Systems-led Leadership - A Conversation with Daniela Papi-Thornton

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

This isn't fixing the problem, but it's easy to build a school and it's much harder to change an education system. And so that's been my learning over time is how do we actually incentivize people to try and contribute to that wider change rather than looking for these quick fixes?

Hi, thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and it's a great pleasure to bring you this episode of the podcast in partnership with Notosh. As schools and education systems around the world explore ways to bring more real-world, authentic, and problem-based learning to students' experiences, this creates many more situations where young people are coming into contact with complex social issues in their attempt to effect positive change. My guest this week, Daniela Papi Thornton, has been working with young social innovators and social entrepreneurs throughout her career to help them better understand the problems that they are attempting to tackle. Daniela is an educator, facilitator, and author whose work focuses on systems-led leadership, an approach to social innovation that centers on systems understanding. She has served as a lecturer at the Yale School of Management, the Watson Institute, and Oxford University's Said Business School, where she was also the deputy director of the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship. In her writing, she has co-authored a book, Learning Service, as well as an influential report on on tackling hero-preneurship. Thank you, Daniela. It's amazing to be able to have this conversation. I was really, really interested when I discovered your work around systems-led leadership, but then also a lot of the work that has kind of been leading up to that around how do we support young people to step into the agency and make change and all of those kinds of conversations that are definitely happening in the education space where I work. And I've found it really interesting the way that you've been kind of gently problematizing some of those things in really important ways, I think. So I'm really happy to be able to connect and have this conversation.

Thanks for having me.

So I'd love to dive in firstly with the idea around that work that the educational institutions are doing to kind of support young people where they, say for example, they feel passionately about something in their community. They want to make some change. There's more and more conversations around that, whether it's in project-based learning in schools or service learning and wanting to encourage young people to do that. But one of the things you've been talking about is the fact that inadvertently they might be promoting this idea of hero-preneurship in the way that people kind of see and respond to problems that they care about. So yeah, I mean, just to kind of start with that, where do you see impulse comes from and then what might we do with that in order to keep supporting the young people but kind of frame that in a way that's more productive perhaps?

I think we create this competition model. When I say hero-preneurship, what I mean by that is this idea of the entrepreneur as a hero, right? This idea that there is a hierarchy in terms of how one contributes to the world and that the founder, startup leader, project initiator, that like entrepreneur is at the top of some sort of hierarchy, which, which is a false narrative. And we create that through our education systems, like you just said. Like, we create that by incentivizing entrepreneurship over other roles, right? So I have no problem with entrepreneurship. I think actually we need entrepreneurial spirit, but— and we definitely need entrepreneurial thinking. But the, the role of like founder— you can be entrepreneurial and be like an entrepreneurial activist, an entrepreneurial journalist, an entrepreneurial educator, an entrepreneurial researcher, an entrepreneurial like media producer, you know, you— and but it's this idea of like startup founder being like the number one path. What, what that does is it creates this, these false incentives to approach problems with a, I'm going to create a new venture to fix it, right? Most of the time always, actually, there are lots of pathways to fix a complex social environmental challenge, right? And so if we're like falsely prioritizing one over the other, we're overlooking other pathways to change that might be quicker or easier or more appropriate for that person's skill set or for the time or for what's needed, right? And the problem is if we don't give those things accolades and we don't give people credit and we don't give them the tools to like approach collaborative approaches or knowledge sharing or like movement building or different approaches, then we, then we're missing out on those opportunities. As educators, I think we create that by doing things like social business plan competitions in a format that resembles traditional business plan competitions. Who are your competitors? How are you going to win? How's your initiative better than theirs? Rather than how is your action contributing to a wider system of change? Because we know that that is how complex systems change, not by one person fixing it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'd love to, I mean, there's loads in that part in terms of responding, I'd love to get into more deeply, but just maybe to orient people, I'm aware I kind of dived right into the meat of the hero-preneurship stuff. What was it that brought you to that kind of insight in terms of your own path and the way you wanted to kind of make change in the world or your pathway that you took through education and to come into that space of social entrepreneurship?

So my teaching is usually about the mistakes that I've made. So I— yeah, and then it makes me a good teacher for it, right? Because then— because I can say, don't do what I did. You're gonna make mistakes, make your own mistakes. You don't need to make mine. Let me help you not make mine, right? And I feel like hopefully it also helps— there's maybe less stigma around it, like I made these mistakes. If you've made them too, it's okay.

Yeah.

