To foster a culture of caring, empathy, and mutual empowerment, philanthropy can cultivate a new baseline for ‘systems thinking.’ In this alternative, members of society help and learn from one another as they innovate to prevent and alleviate suffering at a greater scale and scope than currently feasible. Society confronts the uncertainty and suffering that accompany progress with patience and kindness for all stakeholders – the essence of compassion as defined by modern-day contemplative thinkers (Jinpa, 2016).
As a ‘systems change’ funder, champion, and thought-partner to grantees for more than a decade, most recently at a private philanthropy in the U.S., I’ve promoted whole-of-community initiatives to address complex issues related to health, society, and the economy. In this capacity, I have helped to convene many cross-sector multidisciplinary longitudinal collaborations. These have focused on ‘early life stress,’ aging, chronic disease, obesity, mental health, unemployment, homelessness, and economic mobility, to name a few. I have now come to recognize that the tools of the trade can themselves be an impediment to progress. Frequently our interventions overlook the body’s stress response and the unique mix of feelings and emotions different individuals experience as the uncertainty of change. Instead, we present a rational argument for change based on concepts about past experiences. In reality, the responses range from excitement and curiosity to fear, apathy, confusion, apprehension, or hostility.
Because practitioners see themselves as agents, diagnosticians, and problem solvers, they imagine they inflict no suffering through their intervention. Therefore, systems change initiatives often do not consider a role for compassion to overcome mistrust and resistance, or to address the human need for ‘psychological safety’ (Edmonson, 2018). However, when compassion is not woven into rational analysis as an instrument to guide social progress, even well-intentioned thinkers and actors can objectify the other humans within the system they seek to influence.
A disconnection from suffering in oneself and others, combined with a disembodied view of change common in technocratic grantmaking, undermines philanthropy at large. It dismisses the holistic human experience of being and devalues or ignores the multiple intelligences rooted in each person’s body, heart, spirit, and soul (Cunningham, 2022). Additionally, it relies on historical patterns to describe the future (Hovmand, 2014) when instead we should look to co-create new ones where stakeholders nurture and empower one another. Time, money, and effort are wasted when yesterday’s systems maps are rendered obsolete by the dynamism of radical innovation. Once unimaginable technologies, such as AI and humanoid robots, are now reshaping individual and social patterns. As practitioners, we should reimagine possibilities to humanize systems rather than merely regulate behavior.
In the conventional paradigm, cognitive mindsets alone dictate behavioral responses. To achieve lasting change, we practitioners are taught to promote the widespread substitution of one set of thoughts for another – for example, through ‘narrative change.’ We believe that by doing so, we will ‘shift mindsets’ and witness a desired cascade of effects, such as new rules and regulations.
While important, these strategies mask serious pitfalls when used singly or in isolation from other drivers beyond the conceptual. For one, they place the burden on the individual to adapt and correct their thinking. Yet simultaneously, they favor a uniformity of belief in hiring the people who ‘get it,’ and who are ‘on the same page.’ Alternative perspectives, paradigms, worldviews, and capabilities that may be of benefit now or in the future, are left unrecruited. As a result, foundations narrow their aperture of awareness and strategic possibility.
At root, this paradigm cements an ‘inattentional blindness’ to the subjective workings of the mind, body, and heart, which both shape and are informed by experience. In this manner, conventional systems thinking ties participants into a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) worldview (Henrich, 2020), where a ‘cognicentric’ way of doing is conflated with a way of being. In truth, the labels we use to map a system’s inputs and outputs, causes and effects, are conditioned byproducts of culture and society (Nisbett, 2003), and also of individual attention patterns and unique physiologies and nervous systems (Siegel, 2022).
Thus, although mindsets can affect outcomes, the attention we give to experience also sculpts the neural connections that make mindsets possible. Political inclination and temperament, for instance, are entangled with differences in brain structure and emotional processing (Kanai et al., 2011) as well as problem solving style (Buechner et al., 2020; Zmigrod et al., 2019) and moral valuation (Haidt, 2012). This entanglement weakens the argument for shifting mindsets through data and narrative change alone as the solution to where to intervene in a system. Instead, funders should ask for a new, superior system that supports the wellbeing and felt experience of multiple stakeholders as the system evolves. From the standpoint of compassion, moreover, funders should include as stakeholders all those involved beyond the circle of care defined by a donor’s mission and strategy.
