Circle Process and
System Change
By Sayra Pinto
Grassroots communities all over the world have grappled with the impact of colonization, capitalism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism without respite. The arduous intergenerational task of resisting, subverting, and subverting systems has been a project for humanity for thousands of years even dating back to the powerful stories of old such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the end, over time, institutions do change as a result of inarguable circumstances such as climate change, plagues, new discoveries in technology and science, and evolving social habits.
In the modern day, a time when universities have effectively dispossessed communities from their own knowledge building processes, systems thinking has emerged as a body of work that encompasses much of what we know as a species about how to understand the interconnected nature of reality and of the way we order society through institutional structures. These structures, however, are the result of deeply ingrained cultural patterns that enact the belief systems and the values of said cultures. Institutional cultures respond and ossify to cultural needs. Therefore the process of dismantling social structures requires cultural, structural, and relational interventions.
Transformative change
The more entrenched the cultural needs ossified in an institutional structure are, the more time and resources, multidisciplinary and complex sustained efforts to transform them need to be. For example, to change the structure of policing, there is a need to shift culture around ideas of crime and punishment, power and control, White Supremacy, patriarchy, democracy, capitalism, colonialism, and neoliberalism. These are core beliefs and structures that sustain the entirety of Western society. In addition to these “mental model” interventions, an assessment of structures of social control at the very core of these institutions is needed in order to ascertain possibilities for change of these structures.
Beyond that is human behavior, the ways in which we treat each other that further strengthen these structures needs to be disrupted and transformed also. Each of these layers of efforts to change systems (cultural, structural, and relational) need to be actively engaged simultaneously over an usually long period of time and sustained at similar intensity in order to shift whole systems. The interventions being deployed at each of these levels themselves are the result of complex systems analysis that identify readily particular strategic “pressure points” within a system that can create unexpected, unforeseen and transformative change when activated. These are leverage points that can expedite complex systems transformation over time.
Systems seldom operate in a vacuum, and themselves inhabit ecosystems with other systems that stabilize their survival and evolution over time. And so, you also need intra, inter, and trans systemic approaches to change ecosystems of systems if you will. This type of effort, the type it actually does entail to create large scale systems change in human cultures, requires multiple ways of leading, multiple types of leaders, multiple large scale collaboration efforts, multiple ways of making shared knowledge and generating, amending, adapting, and amplifying innovations. I say all this to say that circles process can be created at any and all levels of that type of systemic complexity. Circles can be created to interrupt mental models; assess, address, and implement structural interventions; model new types of relational structuring; develop leadership, strategies, and action plans; evaluate and generate sense making processes that lead to new types of narratives, etc.
Former Chief of Police for the City of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, Ed Cronin, explaining the systemic structures driving criminality and incarceration.
As it emerges from a separate cultural reality built on very different beliefs, practices, structures and relational arrangements, circles allows us the opportunity to, for a moment, and with the right type of circle practitioners, embody a different intra, inter, and trans systemic reality. It helps us build space for humanity to be fully present even when in the presence of outsized power afforded to some by the state and its various apparatus of domination. In other words, it is possible to infuse even oppressive social systems such as criminal justice with humanity as a result of practicing and embodying the fundamental philosophical and practical underpinnings of this process.
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