What is the Maximum Goodness We Can Create Together?
Life as a Unified Reality
Life is a living system. Life, and consciousness, are a unified reality at deeper orders of reality. Nothing exists outside the greater wholeness of which we are all a part. This makes the reality of life inherently interdependent and interconnected. With this fundamental understanding of the implicate orders of reality, we can move “Into the Heart of Systems Change.”
When working with and sensing the dynamics of life as a living and evolving system, it becomes impossible to maintain a dualistic perspective of ‘me versus you’ or the idea of separateness. Moving into the heart of systems change allows us to perceive and experience the living complexity of life, including our own complexity as an integral part of it
The Evolutionary Coherence of Living Systems
Once we understand that living systems are inherently interconnected and interdependent — because life is whole — we begin to realize that each of us is a unique expression of that wholeness. This understanding allows us to explore systemic integrity and the principles of how systems grow.
When living systems grow and evolve, they naturally diversify and become more complex. This is a universal principle. Each stage of growth and development is guided by finely tuned systemic boundaries, which serve as regulating feedback loops. These boundaries help the system balance and attune its relationship with itself and the larger systems of which it is a part.
Systemic boundaries form part of the intelligence or wisdom of a system, enabling it to actualize its evolutionary potentials in a relational and balanced way. Through this process of actualization, living systems not only become more complex but also more evolutionarily coherent. In a sense, they develop greater self-awareness at a systemic level.
Evolutionary coherence is a crucial aspect of living systems. It guides how a system diversifies while remaining aligned with its overall integrity. Take, for example, the development of a human being. We begin as a single cell, and through growth and development, we evolve into incredibly complex beings. Despite the immense diversification within your body, your system, in all its growing complexity, stays attuned to itself. This internal harmony allows the diversity within your body to function as a coherent whole, adapting, learning, and fine-tuning itself — like a beautifully orchestrated symphony.
The evolutionary coherence of a system is its capacity to remain in tune with the wholeness and unity of life, even as it changes, grows, and develops. This principle is fundamental to understanding how living systems thrive and evolve.
Systemic Boundaries and Barriers
In human-made mechanistic systems, growth models are predominantly focused on quantitative expansion rather than qualitative development. These models prioritize having “more” rather than fostering “better” or exploring the deeper dimensions of growth. When growth is defined merely as accumulating more, these unchecked expansion impulses inevitably harm the systemic boundaries that sustain life.
In classical economic growth models, we fail to adequately learn from systemic boundaries and their feedback. We often disregard signals urging us to “slow down, rest, go within, regroup, and reconnect with the interconnectedness of life.” Many Western growth models — and the imperial expansionist models also dominant in certain Asian countries and Russia — are based on exponential, extractive growth. This type of growth prioritizes relentless expansion at the expense of vital systemic boundaries and thresholds.
Instead of honoring the feedback from these boundaries, extractive growth mindsets seek to conquer them, mistakenly perceiving boundaries as limitations to overcome. When this is coupled with an artificial notion of freedom — “I can do whatever I want, and no one will stop me” — it becomes easier to understand why our world faces such deep crises.
This mindset says, “I must conquer and overcome the boundary,” rather than recognizing the intelligence of living systems, which remind us: “Pay attention here. Be careful. Don’t exceed this threshold. Stay within the boundaries that ensure systemic integrity.”
Our actions impact the planet and everyone else, yet we often ignore the pain our actions cause because of an obsessive focus on growth and expansion. Pain, however, is a vital warning from a living system, signaling, “Be careful, listen.” Unfortunately, many of our human-made systems are not designed to learn from pain. Instead, they bulldoze over it.
As a result, these unchecked expansionist growth patterns harm systemic boundaries and create barriers to our collective thrivability.
The difference between a systemic barrier and a systemic boundary can be understood as follows: if the behavior of a system begins to harm its interdependencies, it creates a barrier — both to itself and to the larger systems it is part of. Recognizing the distinction between systemic boundaries and barriers is crucial.
Take our current sustainability crisis, for example — including climate change, biodiversity loss, and other related issues. These are not boundary issues; they are barrier issues. Yet, we continue to treat them as if they are merely boundary challenges.
