By John Kania, Radha Ruparell, Peter Senge, and Hal Hamilton
In 2015, three of us, John, Hal, and Peter, published an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled, The Dawn of System Leadership. The article quickly became one of the most popular articles on leadership in the publication’s history, and many social change leaders around the world began referring to “system leadership” as what they aspired to in their work.
Our sense of what made the article popular was that it acknowledged the existential nature of today’s leadership reality: No individual or organization can achieve large-scale progress with a complex problem on their own. We proposed that, in addressing the challenges the world faces in such arenas as climate, poverty reduction, health care access, and educational advancement, today’s leaders must leave behind hierarchical approaches to advancing change and focus instead on “catalyzing collective leadership.”
We suggested in the article that catalyzing collective leadership required developing the following three capacities:
- Ability to see the larger system of which you are a part
- Fostering more reflective and generative conversations
- Shifting the collective focus from reactive problem-solving to co-creating the future
Ten years later, we are encouraged by the ways the article was received and the connections many made to parallel developments like Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, Adam Kahane’s Radical Collaboration, and Joanna Macy’s growing global initiative, The Work That Reconnects.[i] Together, they show that there is a longing for new thinking about leadership, particularly leadership in the context of systems change.
Progress and Misconceptions
Watching many embrace the journey of growing as system leaders, we have found that some who aspire to system leadership take no more than small steps as the path to self-change deepens. Some get stuck in self-reference and miss the whole point of moving beyond the individual as a leader.
As the term “system leader” gained in use, we began to encounter people declaring themselves to be “the system leader” because of the scope of their authority or position. We found others decrying people in such positions of power who are “poor systems leaders” because the individuals failed to attend to what was needed to move the system one way or another.
More subtle have been calls for system leadership that echo our ideas about collaboration and broader engagement but leave intact mainstream ideas about “the system”. Specifically, so long as “the system” remains something outside of ourselves, we will fail to see our own handprint on the very problems we seek to address—and the critical role of reflection in deep change.
Elevating Attention to the Inner-outer Connection
It is here, in exploring the connection between one’s inner and outer state, that many system leaders must pursue greater understanding and practice.
At its core, changing systems is human work: wrestling with messy problems together. This requires a willingness to look inward and confront our own inherited patterns, biases, and blind spots. If we wish to advance peace, justice, and compassion in the world, we must begin by cultivating these capacities in ourselves. We must focus on what change is required within ourselves, instead of assuming that others are the ones who must make the changes.
As authors, even as we identified in our 2015 article the inner-to-outer connection as a key gateway to becoming a system leader, our ensuing work over the past decade leads us to believe that it must receive significantly greater attention than it is getting today. Our aim in this article is to clarify several of the critical realities related to the inner-to-outer connection, as deep attention here is where system leaders grow into their full potential.
Inner Work and System Leadership
In our experience, system leaders who engage with inner work experience a range of individual and collective benefits. Inner work supports system leaders to:
- Listen more deeply and mitigate reactive patterns in themselves and others
- Strengthen dialogue and shared work across system actors, shifting power dynamics, and elevating collective creativity
- Navigate relational tension with care, holding conflict in ways that heal rather than reproduce trauma, and transforming disagreement into deeper trust and clarity
- Unlearn inherited assumptions, mental models, and beliefs that unconsciously reproduce the very systems they seek to change
- Stay with ambiguity and surrender to not-knowing, opening up space for intuitive faculties and the emergence of solutions that weren’t apparent before
- Cultivate shared purpose, enabling system actors to move from competing interests toward collective stewardship
These benefits from inner work are core to advancing systems change. But what does inner work for system leaders actually look like? And what do we mean when we say that the inner and outer are connected? And finally, what new capacities related to inner work are needed for system leaders?
To address these questions, we share five inescapable realities of inner work as it is embodied in the practice of system leadership:
1. Transforming the system begins with transforming ourselves.
We cannot treat our inner state, our relationships, and our systems as disconnected. The way we show up shapes the systems we are trying to change.