These challenges, however daunting, underscore the need for further philanthropic investment in new, improved practices for systems change motivated by compassion. The following recommendations are based on my own missteps as a funder and practitioner with over a decade’s experience.
- To begin to humanize systems thinking, fund the adoption and diffusion of compassion cultivation as a trainable embodied skill and secular vehicle for caring relations. Systems change practitioners cannot ‘know’ compassion without having first ‘tasted’ it, nor can they account for it unless its practice is sufficiently widespread. Grantmaking can embed compassion in society as a fundamental skill to feel the qualities of one’s own subjective experience and to relate to one another in new ways. With this skill, disparate stakeholders can overcome factionalism by learning to see the other as themselves. Moreover, it invites mutual reciprocal commitments that push and enable one another to learn from and alongside each other (Koehne, 2022) for greater collective benefit.
- To help leaders and stakeholders confront uncertainty, advance the use and development of organizational change management practices (Patton, 2018) that enable excitement for ‘not-knowing’ rather than penalize it with fear. Such practices must incentivize high-quality learning and ‘failure’ when greater help requires the pursuit of more complex innovation. To assess the quality of constructive risk-taking, funders can capture feedback about perceived psychological safety (White et al., 2022). They can also enable and incentivize (1) management practices that surface ‘courageous conversations’ impeded by stigma or distrust; and (2) workflows that support caring and empathy as pathways for cost and quality improvement (Trzeciak & Mazzarelli, 2019). Such practices and workflows were implemented, for example, in systems for early childhood care through an effort I initiated at The JPB Foundation.
- To prevent change fatigue as well as regret and disappointment, craft holistic interdependent strategies beyond organizational boundaries and throughout the non-profit and philanthropic sector. Prevailing system mapping practices often do not consider explicitly the multisectoral, multilateral interdependencies, feedback loops, and ‘social conditions’ (Andreoni & Lazonick, 2020) that enable the development and utilization of new, superior inputs to yield new, superior outcomes at the scale of markets and full populations. Practitioners are thus left to adapt to existing tradeoffs limiting simultaneous gains in equity, inclusion, performance, and sustainability. Adaptation to commercial inputs, for one, leads the sector to overpromise and underdeliver on socioeconomic and environmental progress.
To help manifest this new baseline, I am sharing as freely as possible a newly-developed experiential program to strengthen competencies ignored in conventional management training. Because the nervous system cannot simultaneously operate in fear and curiosity, the Embodied Leadership for Innovation™ program draws on science-backed insights and evidence-based approaches to help practitioners attune to and regulate their own physiology to improve the quality of their strategic awareness and decision-making. Through contemplative techniques – such as meditation, thought experiments, and gentle somatic practices integrating mindfulness and movement – practitioners learn to expand their aperture of awareness, to see new possibilities in a holistic, panoramic view. As an ardent proponent of humanized innovative systems, I hope for new tools such as these to foster a Global, Relationally-Attuned, Compassionately Engaged (GRACE) movement for humankind, the sacred core of philanthropy.
References
Andreoni, A., & Lazonick, W. (2020). Local ecosystems and social conditions of innovative enterprise. In Oqubay, A., & Lin, J. Y. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of industrial hubs and economic development (pp. 203-227). Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198850434.013.5
Buechner, B. M., Clarkson, J. J., Otto, A. S., Hirt, E. R., & Ho, M. C. (2020). Political ideology and executive functioning: The effect of conservatism and liberalism on cognitive flexibility and working memory performance. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(2), 237-247. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620913187
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Patton, C. M. (2018). CHANGES: A conflict management model for organizational redesign efforts. Journal of Conflict Management, 6(1), 26-40. http://jocm.net/v6/no.1/v6n1_Patton.pdf
Siegel, D. J. (2022). IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the integration of self, identity, and belonging. Norton Professional Books.
Trzeciak, S., & Mazzarelli, A. (2019). Compassionomics. Studer Group.
White, A., Smets, M., & Canwell, A. (2022, July 18). Organizational transformation is an emotional journey. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/07/organizational-transformation-is-an-emotional-journey
Zmigrod, L., Rentfrow, P. J., & Robbins, T. W. (2019). Cognitive inflexibility predicts extremist attitudes. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 989. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00989
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