Thinking about system transformation
as a shaman might

by Sandra Waddock

Can system transformation be purposeful instead of random?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Transformations Forum believes that the answer is—and needs to be—yes.

Systems can be transformed so that they achieve global goals like the UN’s SDGs more effectively. To do so requires new guiding narratives that clearly articulate an inspirational vision and are supported by core ideas—memes—that can be widely repeated and reproduced.

It also demands a willingness/capacity to ‘let go’ and let the system evolve and emerge in its own way—hopefully, guided by the core vision and its associated memes.

In a paper called Thinking Transformational System Change I argued that humanity needs such constructive, forward-looking, and purposeful system change to contend with the manifold problems current economic and societal approaches have created.

Life-affirming opportunity to good to waste

Instead of a financial or material wealth orientation , the paper argues, as does the Club of Rome, for a life-affirming orientation towards societies and the economies are embedded within them, all of which are embedded in and dependent on the natural environment.

In a context in which the Coronavirus is ravaging the world’s social and economic systems, the evidence of a need for purposeful transformation towards something quite different from today’s largely economic, constant growth-oriented economic model could not be stronger. As Steve Waddell (SDG Transformations Forum) recently pointed out: this crisis is an opportunity too good to waste.

Healers and connectors

Several years ago in a book called Intellectual Shamans, building on work by Peter Frost and Carolyn Egri, I argued that intellectual shamans, i.e., academics who are like shamans, serve the world through three capacities: healing, connecting, and sensemaking.

Transformation agents, the current paper argues, serve the world through much the same functions.[1] In the current paper I describe these functions as seeing or understanding the system, sensemaking, and connecting. Just as Frost and Egri argued that organizational development experts—change agents in organizations—were healers, connectors (which they called boundary-spanners), and sensemakers, so too are today’s transformation makers fulfilling these same roles.

Perspectives, patterns and processes

‘Seeing’ is part of what all shamans do—it is core to the healing function. To be able to heal the patient in the case of shamans or the system in the case of transformation makers, the healer must first understand—see—what is going on and where things are not working.

The physicist Fritjof Capra defined three core elements of this type of seeing: gaining perspective on the current system, recognizing patterns of interaction, and determining the processes important to the system.

Seeing sense

Sensemaking is a term coined by management scholar Karl Weick to indicate the process by which we make meaning out of situations. For shamans, meaning making often has to do with shifting core cultural mythologies.

As anthropologists point out, shamans believe that when patients get ill, it is because something is wrong with the cultural mythology that helps frame their understanding of their community and the world about them. With respect to system transformation, cultural mythologies are the core ideas that we all share about the world or our societies work.

Sense and memes: core ideas

Today’s mythology, at least in the developed world, tends to be dominated by economic thinking of the sort that is embedded in ideology known as neoliberalism. Part of the work of the transformation maker as healer is to ‘sensemake’ a different worldview, a different ‘story’ or narrative that can begin to shape thinking more broadly than purely economics-based thinking does.

Thinkers like David Korten and ecologist L. Hunter Lovins argue for a more life-affirming approach to both societies and their embedded economies as part of the shift in narrative that is needed in transformation. The core ideas—memes—that support such stories, when resonant, inspirational, and powerful, have the ability to replicate in many minds—thereby changing attitudes, beliefs, and ideas—and, ultimately, behaviors and practices.

Connecting as shamans

The third function of the shaman is what I call connecting, and it is also what many transformation makers attempt to do. Connecting means purposeful bringing together of actions, initiatives, ways of thinking that cross numerous boundaries—either organizational or institutional, disciplinary, sector, or others—so that more coherent and holistic understandings and actions can be generated. It can also mean connecting a variety of initiatives with similar agendas to aggregate and amplify their efforts and avoid unnecessary duplication of efforts.

Most transformation agents today do not tend to think of themselves as shamans. But, if they are in fact performing the three functions of the shaman—healing, sensemaking, and connecting in the service of a better world—then that, it seems to me, is what they are.

Given the crisis as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic that is sweeping the world, many more of us need to tap into that same healing function in whatever line of work we are in.