One system leader who seeks to embody this in her life and work is co-author, Radha Ruparell. Radha is Chief Learning Officer at Teach For All, a global network of changemakers developing collective leadership in communities around the world so all children can fulfill their potential.
For Radha, the connection between inner and outer has always been clear. Growing up in Canada, with parents raised in Africa and ancestral roots in India, she learned early to bridge cultures and perspectives. Later, moving across sectors—from advising CEOs to leading global social change—she saw again and again how profoundly one’s inner world shapes one’s actions in the outer world, and how little attention it typically receives.
At the heart of Teach For All’s change model is the idea of collective leadership: that true systems change requires the leadership of diverse actors across a social and institutional ecosystem—from students to policymakers, from those who have experienced injustice to those who hold positions of power. But convening people is not enough. When worldviews and lived experiences clash, collaboration can easily falter. Real progress depends on deeper capacities that most of us were never taught, such as deeper listening and “sensing the system,” navigating power, holding space for co-creation, and staying in relationship through tension.
In her work with leaders around the world, Radha has seen two foundational insights emerge.
First, people see the “outer” world through very different inner frames or lenses. What blocks collaboration is often not disagreement itself, but unexamined assumptions. Each of us interprets reality through meaning-making models shaped by identity, culture, power, and lived experience. These lenses influence what we define as merit, whose expertise we trust, and which solutions feel obvious.
Second, this work requires unlearning. For example, for those shaped by more collectivist, community-centered cultures, there may be a more natural orientation toward seeing systems relationally rather than purely analytically. In much of the Western world, however, shifting from “me” to “we” often requires deliberate effort. It means unlearning habits many of our systems reward: speed over reflection, control over connection, competition over compassion, and self over the collective.
In Teach For All’s study of thousands of transformational leaders globally, one insight has stood out: unlearning is just as important as learning. It often happens through disorienting experiences, especially when paired with intentional reflection. For system leaders, this reframes challenge itself. The moments that unsettle us may be the very moments that expand us.
When leaders transform from the inside out, the systems around them begin to shift. As dominant frames loosen and inherited narratives lose their grip, new possibilities come into view. More generative, co-created responses to complex challenges can emerge. Systems change, therefore, is not only about building new structures. It is about unlearning the assumptions that built the old ones – a process of transformation that begins with transforming oneself.
2. Inner work does not mean individual work—engaging collectively is essential.
How we define “inner” in relation to “outer” is anything but simple. Though the words may evoke a sort of superficial recognition, the terms “inner” and “outer” are themselves metaphors.
One approach for gaining clarity here starts with considering the types of challenges faced by systems leaders. Teacher and author Ronald Heifetz popularized the distinction between “technical problems” and “adaptive problems” in leadership work.[ii] The latter are defined as situations where change is required in ourselves. In this sense, the inner work of leadership is adaptive work, where we start to focus on how we show up, instead of assuming that others are the ones who must make the change.
Doing this in practice requires a willingness to reflect on one’s own inherited patterns, biases, and blind spots. Without this, leaders risk replicating the very dynamics they seek to change. Reflection shapes action when it leads to new ways of making sense—while we often contradict our words, we rarely act in ways that make no sense to us. Bridging that gap requires greater alignment between what we espouse and how we show up. Systems can begin to shift when leaders model a different way, not only through their strategies, but through embodying change themselves.
This work does not unfold in isolation. In diverse groups, practices such as learning circles and restorative justice circles provide well-worn methodologies and protocols for structuring space for shared reflection and meaning-making. They enable participants to listen across differences, surface assumptions, and metabolize tension together rather than displacing it onto one another.
