Reflections from the Compassionate Systems Workshop at MIT

In June 2022, I joined the Compassionate Systems Framework workshop at MIT, led by Mette Boell and Peter Senge. Four days later, I left not just with new tools, but with a different way of seeing.

This wasn’t a conference with decks and deliverables. It was a circle of practice—journals instead of laptops, dialogue instead of slides, silence as much as speech.

The Rhythm of the Work

Each day followed a rhythm:

• Grounding — slowing down, noticing what was present before we began.

• Exploring — frameworks like the Iceberg Model and Ladder of Inference revealed the structures beneath events.

• Processing — writing, mapping, and sharing surfaced insights we didn’t know we carried.

• Visioning — not fixing what’s broken, but daring to imagine what comes next.

The real shift? Seeing visioning not as wishful thinking, but as active design—connecting personal practice to collective possibility.

The Core Realization

At some point it hit me with clarity:

We are the system.

The challenges we face are the byproducts of yesterday’s solutions. The system isn’t broken—it’s outdated. It wasn’t built for the complexity we live in now.

The answer isn’t patchwork. It’s reimagination. And that reimagination begins with us—head, heart, and hand working together.

What’s Next

Compassionate systems thinking showed me that change doesn’t start with diagnosing deficits. It starts with imagination, with shaping conditions that allow something new to emerge.

So the real question isn’t what’s wrong?

It’s this: What are we willing to imagine?