As you will know if you've listened to previous episodes, this podcast is really about the central question of the kind of education (formal and informal) that we need to support and enable us all, but most importantly our young people, to transition effectively through this historical period of massive flux and change. There are many people around the world putting language to these shifts and offering guidance to leaders, and organisations for how to navigate them. But few are doing this as prominently and at such a scale as my guest this week. Otto Scharmer's substantial work with MIT, Theory U and the Presencing Institute for the last few decades has been helping leaders embrace cross-sector systems transformation. To quote his 2007 book on Theory U, his work opens up pathways for "dealing with the resistance of thought, emotion, and will; and intentionally reintegrating the intelligence of the head, the heart, and the hand" in the context of leadership, decision-making, and almost any kind of collaborative work.

Otto Scharmer, a Senior Lecturer at MIT and Founding Chair of the Presencing Institute, has dedicated the past 20 years to helping leaders embrace cross-sector systems transformation.

Through his bestselling books Theory U and Presence (the latter co-authored with Peter Senge and others), Otto introduced the groundbreaking concept of "presencing" — learning from the emerging future. He also co-authored Leading from the Emerging Future, which outlines eight acupuncture points for transforming our economy from egocentric to ecocentric. His most recent book The Essentials of Theory U (2018) summarizes the core principles and applications of awareness-based systems change.

He co-founded the MITx u-lab, which has activated a vibrant worldwide ecosystem of transformational change involving more than 250,000 users from 186 countries. In collaboration with colleagues, he co-created global Action Learning Labs for UN agencies and SDG Leadership Labs for UN Country Teams in 26 countries, which support cross-sector initiatives for addressing urgent humanitarian crises.

Born and raised near Hamburg, Germany, Otto’s early experiences on his family farm profoundly shaped his vision. From his father, a pioneer of regenerative farming, Otto learned the significance of the living quality of the soil in organic agriculture, which inspired his thinking about social fields as the grounding condition from which visible transformations emerge. Like a good farmer who cares for the soil, Otto believes responsible leaders must nurture the social field in which they operate. He emphasizes that shifting our economic operating systems from extractive to regenerative requires innovations in leadership support structures for shifting mindsets from ego to eco. Building that infrastructure is the purpose of the u-school for Transformation.

Otto earned his diploma and his PhD in economics from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. He is a member of the UN Learning Advisory Council for the 2030 Agenda, the Club of Rome and the World Future Council. He has won the Jamieson Prize for Teaching Excellence at MIT and the European Leonardo Corporate Learning Award. In 2021, he received the Elevating Humanity Award from the Organizational Development Network.

Useful Links:

https://ottoscharmer.com/

https://youtu.be/6nAagnY_Hq0?si=5CnM5fT0dp4lKQ50

https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/a-farmer-who-puts-his-hand-to-the-plow-must-look-forward-402e6960a7d9?source=friends_link&sk=b78b2cd3b346324ba70f217b2175b060

https://youtu.be/YB25Bqc0yGU?si=UZ1sPNKLo0ynG9eZ

With the so many prevailing stories of uncertainty around for everyone, our roles as educators supporting young people and colleagues to know how to navigate it can be overwhelming! As Thea Snow said on a recent episode, feeling safe in uncertainty is hard. But this is where perhaps we can all learn from the wisdom of those with expertise in futures work and facilitating spaces to explore desirable regenerative futures. Bill Sharpe (http://www.billsharpe.uk/) is one such expert, who has been helping teams in all sectors of organisations and society find co-ordinated ways of managing innovation, creating transformational change that has a chance of succeeding, and ways of seeing the future in the present. He developed the adapted version of the Three Horizons framework as a method for futures studies and practice with Anthony Hodgson, Andrew Curry and Graham Leicester.

Bill was previously a Research Director at Hewlett-Packard's corporate labs in Bristol, UK. He joined HP Laboratories in 1985, becoming one of the first HP Laboratory Directors outside the US. Early work in Bristol provided the impetus for him to set up the Personal Systems Lab that led HP's early work in the emerging world of smart consumer products, mobile computing and digital imaging. Bill then took an assignment in the USA for two years to lead the Internet Solutions Operation of HP's Laserjet Bueiness through the transition to Web. Back in Bristol, Bill set up new mechanisms for coupling HP Labs to the creation of HP's new information appliance businesses. This work led him to co-found the Appliance Studio in 1999 as an independent company, delivering innovation to a wider commercial audience. Having created a range of new product ideas for clients, in particular new business in digital signage for Steelcase Inc, the Studio launched its own start-up Lucid Signs. With the sale of Lucid Signs, Bill moved on to focus entirely on personal research and consulting. Early in his career, Bill took an active role in UK government research through his work with the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) and Advanced IT (Alvey) programs. As a member of the Programme Directorate at Alvey - a programme designed to foster R&D between industry and academia - Bill co-coordinated research into intelligent knowledge-based systems.

