This paper explores the impacts of the Mindfulness-Based Behavioural Insights and Decision-Making (MBBI) programme. Combining mindfulness with behavioural insights instruction, the authors have developed the MBBI programme through a series of iterative trials over the last ten years. In addition to fusing mindfulness and behavioural insights, this programme also draws on the theories of autopoiesis, anticipatory systems, the predictive brain and constructed emotions, which all challenge the common assumption that behavioural and emotional responses are automatic (triggered by given stimuli and not open to change through self-reflection). The paper explores the use of the MBBI in the Welsh Civil Service. Employing evidence from in-depth interviews with participants and a SenseMaker analysis, it rethinks the role of mindfulness at work, repurposes the application of behavioural insights training toward a more ethical and systemic direction, and develops a reflective approach to capability building amongst public servants.

The purpose of this commentary is to offer reflections on the phenomenological inquiry undertaken by Guenther (2022), exploring the nature and potential of group coherence in addressing our global meta-crises. I deepen the discourse in three interrelated areas, to expand our understanding of collective coherence and to explore how we can approach researching it. Firstly, I highlight research, mapping the evidence for consciousness-based practices in engendering greater social harmony and coherence. Secondly, I shine a light onto the shadow sides of coherence and how the power of coherence may be abused for ill purposes. I argue that the cultivation of coherence must not only involve consciousness-raising practices, but that it must also entail direct engagement with social and systemic wounds and fragmentation. Thirdly, I call for multi-faceted forms of research, to enable us to gain a deeper appreciation of group coherence in varied life contexts. Building on Guenther’s vision, I affirm that this research must invite alternative and participatory ways of knowing, so that a multiplicity of voices, inner and outer, are heard and honoured in action.

Autoethnography is a qualitative research methodology that centers self in social and cultural analysis. Building on the emerging study of inner work in systems transformations, this article explores the potential contributions of autoethnography as a methodological companion to systems analysis. By layering excerpts from an autoethnography exploring my maternal family’s history as Finnish immigrants to northern Ontario, Canada with conventional academic prose, I model what this approach might look like and discuss its relationship with established systems approaches. In writing this piece, my intentions are exploratory: what can we learn from those who study and practice systems change if they turned their gaze inward and revealed their journey for others to learn from? Using an autoethnographic approach, I surfaced nuanced understandings of highly complex social and cultural processes. In particular, a previously unexamined connection to ancestry and cultural identity emerged through sauna stories told by female relatives and my own introspection into a life-long relationship with sauna bathing. The partial, dynamic narratives resulting from this work better match our incomplete understandings of complex systems and can even transform the lives of those engaged in systems change.

The editorial of this third issue of the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change is entitled "From Duality to Complementarity," which we read as one of the central themes running through all of the contributions in this issue. It starts of by positioning the condition of our planet and current time as one of polycrisis, whose genesis defies being reduced to singular causes. We contend that Awareness-Based Systems Change as an inherently hybrid inter- and transdisciplinary field can support the co-creation of new action motivating narratives. To that end, and in order to conceive “the unbearable complexity of the world” this calls us to create, hold and tune-into spaces that are shaped by, produce and nurture a multiplicity of meanings and ways of knowing.,

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber talked about, living under the shadow of Auschwitz, that humanity lived with the ‘eclipse of God’. I now wonder if we have moved beyond this ‘eclipse of God’ to a time of the ‘eclipse of relationality’. This article argues that the eclipse of relationality is enabled through a predominant worldview in which the world is understood as mechanical and dead – observed and experienced in increasingly abstract form. In this way of being, the world and the ‘other’, cannot be loved. In light of this eclipse, this article offers two pathways back to life, particularly for practitioners concerned with healing culture. The first is ontological – a new way of being that is experienced through a living polarity between the ideas enfolded within Jung’s theory of individuation and Buber’s dialogical theorising. The second is phenomenological – a new kind of social and ecological practice linked to a perceptivity of living process, traced from Carl Jung and James Hillman, to Mary Watkins, Henri Bortoft and Allan Kaplan. The key wisdom from this article, from travelling down these two pathways - the key theorising of a way forward for cultural healers - is that people increasingly spend so much of their life separated, a-part, lacking intimacy with another, or with the world, or the manifestations of the world that are all around them, and within them. Something is then missing – call it connection, which ensouls the world – the aliveness that invites an anticipatory and participatory relationship with the world, and importantly, a world experienced as both profound Otherness, as well as deeply Oneness. The consequences for people and the world are profound – for the experience of alienation enables abstractions to flourish, exclusions to expand, and rushed interventions to proliferate – the ‘eclipse of relationality’ beckons.

Black ministry has historically found itself at the intersection of theology and racial justice. In this dialogue, a group of people, both ordained and lay, discuss their work in the Methodist Church in Great Britain, taking a deep look at self and system through the lens of justice and inclusion. The Methodist Church has a long history of grappling with issues of (racial) justice. In 2019, at a Racial Justice Symposium convened by the Methodist Church, participants engaged in an awareness-based systems change process to take a deep dive into what it means to shape inclusive community. Theory U (Scharmer 2016, 2018; Scharmer & Kaufer, 2013) provided the overarching framework and key principles for this journey of co-inquiry.

This paper explores how abstract concepts of alignment, such as moving between different levels of attention, were made visible and concrete in a case study carried out in the context of nature tourism. The alignment practices were mapped from a design research project, where the aim was to construct and explore a prototype of future culture based on care and awareness-based co-creation. The paper combines literature form care ethics and ontology of becoming to support the alignment concepts form awareness-based systems change approach, Theory U. In addition, the collaborative and dialogical tradition of constructive design research is being introduced as a potential sense-making approach to explore the deeper meanings of experiences and events in the development process together with local stakeholders. Later, the research findings are discussed in the light of the individual and collective capacity building needs, which aim to change our inner mindset and posture of being and becoming with the world. Finally, the paper argues that the potential for change and the choice to bring about that change can be found within us as a willingness and readiness to re-invent ourselves in every moment, every encounter, and interaction.

‘Global social witnessing’ was originally proposed by Hübl and Ury (2017) and was developed as a practice of “contemplative social cognition” (Singer et al., 2015). Though ‘global social witnessing’ is applied in various contexts by group facilitators of contemplative practice (Cmind, 2014), the concept has not yet been subjected to thorough research and has not yet arrived at a common scientific understanding and definition, which needs to be addressed throughout the research methodology of applying this concept. This paper aims to propose ‘global social witnessing’ as an educational tool for awareness-based systems change by highlighting its philosophical and psychological foundations in search of its ethical implications for bearing witness, a term often used in psychotherapy (Orange, 2017). This body of work draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of relational responsibility, and focuses on transformative, systemic learning. As a consequence, this exploration will hopefully generate further research questions that can serve as focal points for interdisciplinary projects of awareness-based systems change (e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, education, neuroscience, and physics).