Mette Miriam: Compassionate Systems

What are the impacts of integrating contemplative social emotional learning and systems thinking in education?

How can we transform our educational structures to better serve the well-being of students and educators?

Mette Miriam Boell is a biologist specialized in the evolution of complex social systems, mammalian play behavior, and philosophy of nature. She holds a PhD in organizational ethology from Aarhus University and additional degrees in contemplative leadership and the philosophy of science. Mette co-founded the Center for Systems Awareness with Peter Senge, focusing on integrating social-emotional learning, systems thinking, and mindfulness in education.

In this episode, Mette discusses her journey and current work, emphasizing the importance of understanding and transforming the structures that shape behavior in educational systems. She explores the integration of contemplative practices and the science of learning to address the mental health crisis among young people. Mette shares insights on the compassionate systems framework, highlighting the interconnectedness of emotional, social, and systemic elements in creating thriving learning environments. The conversation delves into the necessity of shifting away from outdated paradigms towards a more human-centric, compassionate approach to education.

[TRANSCRIPT AUTO GENERATED]

Louka Parry (00:02.734)
All right. Hello and welcome. Yeah, so I'm just going to do the bio. My first question to you, just so you're ready is what's something you're learning at the moment? And then I'm going to ask you directly about the book and let's just have a conversation for about 30 minutes. Well, we can edit. I very rarely need to, to be honest, Charles. I have no concerns with you. But yes, if you ever want to the end, if you say something, you're like, let me say that again. I'll make a little edit point.

Charles Fadel (00:17.755)
Okay, do you edit this? I hope you're ready.

Louka Parry (00:32.238)
which is very easy to do with this.

Charles Fadel (00:35.163)
Well, even this introduction should be probably cut out, but that's the easy part.

Louka Parry (00:40.43)
yeah, well that's fine, that's fine too. We'll see how we go. All right, enjoy yourself mate, thank you so much for your time, it's great.

Hello everybody and welcome to the learning future podcast. I'm your host Luca Parry. And today we're very fortunate to have just a fantastic thought leader in the global education space. I have been following his work for quite a number of years now. And I think it is world -class, especially as we look at this moment with technology kind of converging with what we do in schools, in universities, in companies and in the workforce. It's my delight to have Charles Fadel here.

who is the founder of the Nonprofit Center for Curriculum Redesign in Boston. Its framework, which we will talk a lot about today, is available in 23 languages. And he is the lead author of the recent book, Education for the Age of AI. A little bit more about Charles. He has taught at Harvard's Graduate School of Education for seven years, and also down the road in Cambridge at MIT, and also at Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania.

He was a senior executive in technology companies for 25 years and founder of Neurodyne AI, formerly a global education lead at Cisco Systems and an angel investor with Beacon Angels. He's been awarded a BSEE, an MBA and seven different patents. Charles, what I love about you is the perspective you bring to education from someone that has really been working in technology and 21st century skills now.

for a couple of decades. In fact, I don't think it's too bold to say you were one of the pioneers of the 21st century skills articulation through your work with the OECD. But thank you so much for joining us for the Learning Future podcast.

Charles Fadel (02:27.163)
Thank you so much Louka for hosting me and you're right, the work on 21st Century Skills goes back to the mid 2000s, so 2005 through 2009 and the book I wrote at the time called 21st Century Skills, well that has become a moniker used worldwide, so that was very rewarding. What is less impressive is to what extent all these recommendations have been put into practice and that's what we'll be discussing today.

Louka Parry (02:56.878)
Brilliant. I'm very curious about where you see us in our work in global education systems and what might be needed. My first question, though, is always a personal question about the beautiful intrinsic act of learning itself. What's something that you personally have been learning recently? What's something that's been on your mind and in your field of awareness?

Charles Fadel (03:23.993)
Well...

The analogy between AI's ramp up and the early days of the internet, at least from a consumer perspective, I'm not talking about ARPANET, where every day there was a new discovery. One day you could stream audio, the next day you could stream video. It was just mind blowing. And I constantly felt out of breath. It was just happening so fast. And I have the same impression. I've had the same impression since November 30, 2022.

Louka Parry (03:42.222)
Mmm.

Charles Fadel (03:54.943)
which is as everybody knows when chat GPT came to the fore and so we've seen this a beautiful acceleration but like all exponentials they come to a saturation point and I think we're starting to see a saturation point if you look at chat GPT 4 well GPT 4 Omni where

Louka Parry (04:20.302)
Yes.

Charles Fadel (04:21.443)
not GPT -5. They've gone laterally, meaning they've added lateral features like multimodality and so on, but they haven't grown to another trillion parameters or tokens or whatever. So that's where we're starting to see a saturation of the traditional S -curve that we find in technology. And I'm, in a sense, glad to see it because now we're going to be transitioning from the science phase into the engineering phase. And we can talk about that.

Louka Parry (04:28.364)
Mmm.

Louka Parry (04:39.95)
Mm -hmm.

Louka Parry (04:49.058)
It's a wonderful and you know, it's wonderful to have your reflections on the internet. And I think it's a parallel that's been referenced a lot, you know. I can just remember, you know, like dial up modems and kind of like using a chat bot on the internet, you know, as a young person at school. I'm pretty old, man. I just look young.

Charles Fadel (05:09.851)
Come on, you're not that old, Louka

Louka Parry (05:15.406)
Now, it's like this just this incredible moment of explosion that of course is kind of too big to know, Charles, if you use that framing. And so I've, when you try to keep up with all of it could be pretty exhausting. You know, I probably follow already too many newsletters of AI experts sharing the next tool that comes out weekly. But there is this incredible energy and I think a real sense of optimism.

but also in some cases like a real caution to where this technology will take us. Because this moving very quickly, of course, we kind of, there aren't any guardrails. It's kind of in some ways uncharted terrain. I would...

Charles Fadel (05:53.403)
Well, I'm hoping that we have learned from the debacle with social media. And we're going to be a bit more guarded this time around, although it's still time to regulate social media. I'm just not sure why that's not happening. Just saying.

Louka Parry (05:57.742)
Yes.