By failing to honor and integrate the feedback from systemic boundaries in our growth models, we create systems that harm themselves and their surroundings. This neglect leads to barriers that undermine our thrivability and result in significant harm and suffering. The climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and even our human behavioral crisis are direct consequences of ignoring systemic barriers.
What happens when system pain is ignored?
When a system does not respond to pain, trust within that system begins to erode. People who feel hurt and do not receive a meaningful response from the systems they are part of lose faith in those systems. As trust diminishes, fear, conflict, and division increase, leading to a breakdown in collaboration.
As collaboration diminishes, the evolutionary coherence of the system weakens. Instead of diversity working in harmony, it becomes competitive — even to the extent that the system begins to work against itself. This pattern resembles a harmful viral program overtaking the immune system, causing the body to attack itself.
This is why understanding the difference between systemic boundaries and systemic barriers is so critical.
If systemic barriers are present, they signal that our behavior is harming interdependencies — whether within ourselves or between us and others.
Harm within a system also indicates a lack of grounding and presence with reality. It may suggest that our ability to collaborate is impaired or that our worldview is distorted, preventing us from responding with the wisdom of life. Recognizing and addressing systemic barriers is essential for restoring harmony, trust, and thrivability.
How to Work with Living Systems
Start by becoming more aware of where you are and your current state of mind or consciousness. Thinking about systemic unity while feeling disconnected from yourself and life can unintentionally create an artificial sense of unity — or even an illusion.
Begin by grounding yourself in the present moment. Ask yourself:
- How do I feel right now?
- What is my experience in this moment?
- How am I living this moment, and how much of me is truly present?
- Where is my awareness flowing to?
Notice your breath as well. Ask yourself:
- Am I breathing in life, or am I breathing in anxiety?
When you breathe in life, let it flow deeply — into your toes, your fingertips, and throughout your entire being. Don’t just think about being connected; feel it. Be connected. Become an active part of your living environment.
Remember: What you focus on is what you energize with your attention. The way you respond to a situation shapes how you experience it. If you find yourself feeling tense or caught in dualism, gently bring your awareness back to the present moment. Shift the quality of your attention. Notice where your awareness has been directed, and intentionally reconnect with life.
How to Relate with Our World as a Living System
A lot of the information shared about the climate crisis or our planet is either too impersonal or too emotional, often overwhelming people to the point of paralysis. From my own research and courses, I’ve observed that many don’t know how to respond to this information. It’s so important that we find other ways to connect with what’s happening with our world, and in ways that don’t numb us to what’s going on, or only incite anger or fear.
Become aware of the systemic barriers within and around you. Many people have grown up in systems — educationally, politically, and economically — that cause barriers to our interdependence and to our thrivability. The first symptom is the systemic lack of trust due to a sense of disconnection from life as a living field of wisdom. When our perspective becomes mechanical, it can be difficult to experience that there is a deeper reality that sustains us.
To address the dangerous planetary and social tipping points we need to partner with the wisdom of our planet for healing, regeneration, and balance. When part of your body gets injured, there’s a whole intelligence of your body that flows towards that injured part. This intelligence brings resources and healing to the injury.
When thinking of our planet, don’t view her solely as injured, dying, or suffering. If we only see the world through this lens, it becomes difficult to feel any sense of hope. It’s in the areas where we’re most vulnerable and hurt that life’s resourcefulness rises to meet the challenge.
See yourself as part of the planet’s immune system — like a little scout sent by Mother Earth to those places of pain and vulnerability. Your role is to strengthen the life wisdom that already exists there and bring forward the love that can help restore trust and healing.
The potential for healing and regeneration lives within each of us. Within every person, there is a voice — a wisdom of our planet — that inspires us, despite the challenges we face. Or perhaps, because of those very challenges, it pushes us to uncover resources within ourselves that we never knew existed. And when we come together, we amplify those resources — the power of the collective.
The health and intelligence of a system are always present. Even when a system is polluted, distressed, and suffering, that intelligence doesn’t vanish. It may not be able to guide the deep planetary processes at the pace required, but it remains. This is where our personal and collective responsibility lies: to become the planetary health response.
Systemic barriers may manifest as fears, distrust, and uncertainty, but you, as life, are not those barriers. The barriers arise when you are unable to fully express the living wisdom that is inherent in you. You are not merely the voices or feelings of duality and division — you are the awareness that can observe these diverse perspectives and emotions.
Don’t get caught in any single voice or perspective. Return to the earlier practice I shared and ask yourself: “What do I choose to focus on right now? What am I giving my attention to?” My guiding principle has always been: if there’s 1% possibility, then it is possible. Become the embodiment of an incredibly healthy system.
The good news is that this intelligence and wisdom are already here, waiting for us. It is up to us to work with it and apply it. As we do, we will discover and learn even more.
Transforming the Harmful Systems of Our World
We’ve grown up in a throw-away society, one that discards what we don’t understand or what no longer serves us, constantly striving to create something new and better. However, when we return to the principle of interdependence, we begin to realize that simply throwing away old systems isn’t the answer. Instead, let’s focus on how we can create the conditions for the intelligence of life to emerge and guide the transformation of what needs to evolve.
To help transform the systemic barriers — both inner and outer — that harm our boundaries and create tipping points, socially and planetarily, we must first become aware of the underlying growth models and our own assumptions about growth. Simply condemning growth or trying to halt it is not the solution. Instead, focus on understanding the deeper causal layers and becoming aware of the unified informational orders of life, which transcend space and time.
Without recognizing these deeper dimensions, we risk making course corrections that only address symptoms, not root causes. If we approach situations with a dualistic mindset, such as “I am going to fix this,” we may miss the resources embedded in the deeper orders of reality that are whole and interconnected. Systems in need of transformation are often those that have become disconnected from the deeper, unified orders of life.
When we align with the unified and whole nature of life, we uncover the ways to redesign and transform our societies for true thrivability. Systems that are not grounded in this informational architecture are prone to duality and division. Just as a forest becomes more resilient as it grows in complexity, diversity and complexity are not the problem — our dualistic, separatist behaviors are. Life teaches us how to embrace complexity when we start from a place of unity and wholeness, honoring the systemic boundaries that protect our wellbeing and thrivability.
Implementing Systems Thinking and Sensing
Living systems are holarchic, not hierarchic. This means they thrive on collaboration, not competition — although competitive behaviors may exist, they do not dominate. At the core, it’s about unity as diversity.
Think in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Living systems are responsive, adaptive, and resilient. They are dynamic and flexible, not static or rigid.
Living systems are evolutionary coherent, which is different from cohesion. Cohesion aims to keep things together, cemented, whereas living systems, in tune with the wholeness of life, don’t need this imposed cohesion. Competitive economic growth models, by contrast, foster growth mindsets that impede our thrivability.
Understanding the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ change is crucial. If we seek change without respecting the living processes of systems, our efforts may disrupt the balance and worsen the problem. In a living system, there are feedback loops that learn. Disrupting vital interconnections can lead to system instability or collapse. This emphasizes the importance of recognizing the difference between systemic barriers and boundaries.
Systemic barriers create dynamics that inhibit natural change processes, preventing them from unfolding or emerging fully. It’s important to recognize the direction of change. Not every growth or transformation will lead to thrivability. Sometimes, systems change in ways that disconnect them from their intelligence and unity with life. When that happens, often the only way forward is the collapse of unsustainable structures. At this point, growth patterns become so entropic that there is no energy left for renewal, and the system collapses.
However, when a system collapses, the information of that system isn’t lost. Instead, it becomes integrated into new life processes. In every change process, there are phases of unification and integration, as well as expansion and diversification. This is a cosmological or evolutionary principle: growth doesn’t go in one direction forever. Every expansion or diversification has a counter-movement that ensures deeper interconnectedness is maintained, even if this process is invisible.
Dying with Dignity
One of the greatest challenges in society today is how to support and facilitate the death of systems, practices, cultures, and paradigms that are no longer sustainable, and to do so with dignity — allowing them to die with honor.
A dignified death means acknowledging the roles these systems have played and expressing gratitude for their contributions. It involves respectfully guiding resources, people, and knowledge toward new, more thrivable possibilities that are future creative.
The process of dignified dying requires careful navigation through various stages of transition. This includes supporting what is still alive within these systems as it evolves into new ways of working and interacting that are more conducive to life and collective well-being. This careful approach helps us create space for renewal, making way for systems that are in harmony with life and better aligned with our shared thriving.