But let's try to not keep making them, right? And so my mistakes were, at least in this context, related to going to Cambodia. And I first visited Cambodia just as a tourist, and I visited a friend who was working there, and he was running a social enterprise, which I didn't have that vocabulary. I didn't know that terminology, but he was the first president of Digital Divide Data. And I had just been working in consulting, and I'd learned Microsoft Access, and I, and I had quit my job saying, I will never do this again. I had to wear a business suit 5 days a week. I was like, I will never work in business again. Oh my gosh, this is horrible. And then I arrive in Cambodia, and I'm like, oh, he's using all of these skills that I had started to learn, and he's doing them in service of— at the time it was ex-trafficked women, people with polio, landmine victims. Now they work with young people who can't economically afford to go into the studies and learning that they want to learn. And they get this job and they learn data entry. And, you know, and I was like, wow, you're using your skills in a way that I feel excited about. So it's my first, like, foray into understanding that business can be used for good. And then I decided, okay, I'm going to come back to Cambodia. And I had friends who were biking across Cambodia, and I thought that sounded really cool. And so I got some other friends and we decided we were gonna bike across Cambodia. And then we figure, oh, if we're gonna bike across Cambodia, you know, our education system has told us we should fundraise and do something, right? Yeah. So we Google build a school in Cambodia. My mom's, what, my mom was an educator, a teacher for 37 years. So I was like, oh, I believe in schools. Build a school in Cambodia. Let's Google it. Turns out there's a website, buildaschoolincambodia.com. We write to them and we start fundraising. But we did not have any idea how to vet a nonprofit. Is it real? Is it a good one? How, like, if we're going to change education, is building a school the way to do it, right? And it turned out through the learning that we got was, wow, we funded the construction of lots of school buildings, but most of them were just sitting empty. And the building costs $65,000 to build. It's built to World Bank specs, etc. And Instead, you know, teachers at the time were getting paid $25 a month if they were getting paid at all. And so it was my first lesson in that, like, schools don't teach kids, right? People do. There's an education system. It can't be fixed by just building this building and walking away. It has my name on it. It's next to an empty health center with a Belgian guy's name on it. This isn't fixing the problem. Yeah, but it's easy to build a school and it's much harder to change an education system. And so that's been my learning over time, is how do we actually incentivize people to try and contribute to that wider change rather than looking for these quick fixes.

Yeah, fascinating. And was that a learning that you had at the time and you then adapted your approach while you were still in Cambodia, or was that then a reflection you had kind of later on?

I really wish it was super quick, but I mean, I was in Cambodia for 6 years, so it was, you know, we had a number of years of building schools and giving things away and giving bikes away and giving uniforms and books and etc., etc. And I had done a lot of volunteer travel before this point But that was the first time I stayed, right? So a few years in, you know, halfway through that 6 years— probably took longer than I would like— was when I started to realize like, this isn't going to solve these problems, right? A, we can't solve them on our own, and B, things aren't going to solve them. Yeah, right. And we also met brilliant people and people that, you know, like taught us and called me out on what we were doing and helped us learn, right? I'm picturing a brilliant woman named Andrea Mesmer who had already gone through a lot of this learning herself and had created, it was basically a multi-year program in partnership with schools. And what we would do, so we brought Andrea in to help us with this and we would partner with these schools to say, first, let's teach you about your rights. Like what happens if we don't get our books? What happens if teachers aren't getting paid? How do we advocate? What's supposed to happen? First, we would actually— before that, let's get diversity on your board, right? So it's not just older men, it's women as well, it's different ages, right? So let's help you get like a really active board that is supporting the school, right? And you— and there's a whole process and trying to support these schools over a multi-year process so that it wasn't like we come in, we build something, we walk away. And what we learned in that process too was actually Number one, you had to have a principal who was excited and active in trying to reshape how their entire education system worked in their town. But the main takeaway and how we ended up shifting after that was that we had young people, we had like middle school students who were listening in. They were the ones who— we had a group of students create a fish pond in their own student club and like take on some of these things. And so Actually, the organization that I helped found in Cambodia, when I left, when it got taken over by a Cambodian team who are much more brilliant and systems thinkers than I am, who understood the system better than I did, you know, that was my key problem, was coming in thinking I could change a system I knew nothing about.

Sure.

They made a shift to say, let's really do a lot of investment in young people and support those young people to come back onto these boards and to come back into these things. And so we're actually just now at the stage where our first scholarship student has gone back in to teach in one of those schools and stuff. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Much longer cycle, longer term impact. Yeah. Interesting. It's, I mean, it's just so interesting hearing what you're saying in relation to some really, really well-intentioned work, like a lot of really, really well-intentioned work that is going on across the world in different contexts, you know, privileged contexts where they want to do something to support and help, but you know, this urge to support, to do something like you say, maybe it's just fundraising or there's all sorts of ways of engaging. But the question that I am often left with is what's the role of the education system to support? And in a way you were talking to it there locally in Cambodia, which is amazing, but more broadly, I mean, and I love this quote in one of your previous talks at the Do Lectures, our education systems are no longer training young people to understand problems. And I think there's a lot in that quote, like, were they before and has it shifted? But also how, how do we support young people to really truly understand the depth of problems and opportunities? It's not all negative, right? But just the, the interactions, the complexity, the interrelationships of some of the things you've been talking about. What does that look like if we have an education system that supports young people to really get those kinds of insights?

