into the world, some particular purpose we're trying to serve, and some particular way we go about it? Every living entity has essence. This was part of Socrates' teaching. It's also found in all indigenous cultures where they look at each child as having an essence to be revealed. And when I was in Ecuador, I met a woman who was a shaman, and beside her for the entire healing and work was a young 12-year-old boy who never left her side or her attention. And I asked her afterwards, why was he there? And she said he was born to be a shaman. Now, I don't know whether you're born with this, but I think you may be, and you're trying to figure out what your work is to do in the world. People call it purpose, but I think that leads people astray as it becomes my purpose.

Right.

Essence is really like a value-added process. It's my work to do for the world, with the world, but I have to grow me to learn to do it. So essence is not taught, not seen. I do a lot with every company I walk into. We start with the founding, and the founding is when the essence is born. So for example, with Seventh Generation, we looked at how much Jeffrey was about transparency, and we developed strategy around the essence And they became the only company that told you, put on the label their ingredients, which is not required of anything but food. And that changed the industry. People had to start talking about the nature of ingredients and where they came from. Right. If you start from essence, my essence is more about disrupting certainty. My grandfather, called me a positive contrarian when I was a kid.

I love it.

Constantly not just questioning, but questioning the validity of things. Yeah. And he said I was born to be disruptive, but in a positive way that made a difference and engaged people in learning. So each of us have that.

Thank you for doing that.

Well, I don't have any choice.

Well, there you go. But it was interesting. You brought up purpose because that's what came to mind as you were talking, because I wrote a piece a while ago about conscious purpose, because obviously Gregory Bateson, someone you knew, talked about conscious purpose and some of the dangers of that. And I think sometimes this idea, again, it sounds like a good idea and we bring it into education, like, you know, let's help our young people find their purpose. And so what, yeah, what could you say more about that?

Okay, when you ask that question, the ego answers. Not as intentions. And you only can ask it in the context of— I always go back and look at where have you made a difference with your life? What is the story? And you have to learn how to do this. It's not a set of steps. It's a different mind works on it. But purpose is very ego-centered if it's not other people's purpose.

Right.

So essence is about other purpose, not your purpose.

Yeah.

And you collapse a child's view or an employee's view into their world, and you— they're now— their ego is trying to be known. They become trying to brand their purpose and sell their purpose, and then they lose the sense of external considering of others. And I know Gregory was— we talked a lot about ego and the effect of ego undeveloped. Now you need ego, sure, to have courage, but you need it to be managed by essence, not by ego. A purpose should be managed by essence, not ego.

Yeah, amazing. So then moving on to the third point is about recognizing individual potential, and one of the things you talk about in the article how the old paradigm is, is really fundamentally based on a mistrust almost of people that if we, if they're not controlled, then we will have unsocialized and unproductive citizens wreaking havoc on society. Right. So there's a, yeah, there's, I always feel there's a kind of real mistrust of, of other humans in some of the implied assumptions of some of that. So what would then would be the, the idea of realizing the individual potential?

Okay, um, behaviorism did that. It said there are experts and authorities and you don't know you, you can't know you. And it said that explicitly. And I write a lot about— I have my book No More Gold Stars, has won 3 awards this year for best education book. And the reason is it's really going through in detail how Behaviorism undermines potential. First, because we decide we don't trust ourselves, as you said, or we don't trust kids or even teachers, right? Exactly. Parents. We create generic competency lists, and where potential comes from is not a generic list, but from the essence of an individual. So you, Tim Logan, have a specific potential. Based on your essence that can be developed. It can be self-developed, but I always say to people, you need to really be in community. That's a missing ingredient often. It's why I run community to help people be in a value-added process, developing their own essence and the potential that's needed to carry that out. So potential It's never generic. You know, this whole idea of high, medium, and low performers based on the test, or gifted, talented, remedial, all those are nonsense because they're based on generic lists of what potential looks like. You have to look at each child, and it's not that hard if you change the work design, the way of teaching. Yeah, no, absolutely.

And maybe that also links to then premise 4, which is about the development of minds and beings, which you talk about. But the, 'cause sometimes, and I know Nora talks about this a lot about the idea that sometimes we get trapped into creating hierarchies of development and that every, you know, we should be climbing this, some kind of this ladder of development to become a more enlightened human being or whatever it is. But again, in a very generic way. So what, how would you, from a living systems perspective, talk about the development of minds and beings?

No, it's like an outside capability called development, but it's really development, the inner growth, inner development of self. And there are hierarchies that help, but they aren't a ladder. They are the ways you go to the top. There are things you win at different moments. So there's a hierarchy of reactive, ego, and purposeful behavior. Sometimes I'm reactive, sometimes I'm ego-driven, and sometimes I'm serving another purpose. That's a hierarchy, uh, drawing circles.

Yeah, okay.

But I'm not eventually or permanently purposeful. Person. I wish I were, but, uh, every day I'm reactive sometimes.

Yeah, sure.

And my ego gets in the way. So they're used to help us see the power of our effects in the world, not as a judge of how we compare to society's ladders of success. Yeah, they're personal development instruments.

Yeah.

When people attend my— join my communities They're committing to growing themselves as a being, working on your own will and your own state of being and your ability to think well. And there are hierarchies of thinking, not that somebody else— the real problem with hierarchies is they keep people in their box.

Right.

