Being Awareness-Based Systems Change

Abstract

This issue’s In Dialogue makes visible what it means to be and to become awareness-based systems change through the very process of systemic intervention. Megan Seneque had been inspired by the story shared by the diverse team who facilitated an in-person UN SDG Leadership Lab in Liberia in 2021. She was keen to host a dialogue that enabled the three facilitators to make visible their journey of transformation: from “offering a program”, to themselves being a transforming system in service of transformative systems change. Megan and the facilitation team explore the invisible conditions for transformative systems change work, including what it takes individually and collectively to provide the quality of holding needed to support such work. The dialogue is an authentic and intimate look at the inner experience of holding systems transformation in all its complexity, including the willingness to look at one’s own role in embodying the dynamics of power, race, and geo-politics.

Keywords

• systemic intervention for systems transformation
• revealing shadows & disrupting patterns
• love, power & justice
• story telling and story listening
• ecologies of practice