So I don't know enough about this. You probably do as someone who looks at education systems, but my understanding of kind of the Socratic method and, you know, if we look at how education systems are working at that time, it was about questions, right? You're generating questions, right? And I think one of my colleagues who I've taught with at CU and who runs the Wolf Willow Institute, Julian Norris, he has this great quote that I love where he talks about the quality of your curiosity, right? And so that's actually what I tell my students Tim Logan's a lot now as well. I am not judging your solution. I don't want you to jump to a solution. We don't understand the problem yet. I want to judge the quality of your curiosity, right? So part of that is just reframing the end goal. Like, the end goal in any short-term way is not to solve this problem in this term, in this class, in this year, whatever, right? It's to understand it better so that you can find your next pathway into understanding it even better, your next pathway to contributing to change, right? And so if we as educators adopted that mindset, that my job is to evaluate and support the quality of your curiosity, right, then it's back to that Socratic method. It's back to like helping you ask questions, right? And so when I introduce this really basic tool called the Impact Gaps Canvas, and that tool I always say it's, it's a common sense tool but not common practice, in that it's common sense that you would want to ask questions about a problem before jumping in to solve it. What's happening? What's holding it place? You know, what is already being tried? What's working that someone else has done? What has someone— does somewhere else that a similar problem, maybe not exactly this, right? Like these kind of like these curiosity questions that are like, if I go into this issue with those questions and I start to answer the ones that I can, and then I ask people other ones, I'm gonna get even more questions, but I'm going to go on this curve that I always show my students, which is like, you're going to start by having these assumptions and kind of this like, I know enough to like take action. And then all of a sudden, at some point, you're going to have so many more questions that you don't know how to answer, you can't answer yet, that you're gonna be like, I know nothing. And I'm like, great, that is when we're doing our job well, is that we're helping you get to a point of realizing it's so much more complicated, right? So there's like something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, right, that it— that reflects that. We, we think we know more than we know at the beginning, and as, as we go down and we're like, oh my gosh, I know nothing, because we're deepening into the volume of questions that we haven't answered. And then hopefully we don't leave our students down there, right? Because that's like despair and chaos, right? And we need to then bring them back up and say, okay, now you're at a point where I'm fine with you going to that hackathon or doing that, you know, and like throwing some ideas against the wall because you have enough context and humbleness, right? It gives you that humbleness too, to recognize that this isn't easy. And hopefully by then— I use a term sometimes as well called marrying you to the problem rather than marrying to your solution, which is like, you know what, my solution doesn't seem to be working. I'm willing to throw that out in service of still trying to solve this problem and finding other pathways to contribute.

No, absolutely. And apprenticing with the problem is another one I've heard you use, which I think is great as well. Just that kind of like the idea of being an apprentice. You don't learn a craft, you don't learn that. Quickly. And I think that's one of my questions is how long do we need to sit in the problem and apprentice with the problem? Because it's usually longer than we think.

So I borrowed the term apprenticing with the problem from Jessamine Shammas Lau, who used to be the executive director of the Peri Foundation, who is brilliant and humble and all the things that I want to be. But Jessamine would use that term to talk about if I don't have lived experience of the problem, How do I learn about it? Because there could be issues. There could be issues that you didn't live that you want to contribute to, right? Just like me in Cambodia.

Sure.

But I am not going to go in there saying I'm going to fix it right now. I'm going to go in there saying I want to learn about it so I can figure out, you know, how to fix it. So we define that way to apprentice. And in reference to your question of like, how long do we sit in it? It's interesting. If I'm teaching in an MBA program or an entrepreneurship and innovation hub where there's a lot of Type A people like myself, right? I also have an MBA, right? So I get it because I am one of them, and I am the type of person just like a lot of them who are like, let's fix it, let's solve it, let's go, why are we waiting, we're late, let's hurry up, right? In those cases, I often find myself like pulling on the reins and being like, no, let's wait a little longer. I, I do an activity where I have the students actually hang up their solutions, right? Like, I teach a class through University of Chicago in Hong Kong with two fabulous colleagues, Kate and Christina. We're just in Hong Kong, and we had the students do origami, make these little t-shirts, but inside this origami paper we would have them write all their solution ideas. And then we have this cute little hanger and shelf, and they go hang it up on the shelf, right? And we say, hold on with this idea. We— you're welcome to move forward with these action ideas, but first let's pause right now. Sometimes I also get to teach in, let's say, it's people who are doing PhDs, or it's in actually this case in Hong Kong, we were working with a lot of social workers, or we're working with people who get complexity already. They are deep in that, and they might be kind of more risk-averse people who are— who, when they come across these challenges, they're like, it's too complicated, right? In those cases, I'm like, hackathon, go for it, try something. And it's a balance. Um, Sally Osberg co-authored a book, the name I'm forgetting right now, but it's a book about rethinking social entrepreneurship, and they have this great dichotomy in there where they talk about this idea that if you really want to solve a problem, first you need to be humble enough to respect the system of how it got there. You can't look at this problem and be like, oh my gosh, it's so horrible. How are these people doing this horrible thing? How did this problem get how it was? Instead, you have the humbleness to look and say like, this is how we got here. This is why people have these entrenched views. So there's a humbleness. And but on the other hand, you have to have this audacity. To think, I can contribute to change. Like, it's possible, and I might find a way to contribute to change, right? So there is this dichotomy, right? You need this humbleness and this respect, and you need this bravery and this, like, self-belief. And that's— I think when I'm talking to a young person that wants to create change, I'm usually trying to analyze, like, which one do you need a little more help with, right? Like, do you need a little more help to, like, bring down— let's get into the humbleness here You're not going to fix it all tomorrow. Or do you need a little help to be like, you know what, you know a lot. Yeah, go out there and try something, right?

