On Compassionate Systems Change in Education - A Conversation with Dr. Mette Miriam Böll

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Systems thinking can easily become an intellectual or cognitive processing skill. In social emotional learning, without learning how to integrate it, it can only go so far. So the combination of these different types of faculties of mind has proven incredibly helpful.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me this week. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. Many of us across education as well as in other sectors are increasingly realizing that understanding entangled systems and their inherent complexity is a critical capability. We've touched on this in previous episodes with Dave Snowden, Nora Bateson, and Daniela Papi Thornton. Today's guest has been doing amazing work in this area alongside Peter Senge, Daniel Goleman, and colleagues at the IB through the work of the Center for for Systems Awareness at MIT. Dr. Mete Miriam Boal is the co-founder and executive director of the Center for Systems Awareness, as well as the co-founder of the MIT Systems Awareness Lab with Peter Senge. Her academic background is as a biologist specialized in the evolution of complex social systems, mammalian play behavior, and philosophy of nature. Mete has a PhD in organizational ethology and holds additional degrees in contemplative leadership and the philosophy and history of science.

Hi Tim.

Hi, how are you? Good. Thank you for agreeing to chat. I'm really, really looking forward to the conversation because I've, I know a bit about the compassionate systems framework from colleagues at the IB and, and other colleagues and friends in the education space who've been working with you and, um, doing some of the work with the Center for Systems Awareness and all of the amazing stuff you're doing. So Yeah, firstly, thank you so much for joining.

Of course, it's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Good. So I think if we can just start kind of quite high level in terms of just in case people haven't heard about Compassionate Systems Framework first. So just to kind of give people a bearing on what, what it is we're talking about. One of the things I heard, or what I think it was in one of your reports about the fact that compassion is an essentially systemic property of mind, and that I thought that was a brilliant sentence. So yeah, I'd love to invite you firstly, just to give, if you could give a bit of an overview of what, why is it that you think young people and the education systems we're working in would benefit from more of this compassion and compassionate integrity?

Yeah, well, where to start? Because there's many, many ways into kind of focusing on that. I mean, the whole notion of compassion for some people immediately becomes identified as, oh, part of the soft skills or nice to have or something like that. And I'm always surprised when people think that working with yourself and greater self-awareness and emotional regulation and kindness and intentionally showing up in different ways, if people think that that's the soft skills, that's definitely because they've never tried it themselves. I mean, I have a PhD in biology and I'd rather any old day choose math and science over having to do this because it's really, really hard work. It's self— confrontational, and people have to figure out why they're doing what they're doing. And many of us are, you know, so habitually operating out of emotional structures that were shaped when we were very, very young. And because of the lack of kind of proper emotional literacy as a core principle in most of our educational settings, it's a complete blind spot. Yeah, for many people. And we've grown up you know, over these last many, many generations pretending that there is a split or a gap between our emotional state or who we are as humans at the emotional level and then our rational kind of thinking skills and critical thinking skills and cognitive processes. But the truth is, of course, that all activity in the brain has an emotional underpinning, if you will. So that whole kind of misconception that the stuff that goes on inside of us is not as important as, you know, what we're thinking about and so on is really causing a fundamental rift. And compassion and the whole notion of that being a kind of a systemic inherent, a systemic property of mind is because compassion is not a nice-to-have or niceties or now I'm always just going to show up and be, you know, kind and positive and all that. I mean, if that was the case, I would have failed miserably.

Wouldn't we all?

Yeah. And but what it is, is it's a choice. And when I teach it, usually people in many spaces will interchangeably use compassion and empathy. And so we start out by really trying to identify, well, empathy is an evolutionary strategy for being social. And it basically allows you to have a sense of what's going on in the other. And there are nuances to that. Passion, however, is something that you can intentionally grow out of empathy. You see, when you can just feel what's going on in the other, but you don't have tools or approaches or intentions or whatever, sometimes you get completely overwhelmed with feeling what it's like being the other and you want them to go away or you get into empathic distress trying to dim down their struggles so that you don't have to feel what it's like. And sometimes, you know, if you're a perpetrator or you want to bully someone, you have to somehow now have some level of empathy of figuring out what's going on in that other person and how can I hit them where it hurts, if you will. Compassion has an intentional choice to it, and it's the choice to stay grounded in my own emotional reality, not become overwhelmed by other people's emotions, but being of support for whatever is needed in that situation. And in order for that to happen, it has to be a kind of a spacious proposition, if you will, because you can't do that from a singular focus of, oh, this is what it's like for me. There's a constant kind of listening to orientation to what's the best for the whole of it right now. What does this person need? No, and boundary setting and all of that can be incredibly compassionate actions, but it's the process of really reflecting and intentionally wanting to show up with a sense of kindness, with a sense of care, and operate from that space. As best as you can in all interactions. And so the heart can hold paradox, if you will, in a system like the global system of education or our global situation in the world with all these intertwined systems. There's so much suffering and there are so many things we wish weren't there. And when you look at most activists, for example, you can go into climate activism or, you know, animal protection or nature preservation or equity or all of them. Really valuable, good, and needed places for people to engage in the world. But it often becomes really siloed. And if you truly want to cultivate systems thinking and systems awareness, there is a capacity to hold the whole of it, even with all the people in it that do things that you wish they wouldn't. All the perpetrators, all the politicians you hate, all the ones that don't care about the climate or other people or whatever, the racists, all of that, they're in that system as well. Now, if I have to hold that, if I intentionally choose to hold the whole of it from a space of still caring, I have to make my care almost like a rational choice, right? It can't be a personal, emotional, nitty-gritty thing because then I'll constantly act out. So compassionate systems and compassionate integrity is a process of consistently cultivating, I don't have to like you to care. I can choose care in all matters, in all interactions I'm in. And the good news is increases my well-being in each of these interactions. So it's— the compassion part is a really healthy disposition for humans and something that is much needed. Now, if it was like empathy, a kind of an evolutionary trait that just emerged spontaneously everywhere, the world would look very differently. But right now it looks as if it has to be a choice and it has to be cultivated because otherwise we can't actually operate like that. But when that happens, then people start showing up differently. They feel differently about themselves and they feel differently about the world. And care is kind of an essential component, I think, of the equation that we've left out for centuries.