Louka Parry (06:06.67)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, the social dilemma and our friends at the Center for Humane Technology, I think they've done such a wonderful job at articulating. So kind of, you know, what's the benefits and actually what are the kind of negative impacts? And I think Jonathan Haidt also wrote a book, The Anxious Generation, which came out only about six weeks ago as we go as we record now. And again, it has some just some really powerful insights about the great rewiring that that social media here in particular has.

has done to our young people and lots of discussion and debate around that too. it's so interesting. So what I'd love you to do is because the people listening to this are educators, largely, you know, they might be leaders in schools, they may be classroom teachers, they might be innovators working in the ecosystem in some way, people living in universities. I'd love you to kind of do two things. Number one is give us a sense of the framework, which I'm holding up if you're watching it on YouTube.

but on the front of the book of the education for the age of AI, this four dimensional education model, which has so inspired me in my work, Charles, as I was saying before we went to recording. So give us a sense of the framework, but then also why it becomes central in this age of AI. Why is it no longer sufficient that academic achievement becomes the main kind of contestation in a competitive system? And it's a ladder of knowledge.

Why do we need to add skills and character to that in the meta learning construct as well to wrap it all together? And then the idea of the motivation sciences even, purpose, autonomy, identity. Who are we? What do I want to do? Two big questions, but give us a sense of the central framework because I feel it just holds everything together, Charles, in this rapidly moving world.

Charles Fadel (07:54.299)
Well, thank you. So yes, so first of all, the framework was created with an eye towards a changing future, not specifically AI, although my center has been involved with AI since 2014. And I personally have been involved with it since I will admit my age, 1989, at a time where we could only compute three layers of neurons and now we can compute thousands of layers. So technology here, the processing power has improved by a factor of 100.

Louka Parry (08:13.806)
Fantastic.

Charles Fadel (08:24.205)
million in 30 years. And that's why we can do all these amazing things like instantaneous translation and on and on and on. That has allowed for massive databases, you know, because of cost of memory having dropped by a hundred million fold. So now we can have enormous databases that we can mine for statistical analysis, which is what the large language models do.

Louka Parry (08:40.11)
Mm.

Charles Fadel (08:49.275)
So that has been an enormous change in all these years. So, but regardless of this, the need for teaching more broadly, more deeply has been known since Socrates and Montaigne and Dewey. There's nothing particularly new about it. What we did was to really rationalize it all by looking at more than 111 different frameworks and 861 papers to

Louka Parry (09:05.07)
Yeah.

Charles Fadel (09:19.301)
to concatenate it all, to summarize it, to synthesize it into an ensemble that was actionable. And by actionable, I don't mean making it happen every once in a while ad hoc, but I mean being very deliberate, comprehensive, systematic, and demonstrable. These are our high bars.

Louka Parry (09:43.982)
Beautiful.

Charles Fadel (09:45.019)
So when you start thinking about it and you look at this concatenation, you realize, okay, well, of course there's knowledge. And no, knowledge is important, it's not gonna disappear.

It's as naive as saying Google knows everything, therefore, you know, why would you learn everything? Because you can search for anything. Come on. Are you really going to stop every other words and search for its meaning or pick up your calculator? Automation is necessary. Your minds of training is necessary, et cetera. So same thing here. The naive view is, well, why would I learn anything? AI is going to be there and do everything for me like a, a genie out of a, out of a lamp. Come on.

Louka Parry (10:15.822)
Mmm.

Louka Parry (10:25.666)
Yeah.

Charles Fadel (10:26.029)
Even if we had that genie, you still have to be explicit with what you want. And how would you be explicit if you're not already educated enough to know what you should want and have a sense of purpose? All this to say that even in the most...

wild of scenarios of jobs being all disappeared and were just hedonists at the beach all the time, you still would need to scaffold that 10 -year -old and make sure that they learn. Okay, that means that the pressure on the second part of the framework, which is related to personalization, becomes all the more critical. If you have...

tools that can do a number of things for you. Why would you waste, quote unquote, waste the brain power on doing so? Our brains are lazy by good evolutionary design. Our brains are only percent of our power consumption for five percent of the body mass. We are wired by evolution to be lazy because laziness allows you to save brain power. That's why Kahneman of  talked about system one, system two. We revert to the emotional system.

Louka Parry (11:21.036)
Mm -hmm.

Charles Fadel (11:38.793)
rapid system as often as we can to save energy. We judge people on their appearance, whatever. We do these things.

Every once in a while, we realize, my God, I need to spend a bit more cycles on analyzing what I've been told. And that's the tragedy of social media. People do not spend that brain energy. The same can happen with AI, where why would I waste my energy analyzing what's been said? I'll just rely on AI. So whereas people are afraid of doomsday scenarios, my fear is the simple doomsday scenario of human nature of wanting to save energy.

Louka Parry (11:59.598)
Yeah.

Charles Fadel (12:18.253)
and therefore overly relying on AI. That's my biggest fear and it's one of those seemingly small but probably highly impactful fears, very much like in social media. Anyway, going back to the framework that implies that you want to pay attention to the motivation of the student.

Louka Parry (12:21.55)
Yes.

Charles Fadel (12:40.571)
in a world where things seem to come more easily. And that means developing their sense of identity and belonging, developing their sense of agency and growth mindset, but also finally developing their sense of purpose and passion. These are the positive motivators vehicleers that will drive them forward, even if they have genies out of a lamp. Of course, we're not going to get genies out of a lamp.

at least not anytime soon.

So that means that we still have to develop a full human being. And that means not just knowledge as has been done for decades, if not centuries, actually centuries. OK. But also what has been been asked of education for centuries, which is development of skills, meaning critical thinking, creativity, et cetera, development of character, you know, courage and ethics and so on. And finally, the development of meta learning, meaning your metacognition, your meta

Louka Parry (13:36.002)
Hmm.

Charles Fadel (13:40.557)
emotion, aka mindfulness, etc. All of these dimensions are important, but the past few decades have seen a narrowing down to mostly knowledge and typically declarative knowledge, not much procedural knowledge unless it's performing arts. And so I think...

AI is shining a spotlight on our glaring deficiencies, having in essence moved too much into memorization and rote learning. And it's great that it's exploring this because it's showing, you know, everything should be open book. Everything should be, you know, having to really understand what you're doing. So sure, first phase, you learn to write your essay because you need to learn how to write an essay. But that's not the only thing you should be

Louka Parry (14:20.27)
Mm -hmm.

Charles Fadel (14:34.221)
doing, should be learning how to use AI to write a better essay and justify the prompts that you have written and justify AI's response and analyze it and see if it has hallucinated or not. So see a mixture of both worlds not just one or the other. Anyway all of the saying it's about a complete whole whole child for the whole world education.

Louka Parry (14:46.862)
Mmm.

Louka Parry (14:59.788)
Mmm.

Charles Fadel (15:00.133)
knowledge, skills, character, meta -learning coupled with their motivation, identity, agency, and purpose.