That's interesting. It's so interesting that it shows up differently in different groups. Have you noticed the difference in age with some of those things, or is age not such a factor?

I mean, generally no. I think you can have a huge ego at any age, but I do think that undergrads, you know, when I work with undergrads, they tend to be more humble. I mean, there's obviously a spectrum within that, but they're like, they recognize that they're learning. So they're more likely to say like, I might not have the answer, right? Because they're kind of used to like still trying to figure it out. And then if I'm working with MBA students, forget it. Like, that's like I said, I'm one of them too. But like, that stage where like, I, I came into this program with my solution, sure, you know? And I'm like, well, hang it up for a little while.

You—

there might be something you could learn, right?

Yeah.

And an example, when I was working at Oxford, we had our MBA program, we had our Exec MBA program, and actually was the MBAs would rate their leadership-y, kind of like more quote-unquote touchy-feely type classes, really low. And the Exec MBAs would rate those classes really high because I think there was a part actually as they got deeper into their work role that they realized that actually these like pieces about how do we understand people, how do we understand how we work together, how do, you know, the less analytical pieces of change and the more complex pieces and human pieces of change, that those were what was going to make the difference, right? And so it's not necessarily age. It might be like there's like a humbleness, then there's a hubris, and then we go out in the world and try and work and it doesn't work. We, you know, and then we get that humbleness again. But not everyone goes through that curve.

That's true. But, but no, it just also made me reflect on the fact that, so I think it's, is it Moving Beyond Better, the book that you're talking about?

Yes.

Sally Osberg. Because the reason I, the reason I know it is because she wrote it with Roger Martin. Yes. And I spoke with Roger Martin on the podcast previously. Oh, great. About strategy, about business strategy. And my, my business background is, is also not that high. And I find that really, that kind of different energy, as you said, that kind of humility and the audaciousness together, having those things together, the right amounts at the right time and responding in that way. Really interesting because, you know, the way that Roger talks about strategy, your business strategy is like, there's a lot of audaciousness. There's not a lot of humility in there, right? It's understanding the space you're in, but it's now it's like, what do you want to be the best in the world at kind of thing? And it's, it's a really interesting, like putting those two energies together that I think is, yeah, it's a real challenge in this space of when you want to actually kind of affect positive change in the world.

I think we have too much of the latter, right? I think we have too much of the, how do I get to be the best in the world? And I get that that attitude is what's needed in business growth, because in business growth there is only one thing, usually in like a depressing view on business being, there's one thing. You're— you open up your little bank account, you stick your head in, you count your dollars, and you close it, right? Okay, we're doing great today, we're not doing great, right? Like you're— you have this one indicator of success. Are we making lots of money, right? When you are looking at complex social environmental challenges, right, there's not this one indicator that's easy to track at any given moment, right? That's all the complexity of a system. There's time delays and lags as to like when you see the impact. There's all these other components, so you can't just stick your head in and be like, oh yep, today we changed the world really well, right? You don't actually know, right? And so I don't think in those challenges, I know in those challenges, you can't go out and say, how are we going to win? How are we going to be the best in the world? Because A, never happens alone. And B, if you have a view that you're going to win, you're taking the wrong energy into the system, right? I give this quote to my students all the time, which is the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener. Bill O'Brien. I think I heard it though from Robert Sigliano, who's a great educator in the system space and also works now with Omidyar Network. And he is just so humble, like, he's a great example of that. But of how— so there's these two parts, this humbleness and this audacity that you have to bring. But to get there, this idea that the success of the intervention depends on the interior state of the intervener means you need kind of two parts of work and two parts of education, right? So that's our job as educators. We need to be educating young people, how do systems change? How do I understand a system? How do I understand a problem? How do I understand complexity? How do I start to intervene? How do I measure if I'm creating change? How do I, you know, collaborate, blah, blah, blah. These are kind of like the harder, quote unquote, skills, not necessarily hard skills, but they like, because they involve a lot of soft skills too, but the skills of change, right? A, but then B, If the success depends on the interior condition of the intervener, then it's our job as educators to help people work on their interior states, on their interior conditions, right? Rather than viewing that as like, oh, that's for therapy or for coaching or for leadership work— like, no, that is for entrepreneurship and innovation and social change and activate all of it, right? We cannot change the world unless we're willing to change our inner state.