Some organizations are also experimenting with new approaches such as “deep performing teams,” which suggest that teams can intentionally cultivate their collective inner capacity. Through disciplined practices that strengthen awareness, emotional regulation, and relational honesty, groups learn to navigate conflict with greater steadiness and awareness of their nervous system responses. For example, a team might pause a meeting when it senses reactivity or withdrawal emerging. Rather than pushing through or avoiding discomfort, members name what is happening, return to shared agreements or grounding practices, and work with the tension in real time.
Over time, this builds the capacity to stay steady under pressure and attend not only to tasks, but to the relational and systemic dynamics shaping their work. In this way, inner work becomes a collective discipline that strengthens a system’s ability to learn, adapt, and perform at a higher level. We see this in the cultivation methods built up over millennia and embedded in diverse wisdom traditions—many of which have passed out of currency in the modern age as well-being became defined by material progress based on Western science and technology.
Today, even though there is an awakening of interest in mindfulness, meditation, and diverse somatic practices like yoga and tai chi, these are usually seen as ways to help people individually cope with the stresses of the modern age, not as keys to how we grow to be better leaders.
Not surprisingly, many older wisdom traditions rest on an understanding that “inner work” is not just individual work. The Great Learning, a classic of the Confucian leadership development tradition, expresses a far broader sense of inner work. The following passage, the words of which are familiar to most Chinese still today, though their deeper meaning is mostly lost, describes a famous progression from self to society.[iii]
The ancients who
Wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well their own States.
Wishing to order well their States, they first harmonized their families.
Wishing to harmonize their families, they first cultivated their persons.
Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts.
Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts.
Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their awareness; such extension of awareness lay in the investigation of the underlying matrix of mind and matter (1)
This progression makes clear that inner cultivation and outer transformation are woven together. The personal is not detached from the political or the systemic—it is foundational to it.
Again and again, we have found that people cross a critical threshold in their personal leadership development when they commit to their own regular “personal practice” of contemplative reflection or another practice that deepens connection and strengthens the capacity to listen from the heart.
That said, just as in The Great Learning, we have found it useful to talk about the inner work for system leadership starting at the more collective levels, lest this whole domain be confused with our own individual journeys of learning and development only. In the words of American Buddhist teacher Rev. angel Kyodo williams, founder of the Center for Transformative Change, “Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.”[iv]
3. Integrating the inner-to-outer connection requires practice.
All older cultures we know value ceremony – singing, dancing, chanting, smudging, praying, or sweating in sweat lodges. The forms are endless. But the common intent of the inner-to-outer connection is to honor and deepen the space that holds us collectively.
For system leaders this often means cultivating what we refer to as a “generative social field”—a space or setting where people feel seen and heard, where there is both the safety to relax and the challenge to “show up in a good way,” as many Indigenous traditions would say, where there is attention to how I listen, not just how I speak, and where, over time, genuine trust and creativity grow.
Consider Teach For Cambodia, a network partner of Teach For All, and the extent to which its system leaders both create a culture of support and continuously practice the inner-outer connection.
In a country where genocide and years of instability dismantled the education system, the leadership team tasked with growing Teach For Cambodia has, for over a decade, carried a mix of embedded sadness for what was lost alongside resilience and excitement for the possibility of the future. For them, the inner work is not an add-on.
From the start, the “fellows,” young leaders teaching in significantly under-resourced schools, are introduced to the principle that a leader’s inner state matters. Their institutional convenings resemble those of industry peers in developing technical skills, but they differ dramatically in integrating diverse practices based in both neuroscience and wisdom traditions—journaling, breathwork, movement, resourcing practices, and collective reflection tools like empathy walks—into their training protocol.
The impact runs deep precisely because these practices are embedded in the ethos. Senior leaders model these practices in their own behavior, which sets the tone for the entire organization. Fellows witness models they can use to support one another. It is visible in the smallest of moments: if a leader or peer says, “let’s take a break to resource and regulate,” everyone knows what that means and participates. As Head of Impact Sreyleap Taing, who designs these leadership journeys, explains, “Everyone knows what to do because this shared culture has been established.”