Bill is a highly accomplished practitioner in futures techniques and systems change, and now works with Future Stewards (https://futurestewards.com/), the International Futures Forum (https://www.internationalfuturesforum.com/) and H3Uni (https://www.h3uni.org/) to pioneer new approaches to futures, systems thinking, and transformative innovation. He is the author of Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope (https://www.triarchypress.net/three-horizons.html) and Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth (https://www.triarchypress.net/economies-of-life.html).

Additional info about Three horizons: A pathways practice for transformation - Three Horizons is a simple and intuitive framework for thinking about the future. The framework explains how people often manage to disagree so violently about their visions of the future and how to achieve them - and it offers a practical way to begin constructive conversations about the future at home, in organisations and in society at large. The three horizons are about much, much more than simply stretching our thinking to embrace the short, medium and long term. They offer a co-ordinated way of managing innovation, a way of creating transformational change that has a chance of succeeding, a way of dealing with uncertainty and a way of seeing the future in the present.

Kate Raworth's excellent description of 3H: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5KfRQJqpPU

Jonathan Rowson's great explanation of the H2 minus vortex: https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/deactivating-the-h2minus-vortex

Social Links

LinkedIn: @bill-sharpe - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-sharpe-6689

As you will have heard on many previous episodes of the podcast, with Marie Battiste, Carl Mika, Wakanyi Hoffman, Vanessa Andreotti and others, understanding the ways in which our colonial schooling systems have propogated one particular way of knowing our world, and excluded and often violently suppressed many others is something that I care deeply about. For me, it has to be a key part of any transformative work that we do to, with humility and curiosity, to reorient education systems. But in order to do this, we need people who are able to gather and convene the critical conversations that put these ways of knowing in dialogue with each other. It is therefore the greatest honour to have Professor Catherine Odora Hoppers joining me on the podcast this week. For her entire career Dr Hoppers has been at the forefront of facilitating these vital conversations. In post-Apartheid South Africa, she designed and enabled the process that led to the first national policy on the recognition, development and protection of indigenous knowledge systems.

Professor Catherine Odora Hoppers is a scholar and policy specialist on International Development, education, North-South questions, disarmament, peace, and human security. She is a UNESCO expert in basic education, lifelong learning, information systems and on Science and Society; an expert in disarmament at the UN Department of Disarmament Affairs; an expert to the World Economic Forum on benefit sharing and value addition protocols; and the World Intellectual Property Organisation on traditional knowledge and community intellectual property rights.

She got a Masters and PhD in International Education from Stockholm University, Sweden. In South Africa, Professor Hoppers was awarded Professor Extraordinarius in 2019 at University of South Africa (Pretoria). She held a South African Research Chair in Development Education at the University of South Africa (2008-2018). Prior to that, she was a technical adviser on Indigenous Knowledge Systems to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (South Africa) and led the Task Team to draft the national policy on Indigenous Knowledge Systems. She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf, 2002), and was a member of the Academy of Science Special Panel on the Future of Humanities (South Africa).

She was the Goodwill Ambassador for Makerere University in Kampala Uganda; and Ambassador for Non-Violence at the Durban Universities’ International Centre for Non-Violence. In July 2015, she received the Nelson Mandela Distinguished Africanist Award from HE Thabo Mbeki for her pursuit of the total liberation for the African continent through the promotion of Indigenous Knowledge Systems of Education and in the same year, Prof Hoppers was awarded “Woman of the Year” by the University of South Africa, and was named as a “Leading Educationist” and was honoured in the Gallery of Leadership as the 63 most influential people who have shaped Unisa since its inception in 1873, in a permanent exhibition in Kgorong Building in UNISA. In 2017, Professor Hoppers received the distinction from UNESCO as an Honorary Fellow in Lifelong learning. She is the Founder and Director, Global Institute for Applied Governance in Science, Knowledge Systems and Innovations (https://www.giagsi-ug.org/the-faculty/). She held a Professorship in Education at Gulu University (Uganda) and is now the Canada Research Chair in Transdisciplinarity, Cognitive Justice and Education as part of the Pluralism Strategy Initiative at the University of Calgary (https://www.ucalgary.ca/pluralism/scholars-educators-researchers).