Yeah, that's interesting because there's a, that self-awareness that you just like, in order to constantly monitor where you are, because that, you know, in a way everyone has that hero prana energy in them. That's called ego, right? And, you know, and that shows up importantly in certain moments, but if you can't be aware of that and then dial it back down at the right moment, then no, absolutely. And the other thing I wanted to ask you about was, you mentioned it once earlier, but just that idea of lived experience. Of a problem and what's the role of that? Because as you said, going to Cambodia yourself, you know, first time there and just trying to understand, you know, that's a very different context, different culture, different set of lived experiences. But as you said, people do have this kind of sense that they want to make positive contribution, maybe in context where they have no lived experience. So what's the, yeah, how do you, how do you kind of reflect on holding that tension?

So the term lived experience and the— my views around that were certainly shaped by Baljeet Sandhu, who has done a lot of writing on, on the value of lived expertise. And she and I both were part of the Clore Social Leadership Program in London at the same time. And it was interesting because we were working on, you know, the same problem but at different ends, right? So she's looking at how do we value this lived expertise of people who who have lived in problem don't often say on their CV, like, you know, let's say you're working on the issue of the unhoused, right? Doesn't say like, was homeless, right? Was unhoused, right? But that actually, that experience of having gone through that gives you such a different lens and context and connections and experience that you could bring into the work of trying to solve that problem, right? And so how do we look at that and value that and not say, oh, we're gonna take some beneficiaries, quote unquote, into our focus group you know, and interview them, and then we're gonna go and write about this and solve the problem, right? Instead of viewing that leadership that is within the, the lived experience populations about any given issue. So Baljeet has done a ton of work on this, and she's way more articulate on these issues than I am. And I was coming at the problem with the opposite realm, was like, I landed in Cambodia, but I am from Westchester, wealthy Westchester, New York. Book, right? And I came to the conclusion in my 6 years in Cambodia that I had no right to step off the plane and be like, I'm going to solve your problems, when I don't know anything about my own education system, let alone your own. And a mentor of mine in Cambodia, Mickey Sampson, would always say, you have to earn the right to bestow your benevolence in this country, right? You have to earn the right to figure out how to— where to put your money to create change, because if not, you actually could cause a lot of harm, right? And we did. And everyone that gets really involved in, especially international development work, blindly. Like, we all have that possibility, and some of us have made those mistakes without knowing it, right? We're just fueling things that either aren't working or at worst corrupt and causing harm, right?

Yeah.

And so I came back, you know, from this experience, be like, oh goodness, do I need to work on Westchester, New York problems for the rest of my life because I have lived experience there? I don't want to do that, right? That's not necessarily what I want to work on, right? And so how do I make that leap to maybe still work in Cambodia or other places and problems I haven't lived And that's where Apprenticing with a Problem came, and that concept from Jessamyn of there is a value. And actually, in any problem, you can't understand a system by yourself. There is— you will always be wearing the lenses of your life and your experience. So you're looking at this problem from the view of a lawyer on this issue, and someone else is looking at it from the problem of being incarcerated, and someone else is, right, looking at the problem from whatever, right? And so You need this multi-perspective. And so there is value from whatever way you have apprenticed or lived this problem and experienced it. And that gives me hope and says, okay, we can tackle these challenges even if we haven't lived them, but we have to go into it with the humbleness that first I need to learn to the point that I can get enough value to add a perspective to this system that might not already be there. And so what I say to my students, you care about the outhouse in Boulder, Colorado, where I live right now? Great. Instead of going out tomorrow and being the founder of something with this issue you haven't lived in and you don't have a ton of knowledge about it, go join the board. Go be a volunteer. Be the CFO of this organization. Go, like, get yourself involved in some way, and you will then apprentice with this, learn more and more. And it might be at a point, at some point, you're like, gosh, I have this idea to add this thing that no one else is doing that fills this gap in the system that really will help But you might not know what that is yet. So just get yourself in there in some way that adds value for now, and you'll figure out if that makes sense later.

Because there's like that collective intelligence and the kind of intercultural piece as well. I was reflecting on there was we all come in with different, as you say, kind of different perspectives from our training or whatever. We also coming in with different lenses from our culture and there may be value in learning from different perspectives on social norms and the way that things happen culturally in one country versus another. And there's value in, as you say, those kind of multiple perspectives bringing that in. But as you say, you kind of got to earn the right to be at that table to have that conversation. And you're kind of going in with more of a learning disposition first. But the, I'd love to talk a little bit about the systems-led leadership that you, where you are now, because I think what it seems to me that you've done there is taken all of these ideas and then framed them into something which is importantly systems-oriented. Like, you know, we've talked, you've mentioned systems a few times and it's, there's a lot of talk around systems thinking, et cetera. But also the fact that you're calling it systems-led leadership is that again, there's kind of a humbleness built into that framing almost.