Yeah, that's amazing. I love that idea that holding the paradox just feels like such an important ability, disposition right now because there's so much of it. I mean, we live every day and But I think often, and I'm seeing, you see this more and more, the response to that in an educational context is often the systems thinking part. So, well, let's just understand how the system works so that, but actually, and this is when you, I think you talk about systems awareness or systems sensing as well. And I think maybe you could say just a little bit about the difference between those two things, cuz I think, as I say, more and more the systems thinking competency is coming in as an idea that that's a valuable thing for our young people to have. But it's missing an element perhaps.

Yeah, and it can become an utter displacement in many ways, in my opinion. Of course, I'm super biased, so disagree with me. But interestingly, so when I started this work 10 years ago— I mean, not my line of work, which has been— seems to have been going ongoing for probably multiple incarnations, I'm not sure— but at least when I started exploring 10 years ago after Peter and Anne Goldman had put out the, uh, the Triple Focus book, So Peter Senge, guru within systems thinking, Dan Goleman, guru within, you know, social-emotional learning, right? Two guys come together, be like, should we put it together and wouldn't that be a great approach to education? And so the little, it's almost like a pamphlet, a small little book comes out with just a suggestion to, you could do this. And interestingly, Peter thought that all the people working in systems thinking and education would love it. And Dan thought that all the people who'd spent 25 years cultivating social emotional learning practices in education would love it. And they all hated it. And no forced marriage ever happened. So we began to explore what would it actually look and feel like? Because you see, to me, and I have great respect for people working with systems thinking in education and people working with social emotional learning in education. And I also understand that when you've invested 25 years in a particular direction and really focusing in on that, you don't really we want to add on something new. So we had to go to the periphery in a different way. But one of the things that became very clear to me, because I got to spend a lot of time with these folks, was in systems thinking in education, first off, there is a kind of a preconceived notion among many of the educators that there is an implicit social-emotional learning component to it because it has a lot of kind of reflective skill sets in it. And the same in social-emotional learning, they think that it's systemic. What they do. And it was interesting for me coming in, not being an educator, you know, having worked with the evolution of complex social systems my whole life. So I like watching how people are moving in systems. I'm like, oh, oh, so we learned a lot about how we could actually grow this effort. And systems thinking can easily become a kind of an intellectual or cognitive processing skill. And social-emotional learning without learning how to integrate it into your challenging situations in the world— great to learn how to breathe and self-regulate and identify your emotions, but when your emotions are overwhelming because of large complex issues in the world like inequity or racist oppression or climate change and you don't have any tools or skills to work with that, it can only go so far. So the combination of these different types of faculties of mind has proven incredibly helpful and really novel in many ways because our focus is as much on the inner work as it is on the systems work. But you see, it's all the same tools and strategies and practices because we don't see it as separate things. These are not personal systems, relational systems, and larger systems over here. It's more of a continuum. Where all the same tools and practices and approaches can be somehow integrated depending on where you're zooming in and out of.

Yeah, no, that's amazing. And I, I'd love it if maybe could you also kind of insert the development process in, because I wanted to ask you about the history of how it has grown and the IB obviously was a key agent in that process of coming together and co-creating what turned into then the Compassionate Systems Framework as a way for schools to use, take these kind of systems thinking, systems sensing ideas and tools and practices, which I'd love to talk to you about in a moment in the specifics. But the development of the framework, I think, was then done in collaboration with the IB, right?