She is the author of many important works including the book, Rethinking Thinking: Modernity's "other" and the Transformation of the University with the late Prof. Howard Richards.https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=qWEKG-QAAAAJ&hl=en

Reductionism - the breaking down of complex phenomena into as many parts as possible to make them fully understandable - is everywhere. To some extent the whole enterprise of modern formal schooling is based on the promise of reductionism, as we break life down into subjects, concepts, facts, etc to be digestible by our young people. It has also enabled unbelievable scientific and technological progress. So who could possibly argue with this? And yet, reductionism has become like the hammer that sees everything as a nail. One of its problems is that is renders everything into a mechanistic functioning of parts and nothing more. Our inability to perceive, understand and value complex and systemic patterns and relationships is maybe something that we need to engage with in our education systems.

Dr. Roland Kupers is an advisor on Complexity, Resilience and Energy Transition, Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, as well as an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is a global advisor on mitigating methane emissions from fossil fuels for UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory.

A theoretical physicist by training, Roland spent a decade each at AT&T and at Shell in various senior executive functions, including Group head for Sustainable Development and Vice President Global LNG. He has a long running interest in complexity theory and its impacts.

He has published widely, including in HBR, on Project Syndicate, A Climate Policy Revolution: What the Science of Complexity Reveals about Saving the Planet (Harvard UP 2020) and co-authored Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up (Princeton 2014), The Essence of scenarios (Amsterdam 2014), and Turbulence: A corporate framing of resilience (Amsterdam 2014).

In 2010 Roland was a co-author of a report commissioned by the German Government on a New Growth Path for Europe, applying a complexity lens to climate economics. He has been an advisor to the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Resources Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Roland is a Dutch national; his travels have made him fluent in five languages.

Useful Links:

https://www.rolandkupers.com/

Complexity Module for the IB Diploma: https://www.rolandkupers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/An-IB-complexity-module-for-the-Diploma-Programme-24.10.17.pdf

UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, 2022 Report: https://www.rolandkupers.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/IMEO2022.pdf

Everyone involved in education from young people to tecahers to leaders to policy-makers are being asked some really tough questions in these current times. Do the systems and institutions that we are working and learning in still serve us? Did they ever? And what are we being called on to do differently? This week, it was such an amazing pleasure to chat with Zineb Mouhyi who is the co-founder of YouthXYouth, a global organisation that she set up with Valentina Raman, to convene action around transforming education systems but in a way that didn't excluding the core of these systems, the primary constituents that they were seeking to engage and serve: young people.

YouthXYouth invited young people around the world to see the COVID-19 pandemic crisis as an opportunity to radically reimagine learning for themselves and their communities. In January 2021, they hosted their first online Learning Festival, which gathered nearly 1000 young people and adult allies from over 80 countries around a central question: What if young people designed the future of education?

YouthXYouth has engaged over 2000 youth activists from 80 countries across 6 continents, buliding their capacity and confidence to reclaim their learning and create life-affirming futures within their communities. They are led by and serve youth who are between the ages of 15 to 26—75% of whom live in the Global South, and about 50% live in Africa.

Zineb is also one of the co-founders of the Weaving Lab (https://weavinglab.org/), an international NGO and a community of weavers learning together how to interconnect people, projects and places to form thriving systems. Prior to that, she was the Policy & Partnership Development Officer at WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education), at the Qatar Foundation in Doha, where she mainly worked on education development policy research and on bringing different education stakeholders together to bring forth collaborations in education.

Useful Links

 YxY Weavership Messaging Toolkit an opportunity for young people or youth organisations who might consider hosting a Weaver-in-Residence.