Louka Parry (15:08.526)
It's brilliant, Charles. In your book here as well, Education for the Age of AI, and I'm sure in the other ones that talk to the model, you know, it's the idea that wisdom is the enduring goal of education, not knowledge, not information, you know, not just skill, but this idea of wisdom, which seems to me like such a human construct. When you think about what does it mean to be useful? What does it mean to live well? You know, you talked about Socrates and some of the old, you know, like,

You could look at all the different kind of traditions, be they Eastern or Western, kind of converging at this point in time. You know, like, what's worth learning is a great question.

Charles Fadel (15:39.419)
Yep. Correct. Correct. Hold on.

You're spot on, but you know, I don't think it's anywhere near brilliantly novel to say that. I think it's been known throughout human history that wisdom is the goal. It's better expressed by some religions like Buddhism, but it's really been known, you know, since the Greeks, since Confucius and Buddha and so on and so forth. It's been known. You always hear about wise kings being good for their

people and all of that. So it's not a modern concept, it's just that it's been turned into something more of a philosophical, mushy view than something actionable. And so we spent a lot of time in the book showing that it's actually not at all a mushy view, it can be decomposed into its elements and guess what? They correspond to knowledge, skills, character, meta -learning and purpose and all of that.

Louka Parry (16:37.614)
Mm -hmm.

Charles Fadel (16:44.859)
with one extra complexity, the addition of time, which is hard to impress. I know and do things at my age that I didn't do in my 20s. And one of the key challenges will be how do we compress more experiences for a young person? Now mind you,

Louka Parry (17:03.532)
Mmm.

Charles Fadel (17:07.419)
Education already does that. Education doesn't take you step by step from Mesopotamia all the way to the modern times. It compresses, you know, all the disciplines. That's what education does. And so we have to figure out even better ways to compress what is essential, including experiences so that these experiences stick with you. That's why we talk about project -based learning and in the right proportion with the rest of the pedagogical techniques.

Louka Parry (17:30.222)
Mmm.

Louka Parry (17:37.55)
I'm really curious Charles, because you're absolutely right. You know, these aren't new ideas. I would love your assessment as someone that's been doing this work for many years on the distinction, it's something that I speak to often in my work, it's kind of the distinction between education, educere, you know, or educare, and schooling. You know, and I think they're conflated often, you know.

Charles Fadel (18:04.185)
Mm -hmm.

Louka Parry (18:07.15)
And I think learning is also confused in that as well. Whereas I see them as three different constructs with three different distinct definitions. My issue doesn't seem to be education. My issue seems to be the kind of mental models that continue to drive traditional schooling, which aren't based on the latest learning sciences. They certainly seem to be far more oriented towards training than...

education than the more holistic development. That's a distinction you call out in the book really beautifully, the difference between training and education. So can you just give us a bit of a perspective on that, the difference between education and school and then maybe education and training, you know, that we're in this moment.

Charles Fadel (18:50.459)
Yeah, well, so education is a broad learning experience. Training is a narrow one related to specific jobs. Education is meant to provide you with a baseline for life. That baseline has to also be mindful that you're going to need a job at some point, but it's not the only purpose of it, right? It's life.

So really it's a meeting, as you saw at the beginning of the book, all three vectors that are needed, the psychological, the social, and the economic. Of course, these three are always considered as antithetical to each other, but that's, you know, that's obsolete thinking. You know, all three are needed. It's not one or the other. which by the way, if I may quickly weave in one of my pet peeves, we, in education, we have too many OR conversations

rather than AND conversations. I think it comes from an academic mindset of fighting for one's concept or one's idea that make one famous. But quite honestly, a lot of these constructs that made someone famous are actually partial. There's no one pretty much that has the absolute truth about absolutely everything. And with a more humble mindset or with an end mindset, we can say, okay, well, I'll borrow this from this theory and this from that theory, and I'll assume that that

assemble them in a way that makes sense and that's much better than either one of them. Again, no OR conversation an AND conversation.

Louka Parry (20:25.07)
Great reflection. I often think about that Charles's, you know, thesis antithesis, we get stuck in the debate and we love a good debate instead of thinking of the synthesis, which is, well, actually what might be the both end? What can also be true?

Charles Fadel (20:33.563)
Right. Yeah.

Exactly.

Charles Fadel (20:42.293)
Correct, correct. And that's perhaps where the engineering mindset we have in my organization comes into play. That's why we call it...

education engineering, the same way that there is civil engineering, mechanical engineering. We call it education engineering because we're trying to be precise and specific and converge our something actionable. I, for example, do not like how often people ask open ended questions and don't try to resolve them. You go to a number of conferences and so on. Everybody says, how do we fill in the blank? And I come on, we're way beyond that by now.

you should be, this is what we need to do, how are we gonna actually do it, not open question about how do we even think of something. We're way past that. So this is where my engineering intensity comes handy, because the idea is 1%. Excuse me, the sweat is the other 99%, and it's green time we actually get it to the sweat level.

Louka Parry (21:30.51Louka Parry (00:03.054)
Hello everybody and welcome again to the learning future podcast. My name of course, Louka Parry and I'm your host. And today we have a wonderful human being to have a conversation with about, well really a whole suite of different aspects around our world, around education, around wellbeing, our emotions, and perhaps the way that we think about our learning systems. Her name is Mette Miriam Boell and she's a biologist specialized in the evolution of complex social systems.

mammalian play behavior and philosophy of nature. She has a PhD in organizational ethology from the Center of Semiotics in Aarhus University in Denmark and holds additional degrees in contemplative leadership and the philosophy of and history of science. In 2014, Mette joined Peter Senge and Daniel Goleman to form the Triple Focus Initiative, which then merged into the Garrison Global Collaborative for Integrative Learning. This

has become a community of researchers and educational practitioners focused on exploring the impact of integrating contemplative social emotional learning and systems thinking in education. In 2019, this initiative merged into the Center for Systems Awareness, a global collaboration of master educators, leaders, students, and researchers, which Mette co -founded with Peter Senge. She has done a whole suite of really interesting things and she's based currently at MIT.

Mette, wonderful to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much, Louka. I'm glad to be here. It's nice to be back with you. And, you know, we had some wonderful conversations in person last year at the Reimagine Conference in Melbourne. Of course, your work is global. And so since then, what is something that you have been learning in the work that you do and the work that you lead? Yeah.