Yes, it was, and many other partners. So we were very fortunate at the time. You know, I had, I had an opportunity to really explore, as I said, in the kind of the periphery of people doing quite remarkable and innovative work in different places in the world in education. To just learn more about what might be needed and how are people, you know, at that time I thought that all the people doing all the work already would be the ones who would eventually figure out how to do it. And it dawned on me gradually that we're probably gonna have to figure this one out ourselves. And then fortunately at that time, as I said, Jane Drake, who is now one of our managing directors at the center, was at the IB and she was the head of CIA, which in IB terms means Curriculum Innovation and Alignment. But, you know, I always just pretended that I was working with the head of CIA. And she reached out to us and asked, so kids have to go to graduate school to learn anything about complexity. And why is that? And what can we do? And that was, of course, really intriguing. And so what we did was she brought in different IB principals and educators that she knew. We all met at MIT, I think the better part of a year. So as I told you, we brought in young people. We wanted students in the— we didn't want to create yet another framework done to kids. We wanted kids' voices in the creation of it. We had remarkable kind of complexity scientists from MIT, educational scientists like Mark Greenberg and Kim Jonath Reichel and others were part of this whole mix. So it was one of those unique formations where practitioners who were out there in the trenches, but, you know, the exquisite sort that are really, really innovative and used to creating stuff in a different way than the circumstances that many educators live under in our time. And the young people and all these different scientists and so on. And for a while, we just started kind of exploring what could this look and feel like. And out of that, the term compassionate systems arose and this whole notion of compassionate integrity, something that is a focus on alignment. So integrity basically comes from a Greek term, integra, which means wholeness. And when we talk about integrity, the kind of the most used definition of integrity is that there is some kind of alignment between how we're acting in the world, how we're thinking and how we're feeling.. And we were like, what would happen if that could be compassionate? If people are actually working towards caring intentionally, clarity and kindness or clarity and care are the two kind of primary components of this cultivation of compassionate integrity. And so we started prototyping because Peter and I had a lot of tools and practices. Of course, he had worked with all the organizational learning tools in I had worked with a bunch of, you know, different, more contemplatively founded tools and strategies, and I'm totally a model builder myself. So immediately I started putting together many of the models that we're teaching now. So we knew how to do that, but we didn't know how to take it out into the school. So the IB prototyped it and we would have check-ins with them, you know, over a year or half year or something where they would report back, well, we tried this, you know, we tried the ladder of inference with 3rd graders. Here's how I made it work. And so on. And then in a couple of those schools, I could go out and start teaching, you know, the tools and practices. And it was a quite kind of organic formative process. And it was always with the focus that it's okay that we're prototyping it primarily in IB schools. There were a few kind of schools that weren't affiliated with IB that we started prototyping in as well. But it has to be for a much broader group of people. It's just that the IB is a wonderful percolator, if you will, for a novel initiative like this. So I got to visit with all these different places and go back over a couple of years, you know, with groups in Spain and Switzerland and many places in the US and, and with this consistent kind of iterative process of what works and what doesn't work. And then that was the birthing of this framework. And it's had remarkable traction and uptake. We've never had a marketing strategy. We've never been heavily funded or mandated anywhere. And so on. It's, it's been word of mouth. And obviously it helps that Peter has, you know, a big name and there are many people who would like to go to a workshop with him and so on. But as many people, or many more people, don't have a clue who he is and what we stand for or anything, but they've heard from their colleagues that this is the most transformative and groundbreaking work that they've ever been involved with professionally and for many of them also personally.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I think it's, I've heard from people who have been through it, that's that kind of personal dimension that also you have to bring in, as you said, you know, there are, it's hard work, you know, showing up in, in these ways is, is hard personal work. And that's some of the things that if you put yourself through that hard personal work, it can be really transformative.

But you see, Tim, where I'll speak for myself. I'm in it because I am one of those humans on this planet who almost can't handle what's going on, right? I'm in a constant state of heartache. I can't handle what we're doing to our planet. I can't handle how we're treating each other. And my grievances for our kids who are killing themselves, who are depressed, who are stressed, who are anxious, who don't have a sense of belonging and all that. My heart is broken with all that. And so I'm in it for changing the world, right? Not, you know, saving the world. I'm in it for the systems change part. And pretty much all systems change efforts fade or don't work or don't become self-sustaining, regenerative over time. And I've had many a conversation also with, you know, large foundations and really influential people and I don't know what. And they're asking, what is it? And I'm like, I have a hunch about what that is because it's the inner part of the work. But because we have such a segregated understanding of ourselves in the work and then, oh, I'm professional doing stuff out there as if it doesn't matter how I'm bringing myself into the spaces that I operate within, we create this kind of chasm. And that's why most systems change initiatives don't work. Now, I don't know what the world will look like, but I do know that if we have a generation of young people who are trained this way, where they learn, you know, to understand complexity and delay processes and interconnectedness and interdependence and, oh, it actually matters what kind of food I eat because it's grown in the other end of the world and all the transportation and the people involved in this and that. They learn all that and they learn to care about it and they learn to regulate themselves and they have strategies for relational competencies that they'll consistently grow and cultivate over time. I'm sure we'll be in a much better place and it's not going to harm anyone in the process. So that's the, you know, motivation for continuously doing something like that. So if it didn't grow as word of mouth, we wouldn't be doing things right. It should grow because people self-report, this really works for me, you should try it out. And that to me is a good strategy.

Yeah, amazing. And one of the things I wanted to ask you later, but I'll do it now because I think it's relevant, is that You talk a lot about the fact that this is not a curriculum or a program because it's a set of tools and practices. And I think that feels to me like a really important insight because often when we take this kind of systems thinking, more systematic approach to complex problem solving, however sophisticated we like to think that thinking is and that, that tool creation and that program creation is. It's of the same quality of the problem itself. You know, it's often kind of exacerbating or mimicking or replicating the problem that exists.

Yeah.

And I think often that's what we do in education is we turn the response to the thing we're trying to address into content to teach into a very cognitive brain-based, you know, propositional, let's teach that, you know, then our young people will understand this. And then we'll be better off. And actually there's just the qualitative shift doesn't happen. So I really appreciated the fact that you were talking about it. Yeah. Not as a curriculum or a program, but as a set of tools and practices. So is there anything there you could say perhaps maybe also to give people a bit of a sense of some specific examples there? What kinds of tools and practices are we talking about?

