On LinkedIn, John Kania posted a followup to The Dawn of Systems Leadership (https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadership – can it be I did not link that here):
In a newly published piece by the Garrison Institute called The Inner Work of System Leadership my co-authors Peter Senge, Radha Ruparell and Hal Hamilton and I explore in depth the connection between inner work and outer change.
Coming 10 years after Peter, Hal and I published the popular leadership piece, The Dawn of System Leadership in Stanford Social Innovation Review, our new article elevates inner work for system leadership and highlights how the inner work of trauma healing is essential for system leaders but often goes unattended to for a myriad of reasons.
Engaging in trauma healing work helps leaders develop more capacity to see, acknowledge, and address historical, intergenerational, and collective trauma that resides in systems and impacts others. Without doing this work, system leaders will find transformational systems change to be elusive, if not impossible.
I invite you to read the new article and I welcome your responses. How important do you think it is for leaders to do their inner work and trauma healing work?
The new paper:
My response:
Also at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_the-inner-work-of-system-leadership-activity-7439947524905328640-YjCc (full LinkedIn post)
And in comments to the original:
It’s a good piece and will deserve its popularity – but I think it lacks the real grit in the oyster.
Your question begs the question, doesn’t it?
“How important do you think it is for leaders to do their inner work and trauma healing work?” well, yes, put it that way – obviously, VERY important. It reminds me of a phrase I loved from the wave of sensemaking, metarational, new thinking podcasts just before and into COVID: ‘we’ll never create a world of holistic wellbeing from our broken states.
And I’m not against it. Of course it matters. No one wants leaders who are blind to themselves or others.
But that’s not quite the same as the stronger claim being smuggled in: that transforming systems begins with transforming ourselves.
And let me contrast two alternative statements:
- ‘deeply flawed, traumatised, broken, sometimes immoral people can achieve great good in the world – indeed, great good has never been done any other way’
- ‘it’s not doing the work on yourself that changes the world, it’s doing the work in the world that changes you’
Similar rhetorical devices, I fancy similar rhetorical power, but rather contrary meaning. I am crafting those sentences only for effect, but/and both feel closer to reality than a prefigurative ideal where better selves produce better systems.
I think the paper is blending very good and strong arguments and slipping in some untested and unchallenged assumptions.
A defensible claim:
‘The way we show up shapes the systems we are trying to change’
quietly becomes:
‘Inner work is essential for transformational systems change’
That leap isn’t evidenced, it’s asserted.
And it matters, because it risks narrowing the field of vision. You end up with a picture of systems change that centres on a fairly specific set of behaviours: openness, empathy, reflection, healing. All good things. But also a very WEIRD, middle-class slice of human possibility.
What drops out is power. Conflict. Dominance. Incentives. Enforcement. Violence. Anger. The fact that systems often work precisely because they constrain behaviour, not because people are aligned or healed.
There’s a long-standing tendency in systems thinking to slide into ‘if we could all just relate better, things would improve’. Sometimes true, especially in the room. But as a theory of change for large-scale systems, it’s thin.
Or more bluntly, as they used to say (about voting): if systems change could change things, it would be illegal.
That’s the gap I think this work is circling. A real and important insight – that inner state and outer system aren’t separate – alongside an underdeveloped account of how change actually happens when interests collide and power is at stake.
If we don’t face that directly, the space gets filled by something else – and, I observe, often a kind of bourgeois conspirituality: psychologically literate, ethically serious, but politically and operationally evasive. Spiritual bypassing, which is a form of complicity.
Inner work matters. But it’s not a substitute for a theory of power, or a method for acting in the world when things get rough. And without that, systems change stays safe, and therefore limited.
I encourage everyone to read the piece – and read it really critically, and to listen as a companion to the two parts of this podcast:
https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-graeber-bannon-anarchism-leninism/
Relevant links:
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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