Well, it's a huge question in a way. I assume, as I can imagine, many of the listeners of a podcast like this, I feel I learn something new every day and that it's a kind of a predisposition in the whole structure of my being that I'm constantly baffled about what's going on and trying to figure it out. And as long as I can remember, that has really been the case. So from a kind of a, you know,

Louka Parry (02:26.478)
academic skill sets type of learning. I'm currently taking an AI course here at MIT where I also run a lab. And I'm doing that because it's for AI business strategies, integrating this into business strategies AI. And I just felt last year when ChatGTP came out, I felt like, okay, I can go boomer on this one. And if I go boomer on this one, I'm just gonna...

our organization may not actually benefit from everything that's coming at us right now. And to me, it's really daunting. I don't have any particular interest in trying to figure out all kinds of tech stuff. And I just knew that I have to try to understand this. So what I did, because I have very constrained time with my many, many things that I'm dealing with. So I kind of organized my team of the

the young guy who leads our youth leadership team, who of course started using ChatGTP the week it came out, and our really tech savvy uncoached and my assistant, I was like, you all are gonna help me figure out what's going on here. And it's actually been quite an interesting journey so far. And from a more personal perspective, I think learning every day, I try to...

walk the talk, and if that sounds so awfully fluffy, but I tried to take my own medicine, right? So every day, I'm really trying to discern the emotional structures and how I'm habitually operating and I get triggered a lot. I've been on this path for my whole life. And of course, I get triggered. And of course, I have reactive responses and so on. But the but the whole action of trying to understand what's going on, and somehow, you know, place

things in the right way so that when somebody comes at me and some old stuff is triggered in me and I have a kind of a habitual response, I try to recognize, look, that habitual response is showing up again. And I will say that's a daily practice. So in between those two, I think the learning space is pretty broad. I read every day as well, and I read a lot of

Louka Parry (04:43.534)
research and I love fantasy literature and everything in between. So I'm, you know, constantly absorbing. What I'm so struck by Mette is kind of the depth and breadth of what you've been exploring, I guess, contributing. And I'm really, I think it's clearly reflected in the MIT Systems Awareness Lab, because it seems to bring together a whole suite of different pieces.

This is not just the neuroscience of emotions. It's also systems thinking, it's also social emotional learning. It's also mindfulness. And so I'd love you kind of to share the big idea that you've been working on and contributing now, which, you know, and here down here down under in Australia as well that you've been starting to run some fantastic work as well with some partners down here and some sessions. So give us a map somewhat of systems awareness.

and compassionate systems in particular, what does that actually mean? And how might we understand it? Yeah, thank you, Louka. For years, whenever people ask me that question, I told them, you should just come to a workshop because it can be challenging to convey the lived experience of going through something that for many people becomes transformational work. And

That is not because of me or something I have created just to get that straight. It's because it's a very eclectic framework and it's based on the compassionate systems framework integrates, you know, as you say, social emotional learning, systems thinking, contemplative practices, neuroscience. I'm a mythologist, which basically means I'm a behavioral biologist. So my whole life I've been studying.

why did they do what they do? look, we can do that more and stuff like that. So all of that is really integrated. We build everything on the science of learning and development, for example. So for people where it works, it becomes a really deep and personal process. But I can tell you the kind of overview of, as you shared in the bio, there's Peter Senge, my good friend.

Louka Parry (06:59.598)
 who I worked with for many years was, you know, instrumental in developing the whole kind of organizational learning and leadership stuff. And Daniel Goleman, of course, most people will know him for, you know, emotional intelligence and all those things. So he was instrumental in the development of CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning. And they came together and said, we should do SEL, social emotional learning and

systems thinking and education as one thing. And they developed a tiny little book clip like in 2014 called the Triple Focus Social Emotional Systems. That was basically just here's my idea, here's my idea, you all should go out and do it. And there was no kind of guidelines, there was nothing. And then they realized just before they published it, like, what are we going to do if somebody really wants to do this?

And basically I knew both of them really well. Peter had been on my dissertation committee and so on. So they were like handing over the manuscript to me and be like, can you please figure out what to do with this? And so that's, you know, there was no organization that wasn't the framework. There was no people involved. There was just basically just two old guys with a great idea. Right. And I looked at it and I was like, you know, I think it is actually a really good idea because to me, the inner workings of what it means to be a human.

is a system in its own right. The workings of what it means to be a relational species, and we're a incredibly social species, right? We're social before we're anything else.  is a system in its own right. And then there's the complexity of all those larger structures in the world. So it's not, you know, emotional over here on Mondays and larger systems out there on Sundays. It's basically a kind of assuming in and out.

looking at similar types of structures, almost like a fractal pattern or however you want to kind of imagine it, but you're zooming into, how does the workings of the inner systems do and how does that relate to the outer system? And that has been a lifelong journey of exploration for me. I started studying complex social animals to just try to figure out constantly what's going on in the context. Because in our scientific traditions,

Louka Parry (09:15.63)
contemporary scientific traditions, at least in particularly, of course, Western science, we know a lot about individuals, right? We know about cognitive processing within the individuals, we have no idea what creates the contract context or the field as we as we call it. So the lived experience and the felt experience of what it means to be in spaces with other humans and other species in that way also. And to me,

that should sit at the heart of education. So I full disclaimer, I have loved learning my whole life. I started reading at a very early age and I was like, you know, the kid who snuck away with my books and sat under trees and read it so I could. And yet, Louka

I went to and I got kicked out of schools because I could not, I did not fit into the structure. So I didn't know how to, it didn't really, it didn't translate the first five years of my school. I basically spent outside of the classroom doing my own stuff. And then when I started, you know, becoming a little more rebellious about things, there just wasn't any space for me. So when Peter originally suggested you should work in education, I was like,

Clearly, honey, you don't want me working in education. You know, it's been a kind of a continuous pattern. And he said, well, that's exactly the reason why you should be in education. Somebody who really loves learning and has this kind of deep curiosity about trying to understand things. And at the same time, the structures in place never worked for me. So when I got to the university level, I became apprenticed by a remarkable professor, Jesper Hofmeyer.

who was a professor of biosymiotics, which is an obscure little part of biology, theoretical biology that talks about profound interconnectedness, basically sign interactions in nature. So that's how I learned. And he didn't like students. I was the shittiest student around, so we were a perfect match. So he literally gave me an office and he helped me out and he gave me access to his library. And he was just, he was what I needed in order to grow into, he taught me how to think straight, right? And so,

Louka Parry (11:33.966)
I've been blessed in that way. So a lot of that I brought into this understanding of, well, okay, contextual understanding of, you know, what it means to be a living species and what it means to be a human being. And when I started working in education, there are two reasons why I do that, Louka why we do the work that we do at the Center for Systems Awareness. Primarily, I cannot stand by or sit by

watching the mental health and wellbeing of young people, children and young people everywhere on our planet declining this rapidly without trying to do something. I'm a mother and I'm a grandmother and I do not want my kids and my grandbabies to grow up in a world where people are fundamentally depressed and have never tried anything else. The suicide rates, I mean, the statistics in the US, the decade that led up to COVID.