Yeah. Well, we, one of the integral tools and practices that we're working with is the Systems Awareness Iceberg. And I always use this as an example when I introduce it because you've operated in the spaces of education for a while. I don't know if you've noticed that there is a tendency towards program fatigue. I mean, educators are so fed up with the next new fad, right? You know, new principal comes in and the new principal's thing is project-based learning, so now we're all doing project-based learning. And then after 2 years, new principal comes in and that new principal is social-emotional learning, so now we're We all do social-emotional learning. And very often the teachers don't, or the educators at large, also the expanded learning educators and everyone, don't have a sense that they actually get to practice for very long before the next new fad comes along. Even worse when it's the superintendents, of course, the superintendent turnover rate in the US, for example, is horrendous. So programmatic interventions are not gonna create any changes. And the reason why, as I'm usually illustrating in my little systems awareness iceberg, is in systems systems thinking in general. And Peter and I, of course, complement each other really well because he comes out of the systems dynamics tradition at MIT and is an engineer, but I'm a biologist. I've studied living systems my whole life, right? And living systems are intricate. They're— the complexity is beyond the roof, right? And full of mystery and all that beautiful variation and diversity in nature, and it always grows and all of that. So it's a very organic process that we're somehow trying to understand. But foundational for all systems thinking is structures in place shapes the behaviors that we see. When you have a programmatic intervention, it's a direct response to a particular behavior. So you're trying to alter a behavior by inserting a new program. But the structure in place is the one that's in the first part is actually creating this behavior. So one of the kind of often an epiphany for people on the first day of any introductory workshop, I'll at some point say something like, You think the system of education is broken. It's not. The system in place is designed exactly to produce the outcomes it's producing. That's what it means that structures produce behavior. That means that you have a structure in place and now you're adding on some kind of programmatic intervention to change these behaviors. You're not changing the structure. All you'll do is you'll exhaust yourself. You'll have great people who are really invested in the work, pushing against the structure in place to try to create different outcomes. We really want to change it. You have to change the structure in place. How do you change the structure? Well, you know, then people think, oh, all the artifacts of policy and curriculum and infrastructure and metrics and all of that, that's what changes the structure. And it does in part, but only if people change along with it. And that means that people's mental models, how they're habitually emotionally responding, how they're thinking about things, how they're acting and operating and showing up, All of that needs to change as well in order for the structure to change. Those are the two main components of what we call the underlying structure. The artifacts, all the physical manifestations, if you will, the metrics, the infrastructure, the policy, the curriculum, and all that. We forget to also have to attend to the people, which means that new curriculum comes into play, but the teachers are teaching it the same old shitty way that they've been teaching all the other curriculum that they've done for many, many years, not going to change anything. You have to create changes in both these dimensions. And the inner work is really hard because we come from a tradition where in many of our cultures it's been taboo to work on ourselves, and it's certainly not something we can request or demand of anyone. But you see, for us to gain emotional literacy and learn social competencies and reflective capacities and contemplative practices from early age which will only help us to increase our well-being, understand our sense of meaning and purpose in life, and get a greater sense of belonging. It is a tragedy in my view that this is not much more integral to what we think about when we think education in our time.

That is a fascinating problem though. I think there's a real interesting question there in that latter part of doing that self-work because in an educational context. I mean, I was having this previous conversation with Barbara Oakley about this, the question of what types of qualities or dispositions or aspects of being human and showing up are we going to prioritize and encourage or teach, right? As soon as you put it in an educational context, suddenly you are teaching how to be. And, and, and I see that happening in education, you know, all of the language around competencies. There's an interesting kind of shadow side to that, which is what kind of human do we want? And we know where those kinds of conversations have gone before in the past and, you know, people putting those things into action. And that's an interesting tension for me that I don't know that I have around this work.

Yeah. Well, I see it this way. First off, I, you know, coming from a field of trying to understand living processes, I know that diversity is essential. The most resilient ecosystems are the ones with the greatest diversity. And I believe that to be a proposition throughout living systems, including human systems, which means that this is an invitation for everyone to join. And if people— if it doesn't click, if it doesn't work for folks, or if they're totally against it, that's great too, because their voices in the system. And I don't have any energy to try to convince anybody about anything. It's basically an invitation. Now, that's the first kind of premise. The second then is I don't have an agenda as to what kind of competencies people then come out with or what the skills are that they're cultivating. These are universal human capacities that we have undervalued for millennia and that the old structure of what we can call capitalism or white male supremacy or industrialized whatever worldview and so on. That structure is coming to an end and we're all seeing the suffering and the grievances of it right now as the new is trying to emerge. We are firmly rooted in the new that's trying to emerge, but part of the new is that we're trying to integrate the old structure. We're not trying to shut it off or cut it because then we would be reproducing the old structure, right? So we're trying to, in an integral way, include and integrate all the amazing things that have come out of this old structure. But we call it enliven it, right? But allow it to actually grow and flourish and become organic. And that means that there is a space for everyone in that. We're not after a particular— now you have to be this kind of human. But we do want for all children in this world to have the ability to figure out who they are and how they want to be in life and what they're striving towards and what— how they follow their blisses. As Joseph Campbell calls it, and so on. And we've come out of a structure where essentially that was only for a very select small group of humans on our planet, the elite, right? The systems in place are structured so that the elite can gain from all the stuff that's working down here, and we don't have to care about what's going on. That is just not an adequate model for any of us any longer. It just won't work. And we see the outcomes that it's producing. And I've thought a long time about this. And as you could probably imagine, Tim, I don't know a lot about economy. I don't know a lot about sociology.

