practicing with perceiving for systems leadership
what we can see moves with the state we are in
in our systems leadership program with danashen, we're working through a series that takes the systems practice framework one area at a time. the framework names six areas of systems practice, knowing, being, doing, relating, thinking and perceiving, and the capabilities each asks of us. we explore a practice area through concepts and methods, and through mindfulness meditation. we also run peer coaching clinics where participants bring the leadership challenges they are working through. having practiced with knowing and with being, we come now to perceiving.
we draw on two streams of knowledge here, First Nations ways of knowing and academic systems thinking, held side by side. we say perceiving rather than seeing because what we take in is never absolute. it arrives already filtered, through our disciplines, our biases, our mental models, and where we happen to be standing. the capabilities perceiving asks of us are in the image below.
we began outward. one landscape read by an ecologist, an economist and a planner returns three different landscapes. one watershed looked at from the shore, from a canoe, from underwater and from a plane returns four. we worked with levels and scales, and with the iceberg model, which surfaces what sits beneath an event without asking a group to agree on what they find. each tool gives us a slice, and the plurality is the point.
then we turned the same attention inward. dana introduced the window of tolerance and polyvagal theory, and we sat with our own states of being. outside that window the field narrows and a fog comes in front of it. participants named this before we did, that in the harder states the capacity to hold a holistic view drops away. dana offered the counterweight: gentle, non-judgemental attention to ourselves opens the mind, and our sight becomes bigger. we practiced rain, michele mcdonald's four movements of recognising, allowing, investigating and nurturing, which dana carries through tara brach's teaching.
there is a third place perception lives, between the parts. every part of a system holds a read on the other parts, on their competence, their intent, and what they are entitled to decide. those reads are rarely spoken and they shape the relationship anyway. a good deal of what presents as a structural problem is two parts of a system perceiving each other in ways neither has put into words.
what would change in your work if you knew how another part of your system perceives you?