YxY website: https://www.youthxyouth.com/

Weavership Application: https://airtable.com/appYm9UwzGZxELiYA/shrHR2MmpZfVclJP5

Authors mentioned during the conversation:

Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle 

Loretta Ross - Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel

LinkedIn: @zinebmouhyi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zinebmouhyi/

Instagram: @yxyactivists - https://www.instagram.com/yxyactivists/

In episode 181 with Robert Barnett, Rob and I were discussing the real constraints and difficult conditions teachers find themselves in as they try to prioritise the meaningful learning and growth of their young people. This week, we are taking a broader look at the kinds of institutional structures that might actually help rather than hinder these more generative ways of living and learning - the kinds of institutions suited to the transformative adaptations and systems change that we desperately need. So in this episode I'm really happy to be speaking with Thea Snow and Toby Lowe about taking a Human Learning Systems approach to management and governance of organisations. Thea and Toby in their work at Centre for Public Impact focus primarily on public sector management. However, these principles certainly apply more broadly to institutions in the private and third sectors. This is very exciting work as it feels much more authentically connected to the beautiful and complex realities that we know we live, learn and work in and that we want to prepare our young people to embrace. But we also know that the way we are held accountable for outcomes in our work often feels simplistic and naive and entirely dissociated from these complex realities.
Thea is the Regional Director for Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand at Centre for Public Impact. Thea’s experiences span the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. She has worked as a commercial lawyer, a public servant, and, prior to joining CPI, at the UK’s innovation foundation, Nesta
Toby Lowe is Professor of Public Management at Manchester Metropolitan University and action researcher at Centre for Public Impact. He has also done policy work addressing poverty in neighbourhoods for the Social Exclusion Unit, worked as a public management action researcher developing the Human Learning Systems approach and held the position as Chief Executive of a participatory arts charity in North East England.
You can find links in the show notes to a lot of the documents and sources we talk about in the conversation, especially if you'd like to find out more about implementing a Human Learning Systems approach in your organisation.
Some of Thea’s work includes:
“The (il)logic of legibility – Why governments should stop simplifying complex systems”
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/02/12/the-illogic-of-legibility-why-governments-should-stop-simplifying-complex-systems/
“Once upon a bureaucrat: exploring the role of stories in government“
https://thepolicymaker.jmi.org.au/once-upon-a-bureaucrat-exploring-the-role-of-stories-in-government/
“Why evidence should be the servant, not the master, of good policy”
https://apolitical.co/solution-articles/en/Why-evidence-should-be-the-servant-not-the-master-of-good-policy
“Public servants are tired of change-washing — not change”
https://apolitical.co/solution-articles/en/public-servants-are-tired-of-change-washing-not-change
Some of Toby’s work includes:
Human Learning Systems: Public Service for the Real World: https://centreforpublicimpact.org/resource-hub/human-learning-systems-public-service-for-the-real-world/
Harnessing Complexity for Better Outcomes in Public and Non-profit Services: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/harnessing-complexity-for-better-outcomes-in-public-and-non-profit-services
Human Learning Systems: A practical guide for the curious: https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/assets/pdfs/hls-practical-guide.pdf
Various links from our discussion:
https://www.humanlearning.systems/hls-insights-findings-from-our-research-2024/
https://centreforpublicimpact.org/resource-hub/storytelling-for-systems-change/
https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/embracing-ensembles-8e049c40b87f
https://www.woodleigh.vic.edu.au/events-public-calendar/reimagined-conference

As educators, a great deal of our understandings of what learning is has been dominated by behaviourist (check out previous episode with Carol Sanford) and cognitivist ideas, but what if our decisions about how we design learning environments, and think about pedagogy and curriculum had taken in ecological insights of Eleanor Gibson and James Gibson and the branch of psychology known as ecological psychology. So few educators know that such a sub-discipline even exists!

Rather than individual students's brains neatly arranged in rows in intentionally informationally impoverished learning environments to compute information and construct meaning in a meaningless world out there, we might have young people as object-environment systems moving around and exploring informationally rich environments to fine-tune their action-perception through multi-sensory relating to the ecologies that they participate in! Sounds like a pretty different world!