I don't know.

There's many things I don't know a lot about. And I thought, how can I have a meaningful kind of input on this? But then I thought, hmm, I know a shitload of things about this systems work, right? And what I can see is that if the structures in place are consistently producing the outcomes that we see in the world today, then something is wrong with the structure. That I can say, you know, with full integrity. Something is not working in the way in which we've organized ourselves. How do I know it's not working? Well, the decade up until COVID started in the US, that decade, teenagers' suicides and suicide attempts in the United States grew 100%. There was a 100% increase in attempted and actualized suicides in young people. And that's just United States. We know that everywhere in the world, young people's health and well-being is declining so dramatically that we don't know what to do with it.

Yeah.

If we're a species that have constructed a world where our young ones can't live, can't thrive, don't know how to exist, and this is the outcomes that we're constantly striving for, then something fundamentally needs to change. And that's what we're trying to do with this work.

It's fascinating, isn't it? Because it's huge, right? It's like, what do you do with that? Right? It's just this, these, the hyperobject is like the phrase, or, you know, it's not even that, it's bigger than that. It's like the, it's the size of the universe, this kind of challenge that we're facing. And so talking about it like this is, I sometimes find completely overwhelming because then it's so big and abstract. And actually where you started at the very beginning was very local, very interpersonal, very in between, you know.

But that's the thing, Tim, that everything global is hyperlocal.

Sure.

Because it has to happen locally.

Exactly.

Right? Whatever we come— if I had just all these fancy theories about what should be done globally, yada yada, wonderful. And what then? Hard work that people have to do in the middle of all the frenzy that they're right now existing within. So that's what we are dependent on to make these changes happen. But it tells you something about what's missing in systems change initiatives, which is people. People are the only actual vehicles and agents for changing systems. And they can do so, but they have to understand and practice and want to do it. And the wanting to do it, that motivational part, how does that come about? You're probably not going to pay them. That's not going to work. It has to be an intrinsic motivation. So it's a long-term process. But once people are on this path, we can say they don't get off it again. Once you internalize this work, and we hear this over and over and over again, there's not a— I live my life from this position now. It's not like, oh, this is something I do for work. And interestingly, many of the social-emotional learning people that we know well, I mean, and I have love and respect and gratitude for the incredible work that they've done. Most of these initiatives dwindle over time. They dissipate. They become integrated into schools or settings, whatever settings, and then they stay there for a little while and then they begin to dissipate. What we do, the Compassionate Systems Framework, doesn't have that. When people start working this way, they don't stop working this way because it becomes, you know, once you've internalized a ladder of inference and you know when you're jumping to conclusion, you can't unknow that there's always a part of you that is part of whatever conflict is going on.

Sure.

It's just there. And that's, I think, the beauty of it really.

Yeah. If I could as well, just to reflect on the fact that, as you say, it's hyperlocal and it's about, and we forget the people, but I also, one of the things I was so interested to learn about your background is that it's also about the space between the people, right?

Yeah.

It's not just because I think that's also one of the challenges that we face is often we think about these disconnected individuals who you know, might need to change their competencies or develop in certain ways. You know, it's actually not about those, those individuals.

You're right about to hit my nerd button right now. This might take 3 hours.

I love it. But that's where that is for me. That's the kind of most interesting insight I've had recently is like, it's about the space in between those people.

Yeah.

Because, and that's where I was really interested to learn about your idea of regenerative social field because, and, and your background in cognitive pathology, right? That idea that we need to stop dealing with isolated individuals and we need to start thinking about what's this interrelationship, this thing, and call it a field or, you know, whatever name you want to give to it. But yeah, maybe you could say a little bit about that thing that's happening there.

Yeah. Well, it's been a mystery to me always. I think, you know, I'm probably one of those people who my whole life I've been completely puzzled by what was going on around me. And so my life journey has been trying trying to figure out what the beep is going on is basically probably my main kind of, you know, motivation for doing all of this. And I studied animal behavior as a kind of a way to try to understand better what's going on. I found that it was very distracting. People will say things, but the way that people talk about things and what you see is going on are usually two completely separate realms. And I understand a lot better what's going on and And then they say stuff and I'm like, what? You know, and then that just creates more confusion basically. So I spend a lot of time in my life figuring all those things out. But with complex social species, take dogs for example, so many people have dogs. We know, at that time when I was studying, we couldn't talk about the context within which things are happening. And I was always so amazed by that, Tim, because clearly, you know, when you see dogs, I heard you had a dog barking in the back. And I studied play behavior because is it's one of those mysteries, right? We can't justify why pretty much all social species, and a lot of species that we don't consider the social species, invest a lot of their time and energy in play behavior. It's not necessarily optimizing fitness, and it's not optimizing reproduction, so it doesn't fit within the paradigm. So people have been scratching their heads and like, why are they doing this? To me, it's not a mystery at all why they're doing it, but that's a different thing. So I was studying that, I was studying wolves and dogs and all of that, and you see them in those play behaviors and we've studied, you know, the play bows when they crouch on their front legs, wag their tails and they're like, basically that's a signpost where they say, what I did just before or what I'm gonna do just next will look as if it's fight, but it's not fight because I just did my play bow first. So it's a way of saying, what comes next is play or what just happened is play, which is very advanced communication skills, obviously. And clearly something happens in the interpretation between the two individuals because it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to study the information processing in one individual and then study the individual processing—