the suicide rates in adolescents, teenagers in the US increased by 100%. The fabric of society is not designed for our young people to thrive. So something really profoundly needs to shift. That's the primary reason for working in education. The second reason is, it's a question of longevity. If kids learn to know who they are,

to adjust themselves, to have kind of emotional literacy. I could say, I'm actually angry now instead of just acting out. If they had relational competencies, if they understood something about each other, if they were kind of in a space where there was a consistent kind of intentionality about operating with kindness and with care for each other and care for the planet, if they understood complexity, if they understood how, you know, the complex nature of say, for example, what

why is there plastic pollution in the oceans to the degree that we see now, or what's going on with climate change, or what's going on with the extinction rates, or all of the different layers of the poli -crisis that we're facing in the world right now. If they had real tools and strategies to work with that without becoming completely numbed out emotionally, which is basically the case for most of us now, right? And that's where the contemplative practices come in. If we are to, in a meaningful way,

Louka Parry (13:55.502)
relate to ourselves, each other, and the big challenges that we're facing on the planet today, we have to have some counter balance. And that's the contemplative practice. For all we know, that is really what can kind of help us adjust in our brains and our bodily systems to constantly come back to baseline and not be overwhelmed emotionally and dissociate or go numb or act out of fear or anger all the time because it's not going to produce the outcomes that we would like to see in the world.

If kids were trained like this, if the educators around them was modeling this, we would look at a totally different trajectory for the future than what we're facing today. So, so that's a very deep motivation on my part. You know, that's it. I, I'm struck by the convergence of all these different ideas. I think this to me seems to be the power of a compassionate systems approach is it's not having a programmatic response.

to say, well, we'll do wellbeing Wednesdays. It's good, but it's kind of this understanding, and you and I have spoken a bit on this before, like schools are living systems. There's human, like it's human beings in relationship with each other, generating a field, which sometimes young people call the vibe, right? We might call the organization culture. And so I'm really curious about why...

Why do you think we are where we are? Like what's your view now having worked in education for some time, realizing, okay, because I feel like we have this kind of an increasing awareness to use that word deliberately of the status quo and how it's actually not in service of human flourishing, let alone kind of ecological balance and land thriving. And then what do you think?

What do you think is needed most? Like, is there a way that this needs to be sequenced? You know, is there something about interoception or contemplative practices? Is there the system level understanding? Because I feel like we have just, the way I reflect on education systems is they're not broken. They were designed for a very specific focus a very long time ago. And it, you know, was from a very mechanistic industrial paradigm based on efficiency.

Louka Parry (16:20.302)
rather than the one like the more human life giving, let alone emotional and social components of the human experience. What's your reflection at this point in the journey? All of the above in many ways, right? It's true that the systems of education are not broken. They're designed to produce exactly the outcomes that they're producing. And those outcomes are not aligned with what is needed in the world. And I think that there is

pretty large consensus around that because not only are kids struggling everywhere, educators are also struggling. And see, you know, it's not as if math and science and literacy and all of that is flourishing in most places. So that whole structure is a piece that the reason why systems thinking and systems understanding is so crucial is

the heart of systems thinking and of course I come from a tradition of understanding living systems, right? So it's very organic and incredibly complex. But at the heart of all systems thinking is the notion that structure shapes behavior. So if the structure in place is consistently producing behaviors that shapes these outcomes, then the structure needs to change. You can't have a programmatic intervention that changes a structure. You have to have a design for a new structure. And

The challenging part of this is people think that those are only artifacts, right? You can change the structure through policy or reform or, you know, metrics or curriculum, all of those. We tried that over and over and over again. And it's like, yay, now we have, we've got it this time. We nailed it. This reform is going to change everything. And I mean, I think most of us have, you know, most of the educators I talked to have complete and utter

reform fatigue, right? The thing is, part of what we call the underlying structure in all this work is our understanding of what's going on. It's our mental models, our habitual ways of dealing with things. And you can see that, you know, you can put together the best possible curriculum in the world. But if you stick it with somebody who's, I've been teaching this for 30 years and blah, blah, blah, and

Louka Parry (18:41.71)
even if it's a new curriculum, if that person is teaching it exactly the same way that they've always done, nothing is going to change. And we see that in societal structures as well, Louka I mean, I'm here in Boston right at the moment. I have a home here and one in Denmark. And of course, the laws of segregation were changed about 70 years ago in this country, right? And now we're seeing all this racism and bigotry and hatred coming out again. That's not a new thing.

It's because we changed the artifacts around. But for a lot of people, the mental models of racism and white supremacy were never changed. And so there was just put a lid on it. And now it became immoral to express that. But as that lid politically got taken off and people in position of power in the country started to speak in that way again, it's blown up around our ears. And now we can't even say it anymore in many contexts. We can't even name.

that it's an oppressive structure or it's designed for racism, which is like, you know, if you look at the data and the factual things and it is, and segregation never went away, by the way, it just, we just called it something else. So that's just a kind of a grave example of if we're not working with the mental models of people and the habitual ways of relating to the structure, the structure won't change. You can't change it by artifacts alone. You can't change it by thinking differently, but it's the combination of the two.

the one thing you asked about contemplative practice and to me that is it is foundational for all the work we do and it is for a couple of reasons. I don't have any agency in kind of claiming that people should now all become spiritual beings. I have a hunch that most people are spiritual in one way or another. I know a lot of brilliant scientists who are declared atheists and I have a lot of respect for them.

I know a lot of brilliant people who are religious. I know all kinds of people in that, in whatever they identify as. Spirituality for me is something else. It has to do with the recognition of being alive and part of a profoundly interconnected whole on our planet. And I think by and large in our cultures, we've forgotten that that's the case. We've forgotten that we belong to this planet and we've forgotten that no life ever occurred in a vacuum. We are the product.