That was the intention because I used to initially for a short moment, I was using the term systems change leadership, and what I was trying to do was move away from the term social entrepreneurship, not because I don't believe in social entrepreneurship, but because that term, and having worked in that space for some time, I realized that that term had kind of been like boiled down to social enterprise, you know, this idea of you start a business for good. And what I was seeing was that a lot of people who had been kind of knighted into the social entrepreneurship world and, you know, been like awarded and celebrated in the beginning, some of them didn't necessarily have business models. They were taking entrepreneurial approaches to solving problems, but not necessarily in this like very specific way of starting a social business, right? And I wanted to like get the conversation back to that view of this wider definition. And you can't really redefine a term that is in the ether and everyone's using in a very narrow way. And so I started to use the term systems change leaders with this idea of people that are kind of contributing to change outside the bounds of their own organization, right? So they are doing this one thing. They are selling solar panels. They are like teaching financial literacy, whatever it is they're doing, their one little thing., but they're also contributing beyond the bounds of that through change in policy, sharing knowledge, you know, convening, whatever that is, like contributing beyond. And what happened is I gave that TEDx talk on rethinking social entrepreneurship and used the term systems change leader. And I had so many people come up to me afterward or like write to me or in the future and they'd be like, oh, I thought I was a social entrepreneur, but in fact I am a systems change leader and I am going to change the whole system, right? And I was like, oh goodness, I have done something.

You just inflated A whole bunch of egos.

Yeah, this is like exactly the opposite, right? I was trying to say like just doing social entrepreneurship well is so hard. Yeah, to think you could be— and now that the term systems leadership is really what people would maybe call that role of like the, this like linchpin role in the center of like we're gonna convene and we're gonna activate and we're gonna bring all these people together. And great, that can happen, and that is way harder, and it's only gonna really happen if you deep, deep knowledge in this issue, and you are super humble, and you're really connected to the right people, and you have that skill set, and da da da da da, right? So if I'm teaching in front of a class of 40 students, and before I had— I was trying to teach them to be, let's say, social entrepreneurs, maybe 2 of them in the class have the, like, mix of the understanding a problem and skill sets and everything that they might be doing that anytime in the short term, right? Now if I take that up a notch and I say, I want you to be the systems leaders, right, the system change leader, Forget it. I am like, I am holding up this pathway of change that is not possible for any of these students out the door because they're not deeply into these issues. And so I'm doing them a disservice by making them think that that is the role that they need to play, because if they try and play it, they're going to fail. And if they feel like that's the only— the hierarchy, the top path to change, then they're going to feel disappointed, right? So what I talk about now is this concept of systems-led leadership, and I view that in kind of 3 parts. Number 1, systems-led means it's leading you. Yeah, you could take a nap in 2019 and wake up today, right? You did nothing, but you cared about certain issues about, you know, like carbon from airplanes or like different, you know, different things. And you're like, oh my gosh, in the last 5 years so much has changed, right? But you didn't do that, right? You took a nap, right? So the systems will change without you, right? And so being systems-led is like— means I need to understand enough about this system to be led to figure out— now that I understand about the system, that's objective. I go subjective, I go back in. Who am I? What am I good at? What do I care about? Be that me or my organization. How might I contribute? Okay, great. Let— we have this theory. I call it a theory of systems change, which is my theory of how the system could change without me there. And then I have my own theory of change of how I might contribute to that wider theory of systems change. So I'm doing that, and now it means I need to check in on that every once in a while. The world has changed. Things have happened. Is my theory still valid? Am I still doing the right thing, right? So you're being led by the system, systems-led. And then the third word, leadership, being about that internal piece too. It's about the leadership pieces. And leadership does not need to be positional. It's not that I'm the founder, I am the systems change leader. Because I think the piece that's missing in the narrative that I'm trying to bring back in, in the way I educate, is there are small ways to contribute. So an example is I had a student who had joined this program here in Boulder, a program called Watson, and in order to get in, you pitch an idea. And she had pitched this idea about working in women's feminine hygiene products in sub-Saharan Africa, and she was going to start a new venture. Doing women's feminine hygiene products in sub-Saharan Africa, right? But she didn't have a lot of knowledge on that space and experience, etc. And I happened to have just been writing this Tackling Heropreneurship report, and one of the many funders I'd interviewed, just one of them, had invested in 13 different women's feminine hygiene products in sub-Saharan Africa. And we talked about, about how there was this like big movement at the time around that. And so in talking to this student, I realized she's a researcher, like she— that's her strength, her skill set. And I said, what if the value you bring into the world is that you analyze those 13 plus 10 more, right? You analyze these and you write a report. Here's what's happening on this issue. Here's the different materials that are being used. Here's people that are selling them versus giving them away. Here's the price points. Here's where they're being manufactured. Here's like the sales rate. Here's the use, you know, like all of that, right? And you do an analysis that says like, here's some trends of like the what seems to be working or not, right? That is a huge value. That is a huge value to that sector, and it fits your skill set. And you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to be ready to be the founder tomorrow. You're actually, by using your strength of research and your curiosity, right, that quality of your curiosity, you can add value by doing your research project, right? And watching like her face and realizing, oh, 'Oh, I can do that,' right? Like, 'That's something I could do, and wow, I could add value by doing that. I could do that tomorrow,' you know? That's what I would consider as systems leadership, is looking at the system, what's happening, and then looking inside, what could I do? And it can be tiny or it can be big, but finding a way to add value so that all other boats can rise, or some, you know, like you're adding value to something that already Absolutely.