exactly—

information processing in the other individual and pretend that there's a vacuum between them because obviously there's not. And so this had really been a kind of a core part of my being puzzled and really trying to figure out what was going on for many years. And then I started studying humans with the same kind of notion. So I would literally hook people up to Holter monitors monitoring their heart rate variability. I would film them, I would analyze facial expressions, bodily postures, and so on to just find out what actually does seem to be going on in the context. Because we've all had experiences of being— oh, the contagious laughter, or you come into a space and somebody just had a fight and it's like you can sense it in the room. So the energy is like this and it's person and you want to get out. And some people will scream and run, and some people will freeze down and dissociate, and some will start crying. And you know, we have all these responses to this, but we have no literacy for understanding it. So the whole idea of us existing only as these separate entities and not acknowledging that life in its very essence is always interconnected— look, it never arose in a vacuum. We are connected to all life there ever has been and all life there ever will be on this planet just by the very virtue of being alive. So interconnectedness sits at the heart of who we are, and we're the only existence like this in the known universe, so we should probably take it a little more seriously. That's true. And so the whole exploration with generative social field is to gradually begin to develop a literacy and cultivate a literacy with people. Not that we tell them what's going on, but that they begin to discover what it's like, because obviously that's essential for creating the kinds of spaces where we would like young people to grow up.

Yeah.

And so we know we can't reach everybody on this planet. But if we can more consistently create generative social fields for people to live and thrive and learn in, then we're onto something because they are by their very nature healing spaces in the sense that I feel seen, I feel heard, I feel I can be me, I can grow, I can learn, I can explore, and so on. It's a sense of safety, but it's more than that. And so with our lab at MIT now that Peter and I launched last year with this at the heart of it, trying to study the contextual aspects of systems change. How do we know it works? And how is the social field somehow a conductor or vehicle for changes that happen? Because then it's no longer independent on the individuals and the individual leaves and then everything falls apart.

Exactly.

It's in the field. And so people who are contributing to that field will consistently, you know, co-create those kinds of spaces.

And it's a really difficult thing to talk about in a way, isn't it? Because as you say, we've kind of, we lack this, the language and the literacy around it. I've been doing a lot of reading recently about ecological psychology and just trying to understand some of the insights from that and Gibson and affordances and, you know, and I think, I hope there is an increasing awareness that the context is such a huge, I mean, Context changes everything. There's a book I read, I don't know if you've read Alicia Guerrero's book, Context Changes Everything. I mean, it's just, it's so important.

Yeah.

But we lack a language to talk about it. And she talks about constraints and there's so much learning to do there. But I think for teachers, I mean, if we bring it back to an educational context, I heard you talking about the magical classroom and it's, you know, it sounds like rainbows and unicorns and, but actually what, like, you know, as a teacher myself, you know, you know when there is a space that feels like that, where there were people are engaged, there's a buzz, there's the learning is happening, there's a kind of a warmth somehow to the environment. It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen. Yeah, but we don't really know how to talk about it.

Exactly. And, and it happens more or less randomly, and it doesn't have to. It can be something that we're working much more intentionally towards. So what we did was we brought And I, of course, in the early days, I got to spend a lot of time in, you know, different educational settings and classrooms and all of that, just sitting there trying to observe what's going on, sensing the context and all of that. And so we brought in some of these masterful educators that consistently produce these kinds of educational spaces. And then we brought in some of the, you know, really broad-minded scientists that we know that are not, you know, Some scientists have a lens that they look through and everything fits into that lens then, right? And this is not that, because when we don't have a language for it and we don't have literacy for it, you have to have that kind of spacious, open mind of just being willing to explore what might that be. And we had a series of meetings at MIT and all kinds of developments around that. And one of the things we did was we brought in a French professor, Claire Pittimanchon, who is a professor of microphenomenology. So phenomenology, of course, is the science of experience, if you will. Yeah, it's a kind of philosophical approach to understanding experiences, but it's been integrated in many different ways. And, you know, understanding more about people's experiences, microphenomenology does that at a kind of a really small scale. So we would ask people to focus on when they notice the shift in the field. Some people call it the drop in energy. Somebody calls it the shifts in the field. And explain what was going on in those specific moments through this interview technique that she's developed. And you literally see layers of the onions peeling off. As the challenge is, of course, whenever I would ask all these damn educators about things, they would be like, yeah, great question. Yeah, I don't know how to answer that. Or, oh, my favorite one was one guy. I asked him, so how, I mean, how have you built this amazing place? He was like, oh, 'Oh, we did it all with love.' And I'm like, 'I'm a scientist. How am I supposed to do anything with that?' Right? That sounds great. So now I'll go out and tell people, 'Exactly, do it all with love. You should just do the same.' Let's do that.

Yeah, exactly.

So anyway, so we needed something, that kind of translational piece, because for many people it's tacit and deeply kind of intrinsic knowledge that they don't know how to express. Through this methodology of this microphenomenological interview technique, we began to tease out elements of what it is people are noticing. And one of the things that was really interesting to me that I haven't quite figured out how we're going to be studying yet, but that definitely is part of my portfolio for future projects, is many of them mentioned that it has a kind of an auditory component. They said, we can hear when the field is not intact.

Interesting.

