Nurturing the underlayer of systems transformation work: Tuning up Our Attentional Capacity
There is a widely shared sense that ‘the world is in trouble’. This is the premise of our series. What we are also observing is a very diverse set of responses by a diverse set of groups. Some people try to ‘fix things’, in a narrow solution-oriented way, with many different models for what ‘fixing’ might look like. Some take an open approach, but focus on just one sector, one group or one geographical area. Some choose to prepare for collapse. Some engage in prefigurative action. Some pause to map the system as a whole. Some combine those approaches or others. Some, rooted in a legacy approach, engage with long arc endeavours. Many simply disassociate or deny that anything of real concern is happening. And many go through various reactions over time. In other words, it depends.
There is nothing wrong per se with this wide array of reactions. In fact, when facing a complex situation, this diversity might be a great richness. Except, those responses are often not in relation with each other, not aligned or not building on each other. Or worse, they are perceived and treated by each other as right or wrong, good or bad, leading to more friction and mutual weakening – thus adding more unhealthy fragmentation to that world we feel is in trouble.
What we believe is missing is some coherent, intentional, shared care for what we’re calling the underlayer or the relational web. So that no matter how people might respond, react and engage, there would be something shared: a commitment to listen to and work on the relational web itself, especially across perceived differences and diversities. We don’t yet see this named as something that everyone has a responsibility to pay some attention to as part of any project, initiative or endeavour — while also recognising that some people need to dedicate their work more fully to tending this layer, in the same way that environmental sustainability has become a shared concern across sectors, while also becoming the core focus of particular roles, organisations and fields.
What if we attended differently?
What we’re proposing is not that we should all ‘do more’, but that we should all ‘attend differently’. If the relational web is the underlayer from which healthy responses, actions and ideas grow, then tending to it by restoring trust, rebuilding connection, healing and reweaving what has frayed, is not a distraction from the real work. It is essential and part of the real work. Because, when we tend to that underlayer, things begin to change, or better, to re-align. We can feel a sort of health and inner force. There is a shift in what we want to do, and how we want to do it.
Still, this kind of attentional shift is likely to feel difficult, or strange, and for good reasons.
At a structural level, the systems in which we work are not optimised for this kind of deep attentional work. Funding and reporting models reward narrow framing, with specific problems, in specific locations, and effective solutions delivered within a defined, often rather short timeframe. The frameworks we use to assess this work – concretely, what we must report on – were not designed to see or consider the underlayer and the longer arc this work speaks to. Including in the all-important (e)valuation process. And so, the work that tends to the relational web goes unrecognised and underfunded, even when everyone in the room will nod, if asked, that it really matters.
Those structures do not exist only somewhere ‘out there’. They’re echoed inside of us. We have been conditioned – most of us – to act on what is tangible and solvable. Choose a problem you can address, then work on it. Focused attention, visible results: that is how we learn to feel competent and useful. As a result, spending time and effort on ‘relational work’ or ‘attentional capacity’ might appear complacent, including to ourselves. When the planet is burning, who has time for some esoteric ‘connective tissue’?
And there may be more visceral reasons why we resist this relational work. To meet this underlayer, we need to widen our attention and perception: this is what we’re proposing. Quite literally, we need to pay more attention to more things in everything we do and consider a wider range of signals, cues and dynamics. Of course, this requires a measure of effort, but also, there will be consequences. If our attention deepens and our perception receives a wider range of information, we will experience more complexity and ambivalence, which is likely to bring up confusion, overwhelm, exhilaration, dissociation: all sorts of reactions, not all of them pleasant or empowering.
And yet, holding this level of attention, including all the feelings and emotions that come with it, is precisely what rebuilding the web of relationship requires. Not only that, but in times when many of us might wonder ‘what can I do?’ – feeling small and helpless in the face of global challenges in a fraying world – this is something each of us can do. Where we place our attention, even if it requires intention and effort, is to a degree within our influence.
Photo by Fernando Strabuli on Unsplash
Expanding our capacity to perceive
As to how, practically, we might make room for ‘more’ in our perception of reality, we can train ourselves to recognise ambivalence and complexity, acknowledge it, and welcome it. Like when we see a beautiful sunset that is also magnified by clouds from pollution or a bushfire. We experience all at the same time: the beauty and the loss, the anger, the grief, and everything else coming up. If we get more used to being explicit – to ourselves and with others – that things are connected and happening at the same time, out there and within us, if we normalise or get used to this complexity and ambivalence, gradually, we are likely to extend our attentional capacity.
In itself, this is a gift to the underlayer, and a step towards reweaving the web of relationships. We might think of this attentional capacity as a sort of glue, an antidote to fragmentation, starting within ourselves. Quite literally, we’re bringing back together things that have been fragmented, starting with our embodied consciousness. We’re demonstrating to ourselves and whoever we share this experience with that what had seemed separate does actually connect. A tiny thread of relationship forms here. And the web becomes just a little bit stronger.
Photo by Eduardo Soares on Unsplash
Hearing the whole orchestra
It’s important to repeat that this does not replace focused action. It changes how we go about doing what we do. It’s the difference between just playing your part in an orchestra or closely listening to the whole so that you can fine-tune your contribution, even subtly guide or influence the whole by how you choose to play. You still have to play, and keep listening, both at the same time. And as anyone who ever played music or sang with others knows, it’s something we can do.
When we work on a specific issue – a forest, a food system, a policy – we can do so with our attention narrowly focused on that bounded problem, placing the rest out of scope. We can also work on the same issue while holding a wider, more peripheral awareness: sensing what this thing we care about is held within, what it influences, what it is influenced by, or what remains outside the current view.
The example of the orchestra should make it clear: what we’re describing here is not some esoteric form of mysticism. It is a trainable, practicable orientation, with associated skills. In fact, some traditions have cultivated this for centuries. It just so happens that our dominant paradigm – in what we might call ‘the West’ – has systematically marginalised it.
A different operating system
Naming the need for this wider awareness, this expanded attentional capacity, does not require abandoning any sense of rigour or practical concern for today’s urgent needs. It requires expanding what we consider rigorous and practical. In itself, that expansion is a paradigm shift. It’s a call for a different operating system: one that is counter-cultural but deeply needed. One that nobody is currently paid or mandated to install. And therefore, one that we must name and advocate for, all the more urgently.
Do you recognise the experience we’re describing in this text, of an expanding attention, asking us to bear with more ambivalence and complexity? Where do you encounter it in your own work, in the systems around you? What do you do to hold it longer, deeper and wider?
This essay is part of a six-part series by Luea Ritter, Dr Julien Leyre, Claudian Dobos, exploring the underlayer of systems transformation work. See the first essay in the series here.