And significantly more value, probably. I mean, as you, you know, as you say, like so many other people can learn from that, those systems insights in a way that someone has taken a lot of care and time to put together. That, that can have huge amounts of value across everyone else working in that space. Yeah. And it's a really important kind of responsiveness there, isn't it? To the kind of the ecosystem. And like you say, kind of, it reminds me of the phrase, Gert Biester, a favorite educational philosopher of mine talks about, what is the world asking of you? It's like sitting in that moment of what am I being asked to do by this bigger system that I care about, rather than starting from the place of me and what am I gonna do to make myself feel like I'm doing good or having an impact or using my agency in that space.

Or rather than the other side, which is that quote I, I love, which is don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive, right? So it's like, absolutely, just because there's this big gap in policy, if that's not the right gap for you to be working on, don't go do that, right? Go— don't go be a doctor if you don't like blood, right? Like, don't, right? What are you uniquely— so it's the same, you know, it's the same thing you're saying. What am I uniquely able to contribute here, and what am I being called to do, right? But that is based on a combination of understanding the system and understanding yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. No, interesting. And I mean, I'm, I'm so fascinated by the role that we can play as educators in that space to support young people to kind of learn some of those things. Like you said, learn from the mistakes that others have made through good intention. But also I think there's an interesting observation for me that the way that education is wanting to shift into these more kind of real world problem type scenarios. If you, you know, think about experiential learning or taking the classroom outside of the classroom and into the real world and contextualizing problems, great, except there's potentially more scope for some of these learnings that educators and young, young people in those education systems may have never really even thought about before. Because in a way, you know, quite a lot of this learning is, as you say, in this kind of social innovation, international development space. Space, nonprofit sector, these are common conversations I would imagine now. But in the education space saying, right, let's build our curriculum around problems that matter, the things we care about, things we wanna change in the world. Great intention, but there's a really interesting whole piece of learning that from putting those sectors together really needs to have a conversation so that we don't just encourage more of that hero-preneurship kind of attitude of, I know a bit about this problem and now I'll just go and make change.

I think the key piece there is that last sentence, is that as educators, our role is not to help our students make change in a short term. It is to learn how to make change in the long term, which requires learning now, not making now, right? I mean, when I worked in Cambodia, I would get emails from teachers that would say, we are bringing a group of students to Cambodia. We would love to do a project that they can see started and finished within the 2 days that we will be there so they can have a sense of accomplishment. Management, right? That is where us as educators, that's where we're failing our students. If we simplify this and we say, oh, it's so easy to pop into a problem and fix it, right? And we would do that at the beginning. I had an education nonprofit but also a travel company that started as a volunteer travel company, and that's what we would do. Come volunteer, pop into a school, let's pause school, you can teach English and yoga and whatever for the day, and we can go home and pat ourselves on the back. Look, we did something good. Right? And what we realized is, look, a number of things. Number one is, is that okay to do every day? Is it okay to do once a year stop school to like let the foreigners come in and play? Is it okay to do that every week? You know, when, when is it not okay? It's not okay, right? We're allowing ourselves to come have this kind of falsified savior experience. And then the other thing we realized was that we were creating this narrative that, that people could go home and be like, I'm done, right? And in reality, what we wanted people to do was we want them to change how they live, how they travel, how they give, right? We want them to go home and say, this is a long-term lifetime thing. I want to change the, the degree that I'm going to study now because of this. When I want to donate, I'm not just going to throw a check out the door, I'm going to ask questions, right? Like, we want them to change how they act in the long term, and therefore we have to add complexity, right? We have to add complexity. So we would— we change from being a volunteer travel company to a development education company. And so you could come travel with us and you would go visit someone who was making water filters and giving them away, and you would visit an organization that was selling them. And it's like, there's not a right answer. It's complex, right? There's complexity here. We would visit the Khmer Rouge tribunal where they're spending half a billion dollars to take 7 90-year-olds to trial. And then you visit an activist Cambodian filmmaker who was working on kind of these reconciliation films. And it's complex. There's not a right answer, right? And so that's what we would help try and help people engage with is that there's context and that if you're in an issue, you, yes, you're going to learn best practices and understand what's true. And then you're going to look at the context of where you are and sense your way in and try and find a way to contribute to change.