And when one person said that, it started to ripple out and people were like, yeah, oh, that's why I walk the rounds in my school. I can hear if the classroom are okay. And one guy had been keeping bees, and he was like, oh, it's like when the queen is not well, you can tell by the buzzing of the bees. So there's something about the sensitivity to the quality of the field that these masterful educators, or people who are masterful at holding space in all kinds of ways, have some kind of orientation to. Now, since we don't have a language for it and zero literacy and understanding, it becomes a kind of an inner thing, and then, oh, they're the ones who are producing or creating magic. And I'm like, could we at least try to figure out what it is? And then we could begin to integrate that into, you know, teacher training so that becomes something that at least is available to people. Because we don't have those sensitivities. Yeah, we just don't. We haven't cultivated it equally. E.O. Wilson, the great evolutionary biologist, he was famous for his Half-Earth book and, and Conquest of Being Social and so on. He wrote, I believe it was in The Social Conquest of Earth, that our senses have deteriorated, that we're so overly focused on our visual sense that so many of our other sensory capacities have deteriorated. And you can test it with any old bug, right? A fly or a butterfly or something. They will immediately sense when you're behind them. You can't catch them because they'll know. Not because they can see you, not necessarily because they know exactly where you are, but the sensitivity to the field is intact. Now, I don't think that E.O. Wilson is precise in saying that they have deteriorated. I think it's our ability to have awareness or to pay attention to what's going on that's deteriorated because we've been so narrowly focused.

Exactly.

Over these past many centuries. And that is part of why we're consistently working, you know, with the contemplative practices, the mindfulness, the spacious awareness, the sensing, and all of that. Yeah, part of what it means to be a human being, and we don't know how to navigate our complex social surroundings without it, which is why we suck at most things right now.

I mean, it is a fascinating problem, isn't it? Because there are a lot of the language we're using around sensing or noticing or, you know, contemplation, you know, it puts you in a conversation in this crowd over here, which is, you know, which is a little bit woo-woo and a little bit fluffy and not very scientific, but pseudoscientific. You know, you've got people talking about fields and morphic resonance and, you know, this kind of stuff, right? And then I hear you also kind of the scientist in you saying, well, you know, how do we understand what this is going? And clearly there are scientists in all sorts of disciplines all, all over the world trying to do the same. And I. It's a fascinating tension again. And my, one of my questions I suppose is how much do we want to make it explicit? So in a way, you know, if you take it to the iceberg, like how much needs to, needs to remain under the waterline and how much, because it, if we make it explicit, do we kill it? Because I think sometimes that's what happens with this work around caring and compassion and empathy and all these things. We, we make it explicit, we turn it into content, we try to teach it, we make it propositional, and then we've killed it. And so I think there's a real interesting tension between those two things.

That's it. I hadn't thought about it quite like that, Tim. I hear what you're saying. I wouldn't usually go and find myself in spaces where people are self-proclaimed compassionate, for example, because that thing that often comes with that, the kind of oozing niceties, it's just I want to say fuck all the time and become very rebellious about things. And so that's the level of maturity I've apparently reached in this late in life. But anyway, so I hear that and I think what we're— if we could describe it a little differently, what we're trying to help people do is to cultivate their own literacy, to pay attention.

Yeah, yeah.

Connected and to have an intention with who and how they want to be in the world. And we're not trying to control it from there because, you know, what happens is probably by a combination of the people who are drawn to this kind of work, but also what I think is a basic human premise. We are by far the most social species on this earth and we've forgotten. But to be a highly social species means that we're highly interconnected, which means that there has to be a foundational part of wanting to do good because we understand that interconnectedness We want to do good things that helps, you know, other people thrive. Part of the disconnect is, of course, that this zero-sum mind game has kind of been infused in people that if they're thriving over there, then that takes something away from you. It's exactly the opposite. So what we're trying to do is to help people recognize what happens when we are in a generative social field, recognize what it feels like in me, recognize how I can contribute to it. And recognize what are the outcomes that can come out of this space like this.

Yeah.

And for kids in particular, of course, with all the diagnoses, all the stress and anxiety and depression and self-harm and lack of sense of belonging and lack of motivation and lack of meaning that we see everywhere in the world, for kids to be in spaces like this and grow and thrive and figure out who they are is probably a fundamental premise for our survival as a species. And I don't want to overdramatize it, but we are on a direct course to something that does not look very promising for future generations.

Absolutely.

And we have no idea how to take collective action. So people have to figure out in themselves how they want to show up differently. That's the only solution I can see.

Yeah, but I think there's also something there about just being okay with the implicit, right? Like even for scientists, this being okay with the implicit, because I think if we, if we get into the mindset that it only exists epistemologically, right, ontologically, if it only exists if it can be made explicit, yeah, then we're falling right back into that same trap.