Louka Parry (21:07.054)
product of an infinite line of evolutionary trial and errors and new variations and this and that. And it's the beauty and richness of all of that is somehow has been kind of written out of our everyday relationship to what it means to be a human being in the modern world. So, contemplative practice, it's a two -sided thing. One is...

we can see from the research on mindfulness -based practices and compassion -based practices and so on, that it really helps people. It creates structural changes in the brains of people who practice consistently. It helps against overwhelm. It balances your emotional space. It can make you feel better about yourself. It increases well -being and so on. In fact, here at MIT, we have our

our brain guy, one of the most renowned brain scientists in the world, John Gabrielli, who runs the Gabrielli lab at our McGovern Brain Center. And he's not a touchy feely guy. He's like a proper old school brain scientist, right? He participated in a study they did in Boston schools in fifth graders, I believe, with mindfulness right before COVID. And literally the quote that he had, we were on a panel together at some point after that, he said,

If mindfulness was a drug, it would be ripped off the shelves of the pharmacies. I'm like, that's okay. That's pretty convincing from, you know, the science of science, you guys, right? That you can just say that it would be ripped off the shelves of the pharmacies. So obviously that needs to be integrated. It doesn't have anything to do with religion. It doesn't have anything to do with trying to convince people that they should believe in things or be in a particular way, but it has to do with a set of

you know, a different science in a way from Eastern scientific traditions that lasted for millennia, where very rigorous people have spent a lot of time trying to explore the nature of mind. And they actually learn a whole lot of stuff about that that is extremely useful for us to integrate into our everyday lives. So it's essential that that sits at the heart of, you know, understanding who we are cultivating our awareness.

Louka Parry (23:25.294)
learning to

they are interoception, what's going on in my body space? How do I resonate with my heart? What's the meaning and sense of purpose? How can I kind of engage with this unique way that this unique creation that is me in a once in a lifetime, you know, how can I how can I experience life from from a much deeper space? And that's, I think, essential. And I can, you know, really recommend it. There's so many pieces there, Mette be it

kind of the interior sciences meeting the exterior sciences, you know, like the, it's the world behind our eye, which is the most fascinating of all, you know, and yet we seem so, you know, it's so much of it seems to be external and, you know, for a long time it was, of science was, okay, what we can observe only. And so you couldn't make the case for things that were quote unquote invisible in that some, that of course has shifted.

significantly this idea of interoception, you know, even things like polyvagal theory and the regulation of your nervous system. I think about hardworking educators across Australia, across the world. And this idea that even when we speak of things like well being, sometimes it's just student well being and this idea that actually, this is a living ecology, a school is a group of human beings doing particular things in particular ways. And that, you know,

 things like emotion contagion, for example, is such a powerful thing to understand. Especially when we have, I would say a profession that is not elevated to the level that it should be. It's all human development. Like it's all that. I mean, that's the central tenant of society in my view, not necessarily this individualistic paradigm, which I think has gone too far.

Louka Parry (25:26.958)
an individuation process so that you can contribute to the collective. You know, like what's yours uniquely to do is one of my favorite questions to ask young people, to ask myself, to ask colleagues. You know, cause then there's that piece of you're in your life. I can think, Mette as you talk to, you know, this sense of agency, which we talk a lot about, of course, in school systems, you know, are you shaping the world around you? Are you being shaped by it? Are you running your technology or is it running you, you know?

dopamine loops and extractive technologies and a lot of the things that are impacting impacting mental health. So yeah, what's your sense then of the future? Like if we were to go into 20, gosh, let's make it a type of 20, 30, right? I'm gonna say 20 40 But what's the kind of system that you envisage through your contribution and the work of the team and the systems where this lab, you know, what kind of, what could, should even.

a kind of school feel like, look like, sound like. Yeah. Well.

So let me back up just two steps. You alluded to before, and I think we can't escape just naming that. The old structure, the old paradigm, the paradigm that we've all internalized and grown up in, and we can name it in various ways. Some people call it the capitalist structure or white supremacy or this or that. I'm not really too concerned about the naming. I like just seeing it as the old structure without trying to shame and blame it and so on.

It has played its round. I mean, it has produced a lot of magnificent outcomes, no doubts about it. But we can also see that a lot of the side effects of the consequences and side effects of decisions made within this paradigm has led to where the world is today. And it's becoming less and less habitable.

Louka Parry (27:25.902)
We're not sure if we can make it. And it seems as if we've already crossed so many tipping points that it is a very, it's a, there is great uncertainty from a, I'm not trying to paint a doomsday picture. I'm just being a scientist, right? It's very uncertain future that we're facing right now. And I think most of us, I mean, I get the, to have the privilege of traveling all over the world constantly. The weather is weird as hell everywhere.

I'm just saying it's a very lived experience for people that it's like, it's never been like this before. You know, it's only going to get worse. Now this can easily lead to increase of warfare, which I think we're witnessing already, increase of destabilization and greater inequities. We're seeing that as well. In fact, a lot of the farmlands that is far away from the ocean here in this country in the United States, like most of Colorado and Montana and so on

has been bought up by the insanely rich people and it's fenced in and it has livestock and grows its own crop.

there is literally training for people on how to train guards that will stay loyal to the families that will fence themselves in come when the crisis hit. So this is not a scenario. This is not a, it's not a wacko scenario. This is actually happening right in front of our very faces, right? So that structure

obviously need to shift. And we are many, you and us and many, many people who know that that is the case, right? And then what we're doing is that we're trying to actively live the new paradigm to pull people into it instead of trying to push against the old structure. And the way in which we're doing that, and this is a whole separate conversation, so you might need to invite me back soon.

Louka Parry (29:28.238)
So I am a science -y nerd that likes exploring things. And all of a sudden, I'm now executive director of a fairly successful global organization and also research director of a lab at MIT. And so I had to learn a whole lot of things about how to do stuff. I never had a real job before. I studied and read and did stuff. I've always done the stuff that I really felt I needed to do.

So there's a lot of new things that I've had to learn. And in part, I tried to figure out, okay, so if we're an organization, if we imagine us as an organization, the Center for Systems Awareness being born out of, if we had successfully created compassionate systems change in the world and supported that, what would an organization look like? So we've created a whole new organizational structure. It's mycelium based.

for those of you who know, have watched Fantastic Fungi on Netflix or something, will know that the mycelium is basically the neural networks of fungi. And the reason why that's such a lovely metaphor is because it's underground in all ecosystems, but it also goes across different ecosystems. And sometimes the mycelium, these fine little threads of hyphae grow into the root systems of trees, for example.

So it's a really good metaphor because it's a very generative and symbiotic way for living species to share nutrients and information across a variety of different structures. And so we see ourselves as the kind of the mother mushroom. And then we have all these amazing partners around the world who are sprouting their own mushrooms and so on. And our job is really to ensure that information

and nutrients in the form of, you know, compassionate systems, change tools, strategies, practices, connectedness and so on is shared. That also means that we're not a separate organization. Everybody who is in this community is by and large in this community. So we don't see ourselves as, now we have to, obviously we have to, you know, be able to pay the wages of our staff and all that. But it's, but it's through a generosity and sharing and interconnectedness that we do that.