Change as Love
When you feel the impulse to change something, take a moment to ask yourself, “Am I wanting to change this situation because I am rejecting what’s happening?” It’s important to check if your desire for change stems from frustration, dissatisfaction, or resistance. The first step in wanting change, even when we feel challenged by the situation, is to look inward rather than focus outward. This might seem counterintuitive, especially when the external world feels overwhelming.
Our instinct may be to think, “I don’t want this; this must change.” Yet, when we resist, we create barriers that can complicate the situation. Often, what we reject will return in another form, and then we may face it in a more difficult way. So, it’s vital to ask ourselves, “What am I projecting onto this situation? Does it truly need to change, or am I interpreting it in a way that isn’t aligned with reality?” These questions are essential because we are interconnected with the change process we wish to create.
How we engage with the process of change — our response to it — becomes part of the change itself. Our stance can tip the balance toward one outcome or another. Even in the darkest times — when despair and grief cloud our vision — we must find a way to connect to the light within. That light, the spark of love, is the guiding force that allows us to engage with change from a place of connection rather than rejection.
Love is the power that arises when our minds may tell us, “This is madness; I don’t want any part of this.” It is the force that, even when we feel like withdrawing or reacting, reaches out with a desire to connect and embrace the paradoxes our minds fail to understand.
When we approach change through love, the change that occurs aligns with the true essence of the situation, not based on imposed rejection.
When we try to change through force, we often create resistance in others — leading them to feel alienated, as though they must become something they are not. This form of change, driven by rejection, is neither sustainable nor desirable.
Therefore, it’s essential to examine your motivation for change: Where is it coming from? Is it rooted in rejection, or is it aligned with the natural, loving process of transformation?
True change, the kind that supports thrivability, is always about drawing forth more of our true potential. It’s the unfolding of life’s greatness and unity within.
Thrivability, to me, means tapping into that deep, innate ability in all living beings and systems to reach our fullest potential and contribute to the larger health of life. Thrivability is the process where our personal health and growth are aligned with the collective well-being of all life, a harmonious unfolding of our interconnectedness.
Let’s work from Beauty
Thrivability is beautiful because it’s an innate capacity, and this aspect is often missing in conversations about sustainability. The word “sustainability” — to sustain — doesn’t always connect us with life. It can conjure images of a flat line. But when we visualize “thrive” and express our ability to thrive, we get a completely different image.
It is essential that we help strengthen and create the conditions for all of us to thrive. Thrivability is always interdependent, and this intelligence seeks to curate those conditions for your thrivability, for ours, and for the thrivability of life as a whole. There’s also a dimension of joy in this understanding of thrivability.
It’s not enough to say, “Let’s focus on the minimum harm.” Instead, let’s focus on the maximum goodness we can create together. Let’s work from beauty.
Acknowledgments
With warm thanks to Kees Klomp, Jeppe van Pruissen, Bart-Jan Prins, Shinta Oosterwaal, Yvonne Lang, and Circl NL for the production of the interview and their publication of Purpose Minds, lecture no 4 on 23 June 2021.
- To listen to the 1-hour audio version of this lecture.
For further reading
- Anneloes Smitsman & Jean Houston. (2021). The Future Humans Trilogy, Book 1: The Quest of Rose. EARTHwise Publications.
- Smitsman, A. (2019). Into the Heart of Systems Change. [Doctoral dissertation, International Centre for Integrated Assessment and Sustainable Development (ICIS), Maastricht University]. https://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.28450.25280
- Smitsman, A., & Currivan, J. (2019). Systemic Transformation into the birth canal. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 36(4), 604–613. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2573
- The Sustainability Crisis is a Moloch Game.
- Transition Plan for a Thrivable Civilization.
- Living Systems and the Call for Civilizational Transformation.
- Leadership for Tipping Point Times.
- The EARTHwise Constitution for a Planetary Civilization.
- The Inner Shifts for a New Paradigm in Politics.
- Confronting the Archetype of Domination.
- Changing how we Play the Game of Life on Planet Earth.
- What is the maximum goodness that we can create together.
- The Call for Educational Transformation.