Oh, we then we identify ourselves as old structure, but that doesn't mean— I mean, I'm a kind of an old school scientist in the way that whenever there is a gap, I'm like, oh, I really don't understand what's going on, we should to explore that. Yes. No, that we haven't discovered the truth about anything yet, and we probably never will. But one of the things that we can do is we can make it— it's a little bit like one of the things that I was kind of studying to become more able to talk more cohesively about social fields was electromagnetic fields. I was like, okay, so we have theories of fields everywhere in physics, and theories of fields have always been there's something going on, but we can't tell what it is until some— at some point we identify what it is. I don't think that we will have a kind of a reductionistic model of here's how a social field works, because it has layers of, you know, intergenerationality, which is really hard. Everything that we've learned from our parents and our peers and, you know, down through the generations, it has a lot of different interpretations of meaning in it and has emotionality. And so that creates a hell of a lot of complexity. So all we actually have to rely on is people's capacity to name what's going on. And now when we bring people together collectively and they begin to name what's going on, we can begin to see if there are generic structures in how people are perceiving it. And then we have something to work towards. So that's what we're—

No, it's absolutely fascinating because then you're also asking people to listen to the noticings of the other people in the space because you're not only studying, you're also creating at the same— I mean, it's, it's, it's fascinating. And I feel for listeners, we've kind of gone into this and up into the clouds, but I mean, it's, I think it's such interesting and important work, but maybe to bring it back down to the reality that actually off recording we were talking about that young people do. I would love to ask you just to finish with what are you hearing from the young people involved in this process? So, and I, I know you've also had young people involved in the co-creation of the process. Process right from the beginning. So yeah, just what are you hearing from the young people?

Well, we are very fortunate that we were, we were quite adamant from the very beginning in the development of the framework that we wanted to have young people as co-developers, so it wasn't just yet another initiative created by adults done to kids. And then our young people formed the youth leadership work, and our youth leadership team have worked with students of all age in a multitude of cultures and different settings and different demographics and so on around the world. And that's by far the most important part of our work in my view. I'll give you two examples. One is we had a process at one of the IB schools in Indonesia, one of the big flagship schools, the British School of Jakarta, that we've worked with for many years. Lovely school, David Butcher was used to be the head of the International School of The Hague, and then he moved out there and he moved out and accepted the position in Jakarta by saying he wanted to create a compassionate system school. So we had a lot of time to figure out how to do that, and we spent a lot of time out there. Part of it was a designated kind of youth leadership process. So our youth leadership team, primarily our managing director for youth leadership, who was a part of developing the whole framework, started working with young people from all kinds of age groups in primary and secondary at BSJ. And it was all voluntary and they could join us if they wanted to. They catch on immediately. The kids, young people, they get this because it's very intuitive work.

Absolutely.

And, and then they started teaching younger kids in their schools and And fast forward to a year later, we did a kind of one of our workshops for the region where people came in from all over Southeast Asia and Australia to join at BSJ. And the kids that were now like 13, 14-year-olds that had been in this process for about a year were a part of the workshop on equal terms, which was shocking to many of the educators. Imagine, like, how am I supposed to check in with a child? And, you know, but it turns out this child has deep reflective capacities as most of the adults in the space, and they are so much quicker to pick up on this work.

Amazing.

And then I overheard afterwards David, the wonderful head of school out there, asking them, so now what do you want? And the kids were like this, they were like, oh, what we want is we want access to the school during the weekend so we can invite in the kids from local schools because we're well aware that they will never have access to this kind of education. Education, and we want to make that up to them so that we can host workshops for the locals. And all of these kids were Bahasa-speaking kids, so they could actually work with the locals. So that was the one thing. And then they started— now the process is the kids are integrated into the board structure of the school, and all decision-making is happening with these youth ambassadors in the work. And it's absolutely incredible. And I got a note from one of the parents of one of the people involved sharing that this child had been bullied and had had really negative self-image and didn't want to speak up ever and so on. And after she had become part of the Compassionate Systems work, she had started to bloom. She would now speak up in all settings. She understood herself much better. She had taken care of herself. She integrated practices for self-care and she knew what she wanted in life and so on and so forth. Now, of course, that's just one parent sharing about one kid, but it's very—

it's powerful.

Absolutely. Yeah.

And the other end of the spectrum is we did a workshop a couple of months ago where in California, where we do site development work. So we work very intensively for many years on the ground with all kinds of educational settings. Some of the kids that were present in that workshop was from a continuation school, which basically means they've got kicked out of all the other schools because they don't know how be in classrooms.

Sure.

They are taught for 3 hours a day, and there's no real expectations to them. And we had a couple of those kids in the workshop. Now, this is a full-on workshop, all adults, 100 people in the room and 100 people on Zoom, very advanced, you know, language and so on. And we had some of our youth leaders in the room as well supporting the kids, but they were there on equal terms, full days, as opposed to 3 days a of regular learning in a small classroom. And so I checked in with one of the guys who was very quiet, sitting in the back. I checked in with him and he said, well, the weirdest thing happened. I dreamt that I was at the workshop all night. And I asked him, so I said, okay, so you had to spend all day here and then you go home and now you spend all night in the workshop and you come back the next day. And he said, it was much better than being at home.

Wow.

And then I asked him by the end of it, and has never had any success with education whatsoever. Never in a very advanced adult setting. He's now exposed to this for 4 days. He has signed up to be part of our youth council. Both of the kids from this continuation school did. And he was like, this is by far the best educational experience I've had in my life. A 14-year-old kid who was never in school. So you see, those are in ways two extremes of what can happen. And why is that? Well, probably because universally human. It matters. It's about us and what we want to do. It's not mandated or curricular activities. And there is interconnectedness and care and love and compassion infused into all the processes, which means that people can feel seen and safe and connected in the spaces. And that actually makes quite a difference for the most of us.

That's it. That's it. I mean, those are the structures we want to change to shape the behavior, right? I mean, that's so powerful. Yeah, amazing. Thank you so much.

My pleasure. I loved meeting you, Tim Logan. Yeah, you too.

Continue.

Amazing.

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