The approach is strengthened when fellows engage in “co-regulation,” renewing gratitude and self-compassion together while practicing deep listening that allows them to hear the highest collective possibilities. Fellows describe leaving these experiences more hopeful, forgiving, compassionate, and better able to manage stress—while also more connected to one another.
These cultural practices have created waves that extend outwards. Fellows immersed in these practices are better equipped to create a calmer, safer classroom environment. Power dynamics shift as teachers move from control toward facilitation by working alongside students rather than over them. As CEO Jojo Lam says, “We are reframing leadership as presence—and normalizing care as a leadership capacity, not just in self but also in the collective.”
In human systems, this is how sustainable change happens. As relational work leads to greater resonance and harmonization between individuals, it then emanates outward and affects many beyond initial efforts.
4. Relational competencies are core to inner work for system leaders.
Many otherwise competent leaders have a limited repertoire when it comes to how to go about cultivating generative relationships. Beyond politeness and social niceties, they have little grasp of what educators today call “relational competencies.”
The fact that a leadership cult of aggression and nastiness is now in vogue sadly further illustrates this limited developmental repertoire in the relational domain—as if there is no other option if “being nice” is not enough. Going beyond the reductive dichotomy of nice or nasty is a first step on a long path to building relational competencies for system leadership.
In our own work, developing relational competencies begins with gaining a clearer sense of one’s own internal state. It is difficult to extend more compassion to others than we can extend to ourselves. This is about showing up with the maximum presence you can muster so that you can help others do the same.
Many traditions of practice, from community organizing to Indigenous knowledge systems, have long emphasized this deeper attentiveness to the relational field that exists between people.
Hal draws an analogy to relational work from working on his farm. Every spring, when using a tractor and machinery to prepare for planting, he would occasionally “turn off everything mechanical, lie on the ground, and experience life returning to its wondrous abundance, to feel and smell and even hear this annual miracle.”
For Hal, cultivating relational fields is similar. “If we practice getting off the tractor of our own hubris, we can sense these possibilities among people also. When I trained to be a community organizer in rural Kentucky, I learned to listen. I learned to encourage others to lead. I noticed that although people with unusual charisma or expertise were useful, a group needs to be full of its own charisma and knowledge.”
In her book, Holding Change, activist and author adrienne maree brown deftly describes the process of facilitating relational fields as “a way of listening through and beyond the words being spoken, feeling for the current of longing underneath and what can be spoken, listening through fear, listening through the scar tissue: What is possible? What is the next step towards possibility?”[v]
For us, this captures the essence of relational work. Both Hal and adrienne maree brown point to a level of attention to the human and relational energy within systems that is often underdeveloped in leadership practice.
Leroy Little Bear, Blackfoot elder and teacher, and founding director of the Harvard Native American Program, calls that which comes into being when two or more humans truly meet in mutual respect “the ethical space between.” The ethical space is something that arises beyond you and me. For Indigenous people steeped in this awareness, this space exists just as much as we two people exist as separate beings. The space itself has both presence and agency—based on the arising of this ethical space, things happen that otherwise would not.[vi]
Deep listening also means holding less tightly to one’s own perceptions of the world. Growing as systems leaders means the willingness to continually move beyond treating our own perceptions as factual, as if they are “the truth.” Simply holding different stories helps us inquire into how our own story could be limited, and how it could be expanded.
In practice, this can shift the tone and trajectory of even the most challenging conversations. In one instance with a group of senior leaders, when conversations had become polarized and trust had frayed, inviting them to hold “multiple truths” helped shift the dynamic from defensiveness and blame to deeper trust and collective ownership. As one leader reflected, what emerged from their work was not only greater collective responsibility, but a renewed sense of empathy and shared humanity across the group.
This is where inner work reveals its rigor. The relational capacity it builds is not simply about compassion or harmony. It is about strengthening our ability to stay present when tension rises, to work through disagreement without collapsing into blame or withdrawal, and to repair when relationships strain. In complex, messy systems work, rupture is inevitable, and the ability to repair becomes the foundation of collective resilience. Learning to move through rupture and repair is a leadership capacity that can be developed.
As systems mature relationally, a wider range of practices to build wisdom and connective depth becomes possible—drawing on somatic (body), ancestral, and earth-based intelligences. In systems long dominated by cognitive and verbal intelligences, these approaches may feel unfamiliar. Yet they unlock capacities essential for collective adaptation.
Somatic intelligence reminds us that the body is often the earliest source of information. Our bodies register stress, safety, and intuition before we can articulate them. Leaders who learn to notice tightness, urgency, or defensiveness—in themselves and in the room—can pause, recalibrate, and respond from steadier ground. This strengthens a group’s ability to sense shifts early and adapt rather than react.
Ancestral intelligence expands the time horizon of decision-making. It invites leaders to weigh choices not only for immediate gain, but for their impact on future generations— learning from Indigenous traditions that plan seven generations ahead. This orientation shifts systems from short-term performance to long-term stewardship.
Earth intelligence encourages leaders to work with complexity rather than try to control it. Like ecosystems, systems evolve through cycles and seasons. Holding plans lightly, adjusting as conditions change, allows leaders to move with emerging realities instead of resisting them.
For system leaders, integrating somatic, ancestral, and earth intelligence into the work of systems change often means developing new capacities themselves—not only developing them but practicing them. Expanding in these ways as system leaders offers tremendous opportunities for inner growth while also expanding the system’s potential for change.
5. The inner work of trauma healing is critical for system leaders.
In these times of breakdown, polarization, and, for many of us, unprecedented anxiety and stress, a critical area for system leaders to examine is how past personal and collective traumas can be at play in difficult current situations—situations such as being in conflict with someone where there seems no room for middle ground, or finding ourselves in such a state of burnout it’s difficult to even lift a pencil.
Trauma is most often internalized at the individual level and often rooted in shared history. What makes this territory critical for system leadership is a growing understanding of how trauma can influence people’s world views as well as their immediate thoughts and behaviors. As author and psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem writes in his work on racialized trauma, its systemic impacts include “constricted bodies, frozen attitudes, and closed minds.” “Until [trauma] is addressed,” he argues, “changing attitudes or opening minds is largely impossible, especially on a large scale.” [vii]
This is new territory for leadership development, obscured for many years by the myth of the hero leader who somehow sits outside basic human limitations like dynamics arising from past trauma. Rather than just being a matter for “people with problems,” there is increasing recognition of the extent and impact of trauma in modern society. This acknowledges trauma happening among very successful professionals and people in leadership positions who may seemingly have all the advantages, and how important “healing” can be in real systems change.[viii]
Teach For All uses “early systems mapping”, a process of identifying the people and patterns, including traumas, that shaped their early lives, to help teachers and teacher coaches explore how these influences show up in their leadership today. Many then apply the same practice to their students, unlocking deeper empathy and a more systemic lens on their work.
Teachers, for example, start realizing that a child sleeping in class might be coping with challenges in their family system, rather than simply being uninterested in learning. More broadly, the practice reveals how trauma ripples across generations—for example, how an impulse toward command-and-control leadership within oneself can be traced to colonial legacies. As one teacher coach reflected: “I now understand better that myself, the fellows, and everyone around us are a product of what we have been through and the systems around us.”
Accessing this territory starts with understanding that re-activated trauma takes us beyond the rational analysis and will-power professionals rely upon to get through difficult challenges. We have been helped by understanding “trauma” as something that can occur when an event overwhelms a person’s autonomic nervous system, creating a sense of danger to which the body reacts through its primitive “fight, flight, or freeze” instincts. Unable to resolve the situation, the overwhelm can become fragmented from a person’s conscious awareness and held in the body.
Unless we take steps somatically to reintegrate what’s been fragmented, we subject ourselves to repeatedly being caught by automatic reactions to new events that our mind-body system associates with the initial traumatizing event.[ix] For most of us, all of this tends to operate below the level of conscious awareness. What typically manifests is a heightened sense of danger or hyper-alertness. This sense of danger, as well as our related habitual actions, is further obscured by the skills we may have built over years and decades to protect ourselves, such as by ignoring our emotions and feelings and by evoking stories about “such people” or “such situations” that prevent us from reflecting on what is going on internally and externally.
Cultivating awareness of how our own “self-system” processes trauma is especially important for those of us engaged in deeply purpose-driven or justice-oriented work. Seeing the ecological and social violence of our modern ways of living is, by its nature, re-traumatizing to all of us, either in terms of our personal life history or our vicarious emotional experience of suffering. Given that the roots of traumatic experiences may not be accessible to us in the moment, we need to look to the signals in our own thoughts, feelings, and actions that are more discernible—for example, through controlling behavior, blaming, shaming, denial, dehumanization, or numbness.
It is not that system leaders must become superheroes who bring collective trauma to the surface and somehow magically “address it.” Rather, the work begins by recognizing their own “expression of related trauma” and learning to give it space within themselves instead of reacting from it. This is the ancient understanding of the root of compassion. When leaders can hold their own pain, fear, or defensiveness with awareness, the patterns they embody begin to shift, and over time, those more conscious and integrated patterns will be mirrored in the people around them and in the systems they touch.
And here is the critical point: what happens at an individual level with trauma plays out at a systems level, starkly influencing the possibilities for systems change. Says wisdom teacher and movement maker, Louise Marra of New Zealand, “Most of the systems in the world today are trauma-led. And trauma is not a wise guide.” A core opportunity for system leaders is to shift systems from being trauma-led to being healing-led, a step that begins—individually and collectively—with one’s own inner work.
Soul Work
The five realities of inner work for system leadership that we describe in this article all challenge the basic tenets of Western culture. In the end, we believe that no more than a superficial embodiment of system leadership will ever develop so long as two inner-to-outer cornerstones of the Western worldview remain unquestioned: the differentiation of “self from other” and the differentiation of “self from system.”
System leadership is not only individual work, although individual commitment is essential. Nor is it only collective work, although only collectively can we practice developing more generative social fields. It is relational in a way that often eludes many dominant ways of thinking (which tend to see self and others as separate and disconnected) but is a cornerstone of many Indigenous and collectivist cultures.
When we stop seeing ourselves as separate from the systems we seek to change, leadership becomes less about “me” and more about “we”—less about fixing, striving, or protecting ourselves, and more about sensing, responding, and evolving as part of the whole. At some point, the distinction between engaging the system “out there” and attending to our inner life “in here” becomes less absolute.
As this rigid distinction wanes, the journey of growing as a system leader deepens. It becomes not just about leadership but also about becoming more fully conscious beings on our planet. For system leaders, it becomes soul work.
Radha Ruparell is a Chief Learning Officer at the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future and leads the Global Leadership Accelerator at Teach For All. She is the author of Brave Now, co-editor of What Leadership We Need Now, and host of the People First Community Talks.
John Kania is the Executive Director of the Collective Change Lab. Previously he was Global Managing Director of FSG. Kania is co-author of Collective Impact and Healing Systems, as well as numerous other articles in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Peter Senge is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founding chair of The Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and co-founder of the Academy for Systems Change. Senge is the author of the book The Fifth Discipline and co-author of the books Presence, The Necessary Revolution, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, and Schools That Learn.
Hal Hamilton is Director of the Sustainable Food Lab and co-founder of the Academy for Systems Change. He was previously executive director of the Sustainability Institute and the Center for Sustainable Systems.
