The term systems awareness refers to the orientation which combines systems thinking and systems sensing. Whereas “systems thinking” points to a set of skills associated with analytical and conceptual capacities for using specific tools and practices to understand complex interdependent phenomena, “system sensing” is about our intuitive understanding of these complex interdependencies.

Systems thinking, the critical thinking skills needed for understanding complexity, has developed in fields as diverse as engineering and studies of complex living systems where it is essential to understand the behavior of the whole instead of how parts function in isolation. In the work of the Center for Systems Awareness we especially rely on tools derived from the system dynamics approach pioneered at MIT.[1] Across many substantive domains, systems thinking involves analyzing a complex situation based on developing conceptual models to see how interconnectedness operates within a given system, such as mapping flows of energy and interaction to understand how different populations interact in an ecosystem, the behavioral dynamics shaping the climate and culture in a school, or how interactions among family members are driving certain family behavior.

By contrast, what we call “systems sensing” is really the attunement to a more spacious sense of the whole or the attunement to the various perceptual fields with which we pick up information about the whole. Systems sensing is less familiar as an academic term because it points to approaches to learning and teaching more familiar in the creative arts, such as in a music or dance ensemble, than in classical mental, analytical education. Sense literally means “faculty of perception” (etymonline) and has an added root of “meaning” and “interpretation.” In the intellectual history of systems awareness, philosophers like Martin Buber are exemplars of pointing to this systems sensing capacity, as in his distinction of the I-thou versus I-It relationship, wherein the ‘other’ arises in our awareness as a “seamless” whole rather than a ”thing among things,” an object separate from ourself.[2]

In effect, systems thinking and systems sensing point to overlapping domains of rational thought and perceptual experience. Both domains are operating at all times, but because of our formal education and training, many of us are biased towards attending more to the thinking domain over the feeling domain. The sensing, however, is still present, as in the immediate feelings we have when we walk into a classroom that is ‘buzzing” with energy and engagement versus another where energy is very low. We see the two distinct qualities of systems awareness as akin to the analog whole (sensing) with digital parts (thinking).

[1] Forrester, Jay W., Collected Works of Jay W. Forrester; “Counterintuitive Nature of Social Systems,” https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-988-system-dynamics-self-study-fall-1998-spring-1999/readings/behavior.pdf; The System Dynamics Society

https://www.systemdynamics.org/

[2] Buber. M, I and Thou; excerpts: http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/i-and-thou-selected-passages/

In the fields of neuroscience, biology and psychology, “emotions” are seen as arising from the autonomous nervous system and, as such, are physiological occurrences that happen as a response to preceptor input (see for example Anthony Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens or [add editors name] The Oxford Companion to the Mind). This means that emotions are the body’s physical reaction to events, either initiated from outside of us or from our own, ever-creative minds.

“Feelings,” on the other hand, are our perceived emotions – the subjective experiences of the bodily, emotional state. This means that whenever we become aware of our emotional states we come to have an experience of it and the emotions transcend to feelings. Per this definition, “emotions” are underlying physiological phenomena, and we are unaware of our emotional states until we come to experience them and realize how we feel (see The Oxford Companion to the Mind). However, we very frequently react to these emotional states, even if we are not aware of them.

When we cultivate emotional literacy, we enhance our capacity to experience our emotional states, to feel them, and to respond to our emotional states with consideration and intentional awareness instead of staying in a purely reactive mode, what is in popular terms known as emotional intelligence versus “emotional high-jacking.” This is the essence of emotional intelligence.

The term “empathy” stems from the German word “Einfühlung,” which means the ability to feel into another (literally “in-feeling”). In the scientific literature, as we touched upon above, there are a variety of different discussions and definitions of empathy and the different stages or categories it may be subdivided into, such as emotional contagion, attunement and empathic concern. Here, we will use one fundamental definition of empathy, which is “the innate capacity to sense and feel the emotions of others.” Per this definition, empathy is not necessarily a good thing: in order to bully someone and do it well, for example, you have to have a quite clear sense of how to hurt them – which requires empathy. And often, when we get caught in the feeling into someone else’s negative moods, depression or anxiety, we ourselves experience traces of these moods. A lot of teachers’ burn-out stems from empathy fatigue and in turn a lack of training of how to remain in one’s own emotional space without shutting down the emotional reality of the other. When we bring awareness and intention to empathy, we can cultivate compassion.

Compassion is rooted in the Latin “com” which means “with” or “together” and “passion” which relates to “suffering” or “enduring.” Two features distinguish compassion from empathy as the word is commonly used today. The first lies in not being overwhelmed with another’s emotions but to stay “next to that other” and feel with them how they feel. There is less internalization of the other’s emotional state in compassion, which is why it is seen as a cultivated, refined state of awareness. The second concerns intention. For example, in many traditions like Buddhism, compassion is most often understood as the intention of alleviating suffering, of supporting the other (be that human or animal or other living being) to have joy and happiness in their existence. In the Taoist tradition for example, compassion comes with a deep sense of joy and wishing a life of joy for others, and in the Christian tradition compassion is expressed as being in service for others.