This episode welcomes Miguel Segundo-Ortín and Vicente Raja, post-doctoral researchers at the MINT Lab, and research fellows at University of Murcia, Spain. Together, they are the authors of the book Ecological Psychology (Cambridge Elements, 2024) -https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ecological-psychology/9E79001702D4D8029E19D11CD330149FMiguel Segundo-Ortin is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy and member of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia (Spain). His research is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, particularly embodied cognition, comparative cognition, and human agency.https://miguelsegundoortinphd.com/

Vicente Raja a post-doctoral researcher at the MINT Lab, a research fellow at University of Murcia (Spain) and external affiliate faculty of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University (Canada). His research lies at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the history of the sciences of the mind, and has appeared in venues including Synthese, Minds and Machines, Physics of Life Reviews, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Philosophical Psychology, Adaptive Behavior, Cognitive Systems Research, and Theory and Psychology, among others. He has also edited/is editing a book for Routledge and special issues for the Journal of Consciousness Studies and Topics in Cognitive Science. https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/about/people/vicente-raja/

This is a talk given by Vicente In Memoriam: Eleanor Gibson - https://youtu.be/QmV4Iz1jJs8?si=HAScaBYB2RcNKjTa

James J. Gibson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson

Systems change is a big phrase, which can mean a lot of different things to different people. Quite possibly the system doesn't actually change "up there" in the realms of national and trans-national policy-making. Perhaps it changes in individual classrooms with teachers choosing to do something different. I was so happy to sit down with Robert Barnett, co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project to talk about this and find out how he, and his co-founder Kareem Farah, have made some very specific and not particularly easy choices about which leverage points they were going to work. MCP has developed an instructional model to respond to every student’s needs - no matter what or where you teach.

You can find out more about Modern Classrooms Project here: https://www.modernclassrooms.org/

Robert's book Meet Every Learner's Needs: Redesigning Instruction so all students can suceed is out on February 5th 2025, and you can find out more about it here: https://www.meeteverylearnersneeds.org/

Here's a way for you to win a free copy of the book! https://meln-form.paperform.co/?podcast=fld

Social Links

LinkedIn: @robert-s-barnett - https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-s-barnett/

Robert's personal site: https://www.rsbarnett.com/

As Manda Scott's BRILLIANT podcast suggests, "another world is possible… we have the power of gods to destroy our home, but we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine." This week's special episode is a joint podcast with Manda on her Accidental Gods podcast (https://accidentalgods.life/).

In all of her shamanic work, bestselling novel-writing, podcasting and convening, Manda Scott is gathering people around the vital question, how we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations to come?

Manda's new novel 'Any Human Power' is out on May 30th: https://linktr.ee/anyhumanpower

And you can find more of Manda's extensive and amazing work on her website here: https://mandascott.co.uk/

Other things we talk about in this conversation:

Nick Mulvey's performance at COP26: https://youtu.be/x-GBl6DeA50?si=8RgDivREYKZTa9I1&t=1273 Beautiful!

The Substack Manda reads from:  ⁠https://theconcernedbird.substack.com/p/elon-musks-and-xs-role-in-2024-election

Systems Transformation Pathway at UWC Atlantic College: https://www.uwcatlantic.org/learning/academic/systems-transformation-pathway

https://sites.google.com/uwcatlantic.org/transformingsystems/centre?authuser=0

Green School Bali:  https://www.greenschool.org/

School of Humanity: https://sofhumanity.com/

Festival of Hope: https://ibo.org/festival-of-hope/

LinkedIn: @mandascottauthor - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/

BlueSky - https://bsky.app/profile/mandascott.bsky.socialandMastodon - https://mastodon.scot/@Eceni

This week it was a huge pleasure to be able to welcome Carl Mika, Professor of Māori and Indigenous Philosophies from Aotearoa, the country now known as New Zealand. As you can probably guess from the title of this episode, this conversation with Carl went pretty deep pretty quickly! That's because underlying the most apparently basic concepts like learning or logic that people use all the time are some pretty fundamental assumptions about the way the world is. And they're certainly not universal to all humans. So what does educating our young people in how to read their worlds mean in this case?
Carl Mika is from the Tuhourangi iwi and is Professor of Māori and Indigenous Philosophies, and Head of School of Aotahi: School of Māori and Indigenous Studies, University of Canterbury. His published work includes Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence was published in 2017, Routledge), along with many articles and chapters, on the issues of colonisation and reductionism; Māori concepts of nothingness and darkness in response to an Enlightenment focus on clarity; mātauranga Māori and science. Carl teaches and researches in educational philosophy and mātauranga Māori, the law, and global studies, as well as aspects of Western philosophy.
In 2024, Carl was awarded the University of Canterbury Research Medal. Also In 2024, he was recipient of the University of Canterbury Faculty of Arts Kairangahau Māori Award for research in Māori philosophies (both traditional and contemporary) and Māori methodologies. He is also a Fellow of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA).