In this series, I explore what we at CoCreative call “the Baddies.” The problem is not fear, conflict, failure, or resistance themselves, but the unhealthy relationship we’ve developed with each of them.

• Part 1: Fear is Not the Thing We Have to Fear

• Part 2: You Will Fail. Why Not Embrace It?

• Part 3: What If the Conflict IS the Breakthrough?

• Part 4: That Resistance You’re Getting? It’s Trying to Help You.

A Story About Continuity

A number of years ago, I was training twenty or so change and transformation leaders across several New Zealand government ministries in polarity thinking. One of the polarities we were exploring together was Continuity & Change, the creative tension between leveraging what works and transforming what doesn’t.

These were experienced, committed change leaders, people who genuinely believed in the transformation work they were doing. And yet they had all been encountering persistent resistance that had seemed, to them, irrational. The people pushing back weren’t being obstructionist. Neither were they ignorant of the need for change. So why wouldn’t they get with the program?

The answer emerged as we worked through the polarity map. Every transformation strategy in every ministry was focused entirely on what needed to change, how things were going to change, and why those changes were necessary. There was very little in any of their plans about what needed to stay the same, nothing about what would be built on, honored, or strengthened, and nothing about what they had learned from the past that should be carried forward. In other words, there was little continuity.

As one participant observed, “It makes a lot of sense that we’re getting resistance. Because we’re not being clear about what’s being kept and strengthened, or what we’re learning from the past, it looks like we’re leaving all that behind.”

The resistance hadn’t been irrational, but entirely reasonable. The change leaders had been asking people to give up everything familiar without offering anything stable in return. Of course people pushed back. What else would we do?

What Resistance Actually Is

Resistance is a way of protecting and managing boundaries. That’s the simplest definition, and one worth sitting with. It’s (usually) not obstruction. It’s not ignorance. It isn’t a character flaw, a personality trait, or a sign of bad faith. Resistance is a boundary-management response, and like all boundary-management responses, it carries information about what matters to the people expressing it.

Resistance is also interest. It’s engagement. It’s a signal that something real is at stake for someone. The person who pushes back hardest on a change initiative is often the person who cares most about something that might be lost. That’s not someone to overcome but someone to listen to.

David Rock’s SCARF Model offers a useful neuroscience-based lens here. According to research by Rock and others, our brains scan five social domains for potential threats or rewards: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. These domains activate the same threat and reward responses we’ve relied on for physical survival since the beginning of human evolution. A conventional top-down change initiative that focuses entirely on change, with nothing about continuity, threatens at least four of these five dimensions simultaneously. It threatens our certainty about what comes next. It implicitly devalues the status and expertise people have built under the current system. It often reduces autonomy by doing change to people rather than with them. And it raises fairness questions when people have no voice in co-designing what changes. Seen through this lens, resistance isn’t a problem to be managed. It’s a neurologically predictable response to having many social needs threatened simultaneously.

This is why one of the most powerful things change leaders can do is help people practice and experience the futures they’re imagining, not just describe them. If you want people to move toward a new vision, they need to be able to feel what it would be like to inhabit it: how they would behave, how they would show up, whether they would be valued and accepted in that future. Abstract pictures of the future can’t do that. Embodied experience can.

Jeff Campbell at Emancipation Theater Company recently shared a beautiful example of this. He helped one non-profit organization perform their theory of change as a play, acting it out in front of potential donors as a fundraiser. The performance didn’t just describe the future they were working toward; it enacted it, giving the audience a felt sense of both the destination and the pathway to get there. The group raised $250,000. Jeff is now developing this as a service for other organizations. What made it work wasn’t the persuasiveness of the argument but the tangibility of the experience. People could step into the future and feel it, not just hear about it. Their resistance quieted because the uncertainty was replaced by something real they could inhabit, even briefly.

What an Unhealthy Relationship with Resistance Looks Like

An unhealthy relationship with resistance usually begins with a single frame: resistance is an obstacle to overcome. Once we adopt that lens, we start asking how to get past it, through it, or around it. And the moment we do that, we lose the important information available to us.

When we frame resistance as something to overcome, we suppress wisdom and experience, especially during change initiatives. We disenfranchise the very people whose buy-in we need. And we often generate more resistance, not less, because people can tell when they’re being managed rather than heard.

Working from urgency makes this worse. The faster we need to move, the less tolerance we have for the friction that resistance creates, and the more likely we are to steamroll it. But urgency is often precisely when resistance is most important to pay attention to. The thing that slows us down may be the thing that saves us from a much larger failure further down the road.

I have my own version of this dynamic, though it runs in the opposite direction. My instinctive relationship with resistance is to be contrary, to push against dogma, convention, and received wisdom—sometimes, honestly, before I’ve fully understood what I’m pushing against. I’ve noticed this lately in discussions about the relationship between inner development and systems change work, where some voices suggest a dependency: that people must do the inner work before they can effectively engage in the outer work of changing systems.

My contrarian instinct immediately reacts against that framing. And it’s not wrong to react. There are real problems with implying a strict dependency between inner and outer work, and the reaction protects something worth protecting: a commitment to not jumping on every bandwagon, and to holding my own theoretical integrity in a field where concepts can move fast and spread wide before they’ve been properly examined. As Karen Horney might say, it’s a form of moving against authority, and there can be real value in that.

But this tendency has also, at times, gotten in my way. My resistance to the framing has occasionally interrupted my deeper engagement with what was actually being offered. The insight I eventually arrived at, that the relationship between inner and outer work is not a dependency in either direction but a mutually reinforcing dynamic (as Tracy Kunkler has beautifully articulated here), and that working in both realms simultaneously produces the most powerful growth and outcomes, required me to stay in the discomfort long enough to find it. My contrarian instinct wanted to move out of that discomfort much faster.

The Benefits of a Healthy Relationship with Resistance

Here is what becomes available when we stop treating resistance as a problem and start treating it as data.

Resistance reveals what people actually value. Beneath every act of resistance is something someone doesn’t want to lose: status, continuity, identity, expertise, a way of working that has served them well. That information is design criteria. If you can surface what people are protecting, you can design change strategies that honor those things rather than threatening them.

Resistance ensures real ownership. People who have had no opportunity to resist, question, or push back on a direction haven’t really consented to it. As my CoCreative colleague Melissa Darnell puts it, “If I can’t say no, then my yes means nothing.” With no opportunity to meaningfully resist, people simply comply, and compliance is fragile. Ownership, which can only emerge through genuine engagement with resistance, is durable.

Resistance weeds out bad ideas. Not every idea that gains traction deserves to. One of the most important functions of healthy resistance in a collaboration is to slow down premature convergence, surface assumptions that haven’t been examined, and challenge approaches that look good in theory but won’t survive contact with reality. The group that has no resistance is the group that doesn’t think critically.

Resistance slows us down in ways that matter. Urgency is one of the dominant cultural values in systems change work, and it produces some of the field’s worst outcomes. Resistance creates productive friction. It forces reflection, analysis, and a more complete understanding of the problem before committing to a solution. That’s not inefficiency. That’s quality.

Resistance, honored rather than overcome, builds the conditions for change. The New Zealand change leaders didn’t just solve a facilitation problem that afternoon. They left with a fundamentally different relationship to the resistance they would encounter in their work. Once you understand that resistance is carrying information rather than blocking progress, it changes how you listen, how you design, and how you lead.

Practices for Developing a Healthier Relationship with Resistance

Read the resistance before you respond to it. When you encounter pushback, resist the urge to address it immediately. Ask instead: “What’s important to you here,” or “What are you trying to solve for?” (And ask yourself, “What might I have missed in my own thinking or planning?”)

Map what will continue or expand, as well as what will change. In any change initiative, be as explicit about continuity as you are about change. What will be named, honored, built on, and carried forward? What has the organization learned from the past that deserves to be preserved? Answering these questions doesn’t slow change down. It actually makes the change more resilient.

Address the SCARF dimensions explicitly. When you’re asking people to move toward a new future, help them experience what that future might mean for their status, their certainty, their autonomy, their relationships, and their sense of fairness. Better yet, find ways to let them experience that future directly, not just hear about it. The more tangible and inhabitable the future feels, the less threatening the path toward it becomes.

Do inquiry before advocacy. Before making the case for your changes, take time to understand the interests and values behind any resistance. An empathy interview, a structured listening process, or simply a well-placed question, like “What are you most worried about losing here?”, can surface information that changes everything.

Notice your own resistance style. The Battle-Klein-Battle Resistance Style Inventory offers a structured way to understand your preferred mode of resisting. Gestalt practitioners commonly identify five common styles: introjection, deflection, confluence, retroflection, and desensitization. None is inherently wrong or unhealthy, but each becomes a problem when it’s our default response. Our goal is to cultivate the same fluency we’ve been working toward across this entire series: not the elimination of the response, but a healthier, more conscious way of relating to it.

Reframe resistance as a resource in your culture. This is the systemic practice, and perhaps the most important. The organizations and collaborations that treat resistance as data and insight rather than friction to be eliminated develop something rare: a genuine capacity to learn more deeply from disagreement. That capacity is one of the most powerful assets any complex change effort can have.

The pushback you’re getting isn’t evidence that something has gone wrong. It may be the most important signal you’re receiving. The question isn’t how to overcome it. It’s what it’s trying to tell you, and whether you’re willing to listen.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

In this series, I explore what we at CoCreative call “the Baddies.” The problem is not fear, conflict, failure, or resistance themselves, but the unhealthy relationship we’ve developed with each of them.

• Part 1: Fear is Not the Thing We Have to Fear

• Part 2: You Will Fail. Why Not Embrace It?

• Part 3: What If the Conflict IS the Breakthrough?

• Part 4: That Resistance You’re Getting? It’s Trying to Help You.

A Story of Avoidance

I have spent a significant part of my professional life helping people navigate conflict across organizational, cultural, and political differences. With multi-stakeholder collaborations, systems change initiatives, and cross-sector partnerships, the work almost always involves people who see the world in fundamentally different ways but need to find a way to work together anyway.

You might assume this means I’ve always had a healthy relationship with conflict.

Well, you would be wrong.

I’m an Enneagram Nine and Five. For those unfamiliar with the Enneagram, a system of nine types that illuminates our core motivations and patterns, the Nine is sometimes called the Peacemaker: someone who instinctively moves toward harmony, tends to minimize their own needs and preferences, and may experience conflict as a genuine threat to their sense of equilibrium. The Five is the Investigator: someone who retreats into thinking and analysis, prefers to observe rather than engage, and manages discomfort by withdrawing into the mind rather than staying present in the room. For all the gifts and strengths of these types, when they are in “dis-integration,” the two types produce someone with a strong, well-practiced instinct to avoid conflict entirely, either by smoothing it over or by stepping back from it.

The psychologist Karen Horney described three fundamental ways people respond to interpersonal threat: moving toward others, moving against them, or moving away. The Nine-Five combination is almost textbook moving away, and for years, that’s exactly what I did.

I did not say what needed to be said in a conversation, but I would stew about it afterward. I ruminated, cycling through what I coulda, woulda, shoulda said, if I only had been a stronger, more assertive person. That rumination ate at me and weakened me, and the more I did it, the more I reinforced the very pattern I wanted to break. As Richard Strozzi-Heckler has said, “We are what we practice. We are always practicing something.” For a long time, without fully realizing it, I was practicing being invisible.

What finally shifted was a realization of the cost of this pattern. Avoiding conflict felt like the path of least resistance, but it wasn’t actually less painful. It was just differently painful. The discomfort of not saying what I needed to say, and then living in the aftermath of that silence, was often higher than the discomfort of moving into the conflict directly. I had to choose who I was going to be. And I came to understand that I was choosing, through every small decision in each small moment, who I am.

What Conflict Actually Is

Conflict is two things attempting to occupy the same space at the same time. That definition, from Gestalt psychologist Edwin Nevis, immediately reframes conflict away from the assumption that the “problem” is that the other person is wrong, or difficult, or acting in bad faith. The problem is that two things that both feel real can’t both be fully true or present at the same time, at least in this moment and in our current understanding.

Conflict is often not even with the other person at all. It’s within us. When we feel that someone else holds all the power and we hold none, that perception of powerlessness can generate a felt sense of conflict, a pressure to speak truth to power, to fight, to organize against, before we’ve said a single word to anyone. The conflict was ours all along, an internal drama about agency and self-worth that the other person may know nothing about. Recognizing this doesn’t dissolve the conflict, but it changes where we look for its source and, therefore, where we might begin to address it.

What an Unhealthy Relationship with Conflict Looks Like

An unhealthy relationship with conflict usually takes one of two forms: avoidance or reactivity. We either move away, suppressing what we feel and think until it finds other outlets, or we move against, escalating minor friction into battle because our tolerance for difference has grown so low that any disagreement feels like an attack.

Both responses share a common root: conflict feels threatening to our sense of self. When I (meaning Russ) avoid conflict, I’m protecting something, likely my image of myself as cooperative and easygoing, my fear of damaging a relationship, and maybe my uncertainty about whether I have the right to assert my own wants and needs. When someone becomes highly reactive in conflict, they’re often protecting something too: their status, their certainty, their feeling of being seen and respected.

Groups are not immune to this. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion observed that groups under pressure to perform often abandon their actual work and start operating instead from shared unconscious assumptions about what will keep them safe. One of the most common of these is the fight/flight assumption: the group acts as if it faces an enemy, either mobilizing aggressively against a perceived threat or withdrawing from the work entirely. Unaddressed conflict is one of the most reliable triggers for this dynamic. When people can’t talk about what’s actually happening, the group’s anxiety finds other outlets: scapegoating, polarization, paralysis.

There’s a broader cultural dimension here, too. We are losing our capacity to be with difference. In an earlier era, community was less chosen than today. We all had neighbors with different politics, an extended family with a crazy uncle whose views you couldn’t avoid, a faith community or a town that held people you fundamentally disagreed with, and yet remained in relationship with. That friction, uncomfortable as it was, exercised a muscle. It taught people that you could be in deep conflict with someone about something important and still find the humanity in them, still discover the partial truth in what they believed, still maintain a relationship across a real divide.

We have tried to polish much of that friction away. We move to neighborhoods where people think like us. We curate our feeds, our friendships, our professional networks. The result, at a societal level, is a growing inability to tolerate difference, to stay in relationship through disagreement, to believe that someone who sees the world differently might have something worth hearing. This isn’t just a political problem. It shows up in every multi-stakeholder collaboration we support, in every room where people with genuinely different interests have to find a way forward together.

The Benefits of a Healthy Relationship with Conflict

Here is what becomes available when we stop treating conflict as a threat and start treating it as information.

Conflict reveals what we actually care about. When conflict arises, something real is at stake for someone. As I describe in more depth here, below every position is an interest. Beneath every interest is a value. And values, even when they appear to be in opposition, often turn out to be interdependent when examined closely. The conflict that feels most intractable is frequently the one sitting closest to something that really matters.

Conflict surfaces what was already there. The disagreement in the room didn’t begin when someone spoke up. It began earlier, when people started holding back. Surfaced conflict is almost always less dangerous than the conflict that circulates underground. It’s just more visible. And when it finally comes into the open, it becomes possible to work with.

Conflict builds the capacity to collaborate. The groups that have learned to move through conflict productively, to meaningfully differentiate their interests before trying to integrate them, to work from values rather than positions, and to find the interdependence in apparent opposition, tend to produce more resilient solutions and more durable relationships than groups that perform agreement. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, one of the most widely used tools in organizational settings, identifies five ways people typically handle conflict: competing, accommodating, avoiding, compromising, and collaborating. None of these is always right. The goal is to develop enough flexibility to choose the mode that actually fits the situation, rather than defaulting to the one that feels safest.

Conflict, navigated well, is where breakthroughs live. The assumption that two worldviews are mutually exclusive is itself often the problem. Many of the most important advances in collaborative work have come from staying in a conflict long enough to find the deeper question, the one that both perspectives were, in their different ways, pointing toward. What looked like an impasse turns out to be a threshold to a third way.

Practices for Developing a Healthier Relationship with Conflict

Notice your default mode. When conflict arises, do you tend to move toward it, away from it, or against it? Karen Horney’s three orientations are a useful mirror. None is inherently wrong, but each can become a problem when it’s the only response available. If you want to go deeper, the Thomas-Kilmann instrument offers a more granular picture of your preferred conflict style.

Ask what the conflict is actually about. Is this a conflict of positions, of interests, or of values? The deeper you can go, the more creative the possibilities become. And ask whether the conflict is really with the other person, or whether some part of it is within you first.

Differentiate before you integrate. One of the most common mistakes in collaborative conflict is trying to find common ground before the differences have been fully named, understood, and honored. Spend more time, maybe even more than feels comfortable, exploring what each person actually needs and values before attempting to achieve alignment.

Make the conflict discussable. Name what’s happening. Not as an accusation, but as an observation. “It seems like we have a real difference here about X, can we talk about it?” That simple move opens up the pathway through conflict so it can be named and worked with.

Stay in relationship through the conflict. The goal here isn’t to win or eliminate the disagreement. It’s to remain in genuine contact with the other person while the disagreement is present. That takes the kind of practice that Buddhist dukkha contemplation points to: rather than meditating to release or soothe tension, we sit with suffering and dissatisfaction, observing it clearly and feeling it fully, without drowning in it or fleeing from it. In that experience, something shifts, not in the difficult thing itself, but in us.

Every conflict navigated with curiosity rather than defensiveness builds the capacity to do it again.

The conflict you’ve been avoiding in your collaboration, and in yourself, is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It may be the most important conversation you haven’t had yet. And the breakthrough you’re looking for might be waiting on the other side of it.

Next in the series: Part 4: That Resistance You’re Getting? It’s Trying to Help You.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

In this series, I explore what we at CoCreative call “the Baddies.” The problem is not fear, conflict, failure, or resistance themselves, but the unhealthy relationship we’ve developed with each of them.

• Part 1: Fear is Not the Thing We Have to Fear

• Part 2: You Will Fail. Why Not Embrace It?

• Part 3: What If the Conflict IS the Breakthrough?

• Part 4: That Resistance You’re Getting? It’s Trying to Help You.

A Story About Risk

In 2013, my colleague Jim Scully of ThinkPlace New Zealand and I were leading a workshop at UNDP with their innovation team, as part of a series to help one of the world’s largest development organizations develop mindsets and skillsets around social innovation. We were using a creative tensions framework to help the group explore the polarities inherent in their work.

One of those polarities was Safety and Risk: how do you minimize the risk of harm to people and communities while trying new approaches and strategies? That morning, the group had been mapping that tension, exploring how safety and risk, when managed well, are not opposites to be traded off against each other but interdependent values to be leveraged together.

Just as we paused for lunch, Jens Wandel, then the Assistant Secretary General of UNDP, asked whether he might have a few minutes to address the group after the break. We said no (kidding!).

When we regathered, Jens told the group that the morning’s work had made something clear to him: UNDP had been systematically embracing safety to the neglect of risk, and that without developing a healthier relationship with risk, their innovation efforts would fail to thrive. He paused, then said: “So starting today, we’re going to change the way we engage with risk. Instead of trying to eliminate risk in our work, we’re going to clearly declare the risks of any new initiative, as clearly as we can, and implement strategies to monitor and manage those risks.”

The effect on the room was palpable, something close to a collective sigh of relief. People shared their excitement that, after years of feeling they had to avoid any risk at all costs, they finally had permission to try things, even if they might not work at first.

That moment has stayed with me. What Jens named that day was a much-needed pivot: the greatest risk to UNDP’s innovation work wasn’t failure. It was the fear of failure and the culture of risk-avoidance it had produced. As Ashley Good, founder of Fail Forward and one of the world’s leading thinkers on productive failure, puts it, “What is the risk of staying the same?”

What Failure Actually Is

As my teacher John Carter at the Gestalt OSD Center has said, failure is simply not getting the outcome we expected. It’s the gap between intention and result, a disruption of our assumptions about how things work, or will work. And like fear, conflict, and resistance, it is inevitable in any work that’s worth doing.

In the work I support to shift complex, human systems to work better for all, failure isn’t just likely, it’s basically guaranteed. Complex systems have adaptive and emergent properties that defy reliable predictions. Every intervention is, at some level, an experiment, a hypothesis being tested against a system that will not hold still. I often tell people that if they’re taking on any truly complex challenge, they will fail. And if they don’t fail, they’re probably not trying hard enough. The question is never whether you’ll fail, but how you fail and, more importantly, how you learn from it.

The only truly unproductive failure is giving up. It’s when funders pull back funding precisely when real learning is just starting, when the most important assumptions are finally being challenged. It’s when we absorb failure as a verdict on our identity or efficacy rather than as information about our assumptions or strategy. Productive failure, by contrast, is failing fast and cheap, learning from what didn’t work, incorporating that learning into what comes next, and keeping going. Good calls this “intelligent failure”: failures that result in useful learning, allowing us to move forward more wisely.

An Unhealthy Relationship with Failure

In my experience, an unhealthy relationship with failure often stems from a linear view of progress, where success is the destination and failure is going backwards. From that view, failure becomes something to move away from, hide, or recover from as quickly as possible rather than something to expect and learn from.

When we hold this view, we stop taking risks that will meet the challenge, sticking with what’s familiar and comfortable. We’re less willing to offer the risky idea or try the untested approach, and we likely won’t admit when something isn’t working. We can develop an idealized image of ourselves as competent, decisive, and on track, even when none of these are totally true.

In collaborative settings, this dynamic is particularly unhelpful. Groups that can’t metabolize failure tend to stop experimenting. And groups that stop experimenting in complex systems tend to keep doing the same things, maybe more efficiently, but they’ll keep seeing the same results.

Note, though, that failure is not equally risky for everyone. For me, as an older white man with some professional standing, a public stumble carries relatively manageable consequences (or at least that’s my story now). For a younger person, a woman, or a person of color, the same failure is more likely to be attributed to identity or competency rather than circumstance, and the reputational cost is often significantly higher. Creating conditions in which everyone can fail safely, courageously, and equitably is key to allowing everyone to fully contribute so we get the best of our collective thinking and risk-taking.

How to Make Failure Work for You

One of the most practical things a collaboration can do to develop a healthier relationship with failure is to prototype early and often, and to be deliberate about what kind of prototype serves the moment.

In the early stages of developing any new strategy or idea, the goal of prototyping isn’t to design the solution but to learn. According to my colleague Laura Weiss, who initiated the service design practice at IDEO, “Lo-fi” prototypes are Rough, Rapid, and Right. Rough just means good enough (one of my favorite phrases as a facilitator), built from whatever materials are at hand, with no emotional attachment to the result. Rapid means iterable, cheap, and designed for fast feedback. And Right means focused specifically on what you most need to learn next, built only as far as necessary to meet that specific learning objective.

Some discipline is important here. A prototype is not a plan to do something, a discussion of possibilities, or a slide deck explaining what you would build. It’s a model of the thing itself, made quickly and cheaply enough that failing with it teaches more than it costs. As we invite people into a prototyping process, we put it bluntly: “Don’t plan it, don’t discuss it, don’t talk about it. Make it.”

This reframes failure in some fundamental way. When we prototype early, failure isn’t a setback; it’s actually kind of the whole point.

Think of a prototype as a null hypothesis made concrete, an assumption about what will work, designed specifically to be tested and, ideally, disproved. Scientists have long understood that we learn more reliably by trying to disprove things than by trying to prove them. After all, confirmation bias is powerful and pervasive, and designing for disconfirmation runs helpfully against that grain. Each failed prototype eliminates a wrong assumption, reveals an unmet need, or surfaces a constraint we didn’t know we had. That’s not failure in any meaningful sense, but the scientific method working as intended.

Brené Brown, writing about Ashley Good’s work in Rising Strong, captured the essential distinction: there’s a vast difference between how we think about the term failure and how we think about the people and organizations brave enough to share their failures for the purpose of learning and growing. Lo-fi prototyping builds exactly that kind of organizational courage, in small, low-stakes, repeatable doses.

Ever seen a failures report?

See this example from Engineers Without Borders Canada, which shook up the international development community when they started producing them, and which Ashley Good played a key role in.

And this example from the Fito Network. (In full disclosure, I serve on the board of Fito, though I’m only responsible for some of those failures!)

The Benefits of a Healthy Relationship with Failure

Some beautiful and important things happen when we stop treating failure as the opposite of success and start treating it as part of a natural process of learning, adaptation, and growth:

We get clearer on what success actually requires. Every failed attempt reveals something real about what’s going on, what the system will and won’t respond to, what assumptions were wrong, and what conditions we hadn’t accounted for. That information is hard to get any other way.

We find our true allies. As hard as this is to say, when things go wrong, we learn quickly who is truly committed to the work itself and who was committed to the appearance of progress. The colleagues, funders, and partners who stay curious and constructive in the face of setbacks are the ones to keep building with.

We loosen our attachment to perfectionism. I once lost my thread completely while debriefing an exercise in front of sixty systems leaders in Toronto. I fumbled forward, stared blankly at the Lego ducks on the table in front of me (they seemed to stare back—yikes!), finally found my notes, and gradually recovered. Some people in the room probably didn’t notice. Some definitely did. What I relearned in that moment was that failure is survivable, and that the group’s trust in me didn’t depend on my being flawless. Loosening our grip on our idealized pictures of ourselves is one of failure’s humanizing gifts.

We model something important. When a leader fails visibly, learns publicly, and keeps going anyway, they give others permission to be more vulnerable, curious, and open. That powerful combination of vulnerability and grit creates something that competence alone cannot: a courageous space in which people can bring their full effort to genuinely uncertain work.

We return to beginner’s mind. Steve Jobs, reflecting on being forced out of Apple, described it as one of the best things that ever happened to him, freeing him from the weight of his own success and letting him reconnect to his work with fresh eyes. Failure has a way of clearing the accumulated certainty that can make even experienced practitioners rigid and less adaptive.

Practices for Developing a Healthier Relationship with Failure

Okay, no single practice here will work for everyone, so what’s below are invitations rather than prescriptions. But across years of working with groups navigating difficult collaborative terrain, these are the ones I’ve seen work:

Declare the risks upfront. Rather than trying to eliminate risk, just name it clearly at the outset of any initiative. What are we assuming? What could go wrong? What would we do if it did? This doesn’t create more risk, just a more honest relationship with the risk that already exists.

Prototype early, prototype cheap. Keep the costs and stakes low in the early stages of any new approach. Build Rough, Rapid, and Right. Put a version number on everything. Treat early iterations as learning vehicles, not commitments, and resist the pull to over-invest before the core assumptions have been tested.

Be clear about what you need to learn next. Before each prototype or experiment, name the specific assumption you’re testing. What would success look like? What exactly would failure help you understand? Focused failure is far more useful than unfocused failure.

Fail well when it happens. Slow down. Admit what occurred (at least to yourself, if no one else). Look for the impacts, both negative and positive, and address them. Find the learning. Get re-grounded in the purpose of the work. Then keep going.

Don’t overlearn. Remember that one failure is one data point. Pulling back from an entire class of approaches because a single attempt didn’t work compounds the original failure rather than the learning.

Create conditions for everyone to fail safely. Be attentive to who carries more risk when things go wrong. Build the psychological safety and equity practices that allow everyone in a collaboration to take genuine risks, not just those for whom failure is easiest to absorb.

As Jens Wandel understood that day at UNDP, the goal was never to eliminate failure. It was to develop an honest, courageous, and productive relationship with it. The organizations and collaborations that learn to do this don’t fail less, but learn more. And in systems change work, learning more is how we can eventually succeed.

Next in the series: Part 3: What If the Conflict IS the Breakthrough?

If you’d like to develop a healthier relationship with failure, my colleague Issac Carter offers coaching and tools that will help. You can reach Issac through the CoCreative website. To leverage failure as a resource for your organization or team, contact Ashley’s team at Fail Forward.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

In his first inaugural address in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told a nation gripped by economic collapse that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It was a galvanizing call to action, an invitation to stop allowing fear to paralyze us and start moving forward together. But vocalist and performance coach Jennifer Hamady, in her book The Art of Singing, offers a quiet but important alternative: “We have nothing to fear but an unhealthy relationship with fear.”

That single reframe is the animating idea behind this series of four articles on what we at CoCreative call “the Baddies,” the experiences that tend to derail collaborative work, the ones we most reliably try to avoid, suppress, or push through. But what if the problem was never the thing itself? What if fear, conflict, failure, and resistance are not obstacles to doing good work together, but essential ingredients in it, resources waiting to be recognized and used? That is the argument I’ll explore across all four articles:

• Part 1: Fear is Not the Thing We Have to Fear

• Part 2: You Will Fail. Why Not Embrace It?

• Part 3: What If the Conflict IS the Breakthrough?

• Part 4: That Resistance You’re Getting? It’s Trying to Help You.

Let’s start here, with fear.

A Story About Fear

I have a long relationship with fear.

I grew up in Rushford, Minnesota, a beautiful postcard-ready town nestled in the forested hills of the southeast corner of the state. For me, it was the perfect place to enjoy nature, and do all I could to avoid speaking with the other 1,317 people who lived there.

To say I was quiet and shy as a kid is a hell of an understatement. I literally didn’t speak until the age of 4. Through elementary school, I was silent most days unless called upon by the teacher, where I would answer correctly but as efficiently as possible, because I knew that my voice would give away my fear if I said more than a few words at a time.

My social anxiety was paralyzing. One August Sunday, when I was 8, I was sitting in the hard wooden pews of our church, trying to stay awake. Most days like that, I could blend into the brown pew and become invisible. But this day the minister came over to me and, speaking directly to me in front of the whole congregation, said, “Russell, would you like to help collect the offering today?”

It was a simple task: pass a basket down one row, collect it at the next, and continue down the aisle.

My response was equally simple: I broke out in tears, dropped to the floor between the pews, and tried to disappear.

Even today, at 58, I have fears. I’m afraid of driving across the 4.3-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I’m afraid of those escalators that rise seemingly unsupported inside malls. I’m still afraid sometimes before I give a talk. But here’s one big difference between 8-year-old me and 58-year-old me: I’m no longer afraid of being afraid.

Two things have changed in my relationship with fear:

First, I can now speak in front of people, which is probably a good thing since I earn my living from it.

Second, I’ve come to appreciate the many benefits that fear can deliver, if only we learn to embrace them.

What Fear Is

Fear is an emotion that arises when we believe someone or something is threatening the loss of something we value. The threatened something may be our lives, our status, our safety, anything that we don’t want to lose. That’s the simple definition, and I think it’s good enough to work with for now. But fear is also something more: it’s energy, a forecast, a signal from our past, and perhaps most importantly, a source of insight.

Research in neuroscience confirms what wisdom traditions have long suggested: fear is fundamentally adaptive. It evolved to help us survive and respond to a changing world. The problem isn’t the fear itself; it’s when fear becomes disconnected from actual threat, when it metastasizes into something chronic, unnamed, and unexamined.

One important note: the ability to develop a healthy relationship with fear assumes some degree of safety and agency. For people being threatened by oppressive governments, psychological trauma, or real physical harm, fear is often a completely rational and healthy response to real danger. What we’re exploring here isn’t about minimizing fear. It’s about changing how we relate to it.

What an Unhealthy Relationship with Fear Looks Like

An unhealthy relationship with fear typically begins when we try to repress or ignore it. The feeling doesn’t disappear; it goes underground, where it shapes our behavior in ways we can’t easily see or name. In groups and collaborations, this is especially corrosive. When fear becomes undiscussable, it doesn’t stop operating. It just operates below the surface.

When we’re in an unhealthy relationship with fear, we tend to shut down or spin out. Our perceived range of options narrows dramatically, and where we once saw many paths forward, we suddenly see one or two, both of which may look bad. We actively search out enemies. We might assume we’re the only one feeling what we’re feeling. We freeze, procrastinate, or retreat to the comfort of the familiar. All these dynamics constrain choice, agency, and the challenge we need to grow in healthy, adaptive ways.

Our fear also doesn’t respond well to others trying to manage it, or to disparagement or dismissal. Telling someone to “push past their fear” or “be rational” almost always makes things worse. Fear needs affirmation, information, and reassurance. It responds to compassion. This is as true in collaborative settings as it is for individuals.

In collaborative work specifically, fear of losing influence, being sidelined, or looking incompetent can quietly drive some of the most destructive group dynamics: the withdrawn participant, the dominating voice, the person who agrees in the room but undermines the work outside of it. Most of the time, no one names what’s actually happening. They don’t need to suppress the fear because it has already suppressed itself.

The Benefits of a Healthy Relationship with Fear

Here is what changes when we stop treating fear as an enemy and start treating it as information.

Fear tells us we care. When I feel fear in my work, it almost always signals something that matters to me—a relationship, an outcome, maybe a value I don’t want to compromise. One participant in a CoCreative webinar (on this very topic) described walking into a courtroom to represent himself in a personal case, feeling fear rise up, and instinctively perceiving it as bad. But then something shifted. He realized that the fear wasn’t bad, that it was telling him what was really important to him. That reframe didn’t eliminate the fear but channeled it. He showed up more focused, more present, and more effective.

Fear tells us we’re learning something important. John Carter, one of my teachers, once said that “If you’re not feeling fear or anxiety, then you’re not really learning.” It takes courage to uncover and take on our most awkward learning edges, often the ones that matter most. When we are genuinely learning new ways of thinking or being, the territory is unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and we experience what Martin Broadwell called “conscious incompetence,” the critical stage of learning where we risk looking like fools. That discomfort is a signal to proceed mindfully, not a stop sign.

Fear connects us to others. When I’ve dared to name my fear in a relationship or collaborative setting, to say “I’m worried about this” or “I don’t know if I can do what’s being asked of me,” others recognize themselves in what I’ve said, and shared experience flows. The group or the other person becomes more honest, and therefore more capable. Sometimes, simply sharing what we’re experiencing with honesty and vulnerability is the most powerful act of leadership available to us.

Fear is a signal worth reading. As a forecast, fear alerts us to risks we haven’t fully recognized, to assumptions we’re making about the future, or to past experiences that may or may not be relevant now. It can tell us when our thinking has become extreme, when we’re reacting to echoes of the past rather than being present now, or when we’re being protective of something that genuinely deserves protection.

Fear, worked with rather than against, builds presence and capacity. Performers who have no fear, Jennifer Hamady observes, tend to give dull performances. The energy of fear, channeled rather than suppressed, sharpens focus and presence. The same is true in collaborative work: the groups that have learned to work with their collective fears tend to be more alive, more honest, and ultimately more effective than those that have learned to perform fearlessness.

Practices for Developing a Healthier Relationship with Fear

No single practice works for everyone, and the practices below are invitations rather than prescriptions. But across years of working with groups navigating difficult terrain, these are the ones we return to most.

Name it. The simple act of acknowledging fear, to yourself or aloud in a group, begins to shift your relationship with it. You don’t even have to resolve it. Just name it.

Respond with compassion, not dismissal. When fear shows up in others, resist the urge to minimize or push past it. Acknowledge what’s present, invite people to fully feel it, offer information where it’s helpful, and create enough safety that the fear can be expressed rather than driven underground.

Get out of your head and into your body. Fear lives in the body before it lives in the mind, and the mind is often the worst place to process it. We’re too good at catastrophizing, too quick to spin stories. Slow your breathing. Notice what’s happening in your chest, your jaw, your belly. Shift your attention there. You might even ask that part of your body what it’s trying to tell you.

Get outside yourself. Fear feeds on rumination, especially the replaying of worst-case scenarios until they feel inevitable. Before a high-stakes meeting that could open doors to working directly with members of the U.S. Congress on cross-partisan policy design, I was so caught up in my own anxiety that I was guaranteeing failure. My coach Bob Dickman offered a simple reframe: stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about them, their pressures, their needs, what success looks like from their side of the table. That shift turned my fear into focus.

Clarify the threat. Vague fear is often the most paralyzing kind. Turn a general fear into a specific one: what exactly am I afraid of? What is the actual worst-case scenario? Naming the specific fear, even catastrophizing it deliberately, often reveals that the threat is either more manageable than imagined or real enough to warrant a concrete response.

Center on purpose. When fear narrows your vision, return to why this work matters. Your larger purpose, in life, in the collaboration, in the specific moment, can provide a stabilizing frame that fear alone cannot.

Seek awe. Experiences of awe in nature, in art, in the presence of something larger than ourselves have a remarkable capacity to place our fears in perspective. This isn’t escapism. It’s recalibration.

In groups: make fear discussable. Create the conditions in which people can name what they’re afraid of without it being treated as weakness or disloyalty. The fears that go unspoken don’t disappear. They shape every conversation that follows.

As Roosevelt knew, paralyzing fear is real and its costs are high. But the answer was never to eliminate fear. It was to find our way to a healthier relationship with it. Fear is not the enemy of good collaborative work. An unhealthy relationship with fear is. And that, unlike fear itself, is something we can change.

Coming next in this series: Part Two: What If the Conflict IS the Breakthrough?

If you’d like to develop a healthier relationship with fear, my colleague Issac Carter offers coaching and tools that will help. You can reach Issac through the CoCreative website.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

I lie under something with no name.
Not grief. Not pain.
Just: no.

No self to suffer.
No self to notice life passing.
No self to receive or refuse love.
Just the weight and the floor.

Then, from somewhere below thought,
below will, below wanting:

“Open your eyes.” I pause.
“O…

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This article was inspired by many conversations with my colleagues at CoCreative and draws from a workshop, “Working with Complexity: Beyond Analytical Knowing,” that I co-created with my colleagues Luzette Jaimes and Ana Lucía Castaño Galvis.

Early in my graduate program in organization development, a professor asked me to facilitate an exercise with my peers. I did it quickly and, I thought, well. We arrived at a clear decision faster than anyone else’s facilitation had managed. I was proud.

Then the professor asked my peers how they felt about the process. The consensus: it was cold. “So a cold process,” the professor said, “which means that the decision itself probably won’t matter because we have no way of knowing whether it is truly important to people, or whether anyone is genuinely committed to it.”

My first, silent instinct was to defend myself. Hey, I got the job done! But my body already knew their assessment was true. I had felt it too, in my body, but had set those feelings aside.

That gap, between what I sensed and what I acted on, would continue to cost me for years.

I have always been strong in analytical and intuitive knowing. With a focused mind and an ability to perceive subtle patterns in any situation, I was useful to groups trying to assess where they were and figure out how to get somewhere better. But while those capacities were well-developed, I was rarely in touch with the subtler signals from my body, and only partially aware of my own emotions—or those of the people I was working with.

I felt the feelings. But not fully. If my chest was tight or my leg was restless, my mind was too busy trying to “figure things out” to notice. And because I wasn’t truly tracking what mattered to me or to others, I spent too many years developing analyses and plans that were technically sound but lacked real energy or authentic commitment. The follow-through was weak, in myself and in the groups I worked with, because the felt sense of imperative, the gut-level commitment, had never fully been present.

I was impaired in some fundamental ways, and I didn’t know it.

The shift came gradually, through two sources. The first was the work itself. After launching CoCreative and building out our training programs, my colleagues Melissa Darnell and Heather Equinoss saw a pattern in our teaching that mirrored my old problem. We have a framework for crafting powerful goals for collaborative networks called MAST, referring to goals that are Meaningful, Audacious, Specific, and Timebound. When I introduced it in a course, I would explain the framework, talk about why MAST goals were important for groups, and then ask people to draft a MAST goal. The goals they produced were fine, rarely great.

So we tried something different. We offered participants eight candidate goals and asked them to vote for the two that created the most energy in their bodies. Every time—the first time we tried it and every time since—the goals with MAST qualities received far more votes. The learning had already happened before we explained a single concept. As we described the qualities of a powerful goal, people leaned in to learn, not because they wanted to understand our framework, but because they wanted to understand what they had just experienced. The insight to lead with experience and follow with understanding now informs everything we do in a room.

The second source was my colleagues. Luzette Jaimes, a gifted facilitator and somatic practitioner, kept pointing to the body, to what people were holding physically that their words weren’t expressing. Isaac Carter, who has worked with emotional process in groups for years, was attentive to feelings in a way that wasn’t incidental to the work but central to it. As their contributions have woven into our work, something in me has been clarified. We weren’t just deploying interesting techniques. We were working from distinct and complementary ways of knowing—each of them real, each of them valuable, and each of them too often absent from organizational and collaborative settings.

This is an exploration of those ways of knowing, why they matter especially when working with complexity, and why it takes some courage (but not as much as you might fear) to bring them into the room.

Before We Begin…

I tend to use the word ‘knowing’ rather than ‘sensing,’ which is the language preferred by the Presencing Institute and some others working in this space. This is a deliberate choice, though not a rigid one. I work with diverse networks that include people who are still developing a relationship to these dimensions of human experience. Knowing occupies a useful transitional space: it acknowledges that something genuine and intelligent is happening without requiring people to adopt a particular and unfamiliar vocabulary before they’re ready. My goal here is integration, not initiation.

I also want to be clear that distinguishing four ways of knowing is a learning device, not a description of how human experience actually works. In reality, these ways are tightly woven together. Consider a gut feeling, that sudden, wordless sense that something is right or wrong. Is that emotional? Somatic? Intuitive? All three, most likely. I name and separate them here only so we can become more conscious of each, and then access them together with greater intentionality. The goal is integration. But differentiation comes first.

Finally, a word about access. We each come to these ways of knowing with different levels of familiarity and ease. Some people are naturally attuned to their emotional landscape; others find somatic awareness almost entirely foreign. Some have developed sharp intuitive pattern recognition; others have learned to distrust anything that can’t be argued analytically. None of this is fixed. Access to each way of knowing can be deepened through intentional practice, which is partly what the workshop this article draws on is designed to support. Wherever you find yourself on that spectrum, the invitation is the same: not to abandon what you’re already good at, but to expand the range.

The Default and Its Limits

In my experience, most organizations and groups around the world default to analytical knowing. This isn’t surprising. Western institutions, from universities to corporations to government agencies, have been built on the premise that analysis, evidence, and rational argument are the legitimate forms of intelligence. That data, logic, and structured frameworks are the currencies of credibility.

Analytical knowing is genuinely powerful. It helps us examine situations clearly, test hypotheses, and make evidence-based arguments. I’m not arguing against it. It’s powerful and valuable (and part of who I am, after all). But as a default, and as the only way a group might come to know things, it has serious limitations, especially when working with complex human systems.

Complexity means that the situation is too large, too interdependent, and too dynamic for any analysis to fully grasp. The variables interact. The humans inside the system are not passive objects but active interpreters of events and their meaning, deeply shaped by history, emotion, and identity. Good analysis is necessary but not sufficient. And yet, if analysis is the only tool we trust, we tend to reduce complexity to problems we can analyze, which means we regularly misunderstand what we’re really dealing with.

Analysis also tends to be individualistic. It privileges whoever is best at expressing their case most clearly and quickly. It rewards the preparation of positions and the winning of arguments. In multi-stakeholder settings, this often means the loudest and most powerful voices set the terms of conversation, while quieter, often more diverse, yet equally important perspectives, representing many dimensions of human experience, go underground.

These Ways of Knowing Are Not New

Before they got squeezed out by Western professional practices, emotional, somatic, and intuitive ways of knowing were (and remain) central to human wisdom traditions around the world.

In Andean Indigenous cosmology, particularly among Quechua and Aymara peoples of Peru and Bolivia, the concept of Sumak Kawsay, often translated as “living well” or “the good life,” integrates the felt relationship between people, community, nature, and the cosmos as a fundamental unit of knowing. Wisdom is not extracted from experience and stored as abstraction. It flows from being in right relationship, and that relationship is sensed as much as reasoned. The Andean paq’os, or spiritual healers, work with energetic and somatic perceptions that inform their understanding of what a person or situation needs.

In Māori culture in Aotearoa New Zealand, the concept of mauri—the life essence or vital force that flows through all living things—informs a way of sensing whether a situation is healthy or degraded, whether a relationship is flourishing or depleted. Mātauranga Māori, the Māori knowledge system, is place-based and embodied, evolved through generations of deep attentiveness to the living world.

Many Indigenous wisdom traditions of the Americas, including those of Colombia, from which my co-creators of this framework, Luzette Jaimes and Ana Lucía Castaño Galvis, draw parts of their lineages, understand the body as a site of knowing rather than merely a vehicle for the mind. The head is not the seat of all intelligence.

Contemporary change practice has also been moving (back) in this direction, even if the language is sometimes more cautious. The Presencing Institute centers sensing as essential to accessing the emerging future, distinguishing between seeing, sensing, and presencing as progressively deeper modes of awareness. Strozzi Institute, founded by Richard Strozzi-Heckler, has spent more than four decades building rigorous somatic practice for leadership and organizational change, drawing on aikido, bodywork, and neuroscience to show that the body is not a passenger in our work but an active source of intelligence.

The Four Ways and What Each Contributes

Our workshop distinguishes four distinct ways of knowing, while being clear that in practice they are woven together. We separate them for learning, not because they are actually separate.

Emotional knowing helps us sense the resonance of a situation. It tells us what matters, what we value, what we’re attached to, and often what we fear losing. The etymology of emotion comes from the Latin emovere: to move out, to agitate, to remove from one’s habitual place. An emotion is something that moves us out of our ordinary state and demands our attention. When we ask a group, How do you feel about this situation? we often unlock information that no amount of data has surfaced: what’s actually at stake for people, where the real resistance lies, or where the energy and commitment are.

In practice, we use tools like checking in about how various stakeholders feel about a problem or using frustration, fear, anger, or disappointment as signals for deeper inquiry in a group. Strong emotions are typically signals pointing toward deep values, and what looks like obstinacy or resistance is often simply a value that hasn’t yet been fully acknowledged.

Intuitive knowing gives us insight into the whole when the situation is too large, too nuanced, or too complex for our conscious minds to hold. Where analytical knowing breaks the problem into parts, intuition senses the larger pattern. It is what happens when we’ve absorbed enough insight and context that our subconscious minds can synthesize what our conscious minds cannot yet articulate.

One of our favorite methods is what we call character channeling: rather than asking people for their own ideas, we invite them to generate ideas as Audre Lorde, or George Washington, or Oprah. Participants consistently report that this bypasses their habitual thinking and produces genuinely fresh perspectives. What’s happening is that the imaginative act of taking another’s perspective disengages the analytical editor and activates the intuitive intelligence. Another simple but powerful shift: instead of asking groups What do you think? we ask What are you sensing?—a question that points people toward their intuition rather than their prepared positions.

Somatic knowing offers confirmation, a felt sense of solidity or rightness when we commit to something. It also offers early warning: the tightening in the chest before a difficult conversation, the lightness and openness we feel when something aligns. Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis provides neurological grounding for what practitioners have long known: the body is participating in our decisions before our conscious mind catches up. The HeartMath Institute’s research on heart coherence adds to this picture, suggesting that people in states of bodily calm and connection access more reliable intuitive insight.

A simple somatic practice we use comes at the end of network convenings. Before we invite people to name the actions they’ll commit to after they leave the room, we ask them to sit up in their chairs, soften their gaze, and feel their feet connected to the floor. It takes less than a minute. But that brief grounding—returning attention to the body before making a commitment—shifts the quality of what people offer. We’ve also renewed the practice of using commitment worksheets at the close of gatherings, noticing that the physical act of writing out a personal commitment makes it more concrete and real in a way that simply stating it aloud doesn’t. The body is participating in the promise.

Cognitive knowing, the analytical mode, gives us explicit frameworks for examining situations and testing options for action. It is essential. The point is not to abandon it but to bring it into relation with the others. When we have emotional data about what matters, intuitive data about the pattern, and somatic data about alignment, your cognitive analysis becomes considerably sharper and more trustworthy.

The workshop slide that captures this most cleanly uses a single clarifying question for each way: How do I feel about this? (emotional). What am I sensing? (intuitive). What does my body tell me? (somatic). What does my analysis show? (cognitive). These are four aspects of whole, human selves, not four competing systems. When they point in the same direction, we have genuine confidence. When they diverge, we have important questions to explore.

The Challenge of Introduction

If you work in systems change, you almost certainly see the value of all four ways of knowing. You may even use them personally. The harder question is how to introduce them into a room full of people who don’t.

Many of the people we work with—program officers, executive directors, government officials, corporate leaders, have built their professional identities around analytical competence. Asking them to check in with their bodies or name their emotions can feel threatening in at least two directions: it might seem unprofessional (or at least non-professional) or it may require a kind of vulnerability they haven’t practiced. If you’ve spent many years being rewarded for your analytical rigor, being asked to feel rather than analyze can feel like a demotion.

What I’ve found, over and over, however, is that this resistance dissolves faster than you’d expect, but only if two things are true: First, the facilitator needs to be genuinely embodied in the practice themselves. If you introduce a somatic exercise while you’re visibly tense and rushing through it, you communicate that you don’t actually trust it. If you’re grounded, spacious, and curious, your presence becomes the invitation. Second, the practice needs to produce something real, even if that’s a real and undeniable experience. When a group uses a somatic check-in and discovers a pattern they weren’t aware of, when the body reveals something the conversation had been dancing around, people get it immediately. They didn’t need to believe in it first. The experience creates the understanding.

A few practical strategies for the consultant or facilitator introducing these practices:

1. Start with the least threatening entry point. Intuitive practices like character channeling or silent idea generation often have the lowest threshold for skeptical groups, because they can be framed as “creative thinking tools” without explaining the deeper mechanism. Once people have experienced the method and found it generative, they are much more curious and open to understanding what just happened.

2. Name the purpose, not the method. Saying “let’s do a body scan” in a corporate strategy session might raise eyebrows. Saying “I want to give people a moment to check in with themselves before we make this decision” does the same thing without triggering the skepticism. Frame the practice in terms of outcomes that the group already cares about: better decisions, more authentic agreement, surfacing perspectives that don’t emerge in argument.

3. Use that moment when analysis is stuck. Analytical knowing is most comfortable when the problem is well-defined and the data is clear. Complex systems challenges regularly produce moments when the group has analyzed everything and is still overwhelmed with awareness. Those are precisely the openings to say: Our analytical minds have done what they can. Let’s try a different kind of understanding of this. The stuck moment is your invitation.

4. Expect surprise, not conversion. You don’t need people to embrace a new consciousness. You just need them to try the practice and notice what happened. Most people, given a genuine experience of intuitive or somatic insight, will incorporate it quietly and on their own terms. That’s enough.

It can take some courage to introduce these ways of knowing, especially the first time, and especially with a skeptical group. The courage needed is not the courage of the visionary challenging the status quo. It’s the simpler courage of trusting what you know to be true, doing it with awareness and care, and being willing to stand with what emerges. In my experience, you rarely need to defend it. The work defends itself.

Mary Oliver wrote:

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”

The line is about something far larger than facilitating a workshop, of course. But it points to the intelligence that lives in the body, in feeling, in the non-analytical dimensions of our human experience, has always been there. We didn’t invent it. We’re just learning to welcome it back into the room.

If you’d like to go deeper with these ways of knowing—including getting hands-on practice with the full framework, CoCreative offers a Working with Complexity: Beyond Analytical Knowing workshop that takes these concepts from insight to skill. We’d love to have you join us.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Originally published in the Leverage Points blog, January 28, 2011

In her now-classic list of 12 places to intervene in a system, Donella Meadows elegantly prioritizes the most effective “leverage points” for getting more of what we really want in our families, organizations, communities, nations, and global community.

Of these 12 leverage points, it’s the highest level that is the most challenging to actually put into practice. That’s the point which Meadows named simply “the power to transcend paradigms.” It’s the point that we access, she observes, only when we learn to detach ourselves from specific paradigms and realize that no one paradigm is true, even the ones that most define us.

The power of this intervention point can’t be overstated. According to Meadows, this is the place where “people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, or bring down empires.” If you really want to move the world, this point holds the one lever that’s long enough.

It’s also a risky place to operate because many people don’t like it when you question the absoluteness of their deeply-held truths. And the unintended consequence of pressing on people’s favored paradigms is often to only further entrench them.

Unfortunately, given our intensely increasing interdependencies, we can no longer afford individual transcendence. We must discover ways to transcend paradigms together.

How do we do that? In part by recognizing that each and every value we hold is really only half a value.

To truly realize freedom, we must also commit to mutual accountability, and vice versa. If I thrive on change, then I must eventually acknowledge the need for stability as well. When I call for greater accountability, others will also demand the need for greater support. Or, if I tend to focus on the short term, then the need to focus on the long term will inevitably assert itself. In each of these values pairs—and literally hundreds more—one value complements the other, and to reject one half of the pair over time is to make a false, often harmful, choice.

It’s those false choices—the rejection of values that actually complement and reinforce our own—that blind us to our true interdependency with others. And that blindness quickly turns to ignorance, rejection, and hate. If I deeply value individual freedom, then others’ commitment to mutual accountability seems to me like social control. If I deeply value reason, then others’ commitment to faith seems, well, unreasonable. But what about those times where reason ends and I need faith to move forward, or I find that I need to rely on others despite my best efforts at making it on my own?

For every value we hold, or anyone else holds, there is a hidden value, and we in fact hold the secret to one another’s transcendence. When we learn how to work with others to see the true interdependence of each of our closely held values, only then can we transcend paradigms together.

If you’d like to go deeper with these ideas—including getting hands-on practice with the full framework, CoCreative offers a Working with Difference: Leveraging Creative Tensions workshop that takes these concepts from insight to skill. We’d love to have you join us.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

When Avatar: The Last Airbender came out about twenty years ago, I remember cozying up with my kids on the sofa to watch. I was fascinated by it, struck by the metaphors of dynamics that I saw showing up in the reality around me. It is ostensibly a children’s story, but it’s become for me one of the most useful lenses for understanding something profound about the moment we’re living in.

In the series, the world is organized around four elemental nations—Water, Earth, Fire, and Air—and the story begins with a world in crisis. The Fire Nation has been waging war for a century, its energy consuming and displacing the others. Water is besieged. Earth is occupied. Air has been nearly extinguished. The Avatar, the only being capable of holding all four elements in balance, has been absent. And so the world suffers, not from the presence of fire, but from its dominance.

The ancient Chinese philosophy of Wu Xing, or the Five Phases, describes the world as a dynamic interplay of five fundamental energies: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. What makes Wu Xing different from a simple typology of matter is its insistence on relationship and cycle. Each element generates another and is constrained by another. Wood feeds Fire, Fire creates Earth, Earth bears Metal, Metal collects Water, Water nourishes Wood. The cycle flows. Life sustains itself.

But there are also cycles of imbalance. When one element becomes excessive, when it overcontrols, crowds out, suppresses the others, the whole system suffers. And crucially, the problem is never something inherently negative about the element itself. Fire is passion, transformation, and joy. Metal is precision, structure, and discernment. These are real gifts. The harm comes from dominance, when one element controls and starves the rest.

I want to suggest that this ancient framework illuminates something important about the cultural waters we swim in today.

A few years ago, drawing on the work of Dr. Edwin Nichols, Judith Katz, and Tema Okun, I drafted a simple framework called Dominant Cultural Ways. It maps a set of paired orientations—ways of knowing, organizing work, organizing ourselves, interacting, and valuing—where one value or “way” in each pair has come to dominate, particularly in modernist, Western cultures, often at the expense of its pair.

The dominant side includes ways like Either/Or Thinking, Focusing on the Parts, Linear Cause and Effect, Moving Fast, Getting to the Right Answer, Personal Responsibility, Competition, and Material Value. The subordinated side includes Both/And Thinking, Focus on the Whole, Cycles and Forces, Taking Time, Trying Things Out, Collective Responsibility, Cooperation, and Spiritual Value.

When you lay these two columns side by side and look at them through a Wu Xing lens, something comes into focus. The dominant ways seem to express the energy of Fire and Metal—the drive to expand, achieve, measure, cut, control, and win. These are real and potent energies. They have generated extraordinary scientific, technical, and economic achievements. Fire and Metal, in balance, are forces of transformation and clarity.

But look at what has been systematically subordinated:

• The realm of Water: Wisdom, introspection, and inner knowing—the deep, still quality of receptive intelligence that cannot be measured or externally verified, only accessed through reflection and stillness.

• The realm of Earth: Nurturance, relationship, and the mediating work of holding things together—the centering force that sustains collective life, marks the turning of seasons, and creates the stable ground from which meaning emerges.

• The realm of Wood: Growth, vitality, and the life-force of living systems—the recognition that human communities, like forests, sustain themselves through interdependence, cooperation, and collective flourishing rather than individual achievement.

When these ways are consistently crowded out, we get what your own experience likely confirms: fragmentation, urgency that overrides reflection, perfectionism, power hoarding, dehumanization, and impaired ability to work adaptively with complexity and emergence.

This is not a metaphor. It is a description of group and system dynamics that systems change leaders recognize immediately.

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A Deeper History

The ways on the subordinated side of this table are not abstract ideals waiting to be invented. They are, and have been, lived realities that were encoded in languages, cosmologies, and daily practices across human cultures for millennia. What has been subordinated in modern life was not subordinated by accident.

Consider what several Indigenous traditions have long carried as foundational ways of knowing and being:

• Cycles and forces. As my colleague Melanie Goodchild once shared with me, Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the language itself is 80% verbs to English’s 60% nouns. To think in Anishinaabemowin is to think in motion, relationship, and process, not fixed things acted upon by external forces. This isn’t a cultural preference layered onto a neutral grammar; it’s a fundamentally different architecture of reality, one in which the world is understood as dynamic and relational at its most basic level. For the Aztecs, similarly, time was not linear but cyclical, part of an all-encompassing, immanent force within nature called teotl, constantly changing and evolving rather than moving toward a fixed endpoint.

• Focus on the subject. In Anishinaabemowin, the animacy of a thing, whether it is understood as alive and in relation, is determined by its relationship to other things in a given moment, not by its fixed categorization as a substance or type. A rock encountered in ceremony may be animate; the same rock in another context may not be. Meaning arises from relationship, not from an inherent category. This is a direct linguistic expression of the “focus on the subject,” where context and connection determine meaning.

• Collective responsibility and “we each matter.” The Zulu concept of ubuntu, often rendered in English as “I am because we are,” communicates that human beings have such deep natural interdependence that we are mutually dependent on one another for our very existence. From the Philippines, the concept of kapwa expresses a shared inner self, the recognition that self and other are not separate, that caring for others is not a moral obligation imposed from outside but an expression of our fundamental oneness. Both concepts encode collective responsibility not as a moral position but as a description of reality.

• Spiritual value and imagery, feeling, and spiritual experience. The Anishinaabe Medicine Wheel integrates physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of being into a single framework of health and understanding. These are not separate domains with different levels of validity but aspects of a whole. The subordination of imagery, feeling, and spiritual experience as legitimate ways of knowing is not a neutral methodological preference; it actively displaces frameworks like this that have sustained communities for thousands of years.

• Holism and collective stewardship. The Seven Generation Principle, most clearly expressed by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, says that decisions should be made with consideration of their consequences seven generations into the future and seven generations into the past. This temporal and relational scope of responsibility is so far outside the dominant way of moving fast to maximize quarterly returns and advance annual plans that it is nearly impossible to hold within them.

These are not isolated examples. Those who study Indigenous worldviews across continents note that holistic perspectives, cyclical time, collective responsibility, and the integration of spiritual and material life are not unique to any one culture. They are features of a wide range of traditional knowledge traditions that developed in close relationship with living systems over long periods of time.

What happened to these traditions is not a matter of philosophical debate. The Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos coined the term epistemicide, the killing of knowledge systems, to describe what colonialism did to non-Western ways of knowing as a deliberate and integral part of its project. This was not a side effect of conquest; it was a feature of it. Many local and Indigenous knowledge systems undermined the logic of domination itself, so they had to be eliminated.

As one example, on July 12, 1562, Spanish Franciscan Bishop Diego de Landa presided over an auto de fé (an "act of faith") in the town of Maní in the Yucatán peninsula, during which Mayan codices and thousands of images were burned. The Maya had maintained a sophisticated written tradition for centuries, their bark-paper books recording astronomy, history, and ritual in hieroglyphic script. Landa's own account is unsparing: he admitted burning the books because they contained, in his view, nothing but "superstition and lies of the devil," noting that the Maya "regretted it to an amazing degree." Of the thousands of codices that once existed, only four are known to have survived.

That kind of destruction wasn’t unique to Maní. Other Spanish clergy continued the burning across the region. And later, Indigenous languages across North America were banned in English-language and residential schools. Because to lose a language is to lose the worldview encoded in it, these were not passive cultural losses, but active replacement of “poorer” ways with “better” ways.

To the modernist mind, these dominant ways are self-evidently better because the evidence seems to support that. These ways lend themselves to scientific, technical, and economic success and have generated greater influence, financial wealth, and power for those who have embraced them. For example, Either/Or Thinking, Focus on the Parts (Reductionism), Standardizing/Counting/Measuring, and Linear/Cause and Effect thinking are useful in solving scientific and technical problems and support success in key areas of economic productivity like energy and agriculture. This success is, in turn, used to justify and reinforce the dominance of these values. However, the dominance of these siloed, reductionist ways of knowing also underlies systemic harm and failures such as breakdowns of ecosystems, economic inequity, climate change, and loss of biodiversity.

The consequences are ongoing and concrete. Kathy Absolon, an Anishinaabe scholar and practitioner writing from within her own tradition, is direct about what the destruction of Indigenous worldviews has produced: where those traditions are foundational to living a good life, their absence or active suppression has created imbalance and disease—not as metaphor, but as lived reality in Indigenous communities across North America and around the world. I would argue that these negative consequences aren’t limited to these communities. We are all experiencing them.

Polarized Reactions

While I drafted this resource years ago, we’ve never published it. I personally felt it was important to be in direct dialogue with people when they first encountered it because we found that it often produced two very different but similarly unhelpful reactions.

One response was defensiveness, often expressed as, “Why are you saying that the things in the first column are bad?” An interesting response, because I had only indicated that these ways were often dominant, not that they were bad. Even when I would explain that the ways themselves are not bad, but that their dominance is producing negative outcomes, I’d still get at best a skeptical, “Okay…”

It seemed that those of us who somehow have identified our success (or even ourselves) with some of those dominant ways, like analytical rigor, decisive action, clear accountability, or measurable results, somehow felt implicated by this framework in a way that didn’t sit well. If this reflects at least part of your reaction, this framework isn’t indicting you.

And I’m with you. I once participated in a Chinese elements training with 30 colleagues at my previous place of employment. The trainer, after describing the Metal personality as “methodical, structured, and analytical,” and the person “who can most effectively help a group get from point A to point B,” asked the group to turn to the Metal personality in the room. Everyone immediately turned to me. So, yes, I value these ways.

The other common response was a kind of moral certitude that something really bad was oppressing something really good. Well, based on the evidence above, that seems true. If you have felt marginalized by dominant-way cultures, or if you work in equity and justice spaces where this analysis feels long overdue, you may find yourself recognizing that truth, nodding vigorously, and feeling affirmed that there is a long-overdue fix to “the problem.” That clarity can feel like solid ground. I hear you, and I agree with that.

Yet here is what I want to offer: both reactions—clinging to the dominant ways and holding moral certitude about their correctives—are expressions of the dynamic of imbalance. Both, ironically, reflect a mechanical, either-or, problem-solution frame on these complex and nuanced wholes. Both collapse the spaciousness we need to work with these diverse ways effectively.

Both responses also involve confounding a cultural current with a personal identity, personalizing things that are much bigger than us. The various ways on either side of this table are not yours or mine. They didn’t originate in us. They flow through us as individuals, and through our organizations and societies. They accrue power in some contexts and are suppressed in others, like weather systems moving across cultural landscapes. You may have, based on your family, your background, your training, your significant others, or the organizations that shaped you, internalized certain ways more deeply than others. That’s real. But the ways are larger than any of us.

And that means that, wherever you stand in relation to these patterns, it says nothing about your value as a person. It only reflects which currents have moved most strongly through your life…so far.

As A. R. Ammons put it, in In Memoriam Mae Noblitt:

…but is love a reality we

made here ourselves—

and grief—did we design

that—or do these,

like currents, whine

in and out among us merely

as we arrive and go:

this is just a place:

the reality we agree with,

that agrees with us…

A Way to Balance

The goal, then, is not to reverse the polarity, to simply flip the dominant and subordinated columns and call it progress. That would be its own form of imbalance, and it would reproduce the same either/or logic we’re trying to move beyond. The goal is the restoration of the cycle: honoring the genuine gifts of fire and metal while creating the conditions for water, wood, and earth to breathe and grow again.

In Wu Xing, balance is never static. It’s not a fixed point but a living movement, with each element having its season, each checking and nourishing the others. The same is true in organizational and group life. There are moments that call for precision, convergence, and decisive action. There are moments that call for slowness, imagery, and collective sense-making. Wisdom is knowing which moment you’re in and having access to the full range of ways.

Most of us, and most of the organizations and systems we inhabit, have not had that full access. We have been living in the Fire Nation, maybe more today than at any point in our lives. The work of systems change, of genuine transformation, may begin with learning to embody all the elements again, to let them back into us, to remember that they were never the enemy.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

CoCreative provides coaching to help you become a more effective, collaborative, thriving leader. Learn more.

Commencement Address: Goddard College Sustainable Business and Communities program, Spring, 2010

Welcome, parents, staff, faculty, and students of Goddard College and the Sustainable Business and Communities program.

And thank you. Each of you in some way has contributed to the fact that we are now celebrating the newest graduates of this small but powerf…

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I clearly remember one moment from a training in Gestalt facilitation many years ago. My teacher, John Carter of the Gestalt OSD Center, was leading an exercise. Twelve people sat in a circle in the middle of the room in conversation, while the rest of us were distributed around the outside, observing. At intervals, John would pause the inner group’s discussion, point to someone on the outside, and say, “Intervene.”

When he pointed to me, honestly, my first response was to lock up for a moment. I respected John a lot and wanted to perform well. But I was also tense because I was very aware that the white people in the inner group had been doing (by far) most of the talking. So I gathered up my courage and said, “Group, pay attention to who’s speaking and who’s not speaking.”

John paused. “Okay, Russ. That’s your instruction. What’s your intent?”

On that invitation, I paused. I grounded myself in what I was sensing and what I cared about in that moment. And I came back with something much more honest: “I want to hear less from the white people and more from the people of color.”

That turned out to be a much more powerful intervention—and a more powerful Use of Self. The first instruction was safe, process-level, and technically neutral. The second was grounded in what I actually saw, what I actually believed, and what I genuinely intended. The difference between those two moments is, in a nutshell, what Use of Self is about.

A Concept That’s Easy to Recognize, Hard to Pin Down

While most leaders and facilitators get the idea of Use of Self quickly and intuitively, it’s trickier to nail down exactly what it is and how to put it into practice.

The concept has been central to organizational development (OD) practice since its earliest days. Its roots trace back to Gestalt therapy, and the concept and practice were later developed through the National Training Laboratories, now the NTL Institute, and the T-group experience (now called “Human Interaction Labs”). Since then, the concept has extended across OD, psychotherapy, social work, leadership development, coaching, and facilitation. Wherever people intervene to support change in systems (and people are systems too), Use of Self applies.

The terminology varies, often along geographic lines. American practitioners—particularly those in the NTL and OD Network traditions—tend to speak of “Use of Self,” sometimes abbreviated as UoS. Their counterparts in the UK, including those at Roffey Park Institute and Mayvin, more frequently use “Self as Instrument.” The underlying concept is the same: as leaders and facilitators, we are not neutral conduits. We are instruments of change—and the use of the instrument matters as much as the methods in our kit.

What makes the concept slippery is that there may be as many definitions of it as there are people who write about it. A landmark 2018 global research study by Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge and David W. Jamieson found more than 60 distinct ways people define, describe, or discuss the concept across disciplines.

Beyond sorting the many definitions of the concept, the study also identified 66 distinct aspects of Use of Self. The list is both rich and unmanageable, covering everything from “cognitive power to sift through data” to “consciously develop own presence through more integrative work.”

Makes sense, I guess, as we’re complex selves intervening in complex situations, but the breadth also seems unworkable in practical terms. Even the more popular frameworks are fairly complex. In one model, laid out by Charles Seashore, Mary Nash Shawver, Greg Thompson and Marty Mattare in their article, “Doing Good By Knowing Who You Are: The Instrumental Self as an Agent of Change,” the authors present a range of elements of Use of Self, including various selves (the shadow self, robotic self, creative self, etc.), self-differentiation, self-efficacy, agency, support systems, feedback, deliberate choices, leadership, personal growth and development, and more.

That breadth reflects the genuine richness of the concept. But it has also made Use of Self difficult to get our arms around and apply in practice. The concept resonates immediately with most thoughtful practitioners—and then leaves them asking, “Okay, but how do I actually DO this?”

A Framework for Practice: Awareness-Based Leadership

As with our other frameworks at CoCreative, we wanted a Use of Self framework that is nuanced and complete, but also practically useful. What emerged from my background in Gestalt group work, reviewing existing models, and our team reflecting on skilled practitioners who do this work well is what we have called Awareness-Based Leadership, a five-element framework designed to make Use of Self more integrated and more actionable.

The five elements are Awareness, Intention, Choice, Courage, and Support, and they function not as a linear sequence but as an interdependent system:

Awareness is the foundation. We can’t make meaningful choices about something we haven’t noticed. Developing awareness means scanning at multiple levels of the system—what’s happening in the larger context, what’s happening with others cognitively and emotionally, and what’s happening inside myself.

The barriers here are familiar: automated internal narratives, lack of empathy, the reflexive deflection of feedback we’d rather not receive. The practices are equally familiar but require discipline: meditation, soliciting feedback, system mapping, and cultivating the habit of noticing choice points where we have in the past made choices out of habit or reaction.

Intention is where awareness gets focused, bounded, and directed. How is what I’m becoming aware of shaping what I want to make real in the world? Clarifying intention is how we act with congruence—connecting our own values, analysis, and priorities with our needs, the needs of others, and those of the larger systems we’re part of.

The barriers to clear intention tend to involve borrowed assumptions (absorbing others’ beliefs without examining them) or conflict avoidance that dissolves intention into vague agreeableness.

Awareness and intention are interdependent: as awareness deepens, intention sharpens; and as intention focuses, we become more attuned to what matters for achieving it.

Choice is about expanding and exercising agency. In any given situation, the goal is to be genuinely “at choice,” able to see beyond habituated responses, identify real options, and move through even seemingly immovable barriers. This requires noticing when we’re reacting rather than choosing our reaction, and resisting the pull to make things overly binary or overly complex.

Courage and Support are also interdependent. Taking action in service of meaningful change—especially in complex, high-stakes contexts—requires a willingness to take risks with ourselves and in our relationships with others. But courage is not purely an individual achievement. We feel more willing to take risks when we know others are with us, and acts of genuine courage tend to attract more support in return. Building and drawing on a support system is not a supplement to courageous action; it is part of what makes it possible.

This framework applies to individual practitioners developing their capacity over time, and it applies to how we use ourselves in the moment, in the room. But it also scales to the collective level. A team can develop shared awareness of a challenge or opportunity, clarify collective intention, expand the range of choices available to them, and systematically build the mutual courage and support needed to act on their choice. In fact, that process describes pretty well the Collaborative Innovation approach we use at CoCreative. In this way, Awareness-Based Leadership supports not just the interior condition of the individual intervener, but the interior condition of any group.

In Practice: A Self-Reflection Exercise

One of the ways we use this framework in training is through a structured self-reflection exercise, offered after participants have been introduced to the model and have had time with a learning experience. We can reflect on four questions in sequence:

• What am I becoming more aware of now?

• How might this new awareness inform my intention moving forward?

• What new choices do I now see for myself?

• What will support me to take action and act with courage?

These prompts work because they move people through the framework in a way that feels natural but goes much deeper than a generic “what did you learn?” reflection. In our experience, participants begin to more clearly see and name the specific intentions their learning is shaping, identify concrete new choices rather than vague aspirations, and—crucially—think honestly about what it will actually take to do something different. That last step is often where courage fails us, not because we lack resolve, but because we haven’t grounded our action in a clear enough awareness or a sharp enough intention to carry us through.

Action-Based Awareness

The five elements don’t just describe an interior condition—they move us toward action in the world. The graphic below maps this flow explicitly, and it’s worth pausing on it because one direction of travel may seem counterintuitive.

We tend to think of awareness as something that precedes and informs action. And it does. In fact, there’s a whole contingent of systems change practitioners advancing self-awareness and self-development as requisites for effective systems change work.

But the cycle runs the other way too, and that return part of the loop is just as important. When we clarify our awareness and intention, we expand our sense of what’s possible. When we build the courage and support to act, we take action. And when we act—when we actually try something new, we get results. Not always the results we intended (sometimes especially not those). But results that feed back into and inform our awareness.

This is the learning arrow in the graphic, running back from results toward the beginning of the cycle. It is not an afterthought. It is an engine. Use of Self deepens not through reflection alone but through the iterative cycle of awareness, action, and learning—trying something, noticing what happens, and letting that reshape what we see and what we intend next. Without that return loop, we get stuck in awareness that’s untested against reality.

A Lifelong Practice

Returning to John Carter’s training room, when he asked me what my intent was, John wasn’t criticizing my first intervention. He was pointing me toward a deeper layer of myself—toward the awareness that was actually driving me, and the intention that could make my action genuinely meaningful.

That’s what Use of Self asks of us, again and again. Not neutrality. Not performance. Not a set of techniques applied from the outside. But an ongoing, honest encounter with what we actually see, what we actually believe, and what we genuinely intend—and the courage, with support by others, to act on it and learn and grow through that action.

The instrument is you. Learning to play it well is the work of a lifetime.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Free resource from CoCreative: Awareness-Based Leadership

Systems change work tends to attract people who care deeply about justice, sustainability, and transformation. We’re motivated by powerful visions of what could be different and often righteously impatient about the need for change. This moral clarity is essential—it fuels the long, difficult work of challenging entrenched patterns and power structures.

But moral clarity can also make us vulnerable to overcorrection. When we identify something that needs to change, we often swing hard in the opposite direction, embracing new articles of faith with the same certainty we’re rejecting in the old ones. Essential truths become romanticized as the whole truth. We trade one set of simplifications for another, just another that might feel more morally righteous.

This series examines five notions that can function as articles of faith in systems change work:

1. “We need to work at the root cause.”

2. “It’s all about power.”

3. “Self-organization just happens.”

4. “Awareness naturally leads to action.”

5. “People with lived experience of harm should lead.”

6. Why We Overcorrect

Each represents an important correction to historical patterns of harm. Each is also prone to overcorrections that can limit our effectiveness. The challenge is to hold on to the correction but hold them with more nuance—to recognize when a needed correction has swung too far and what practices might help us find balance.

Why We Overcorrect

I’m getting into conjecture here, but I think it’s important to reflect on the dynamics of overcorrection, because greater awareness of our tendencies can lead to greater choice.

From a polarity perspective, when we experience the downsides of a dominant way of knowing, being, or doing, we want to “fix” that. Our response is to correct the situation by asserting a solution. If, for example, things have been overcentralized in our work, we want to move TO decentralization. If people have been rushing to action without building awareness of what’s really going on or engaging context experts, we want to move TO opening things up with inclusive, awareness-based activities in our work together. The problem comes, however, when we view the dynamic as a problem to solve in the first place, rather than seeing the larger truth—that we need BOTH centralization and decentralization and BOTH awareness and action over time. By seeing and pursuing both poles, we design more resilient and adaptive ways of working and, importantly, disrupt the pendulum swings that often sow unproductive work and even division among us.

I also sense that, because many of us are so committed to creating a world that works for all, the moral intensity of the work makes nuance feel like weakness or compromise. Taken with the polarity lens above, the urgency of addressing the harm we see or experience makes us impatient with “both/and” thinking. When I see so clearly how the corrective lens or approach or value can “fix” things, I take on the role of campaigning for it, especially in the face of resistance. Thinking that I’m taking a stand, I’m often instead stepping backward into a position of doubling down on a half-truth rather than embracing a larger whole truth.

We’re also caught in systems even as we work to change systems. In systems of philanthropy and professionalized social change, complexity is genuinely hard to communicate, hard to engage others in, and even harder to fund. The field often rewards bold claims, clean analysis, and clear positions over careful, holistic thinking.

As Lucinda Gurthwaite at the Institute for Liberatory Innovation puts it, we’re bumbling humans, just trying to find our way forward as best we can, even as others seem to demand performance and even perfection. Our own trauma from old, unhealed patterns can make us reactive rather than responsive; we seek certainty and clear answers even when they’re not available. The challenge is developing the capacity to notice when we, or at least our work, have become defined by the overcorrection and having the courage, or the equanimity, to seek balance.

I’ve seen what becomes possible when we get this right. I’ve watched groups move from stuck polarization to creative synthesis. I’ve seen funders and “field leaders” (not a fan of that term) co-create strategies that neither would have imagined alone. I’ve witnessed organizations find ways to address the harms of symptoms and shift foundational patterns simultaneously, building trust while pursuing transformation.

These moments don’t come from having the perfect theory or the right answer. They come from people who’ve learned to hold multiple truths at once, people who can speak truth to power AND stay in relationship, who can honor lived experience AND bring technical expertise, who can act with urgency AND take time to build shared understanding.

This is the work: not choosing sides or trying to correct our partners and allies, but building the capacity to navigate between our different wisdoms with skill and grace. It’s harder than certainty AND it may be the only way to create lasting change.

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Learn about CoCreative’s coaching support for leaders, funders, and facilitators of collaborative systems change.

Systems change work tends to attract people who care deeply about justice, sustainability, and transformation. We’re motivated by powerful visions of what could be different and often righteously impatient about the need for change. This moral clarity is essential—it fuels the long, difficult work of challenging entrenched patterns and power structures.

But moral clarity can also make us vulnerable to overcorrection. When we identify something that needs to change, we often swing hard in the opposite direction, embracing new articles of faith with the same certainty we’re rejecting in the old ones. Essential truths become romanticized as the whole truth. We trade one set of simplifications for another, just another that might feel more morally righteous.

This series examines five notions that can function as articles of faith in systems change work:

1. “We need to work at the root cause.”

2. “It’s all about power.”

3. “Self-organization just happens.”

4. “Awareness naturally leads to action.”

5. “People with lived experience of harm should lead.”

6. Why We Overcorrect

Each represents an important correction to historical patterns of harm. Each is also prone to overcorrections that can limit our effectiveness. The challenge is to hold on to the correction but hold them with more nuance—to recognize when a needed correction has swung too far and what practices might help us find balance.

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1. “People with lived experience of harm should lead.”

Why this notion is critically important

This notion emerged as a necessary response to things being done TO people and communities. Historically, too often, both analysis and decision-making in systems change have been driven by outside experts, funders, and others who hold positional power and resources but lack a direct experience of the system.

This “doing to” pattern rests on a false and damaging premise: that communities—particularly communities of color and low-income communities—are communities of need rather than communities of strength, knowledge, and resilience. At the root of this view is often some element of racial and cultural supremacy: “we” know better and are more inherently capable than “them.”

Yet we’ve seen time and time again that people with lived experience of harm hold powerful insights into both what’s needed and what solutions will work best in their contexts. In fact, they are what we might call, as the late complexity science scholar Brenda Zimmerman put it, “context experts,” people with lived experience of the system, who experientially understand it in ways that no one else can. This is a powerful view of a system and possible pathways to change, and supporting leadership of and by the community brings greater legitimacy, proximity, accountability, and sustainability to systems change work.

The risks of overcorrection

An overcorrection based on this notion can shift the burden of change to those with lived experience. Consider, for example, that in any given community, there are dozens, if not thousands, of professionals responsible for the delivery of education and health services. Should a person who is professionally responsible in their day job to ensure that a system serves people well turn over that responsibility to a parent who might be working two jobs just to pay rent and put food on the table? This dynamic can feed a form of double taxation, where people are now expected to lead the work of changing a system (and, worse, educate more privileged others about that system) on top of dealing with its direct harms.

This notion can also contribute to a perception that “the front lines” is a monolithic position rather than a multitude of diverse perspectives and experiences. Who exactly is “most impacted”? The student struggling in an under-resourced school? The parent working three jobs? The teacher burning out in a seemingly impossible situation? The neighborhood elder who’s seen decades of broken promises? These perspectives may align, but they often don’t—and each person’s proximity to one dimension of the system may obscure others.

Also, does having been harmed by a system automatically equip someone to redesign it to work better? The overcorrection of this notion can romanticize proximity to problems as inherently generative of better solutions. Yet sometimes those closest to a problem can be most constrained by its logic, and those with distance can provide helpful, even powerful, perspectives and possibilities. While we have certainly overrelied in the past on what Zimmerman called “content experts,” such as professionals, researchers, and service providers, setting aside their learning, capacities, and experience leaves a lot on the table.

Bringing balance

Balance means recognizing that systemic change requires bridging multiple forms of expertise and a mix of capacities: Context expertise and content expertise. Lived experience and analytical capacity. Those most impacted by the system and those who most impact the system.

Effective bridging means providing genuine structural supports for community leadership—not just symbolic seats at tables, but formal power over resources, decisions, and direction. In Hawai’i, for example, a number of parents with lived experience of the state’s child welfare system now allocate funding to change initiatives and train child welfare professionals in how to work in more culturally-grounded and family-centered ways.

Though supporting the leadership of context experts through positional authority is powerful, they contribute to systemic change in a whole range of ways, including defining community standards of success for change initiatives, determining what’s most important to measure, developing and facilitating feedback and early warning systems, and holding other leaders to account.

Balance means asking different questions: Not “who should lead?” but “what kinds of leadership does this moment require?” Not “whose voice matters most?” but “whose knowledge is essential for this particular decision?” Not “community-led or expert-driven?” but “how do we weave together different forms of knowing in service of change?”

Coming next: Part 6. Why We Overcorrect

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Learn about CoCreative’s coaching support for leaders, funders, and facilitators of collaborative systems change.

Systems change work tends to attract people who care deeply about justice, sustainability, and transformation. We’re motivated by powerful visions of what could be different and often righteously impatient about the need for change. This moral clarity is essential—it fuels the long, difficult work of challenging entrenched patterns and power structures.

But moral clarity can also make us vulnerable to overcorrection. When we identify something that needs to change, we often swing hard in the opposite direction, embracing new articles of faith with the same certainty we’re rejecting in the old ones. Essential truths become romanticized as the whole truth. We trade one set of simplifications for another, just another that might feel more morally righteous.

This series examines five notions that can function as articles of faith in systems change work:

1. “We need to work at the root cause.”

2. “It’s all about power.”

3. “Self-organization just happens.”

4. “Awareness naturally leads to action.”

5. “People with lived experience of harm should lead.”

6. Why We Overcorrect

Each represents an important correction to historical patterns of harm. Each is also prone to overcorrections that can limit our effectiveness. The challenge is to hold on to the correction but hold them with more nuance—to recognize when a needed correction has swung too far and what practices might help us find balance.

4. “Awareness naturally leads to action.”

Why building awareness is critically important

This notion emerged as a correction to action-oriented approaches that skip past the essential work of developing shared understanding and cultivating shared will. Too often, systems change work rushes to implementation without adequate space and time to really “sense” the current system and our roles in it, cultivate and connect our pictures of our desired future, or discover the path between these.

The correction insists that we need awareness-based action, not action based on the assumptions of some or the biases of others. It recognizes that when people develop genuine shared understanding—of patterns, dynamics, root causes, and possibilities—their actions become more coherent, aligned, and effective. The work of collective sensemaking isn’t a luxury; it’s foundational.

The risks of overcorrection

The overcorrection, however, treats awareness as sufficient fuel for change. It’s a kind of enlightenment model: once people see clearly, they’ll naturally act differently. But this can ignore competing commitments, structural disincentives, habit patterns, capacity constraints, and the sheer practical difficulty of coordinating aligned action across organizational boundaries.

People can share sophisticated awareness and still act in contradictory ways. We all know what choices are good for us, yet we continue not to make them. Understanding a system and being able to act differently within it are related but distinct capacities. Sometimes the barrier isn’t awareness but skill, resources, relationships, or courage. Sometimes people sense the same pattern and draw wildly different conclusions about what to do, so our actions can become more diffuse or even contradictory rather than mutually reinforcing.

This overcorrection can also be closely associated with diagnostic approaches that assume problems are fundamentally about information deficits. If we just map the system well enough, share the data widely enough, facilitate the right conversations—then action will flow naturally. But systems change also requires building engagement, negotiating, experimenting, failing, learning, and persisting. It requires building power, not just consciousness.

Bringing balance

Balance means recognizing that awareness and action need each other. Awareness without action is sterile; action without awareness is chaotic and wasteful. We need both the work of collective sensemaking and the work of coordinated intervention. And given how much learning arises from action, especially when intervening in complex systems, our awareness lacks a kind of maturity until we’ve tested, developed, and matured it through action.

This means designing for both. Creating spaces for genuine inquiry and reflection while building structures for experimentation and adaptation. Developing feedback loops that connect learning to action and action to learning. Recognizing that sensemaking is ongoing, not a phase we complete before moving to “real” work.

Balance also means being realistic about what awareness can accomplish. Sometimes people, especially many of us who are “accommodating learners” and enter the learning cycle through concrete experiences, need to act their way into new understanding rather than understand their way into new action. Sometimes seeing isn’t enough—we also need to feel differently, imagine differently, relate differently. Sometimes the most powerful awareness comes from trying something together and then reflecting on what happened.

Coming next: Part 5. “People with lived experience should lead.”

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Learn about CoCreative’s coaching support for leaders, funders, and facilitators of collaborative systems change.

Systems change work tends to attract people who care deeply about justice, sustainability, and transformation. We’re motivated by powerful visions of what could be different and often righteously impatient about the need for change. This moral clarity is essential—it fuels the long, difficult work of challenging entrenched patterns and power structures.

But moral clarity can also make us vulnerable to overcorrection. When we identify something that needs to change, we often swing hard in the opposite direction, embracing new articles of faith with the same certainty we’re rejecting in the old ones. Essential truths become romanticized as the whole truth. We trade one set of simplifications for another, just another that might feel more morally righteous.

This series examines five notions that can function as articles of faith in systems change work:

1. “We need to work at the root cause.”

2. “It’s all about power.”

3. “Self-organization just happens.”

4. “Awareness naturally leads to action.”

5. “People with lived experience of harm should lead.”

6. Why We Overcorrect

Each represents an important correction to historical patterns of harm. Each is also prone to overcorrections that can limit our effectiveness. The challenge is to hold on to the correction but hold them with more nuance—to recognize when a needed correction has swung too far and what practices might help us find balance.

3. “Self-organization just happens”

Why self-organization is critically important

A strong interest in self-organizing systems has built over the past few decades as a necessary corrective to overly centralized, regimented governance and decision-making. For decades, social change work has been dominated by command-and-control approaches, blueprint thinking, and the assumption that change requires top-down coordination and management.

These mechanistic approaches ignore the reality that complex systems can’t be controlled from the center. They stifle local adaptation, suppress distributed intelligence, and create brittle structures that can’t respond to changing conditions. The turn toward self-organization recognizes that living systems have inherent capacities for coordination, that emergence is real, and that sometimes the best thing we can do is create conditions and get out of the way.

And, in certain contexts, self-organization can be powerful. Take the emergence of resistance to ICE raids in Minneapolis, where communications protocols, coordinated collective behaviors by groups of people who don’t even know one another, and shared messages emerged rapidly and organically among citizens.

The risks of overcorrection

An overcorrection can treat self-organization as a natural state we return to when we remove constraints, rather than a capacity that requires specific enabling conditions. It’s an almost mystical kind of emergence fallacy—as if complex coordinated behavior just spontaneously arises once we decentralize the work.

This ignores everything we know about context-dependent constraints. Self-organization doesn’t “just happen”—it happens when there are enabling constraints that catalyze integration while preserving the autonomy and integrity of diverse actors. It requires boundaries, feedback loops, shared protocols, sufficient (but maybe not excessive) resources, and, often, ongoing stewardship.

The romantic version of this notion has been fed by the oft-cited example of open-source software development, where many programmers, including most who have never met in person, develop extraordinarily sophisticated and robust software with distributed roles and, apparently, no formal leadership. What’s neglected in this narrative is that software development, while certainly requiring coordination across differences, has some characteristics that make self-organization easier than complex social change, such as clear user needs with generally understood use cases and self-selecting participants who’ve opted into shared community norms.

When the intent and scope are more open, however, and the experiences, perspectives, and vision of the future are far more diverse, things get more complex. The citizens organizing ICE resistance in Minneapolis have developed a remarkable level of self-organization. But street-level organizing and long-term strategic co-creation of a shared future require different structures and processes. I’m not implying any failure on the part of the organizers; it’s just different work, with different goals, in a different context.

The overcorrection can also implicitly idealize decentralization. Too little coordination is just as problematic as too much. Without any shared center, we get fragmentation, duplication, competition for scarce resources rather than building our collective resource base, and the inability to leverage collective capacity. Pure decentralization often means the loudest voices or those with the most resources dominate, just in a less visible way.

Bringing balance

Balance means recognizing that even self-organizing ecosystems of change need both centralized and decentralized elements. Sometimes we need distributed experimentation and strategies that adapt to the local context. At other times, we need structures and processes to work out where we want to get to, and the standards, norms, and coordinated action to work toward that over long periods of time. More importantly, if we are doing the work over long periods (which I’d argue nearly any meaningful systemic change requires), then we need to organize and concentrate resources over time for both the centralized AND the decentralized work.

Real self-organization is about organizing in ways that deliver the upsides of both centralization (coordinated action at scale, efficient resource allocation, consistent standards and quality, strategic alignment across diverse actors, and the ability to leverage collective capacity for systemic leverage points) and decentralization (local adaptation, distributed innovation, community ownership, faster responsiveness, system resilience, and the emergence of solutions that wouldn’t arise from centralized control).

Creating conditions for self-organization is itself skilled work. It requires understanding what enables emergence in this particular context. What boundaries help? What feedback mechanisms matter? What resources need to be available? How do we support coherence without centralizing control?

Balance means moving fluidly between center and edge, between coordination and autonomy. It means developing the capacity to sense when more structure would help and when more freedom is needed. It means recognizing that “getting out of the way” is sometimes exactly right and sometimes an abdication of necessary responsibility.

Coming next: Part 4. “Awareness naturally leads to action.”

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Learn about CoCreative’s coaching support for leaders, funders, and facilitators of collaborative systems change.

Systems change work tends to attract people who care deeply about justice, sustainability, and transformation. We’re motivated by powerful visions of what could be different and often righteously impatient about the need for change. This moral clarity is essential—it fuels the long, difficult work of challenging entrenched patterns and power structures.

But moral clarity can also make us vulnerable to overcorrection. When we identify something that needs to change, we often swing hard in the opposite direction, embracing new articles of faith with the same certainty we’re rejecting in the old ones. Essential truths become romanticized as the whole truth. We trade one set of simplifications for another, just another that might feel more morally righteous.

This series examines five notions that can function as articles of faith in systems change work:

1. “We need to work at the root cause.”

2. “It’s all about power.”

3. “Self-organization just happens.”

4. “Awareness naturally leads to action.”

5. “People with lived experience of harm should lead.”

6. Why We Overcorrect

Each represents an important correction to historical patterns of harm. Each is also prone to overcorrections that can limit our effectiveness. The challenge is to hold on to the correction but hold them with more nuance—to recognize when a needed correction has swung too far and what practices might help us find balance.

2. “It’s all about power.”

Why a power lens is critically important

A power lens is an essential correction to analyses that ignore or minimize its core role in shaping systems and keeping harmful systems locked in place. For too long, systems change work has treated problems as merely technical when they are powerfully political. We’ve optimized system functioning while leaving underlying structures of power, privilege, and oppression intact. We’ve talked about “stakeholders” as if everyone had an equal stake, ignoring vast differences in who benefits from current arrangements and who bears their costs.

Foregrounding power helps us reveal what is covered up and name what is undiscussable. It names the elephant in the room. It refuses false neutrality and false equivalencies that perpetuate harm.

The power lens has been crucial for honestly understanding how and why systems work the way they do—in ways that no other lens can. Take, for example, the lack of meaningful action on climate change. A power lens reveals deeper truths about why, despite knowing about climate change for 50-plus years, we’ve made so little progress: fossil fuel companies haven’t just lobbied against regulation, they’ve funded doubt, captured regulatory agencies, and reinforced such deep economic dependencies—through jobs, tax revenue, and campaign contributions—that politicians face real electoral consequences for challenging the industry. It’s not a knowledge problem or a technology problem; it’s about who has had the power to set the terms of debate and block alternatives.

The risks of overcorrection

During a 2019 Systems Transformation Learning Journey with 30 leaders in philanthropy, my colleague Luzette Jaimes and I invited the participants to experience the power of a system lens. We gave each person a pair of red glasses and a card with a hidden message on it. When they put on the glasses, much the printed noise in other colors disappeared, and a hidden message was revealed (spoiler alert: the message was “Seeing into Systems”).

When we asked about the implications of this, it was obvious to everyone how lenses help us see aspects of systems that are normally invisible, or at least difficult to perceive. Then someone noted that these aspects are only hidden to those of us who haven’t been wearing those lenses their whole lives. What no one noted was another truth: that the lens not only revealed, it also hid. To reveal the hidden message, the red glasses had erased a lot of other information in the image, blinding us to other possibly important data in that picture. (Cool idea for the future: Hide an additional message that can only be revealed with blue glasses :)

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An overcorrection treats power as not just a necessary but, too often, as a sufficient explanation for how systems behave over time. This monocausal framing can flatten the actual complexity of how and why systems reproduce themselves—and, importantly, what motivates people to maintain or disrupt them. It becomes a seductive analytical shortcut that feels morally righteous (especially to those of us who don’t feel so powerful) but may limit our understanding of other high-leverage mechanisms, dynamics, and pathways.

The overcorrection can also become strangely disempowering. The moment we assign power to others, we often implicitly give away part of our own agency. After all, if “they” have all the power and “they” are calling the shots, what’s left for “us” to do except to react rather than proact by, for example, demanding that they use their power differently?

“It’s all about power” can also shut down rather than open up conversation. It can become the analysis, the intervention, and the justification all at once, precluding the harder work of understanding how specific systems maintain themselves and where genuine leverage might exist.

Finally, and importantly, any single lens, overused, can become dehumanizing. When we reduce others to merely actors in a power dynamic, for example, we can lose sight of the whole, complex human beings who are in the system with us, which is often where the openings lie. Where we see people grasping to hold onto power, another lens might reveal a person holding fear of failure, personal trauma leading them to take on the hero role in a Drama Triangle, or feeling seemingly existential threats to their status, certainty, or even their identity. These other lenses aren’t mutually exclusive with the power lens—they are more true together, and, together, they suggest a more whole approach.

And the impact isn’t only on others. As author Ursula K. Le Guin put it in 1975,

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.”

Bringing balance

Balance means holding power as a crucial dimension of analysis without treating it as the only dimension needed to understand both a system and the human experiences within that system. We can name power dynamics clearly while also attending to mental models, mindsets of either-or thinking and scarcity, structural incentives and disincentives, the dynamics of fear and threat, the flow of signals and the shifting of boundaries, and emergent properties of complex systems (see 8 Lenses for Systemic Analysis for a range of lenses, each of which provides a distinct view on a system).

We can speak truth to power while building relationships with—and, I’ll say it, even have empathy for—people who hold power. We can challenge systems of oppression while seeing the people embedded in them as complex, often conflicted, and, most importantly, maybe even open to change.

Balance means asking: What does a power analysis reveal here? And what does it obscure? What other lenses help us understand this system’s behavior? Where does power intersect with other dynamics? What becomes possible when we hold multiple frameworks simultaneously?

Coming next: Part 3. “Self-organization just happens.”

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Learn about CoCreative’s coaching support for leaders, funders, and facilitators of collaborative systems change.

Systems change work tends to attract people who care deeply about justice, sustainability, and transformation. We’re motivated by powerful visions of what could be different and often righteously impatient about the need for change. This moral clarity is essential—it fuels the long, difficult work of challenging entrenched patterns and power structures.

But moral clarity can also make us vulnerable to overcorrection. When we identify something that needs to change, we often swing hard in the opposite direction, embracing new articles of faith with the same certainty we’re rejecting in the old ones. Essential truths become romanticized as the whole truth. We trade one set of simplifications for another, just another that might feel more morally righteous.

This series examines five notions that can function as articles of faith in systems change work:

1. “We need to work at the root cause.”

2. “It’s all about power.”

3. “Self-organization just happens.”

4. “Awareness naturally leads to action.”

5. “People with lived experience of harm should lead.”

6. Why We Overcorrect

Each represents an important correction to historical patterns of harm. Each is also prone to overcorrections that can limit our effectiveness. The challenge is to hold on to the correction but hold them with more nuance—to recognize when a needed correction has swung too far and what practices might help us find balance.

1. “We need to work at the root cause.”

Why this notion is critically important

This notion emerged as a necessary push toward addressing deeper structural issues rather than just treating symptoms. For too long, systems change work has focused on downstream interventions—band-aids that address consequences while leaving underlying patterns intact. The need for this correction was powerfully expressed in the Parable of the River, shared by sociologist Irving Zola, where a community is so exhausted by saving people that have somehow ended up in the nearby river that they lack the energy to go upstream and figure out who’s throwing them in the river in the first place.

The root cause frame encourages us to look deeper, to ask “why” multiple times, to trace presenting problems back to their underlying drivers. It resists the temptation of quick fixes and insists on fundamental change. This correction has been crucial for developing the ambition and patience required for genuine systems transformation.

The risks of overcorrection

The overcorrection often assumes linear causality—that systems have identifiable roots which, if addressed, will deterministically produce different outcomes. This treats systems as essentially mechanistic rather than emergent and adaptive.

Complex system dynamics don’t have root causes in this sense. They have circular causation, multiple reinforcing dynamics, emergent properties, and even the capacity to maintain patterns through different pathways. What appears to be a root cause is often just one element in a web of mutual causation. Change it and the system may simply reproduce its pattern through other means. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a yet-deeper root, only that a more nuanced convergence of forces might be reinforcing that pattern.

The search for root causes can also become a way to avoid action. We keep digging deeper, postponing intervention until we’ve found the “real” problem. Meanwhile, people suffer from symptoms that could be addressed, and we fail to gain the grounded learning that can only arise through action. Sometimes treating symptoms is essential, not as a substitute for deeper work but as necessary for survival and for building the relationships and trust required for deeper work.

Bringing balance

Balance means working on deeper structural issues while understanding that we’re shifting conditions, boundaries, and signals rather than fixing a root cause that will mechanistically produce different outcomes.

From complexity thinking, we can embrace concepts like basins of attraction—the idea that systems tend toward certain patterns given particular conditions. Our work is to shift those conditions to destabilize current basins and make new ones more attractive. This is different from identifying a root cause and “fixing” it.

There are certainly intervention points—places where small shifts in conditions can enable much larger shifts. But these aren’t root causes; they’re leverage points in a dynamic system. And they don’t work in isolation. Effective systems change requires working at multiple levels simultaneously—addressing symptoms while also shifting structures, changing policies while also transforming culture, building new capacity while also dismantling harmful patterns.

Balance means asking: What conditions continually reproduce this pattern? What new conditions might generate different possibilities? Where can we intervene to shift attractors? And how do we work at multiple levels at once, attending to both immediate needs and long-term transformation?

Coming next: Part 2. “It’s all about power.”

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Learn about CoCreative’s coaching support for leaders, funders, and facilitators of collaborative systems change.

Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance, once observed that “the success of an intervention depends on the inner condition of the intervener.” After two decades of working with multi-stakeholder partnerships and coalitions across sectors, this insight has proven profound for conveners in ways I never expected when I first encountered it.

The reality is that the convener’s interior landscape (our mindsets, fears, beliefs, and way of being) fundamentally shapes whether collaborative efforts flourish or fail. I’ve seen promising collaborations fail to launch because of a convener’s unconscious need for control. I’ve watched networks lose their most committed participants when conveners unknowingly operated from scarcity thinking. And I’ve witnessed the magic that happens when conveners show up with genuine faith in collective wisdom and the courage to work with what I call “The Baddies,” those uncomfortable realities like fear, conflict, failure, and resistance that many of us try so hard to avoid.

Learn more about developing a heathy relationship with the Baddies:

Part 1: Fear is Not the Thing We Have to Fear

Part 2: You Will Fail. Why Not Embrace It?

Part 3: What If the Conflict IS the Breakthrough?

Part 4: That Pushback You’re Getting? It’s Trying to Help You

The art of convening isn’t about becoming a perfect leader or achieving mastery of a specific set of competencies. It’s in large part about cultivating interior conditions that create space for genuine commitment and collaboration to emerge and thrive.

When Fear Drives the Ship (And Why It Always Crashes)

James (not his real name) is a brilliant sustainability leader whose commitment to regenerative agriculture prompted him to convene a coalition to address the overuse of chemical fertilizers. He had impeccable credentials, deep subject matter expertise, and the support of his close-in peers. The coalition he wanted to develop failed to even start.

What happened? James’ fear of failure drove him into a “control trap.” Convinced that he would be ultimately responsible for the coalition’s success, he worked frantically behind the scenes to get everything just right. He tried to pre-determine the priorities before bringing stakeholders together, so that, as he rationalized it, “everyone could be confident in having a clear plan.” Rather than engaging early and often with others, he crafted strategies in isolation and then tried to get buy-in from others. When colleagues raised concerns or alternative ideas, he listened politely but rarely incorporated their input into the actual work.