In the work on compassionate systems, we have come to talk of compassion as an essentially systemic property of mind: to cultivate compassion is to be able to appreciate the systemic forces that influence people’s actions – ‘to walk in their shoes.’ This goes beyond seeing a system from the outside but actually feeling what it is like to be an actor in the system. This is the systems sensing referred to above and is complementary with systems thinking, which tries to objectively understand how a system is functioning. In some spiritual traditions, systems sensing and the capacity to hold such paradoxes are seen as indicators of an open heart. We may say that to cultivate the capacity for seeing and sensing the larger system is fundamentally a compassionate state of mind.

In our work with the Compassionate Systems network, we view “compassionate integrity” as an outcome of what we are seeking to help grow in students and teachers – to have alignment between how we think, feel and act. The term integrity comes from a root of “wholeness” in Latin. Likewise, what we wish to help our students grow is the ability to not only think compassionately but to also feel and live compassionately by virtue of an ever-unfolding awareness of interconnectedness. This can extend naturally from feeling of connection to oneself and others to feeling connected to the consequences of my actions at greater distances of time and space, starting with simple acts like holding in awareness, for example, how in charging our mobile devices we use electricity that in most countries comes from burning coal. This feeling of connectedness underpins a persistent inquiry to understand ever more broadly the consequences of our actions as the root of all ethical behavior. This inquiry encompasses my choices as a citizen and a consumer, from the energy I use to the food I eat, to the products I buy (e.g., the water and carbon footprints of energy and food, the just treatment of workers, the wellbeing of animals – even on the other side of the world). Since we can never see all of the systems within which our actions unfold, this spirit of genuine curiosity and openness is the real hallmark of a systems thinker, and the cultivated experience of interconnectedness that of a compassionate systems thinker.

When we started this collaboration, initially partnering with the International Baccalaureate (IB), we looked at how understanding complexity (from the emerging field of complexity science) and systems (as understood in fields like system dynamics) overlap in common guiding ideas for education:

1. There exists an innate systems intelligence within us all, which begins to unfold from very early childhood on.
2. This systems intelligence is systematically underdeveloped in mainstream education with its emphasis on reductionist ways of understanding, right versus wrong answers, and intellectual versus embodied understanding.
3. Understanding reality thorough the lens of interconnectedness and change represents a powerful way to integrate diverse subjects.
4. To cultivate this innate systems intelligence and investigate this interconnectedness between subjects requires practical tools and methods, many of which have been developed over the past 20-25 years and are now in use in preK-12 education.
5. Those approaches that we have found to be most useful engage learners and teachers in reflecting on their ways of seeing and becoming more explicit in constructing and testing their own models of reality.
6. Working rigorously with complexity and systems leads to enhanced conceptual skills and understanding – e.g., the ability to construct coherent explanations that connect different elements in a complex setting, the ability to explain one’s reasoning about interconnected issues, and the ability to appreciate how one could test (disconfirm) or refine that understanding – such as what is missing from “my model.”
7. Working rigorously with complexity and systems also yields to more integrated learning modalities:

• rational and intuitive
• general and personal
• conceptual and enactive/embodied
• thinking and sensing

A Systems Theory of Systems Change

Our model/theory of change is both simple and multi-faceted, having arisen over more than three decades of system change experience.

Much of the work revolves around a particular approach to capacity building for leadership at all levels that focuses in three broad areas:

• Aspiration and a Creative (versus reactive) Orientation; this is the domain of personal vision and personal mastery - especially holding creative tension - and building shared vision,
• Reflective Conversation: this is the domain of personal reflection (becoming more aware of my own mental models)  and nurturing a different quality of conversation and social field,

Understanding (and being able to deal better with) Complexity: this is the domain of systems thinking (e.g, the “iceberg") and systems sensing, feeling into the forces at play in a larger system: 

The significance of the 3-legged stool metaphor is that each domain is equally important – the stool will not stand if any one leg is missing. While the sequence for developing these capabilities varies by setting, all three are vital for developing systems leadership - the ability of people to collaborate effectively for systemic change.

This capacity building unfolds as one lead dimension in the systems change mandala that arises from natural tensions among:

- capacity building and community building

- research and practice

One simple way to summarize the overall approach is an ongoing process of:

• transforming the quality of thinking together
• transforming the quality of relationships
• transforming the quality of collective action

One example is ‘evidence-based practice.’ Everyone advocates for gathering data to assess what is working and not. But, then, why is this so hard to do?

From our perspective it is because the corrective feedback loop of better data leading to better action is often weak or non-existent given the ability to think together and quality of relationships that typically prevail. When these are low, data that is disconfirming or potentially threatening will be either ignored or discounted, or people will acknowledge the data and do little to change their actions. Similar behaviors prevail around many “hot issues” like race and inequity. In effect, the typical low quality of the relational space diminishes the capacity to “process” (recognize, inquire collaboratively into, and ultimately act upon) disconfirming data. In essence, the corrective feedback loop (the inner loop) is weakened when the basic growth cycle (the outer loop) is weak. So, rather than just working on gathering more data and assuming naively that data will produce change, we focus on the basic growth loop so that better data can to lead to more effective collective action. Without practical ways to initiate and sustain the self-reinforcing processes that enhance the overall relational space, better data will accomplish little - when difficult issues arise, they will be neglected or treated only superficially.

The deep capacity- and community building that drive the basic growth cycle never end. This learning continues to unfold as new stakeholders become involved and as new issues are confronted. An important plateau is reached when there is sufficient understanding and skill embedded in diverse organizations within a community to sustain the whole process. As this develops, less external ‘expert help’ is needed and peer learning relationships become more important – both within the community and between it and others doing similar work. Cultivation of both internal and external forces that make the whole mandala process resilient is central to our longer-term view of systems change.

Increasingly, the diverse leaders we collaborate with, each facing their own complex challenges, understand their work in terms of shifting social fields.

Understanding the processes of shifting social fields is a relatively new way of looking at complex change. The study of fields, however, has antecedents in the physical and, to a lesser extent, social sciences. In our understanding, no individual exists apart from a social field – a context created by interacting human mind-body-heart systems. Social fields are always present among humans and other social species, and we have come to talk about social fields as generative or de-generative, in the sense of increasing or decreasing collective wellbeing.

In physics, field is a concept with roots extending back at least to Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century British scientist credited with discovering electromagnetic fields. The field idea was that even though spaces may appear "empty," they are in fact permeated with imperceptible forces that are active and have a causal influence, like gravity or magnetism. Before Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, many physicists intuitively appreciated such ideas, but they were not spoken about extensively or agreed upon among scientists – in some ways similar to the present state of the concept of social fields.

In the social sciences, Kurt Lewin, organization development pioneer, viewed “the social environment as a dynamic field that interacts with human consciousness.” In his theory, he defined a field as “the totality of coexisting facts, which are conceived of as mutually interdependent,” and argued that, in order to understand people’s behavior, one had to look at the whole psychological field, or “life-space,” within which people act. Lewin also studied “the power of underlying forces (needs) to determine behavior by integrating insights from topology (e.g., life-space), psychology (needs, aspirations, etc.), and sociology (e.g., force fields)” (Scharmer, 2015). ^[1]

Systems

In the physical sciences, fields are extensive forces that operate over space and time and create contexts wherein particular living or non-living systems can be influenced. By contrast, in academic fields of study like system dynamics, social systems are conceived as structures of relationship connecting individuals, groups, organizations, and larger systems in ways that give rise to collective behaviors and outcomes. But these ways of talking about “the systems” characterize the situation ‘from the outside looking in’ versus what does it feel like to be an actor operating within such a situation. Using the distinctions of “first-person, second-person, and third-person,” Otto Scharmer says that, “At the moment we step inside a social system—that is, at the moment we begin to inquire into its interiority by ‘turning the camera’ around from the third-person to the first-person view—we switch the perspective from the social system to the social field.”

Some characteristics of generative fields:

• a field where phenomena consistently and intentionally arise that are beneficial within a larger context – i.e., contribute to wellbeing of a larger system,
• a field where learning and collective creativity– realizing new outcomes and building new capacities – takes place,
• a field that nurtures and grows wellbeing for those who co-generate the field.

[1] Scharmer, C.O. “The Blind Spot: Uncovering the Grammar of the Social Field,” June 2015 and Theory U, 2006

The noun “well-being” has interesting roots, with the word “well” from Old English meaning  in a satisfactory manner or abundantly on the one hand, but also with a root in Sanskrit prati varam, which translates to at will. The noun “well” figuratively meant the source from which anything is drawn in Old English, and when we look at how the term is used today – in combination with the noun “being” which literally means fact of existing we begin to see that it’s a rich and complex territory to unveil.

Over the past decades there has been a shift in focus in various domains of the science of the human mind, away from studying pathologies and anomalies towards explorations of what constitutes a healthy mind. Richie Davidson at The Center for Healthy Minds of the University of Wisconsin have developed a model of “The Four Pillars of Well-Being:”[1] “awareness”, “connection”, “insight” and “purpose.”

Interestingly, these correlate well with the understanding that grew from the many years of iterative development in the Organizational Learning world, expressed in the “3-legged stool” of core leadership capacities: aspiration, reflective conversation, and understanding complexity (see "Systems Change" section above). Aspiration includes purpose and vision. Systems thinking is all about insight in complex settings; and, reflective conversation the ability to connect with others. Many of the tools and practices we use for working today with compassionate systems, leadership and systems awareness build on this model. The fourth element in Davidson’s model, awareness, is reflected in our growing emphasis on systems awareness.  While most of the research today focuses primarily on the more individual aspects of well-being, in our projects we regard this capacity building as being inherently individual and collective.  For example, many of the core projects of the compassionate systems framework focus on developing teacher well-being as a mean to enhance student well-being on the one hand and create a more generative social field in the classroom and the overall school culture on the other.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/richard-davidson-well-being/ and

https://centerhealthyminds.org/about/why-well-being