The workshop will be organized around three essential components from a curricular standpoint:

1. Developing the skillsets of a systems thinker, through using a variety of systems thinking tools and practices:  seeing deeper systemic structures underlying surface events, and how mental models and “artifacts” shape those structures.
2. But, even for skillful systems thinkers, complex issues can easily be seen as something outside of ourselves, or something we understand intellectually but not emotionally. “Systems sensing” skills help to “sense into” the multiple experienced realities in any complex setting.
3. Over time, these skills can combine to nurture a compassionate stance. One foundation lies in understanding the structural sources of problems that go beyond individual actors. In that sense, systemic understanding is beyond blame. Another lies in staying “next to that other” and feeling with them how they feel yet with less internalization of the other’s emotional state than can occur with empathy alone (and the consequent feelings of being overwhelmed or “emotionally high-jacked”) and yet also holding an intention for others’ well-being – which is why compassion is seen in many developmental traditions as a cultivated, refined state of being.

In this framework and training, we conceptualize 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. It is the capacity to hold paradoxes – to see and sense the larger system with all its interdependence and interconnectedness and all the unintended consequences of human behavior – without judgment but with real care for the system and everyone involved in it.