The participants sensed this pattern. They quickly figured out that this was James’ coalition, not theirs. One by one, key leaders peeled away and put their energy into other efforts. By the time James realized what was happening, the damage was irreversible because he had already clearly communicated that they weren’t really needed.

I’ve seen this pattern too many times. The convener’s fear of failure creates a compulsive need to control outcomes, which paradoxically creates the very failure they feared. Like trying to hold water in your hands, the tighter you grip, the faster it slips away.

Warning signs of a control trap include:

• Pre-determining the goal and solutions before engaging stakeholders in meaningfully shaping these

• Consistently steering conversations back to predetermined agendas when participants raise different issues, directions, and possibilities

• Debating the accuracy or efficacy of others’ perspectives or ideas rather than honoring and building on them

• Feeling personally responsible for every aspect of the collaborative’s success or failure

• Reluctance to share real decision-making authority with network participants

The Invitation: Faith in Collective Wisdom

Marcus had convened a coalition addressing homelessness in a mid-sized city. When I first met him, he was facing a crisis. Two of his key partner organizations were in open conflict about their services and priorities, foundation funding was uncertain, and the mayor’s office was threatening to pull out if they didn’t see “concrete results” within six months.

Marcus’s response encouraged me. Instead of panicking or trying to control the situation, he reached out to network members individually and said something like this: “Here’s what I’m seeing and here’s what I’m concerned about. What are you seeing? How do you think we should address this so we can move ahead more effectively together?” While not a community organizer, Marcus employed a maxim of the practice—when in doubt, do a one-on-one.

What he didn’t do was to take the problem on himself, diagnose it, and try to bring forward a packaged solution. He didn’t try to “manage” the conflict by avoiding it or smoothing it over. He invited the network into collaborative problem-solving about their own process and relationships.

This approach worked because it was grounded in Marcus’ faith in collective wisdom and a deep trust that this group of committed peers could figure out what they needed if they were supported to do so. He wasn’t being naïvely optimistic. He had just seen attempts at collaboration go sideways in the past, and he believed that the solution didn’t need to come from him alone.

When we have faith in collective wisdom, we start to build the conditions for it to emerge. When we lack this faith, like when we seem unsure that the collaboration can actually work, others sense that uncertainty and become less willing to fully commit. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What faith in collective wisdom looks like in practice:

• Approaching problems with curiosity rather than predetermined solutions

• Asking “What are you seeing?” while also sharing your own observations and take on things

• Creating structures and processes that help the group navigate ambiguity and complexity together

• Staying present with not-knowing instead of rushing to fix things

• Truly believing that sustainable solutions are more likely to emerge from the group than from any individual

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Stewarding vs. Directing: The Art of Leading by Following

Effective convening isn’t about being passive or letting groups drift without direction. It’s about “stewarding,” creating conditions for the collaborative to do its own work, rather than doing the work for them.

I learned this distinction the hard way early in my own career. I was working with a collaborative focused on education reform, and I was so eager (too eager = red flag :) to add value that I kept jumping in with my own ideas and insights. I thought I was being helpful. What I was actually doing was training the group to look to me for answers instead of sharing and leveraging their own collective intelligence.

Stewarding looks different. It means asking questions rather than providing answers (but first checking that we even have the right questions). It means curating processes that allow connection, analysis, and strategy to emerge organically rather than imposing solutions on the group. It means, at times, presencing a difference that’s missing in the group, even if it’s not my preferred difference, like slowing down a group that wants to rush right into a favored solution. Most importantly, it means being transparent about my own experiences, hopes, concerns, and uncertainties so that others feel more ready to do the same.

This transparency piece trips up many conveners because it requires a kind of vulnerability that many of us weren’t trained for in our professional contexts. We think we need to appear competent and in control. But sometimes the most powerful thing a leader can say is, “I honestly don’t know what’s needed here, and I’m hoping we can figure it out together.”

Some differences between directing and stewarding:

Directing

• Taking responsibility for outcomes: “Based on my analysis of the situation, here’s what I think we should do...”

• Presenting solutions and asking for buy-in

• When you’re feeling stuck or fearful about things not working, you first ask, “How can I fix this?”

Stewarding

• Creating processes for solutions to evolve and ownership to emerge: “I’ve been noticing this pattern, and I’m curious what others are seeing. How might we approach this together?”

• Taking responsibility for conditions and letting the group own the outcomes

• When you’re feeling stuck or fearful about things not working, you share what you're experiencing with peers who can help.

There is a third stance, however, that’s the opposite of Directing but just as unhelpful. When we feel so humble and self-effacing as leaders that we step back and encourage a group to “self-organize.” This can create a vacuum where, without constraints and direction, at least at first, collaboratives fail to coalesce. In our desire to let others lead, we can create a situation in which no one really leads. The stance of Stewarding isn’t just leading OR following, but doing both.

The Energy Economy: Focus on What’s Building Momentum

As someone who spent much of my life in my head, playing with concepts and ideas, it took me some time to learn to sense what matters most in collaborations: Energy. As I learned to tune into the energy patterns in groups, it quickly became clear that in every collaborative, some activities and conversations clearly generated energy and excitement, while others sapped it. Effective conveners become masters at sensing what builds energy and focusing there.

I remember working with a coalition that was getting bogged down in lengthy, almost circular discussions about governance structure and decision-making protocols. Rather than actively contributing, people were checking their phones—maybe looking for something, anything else to do.

My colleague, instead of pushing harder on governance, artfully shifted the focus to a pilot project that had come up earlier, one that several organizations were excited to advance together. The room suddenly came alive. People were leaning in, building on each other’s ideas, volunteering to take on pieces of the work. And, of course, in that specific project, we simply had to work through how the project would be governed and how decisions would be made, and we did. Here’s the thing, though: While the governance questions were the same basic problems we’d been working on thirty minutes before, they now had real meaning and energy in the context of something the group had real energy for.

Only later did I realize that I had also been bored! I felt my lack of interest and energy, but just sat with it, thinking, “Well, we just have to work through this.” It was my colleague who not only felt that sensation but also brought it fully into her awareness and took action on it.

Feeling and working with energy:

• Notice what topics, conversations, and possibilities generate excitement, starting from within you, and lean into those

• If you don’t feel energy for something that a group is doing, consider disclosing that and checking what others are experiencing

• When only a few people show up for a meeting where you’d expected a dozen, check your thoughts and feelings, and, if you’re feeling a sense of disappointment or scarcity, choose what to do with that as a convener, not as a leader

• Keep yourself connected to what energizes you in the work and help others do the same (nothing that your source of energy probably won’t be theirs)

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Making Friends with The Baddies

One of the most transformative shifts a convener can make is to change our relationship with fear, conflict, failure, and resistance (what I call the “Baddies”).

Many of us were taught early on that at least some of these Baddies are things to avoid, minimize, or fix as quickly as possible. Our families, schools, and organizations may have taught us that good leaders are fearless, overcome conflict, avoid failures, and meet resistance head-on. But the Baddies are not problems to be solved. They’re resources to be leveraged.

Consider, for example, when you’ve grown the most in your own life. When everything was smooth and easy, or when you were grappling with something difficult? When you were comfortable, or when you were stretched beyond your current capacity?

The same is true for collaborations. Conflict often signals that the group is wrestling with something important. Resistance frequently contains wisdom about unexamined assumptions or overlooked risks and impacts. Failure provides learning and insight that can’t be gained any other way.

I worked with one coalition where one of the partner organizations kept pushing back on the group’s strategy, asking uncomfortable questions and raising concerns that others found annoying. Instead of trying to get this “difficult” partner to fall in line, the convener got curious about their perspective. It turned out they were seeing significant implementation challenges that everyone else had missed. Incorporating their concerns into the strategy made it much more robust and realistic.

Reframing The Baddies:

• Conflict → Insight about what matters most to different stakeholders

• Resistance → Wisdom about potential unintended consequences or overlooked factors (often based on past experience)

• Failure → Essential learning that can’t be gained through planning or even through success

• Fear → Signals about what’s at stake and what needs attention

The conditioning of dominant culture runs deep here. Many of us were socialized to see the Baddies as negative forces to be controlled or eliminated, rather than helpful forces in healthy systems. Leveraging them builds our adaptive capacities and resilience. Avoiding them or trying to manage them down leads to more brittle and fragile collaborations and, maybe ironically, to real resistance, unproductive conflict, and the very failure we fear.

This doesn’t mean seeking out conflict or celebrating failure. It means developing a mature, grounded relationship with the full spectrum of collaborative experience. It means seeing The Baddies as partners in the work rather than obstacles to it.

Perspective and Power: Holding Your Seat Lightly

Perhaps the most sophisticated inner work for conveners involves a kind of “perspective paradox,” the capacity to simultaneously hold a strong vision while having only a light attachment to our own viewpoint.

As conveners, we often have more information about the system and more influence over the process than other participants. This position comes with both privilege and responsibility. The privilege can unconsciously feed ego and attachment. The responsibility can create pressure to have all the answers.

Effective conveners learn to hold this tension skillfully. They stay true to their core purpose and vision while remaining genuinely open to having their analysis, strategies, and even their role evolve based on what emerges through the collaborative process.

I’ve seen conveners get stuck in single-lens thinking, viewing every situation through frameworks of power, or race, or economics, or whatever their preferred analytical tool might be. While these lenses capture essential truths, any single framework becomes limiting when it’s the only way you can see. The most effective conveners develop “lens flexibility,” the ability to try on different perspectives and integrate insights across multiple ways of seeing.

Practices for perspective flexibility:

• Asking yourself at times (though maybe not every day): “What if I’m wrong about this?”

• Seeking out people who see the situation differently and genuinely trying to understand their viewpoint

• Asking what your dominant lens might blind you to, or what the unintended consequences of overusing it might be

• Noticing when you’re becoming more attached to being right than being useful

• Reminding yourself that your perspective, while valuable, is just one piece of a larger puzzle

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The Deeper Work: Interior Conditions vs. Skills

Notice that I’ve talked very little about skills here. Stances, practices, habits, but not skills. That’s because I don’t believe that ultimate success as a concern is primarily about developing new skills or competencies. It’s about cultivating interior conditions—those ways of being that naturally generate better choices and more effective action—through practice. As Richard Strozzi-Heckler put it, “We are what we practice, and we are always practicing something.”

Take Non-Violent Communication, for example. Yes, there are specific techniques and practices we can learn. But at its heart, NVC is about an interior condition of taking responsibility for our own feelings, perceptions, and interpretations, separating what we experience from the meaning we make of it. When that interior condition is present, skillful communication tends to emerge naturally.

The same is true for other aspects of effective convening. When I genuinely trust collective wisdom, I naturally ask different questions. When I’m not driven by fear of failure, I naturally create more space for others to contribute. When I’ve made friends with The Baddies, I stop wasting energy trying to avoid or control them and can use them as sources of collective learning, mutual understanding, and momentum.

That said, these interior conditions can be cultivated through specific practices: Polarity Thinking helps us work skillfully with tensions rather than trying to resolve them; Shadow Work builds awareness of unconscious patterns; nervous system regulation practices support the equanimity that this work requires over time; frameworks like the Art of Hosting help us develop skills for generative dialogue.

But the practices are in service of the interior conditions, not the other way around. When things get tough or tense, we won’t remember to use a method; we’ll first act from our interior condition.

The goal isn’t to become perfect at these techniques. It’s to develop ways of being that make collaborative leadership feel natural and sustainable.

Building Your Early Warning System

Given how much I’ve learned from watching (and sometimes being a part of!) things going sideways, let me share a few practical warning signs that a convener’s interior condition might be undermining their collaborative:

The Problem-Focused Pattern: When someone consistently brings up barriers, concerns, and reasons why things can’t move forward, they’re usually trying to manage their own anxiety rather than creating conditions for collaboration. They may believe that they are being realistic and helpful. What they are actually doing is training the group to expect problems and lose hope.

The Single-Lens Trap: Watch for conveners who apply the same analytical framework to every situation. This blocks learning, adaptation, and growth and sets up a rigid pattern of responding to each distinct situation with essentially the same response, which is very unhelpful, especially in complex systems change work.

The Savior Complex: Some conveners unconsciously position themselves as the person who will rescue the collaboration or solve the big problem. This might feed their ego, but it actually dis-empowers other participants and creates unhealthy dependency or, if the participants have dignity and agency, a rebellion. You’ll notice this when someone can’t seem to step back and let others take the lead, even when it would serve the work better.

The Attachment to Being Right: This shows up when a convener becomes defensive about their analysis or approach, when they subtly dismiss input that doesn’t align with their thinking, or when they seem more interested in proving their point than in learning and adapting.

Three Essential Interior Conditions

If I had to distill two decades of experience into the most essential elements of a convener’s interior condition, here’s what I’d focus on:

First, the ability to recognize and work with what’s in your own shadow while skillfully navigating polarities both within yourself and the group. This means knowing your triggers, understanding your unconscious patterns, and developing the capacity to work with tensions rather than trying to resolve them prematurely.

Second, the capacity to transform The Baddies—fear, conflict, failure, and resistance—into productive forces in the work. This requires unlearning much of what our culture taught us about these experiences and developing a more mature, nuanced relationship with the full spectrum of collaborative dynamics.

Third, the ability to stay true to core intent while remaining genuinely open to evolving understanding, changing strategies, and emerging possibilities. This means holding vision and flexibility simultaneously—what Donella Meadows described as being “true to the vision” while staying “open to any path by which the vision will be realized.”

The Practical Path Forward

This isn’t theoretical work. These interior conditions can be developed through practice, reflection, and community. The conveners I know who have deeply cultivated these interior conditions engage in regular practices that support self-awareness, seek feedback from trusted colleagues, and create structures for ongoing reflection, learning, and adaptation.

They also recognize that this work is better done in community than in isolation. Building support systems with other conveners, finding mentors who model these approaches, and creating spaces for honest feedback and reflection about both successes and failures all accelerate development.

Most importantly, they approach this work with the same spirit they bring to their collaboratives—with curiosity rather than judgment, with faith in collective wisdom, and with genuine openness to learning and growing through the process.

To some extent, until we’ve evolved to engage in true self-organization together, collaboratives will only be as healthy, resilient, and generative as the interior landscape of those who help convene it. In a world that desperately needs more effective collaboration, perhaps the most important work we can do is tend to our own inner condition—not as an indulgence, but as an essential foundation for the systems change our communities and planet require.

After all, as Bill O’Brien knew, the success of any intervention depends on the interior state of the intervener. The question is: what interior state are you cultivating, and what kind of collaboration does it make possible?

Free resource from CoCreative: The Benefits of Fear, Conflict, Failure, & Resistance

Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.