And there are in indigenous communities and wisdom communities argues and thinking that we can use for ourselves. And so my community, we all work on making it different, but we come together to assess ourselves based on instruments that come from Indigenous wisdom tradition. So that's what development's really about.

Lovely. And in a way, again, this— I mean, obviously these are all connected because it in a way then connects to nestedness, because what I was thinking as you were talking about is is you've got, is sometimes that development conversation just pulls people out of their context, right? Because everybody's experiencing in a context all the time. And of course we are imperfect and we, we respond and react because we are embedded in that constant context, which I think often education is very good at pulling things out of their nestedness, right?

The really important thing about nestedness is not context, although what you said is accurate. It's seeing it as a natural working system. So if you go by— rename watersheds, life sheds, because watershed is a look at one thing, water, and we are water. And so you can't just look at it generically. You have to look at the essence of that life shed. Now, what does your mind do when you think of life shed? You think about bears and salmon and trees. And water and air and hydrology and geology. And you learn to see it as a system and a system within other systems. So the context is really about systems and them being at work and their effect on one another. I'm learning. My grandfather used to take me walking every day, and he raised pigs, and he was at work for the Farm Bureau. He was constantly saying, "Look at the effect of Piggy there, our baby pig. What happens when she takes a poop? Where does it go?" And he'd make me track all the kinds of things about water coming through there and then looking at the wetlands and the weeds that cleared what Piggy had done. And so if you build a land and understand the life shed it was in, You wouldn't understand how you could have pigs, and he taught people how to have pigs in a way that were not destructive to the landscape, right, the creeks nearby, but not by giving me rules and best practices, but by seeing it as more alive and effects were happening. Yeah, that's the importance of nesting.

And that's interesting because it's like there is a lot of talk about systems thinking and systems approaches in education now, but often it gets trapped in, like we were saying at the beginning, in the kind of the old mind, because it, yes, it's about a system, but it's somehow still fragmenting the pieces to see how they fit together, right?

It's not together. That's the wrong thing. Okay. So that word is fragmented. You have to fit it together. This is a system at work. Alive, right? Work. That's mental. Interesting.

So even the word together implies fragmentation.

Exactly. And I was saying parts. There are no parts in the living system. They're all working. And the hydrology on my grandfather's life shed was different than the one my father had about 100 miles away. So you have to look at the essence of each life shed. At work. And you do the same with kids in a school ground, whatever they're looking like, or restaurants, at work, and the effect of their farm as in the life shed they're in. And you're learning about the ecological system, hydrological, geological, biological, trade, economic system, all by being in a life shed. Serving them like a restaurant.

All right, thank you. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, just makes me think how deep the traps go, right, in the old mind.

Yeah, and it's in our language. If we learn to watch our language— people say to me, how can you tell what paradigm I'm in? They say, it comes out of your mouth. It's not hard. Amazing. And you could learn to look at it for yourself.

Yeah, beautiful.

You have all the power in the world.

Amazing. So just the last two, if we can. Moving from the laser focus to nodal is your premise 6, and then premise 7 is thinking about regenerating energy fields. So maybe if you could just say something briefly about the last two, and then we can—

So nodal is another one of those ideas that's hard to conceive of because we're used to fragmenting and then prioritizing and the leveraging. It's something that's been together as under. If you have ever had acupuncture, you learn about nodal, because acupuncture only puts in maybe 3 needles and everything moves. That's because there are intersection systems that are the node which are guiding an entire system. So learning how to see One of the reasons I work on education is it's a noble place to change society. Parenting and education, because it's a value-ending process to raise your work culture. And so if they begin to quit doing it with the old model, you can learn. And all it takes is a couple of things. All my books are written about neural intervention, how I did it in South Africa. And how Mandela gave us the award for having racism not where it's at, which had been tribes inside Colgate. We did it by education and having people work in the value adding process. That is a noble intervention. And part of it is, is it creates a field. You know, when you go to a party, you walk in and you can feel field. Are people happy? Is there a problem? Is there a— alcohol, but somebody's state of mind. And if you work with children with this state of mind, it builds confidence. You know you're building a field. So quantum mechanics is the way it plays. I learned about fields. Things change when you move one thing. You move something here, a bunch of other things change. That's a field. So my grandfather said in Mohawk, or Iroquois culture, people were more mindful of the field and the mindset and the state of being and the state of mind than they were what they were going to do, because the doing would change. Based on the field. If you're doing a selfish attitude, you have a selfish field. So noble is how you work when you have the field. It doesn't take much. Noble is the idea of moving one or two things that are the heart of why everything else is working the way it is. But you have to go back underneath, way underneath,— the brain works normal.

And that feels to me like a whole set of capabilities and awareness that we've just lost in so many ways. I just know, it's so interesting.

You can't do it without working on the whole soul.

Yeah. Thank you, Carol. This is one of the greatest pleasures being able to talk to you, and I just so appreciate your time. I know I want to honor your time, and so let's stop there, but amazing. Thank you so much.

Thank you for inviting me and for caring deeply.

And I will, I will share with the show notes, I'll put all the links to the articles and, and your books. And yeah, I love it. And the indirect work is the only other thing that I just think is such a powerful idea. So thank you for that as well. That's not for the conversation. That's just, I just wanted to say that.

Have you read No More Gold Stars?

No More Gold Stars I've got, and I've read some of it. I haven't read all of it yet, but, um, you'll love it.

Because it builds on in the work.

Yeah, beautiful. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Thank you, Tim.

All the best. Loads of love.

Okay, bye-bye.

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