Yeah. And it's just that it's not amenable to that quick fix, quick hit of dopamine that we get from thinking that you've done, but actually, as you said, I love that quality of your curiosity. Like if your satisfaction and dopamine here is coming from just learning more deeply about that context and that situation and the deep, incredible complexity that has brought that situation into being, like if that can feed into some of that satisfaction that those students feel, then that would be a way. Yeah, it's a complex problem, even the way we approach but I think it's— I so appreciate the work you're doing. And I mean, I've spoken to Alex Budak on the podcast about becoming a changemaker, and I've been, you know, doing work with organizations who talk a lot about changemaking. And I think your systems-led leadership lens on it is a really important kind of counter to some of that. Not that they're not well-intentioned in that work, but that this being led by the complexity of the system is such an important, humble disposition to I want to bring Mickey Sampson back in.

So he's that mentor that I talked about in Cambodia, and he passed away sadly very young. And we would do that, that we would talk about, like go on a field trip, right? So we had these tours, we would go on a field trip to visit Mickey. He ran an organization called RDIC, Resource Development International Cambodia. And he— we would be like 2 hours, you know, you'd go meet Mickey and he would talk about complexity in a way, you know, and, and you'd get to see, oh, we made these fish ponds with these Hydroponic situations, and you'd go and look and no one was making like a Sesame Street type educational program in Cambodia. So we took this converted little box and turned it into a studio. And oh, well, no one's doing water filtration in a way that really takes out all of these things. So we created this ceramic water filter and this water pump, and now lots of people are doing it, right? So you'd have this like 2 hours of having your mind blown by this man man who was a scientist, but he got complexity. And he sent his kids to public school in this, like, rural-ish Cambodian area because he's like, if I am going to try and create change in my community, I need to be embedded in it. I need to understand it. I need to be committed to it. Now, and he was driven by faith, which— that wasn't our, our necessary orientation. But what you could see was this was a man who, you know, based on whatever choices he's made and beliefs that he was so committed to impact, right? He's so committed to it. 1 or 2 hours of their life, they would go on this little field trip. So imagine, you know, you're talking about school field trips. When he passed away, we had dozens and dozens of emails that said, that 2-hour trip with Mickey changed my career, changed my life. I went home, I did a different degree, I thought about the world differently. Like, so many people are like, I wear a bracelet that says, what would Mickey do? 2 hours with this man and seeing his engagement in complexity and his view of how you create change and this humbleness, but there's also audacity. We had so many people say, he is the reason I do the work that I do right now.

That's incredible.

It was just fascinating to me. So it's possible, right? But if we go out saying, I'm gonna— because this is what we used to do— take that 2 hours and we are gonna build the thing and we're gonna solve the problem and we're done, go home, instead of like, let's get inspired by the possibility of change and then you have to go home and figure out what you're going to do with your life. That's what we need to do as educators, right? We need to have that Mickey example.

Amazing, really inspiring. But it's not— I also was thinking it's not that that's the only way either. Like, you're—

you're—

I think your point about the researcher is really well taken as well, because that giving everything to this thing like Mickey you did, that's not necessarily for everyone either. And that's important that, as you said earlier, people can make positive contributions in really small ways, maybe even by stopping doing something sometimes, a certain behavior or a certain, you know, habit. And so I think I just wanted to make that point. I think it's really important that this is a huge whole kind of complex ecosystem of interrelationships around certain things that you might care about. And there are all sorts of ways to kind kind of effect change in that.

And I think Mickey's inspiring point was usually, what do you care about? What do you want to do? What's— where's your strength? You know, like, he's like, this happens to be mine, right? And that's the value, right? Is what I always say is that quote, don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive. It works as long as you're not a jerky person, right? Makes you come alive to just go like compete and win and destroy.

Yeah, right.

As long as— as long as your motivation Sure, is to do good. If you hold that lens, then you will find a path there through the path of humbleness, of saying, what am I— look, how could I add value? Oh wow, I tried something, it didn't work. We're all going to make mistakes. Fine, I'm gonna try something different, right? And you will find your way into really adding value with that, that humbleness and that North Star of I want to make a difference.

Amazing. Thank you, Danielle. There's, I mean, there's so much here and I, I really am excited about the possibilities of kind of, of having these conversations cross-fertilize a bit with the education space and the way that I think education is moving and what, what you've learned from a career doing this work and what other people have been learning. I think it's, there's a really important kind of conversation going on there. So yeah, no, I so appreciate you sharing the insights.

Thanks for inviting me, Tim. It was great to meet you and I look forward to future conversations. Congratulations with you as well.

Amazing. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.