Louka Parry (31:51.278)
And in this understanding, which is our kind of new way of operating or new way of talking about who we are and how we work and so on, this connection with other people, my vision for this work and for how we can create that structural change is everybody who knows, like you and me, Louka, we meet each other and we immediately know that,

I have one of those, there is one of those, right? Everybody knows that things need to change and that there is a completely different way in which we can be human beings on this planet that can lead to thriving and flourishing, that can be generative, that can be full of prosperous generative ideas about how we can collectively deal with all the challenges we're facing, that we live in shared spaces and that we're protecting our nature and our

beautiful, beautiful planet, all of that, all of those who know that we need to somehow come together and make sure that that happens because it is not going to happen politically. It is not going to happen through activism, which, you know, even though I have the greatest of respect for people who engage in things is usually driven out of fear or anger or both. No generative changes is going to come out of that. It has to grow out of interconnectedness and compassion. So for us, we call it the enlivenment project.

And basically what we're trying to do is we're trying to enliven the entirety of the old structure, because then it's going to change all on its own. If enough people in different places in the systems all around the world start to do this, it is actually going to change. And so that's my hope and aspiration and what I'm really, you know, just I've invested my life in trying to do whatever I can to bring that about.

Mette, it's really inspiring. It's one of my favorite reflections is what's present for me. And that is we are the people we've been waiting for. You're the person you're waiting for in your life. You know, it's like this. And that I think calls us back into this moment to really be a leader, to be somebody that is embodying change and facing in some ways like the inner world of fear and the emotional states that.

Louka Parry (34:14.83)
we can move through to create these more abundant places to be within to be. And we need to do that in community because individuals, heroic individuals and all the different places in the world is not going to create the change. We tried that. That's an old structure model. Right. Yeah. The other thing is, Louka, we also can't just cut it and say you all suck and you did wrong. And now we're going to do all this better because that's a repetition of the old structure.

So it's all about inspiration, about learning what we can learn from what was and learning how to reshape it into what we want to have. And that I think is possible. I had hopes for many years that we could still kind of make it before all the tipping points were reached and all of that. I am not sure that that's possible, but I think, and using your own terminology also that I've heard you use before, if we come together,

with tools, practices, orientations, and a deep understanding of commitment to care, intentional caring about each other and the planet, we can be the regenerative generation. We and the people who are to come are the ones who can actually help at least reconfigure some of all the stuff that's going on right now. And nature is incredible.

incredible in all its variation and the willingness to adaptability. So if we begin to display that and we begin to model that, I feel certain that nature is going to really be with us on that journey as well. It's actually, it's almost not, I mean, it's the best metaphor Mette but it actually, it's not even metaphorical. It's just a literal reality that we are nature.

We are totally nature. We could use a natural metaphor. It's like, no, it's just a deep realization. And the weird -ass thing, Louka, is we are nature, right? We came out of nature. We don't know anything but that. And we're killing nature. Wonder what's going to happen to us when nature dies. 100%. Let me think about this one. my gosh. There's so many more things I'd love to talk to you about. Let's have a final question for you as I reflect on

Louka Parry (36:36.75)
the new structures, I think that are emergent across the ecosystems, the learning ecosystem. And of course, I think one of the key characteristics I see is courage, courage of educators, of leaders, of communities to say, we understand the old structure. It's the safer place to operate in because everything is kind of continuous and self -replicating. But we're gonna kind of leap across to this new structure. And I think that's where I find great hope.

What would you like to leave our listeners with, Mette of the ground that we've covered? And there's so many more things we could get to. What's your take home message that you'd like to resonate in the minds and the bodies of the people that might be listening to us? I think I would leave with an invitation, Louka. With this framework that we've developed, obviously it's not a one size fits all.

And it's not going to, you know, this is the framework that will save the world. But it seems to actually really work for many people. It becomes transformational and they start showing up differently. They start relating to other people differently. They relate to themselves differently and they start doing things differently in the world. So everybody who would like to join in this compassionate systems movement in the world, not just in education, I feel that kids.

and young people and the well -being of kids and young people should be at the center of everything we do in global society because they're all our kids and they're the future of our planet. So everybody who would like to join are really welcome to and it might sound like an awful sales pitch and it's really not intended as that. But I do think that there is we need to have some kind of organizing framework to gather around.

And it cannot be a religious one. It cannot be a, you know, a political one. It has to be a people one. And this is, I mean, when people ask me what I do, I say, well, basically, I explore how to human better. And so this is the invitation for people to come together and learn how to human in a in a very particular way that generates greater well -being and greater social and emotional flourishing and helps us deal with the large

Louka Parry (38:59.822)
huge threatening complexities that we're facing on our planet today. And I just wish that we can make it work. So that would be my, it's an invitation. Fantastic. I actually think at the end of the day, we have no other option and to make it work. No, I don't think we have either. What we create actually.

And you're waiting around for the right politicians and we're waiting around for, you know, somebody is going to take the move. And I mean, all those cup meetings and you think really people, this is the best you could come up with. It's and we can't blame the people. The structures place can just not hold it. But we are the structures. We can do things differently and we can't do it half -assed. We can't do it with niceties and say, now we're all going to do the right thing. We have to live it.

And that's what the Enlivenment Project is all about. So my hope is that we just have, you know, dormant agents at all levels of systems globally, everywhere, and people just start showing up differently and doing things differently. And the old structure will kind of crumble and grow into this new, beautiful, interconnected, collective, shared vision of the world. Not that individuals shouldn't be there and not that...

You know, it's not some kind of utopia. Obviously we're all going to be angry and frustrated and have aggression and you know, all of that, that's not going to go away, but how we deal with it can be different. How we deal with it can be. Shape very, very different outcomes. And that's, you know, I think we can do it. Mette inspiring stuff. Thank you so much for joining us for the learning future podcast. Well, thank you for having me.

Louka Parry (40:53.486)
We'll stop there and we'll keep the recording going, cause I'll do some post edits, but that's fantastic. It really, it's just so aligned. It's just so resonant with my own orientation from my inner exploration, my outer exploration. Yeah, it's great that we've connected. And I mean, I'm playing a role in Australia in this ecosystem at least. And I expect that to continue to grow.

And I will engage at some point just to delve into the work also. Cause I see myself as one of those sleeper agents, frankly. Increasing. I'm good at spotting people. I'm trying to position myself strategically so that I don't think I'll ever be the politician. That's not my path, I don't feel.

