Anna Birney is a world leading expert, facilitator and coach in systems change, systems innovation, leadership development, organizational capacity building, and adult learning. She is Global Director of Learning and Community at the Forum for the Future where she leads their work in designing and facilitating systems change programs that support peoples’, communities’ and organizations’ capacities to transform. She is also Director of the Forum for the Future’s School of System Change: an international learning community that cultivates, equips, and connects a growing network of change-makers to deliver systems change using living systems practices and flexible learning experiences to address the complex challenges of our times. Anna also led the Systems Innovation Lab which explores the paradigm shift that is required to shift people’s mindsets, behaviors, and societal structures, and she has also run the Leadership and Change program that works to ensure that individuals and organizations show leadership in sustainable development. Anna is co-initiator of Living Change: an emerging platform of action inquiry that explores questions in practice to better navigate complexity and change. In the past, she has worked as a trainer and educator for World Wildlife Fund (WWF-UK) and has worked as a coach and facilitator for a number of forward-thinking organizations.
In this episode, Anna talks about how, from a young age, a learning disability fueled her internal fire to overcome her learning challenges which later grew into a passion for learning, and in the process she developed an ability to see patterns which opened the door to a heightened sensitivity and understanding of systems dynamics. She talks about how most systemic challenges today are ‘unknowable’ and ‘unpredictable’ but that we all have the innate ability to be systems thinkers and to solve these challenges by first understanding ourselves and then turning this awareness into daily practices, decisions and actions as change makers and leaders. This process helps develop the mindsets and the ‘muscle memory’ we need for systems-based thinking and being, and enables us to truly see the world from a systemic lens.
She describes systems as patterns of behaviors and how, in order to change systems, we must first restructure the patterns into new ‘fractals’ of behavior; leveraging our systems-based mindsets to create new approaches and models for the future we desire and the systems we want to create. She also describes the systems as being composed of multi-dimensional relationships which play themselves out as exchanges of information and power. How you act, communicate, and relate to people on a daily basis become real inputs into the system (with measurable impacts) and influences how the system changes and evolves i.e. “what you put into the system becomes the system.” Anna recalls her own personal leadership journey and ‘a-ha’ moments as she learned how to be a successful facilitative leader by balancing ‘leaning in’ and ‘leaning out’ of meetings to provide role fluidity, shift power to the group, and to access a diversity of perspectives and collective wisdom. This is important for organizations to consider as they examine their roles and define their purpose within bigger and broader systems, including society and the planet.
FOR MORE INFO ABOUT ANNA: Please visit https://medium.com/living-change and https://www.forumforthefuture.org/anna-birney
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