Most of the people we like and respect would never be the politicians, right? I know. Well, it's the old structure. It's old power. And I see people that go in thinking they can somehow shift it and they become changed. But my role might be to be able to work alongside some of them to change them. And I mean, I think that's it. If we're not changed by every conversation, by every day, mini lifetime that we live,

That's I think we're, we're missing out on our own life, you know, kind of staying in the safety, going back towards safety instead of forwards towards growth. Yeah. And because most of us have never learned what that's like, right? Some of us of course never really had a chance to not do it, but, but most people are just sticking with the conditioned ways in which, you know, they've gone through the system of education and that's the condition that they live in. It's very sad. And I think.

Louka, I mean, the framework is very eclectic. So it'll resonate with you and then you can take it and integrate it into your own stuff. Right. And that I think is really the power of it. It's a, it's a super eclectic and it's like a foundational layer where people can do all the other stuff that they're kind of doing. Yeah. And I am coming back to Australia for a new workshop. So you might want to pencil that in, in your calendar or something.

Louka Parry (43:12.91)
Yeah, in November, I think I'm going to be back at reimagined Ed. At least according to Rich, I'm going to be back at reimagined Ed. And last time, you know, the whole deal was I've been kind of telling Rich for years that if he invited me, I would come because I really want to go and dive on the Great Barrier Reef, one that's still existing. And, and I didn't get around to doing that. So I told him, I mean, I'm going to have to come back, you know, so, so this time around, I will. I found a

a biodiversity project run by marine biologists that takes you out on boats to the outer spaces of the reef where it's still really intact and they do a lot of regrowing of corals. Gorgeous. So I'm going to be on a liveaboard with them. As only a biologist would do the research to find out the specifics. but it's horrible. I don't know if you've ever done scuba diving, but when you dive with people who have no care for the, I mean, it's so, yeah, they step on it and all that.

kind of stuff. I get very, you know, I can't carry a knife or something. So I want to go to a, you know, where it's a regenerative process. Yeah. And that's a piece. It would be lovely seeing you again, of course. Are you going to be at the conference next year? We will be. Yeah. It's looking that way. And of course, some some US travel and other

things as well. So whenever there's an opportunity, I'll keep an eye on the whole program suite and just whenever it makes sense, drop in. Yeah, I'm developing some different things around this my see based organizations, stuff like that. I'll share it with you when it's ready. And let me know when you are, if you're in the area here, because sometimes it might overlap and you know, I can have you do a talk at MIT or something like that, which would be, you know, just that kind of probably

low key informal one, or we could have you do one of the edX ones or something like that. Just please always copy tools because I do not actually see my emails. So it is good, which is a gift. But yeah, I'll do that. I'll keep in touch with you. I think there's something emerging in our space as well. The regenerative piece, we're kind of weaving it all together. And it's the same work just from a slightly different frame, it feels like. Yeah.

Louka Parry (45:39.246)
But yeah, I can see that we haven't got time to waste on going off on side quests. It's the main quest. It is the main quest. And the new paradigm is also a collaborative paradigm, right? So if we were like 10 or 15 years ago, we might be butting heads because we were kind of competitive in the same space. And I'm like, we

This is a fucking all hands on deck moment. More people who are doing this kind of work better. And we have to be aligned and organized and be supportive of each other, right? As supportive as we can that we can, you know, different flavors works for different people, just as long as we're sure that the integrity of the work is the right thing. And that's always where my challenge lies, right? There's a lot of people talking.

speaking the work, but not really doing it and that I... Not embodying either. It's yeah, how they feel. I don't know about you, the generative field space, I think I've, and I continue on this journey, but the more that I kind of clean my own inner window from my own sense of trauma, wounds or whatever, the more I can kind of just be in a space and I notice like dysregulation quite quickly.

I can feel like if I hug somebody, I'm like, whoa, there's a lot going on in this person's body that they haven't processed. That attunement, I think is something that I'm trying to cultivate more and more because that then means I can stay mindful in the visceral state of presence instead of getting triggered into the future or into the past and absencing. Become overwhelmed with everything you're experiencing in them. And then we take it on.

That's why they're emphatic people are either, you know, developing coping strategies to not feel anything or becoming, being in a constant state of what I care. Yeah. It's so insane. And then you're like, starting hating people before you even know them. And I have to remind myself, it's their self -loading that I'm now picking up. It's not my emotion. Okay. I'm just going to work with this one. You know, that is happening all the time. We do a little empathy check -in once in a while. And so, wow.

Louka Parry (47:54.19)
It's just people basically being in conversation without words and they can, you know, 95 % of the time, everybody picks up what's going on in the other person, right? And it's like, Hey humans, so notice the space. It took like three minutes total. And this is how we're operating. This is how we're walking around in the world every day without even noticing. Yeah. Yeah. It's exciting. yeah. So

I'll leave you to finish off your day. But this is a wonderful way to begin mine. So thank you so much, Mete. And for the work you do. Thank you you having me, Luca. Louka. make sure to please share the final product. Yeah, it will come out in March, probably late March. We've got a few colleagues from the Stanford D School as well that are part of this new series. Yeah, just great human beings all around. Pretty exciting. Thanks for being one of them.

Well, thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you again. Absolutely. Stay in touch. Take care. Bye. Bye.

Louka Parry (49:04.814)
Thank you for listening to the Learning Future podcast colleagues. That was a wonderful conversation with Mette Midiamboed and she is a biologist specialized in the evolution of complex social systems. She is currently leading both the MIT Systems Awareness Lab with Peter Senge at MIT. And she's also the executive director of the Center for Systems Awareness. She's a wonderful body that is doing work across the world with educators.

with leaders trying to imbue new structures, new ways of being such that we can finally create more compassionate schools, places where people are calmer, where there is a greater presence of wellbeing, a greater regulation as a living system.

Louka Parry (49:56.878)
Hi team and welcome to the learning future podcast. Today you're in for a treat. This conversation is between me and Metta Miriam Boil. She is a biologist. Hi team and welcome to the learning future podcast. I'm Louka Parry. And today we have a wonderful conversation with Metta Miriam Boil. She is a biologist specialized in the evolution of complex social systems. And she is currently at MIT, the university.

over there in Cambridge in Boston. And she runs the MIT Systems Awareness Lab with Peter Senge as the research director. And she also is the executive director of the Center for Systems Awareness. As you'll hear in this conversation, we talk about what is a compassionate system? What are the elements that bring it together? We talk about some of the challenges that exist right now in our world as part of the polycrisis, the meta crisis.

We also talk about the role that structures have in shaping behaviors. And when we think about our schools and our roles as educators and leaders, how might we move away from structures that are no longer in service of a fully human way of learning? This idea of understanding the interconnectedness of these living systems, of the schools that we lead, that we work in, that our children attend, that make up so much of the future.

of society. Hope you enjoy this conversation.