Levels show years of experience in brackets. Swipe each table sideways to see all four levels →
Personal Grounding
These learning areas keep you grounded in the context you act within: your own position and power, the histories and ways of knowing around you, the living world, and how systems behave. Staying steady and seeing clearly are practices you carry through every stage of the work.
Learning Area
Description
Beginner (0-2)
Developing (2-5)
Effective (5-10)
Influential (10+)
Listening Deeply
Learning to listen beneath the surface to people, groups and places, including what goes unsaid. It draws on practices such as presencing, strategic questioning, warm data and listening interviews, so that action starts from what a system is actually saying.
Notices own assumptions and filters, and chooses to listen to people whose views differ — including those usually overlooked — without rushing to judge. Practices active, empathic listening: summarising what was heard before responding.
Pays close attention inside a group or community, picking up the unspoken feelings, histories, and tensions that shape how people show up. Draws out what isn't being said directly, and reflects it back so the group can see it too.
Reads the deeper dynamics inside organisations — who really holds influence, what goes unsaid, and what people care about beneath their stated positions — and adapts how to engage accordingly. Distinguishes genuine empathy from projection or assumption.
Senses wider shifts across regions, cultures, and ecosystems, and designs settings where groups who usually talk past each other can genuinely hear one another. Models the kind of attentive presence that helps whole fields listen better.
Thinking in Systems
Learning the core tools of systems thinking: tracing feedback loops, delays, stocks and flows, and mapping how a system’s structure produces its behaviour, to find leverage points in any field.
Traces simple cause-and-effect and feedback loops in a nearby situation, seeing how one thing influences another over time. Begins to look for patterns rather than blaming single events or people.
Maps how a system works — its loops, delays, and unintended effects — to make sense of a community challenge. Makes that picture visible and simple enough for others to question and add to.
Models complex organisational or city systems to find leverage points where a small, well-placed shift produces outsized change. Distinguishes symptoms from the deeper structures that generate them.
Builds and maintains large-scale system models that guide major, multi-partner efforts over time. Helps whole networks reason about feedback, delay, and consequence before they act.
Honoring Many Ways of Knowing
Learning to recognise and work with Indigenous, local, land-based, oral and spiritual knowledge alongside academic and technical expertise, with consent and respect, and to notice whose knowledge has been excluded and why.
Values local histories, oral traditions, and lineages, and respects cultural ways of knowing different from own. Listens to ancestral and land-based knowledge with humility rather than extraction.
Brings traditional and Indigenous knowledge into the design of programs, with care, consent, and respect. Recognises whose knowledge is present and whose has been erased.
Bridges technical methods with ancestral practices in real projects, always crediting their source and honouring their integrity. Holds the tension between different worldviews without flattening them.
Helps many ways of knowing gain genuine standing within large institutions, protecting Indigenous and land-based sovereignty. Normalises pluriversal knowledge in spaces that have long excluded it.
Building Power & Agency
Learning to see how power works, formally and informally, and to build the agency of people who have been kept from it. Changing the rules of economies and states sits with Reshaping Economies & States.
Maps who holds influence — both official and unofficial — in a familiar space, and who benefits or loses from how things are arranged. Begins to notice the hidden and invisible forms of power, not just the obvious ones.
Sees how power intersects with race, gender, class, and history to shape what's possible in a community effort. Can show who holds which kind of power in a real situation, where it sits, and how it is used.
Analyses how power works inside institutions, funding, and value chains, and designs realistic strategies that account for it. Identifies where power can be challenged, shared, or redistributed.
Shifts deeply entrenched power imbalances across large funding systems and institutions toward those most affected. Helps return agency and decision-making to communities long kept on the margins.
Staying Grounded
Learning to stay steady in body and mind through the stress, grief and uncertainty that systems work brings, using somatic, contemplative and land-based practices, and helping groups do the same so people can keep going without burning out.
Notices how stress, grief, or overwhelm show up in the body, and learns simple ways to steady oneself, through the body, breath and time outdoors. Begins to name emotions without being swept away by them.
Helps a team or group stay grounded and feel safe with one another through demanding, high-pressure work. Builds shared practices of rest, care, and reflection that sustain people over a long project.
Stays steady and clear-headed while guiding others through crises, transitions, or turbulent periods, drawing on an understanding of how the nervous system responds to stress. Treats setbacks as material for learning rather than threats.
Holds space for collective healing and recovery across large, conflict-heavy efforts, helping whole communities avoid burnout. Builds cultures and structures where wellbeing and long-term purpose are protected, not sacrificed.
Living Within Planetary Limits
Learning how the living world works, including earth systems, biodiversity, resource limits and ecological feedback, and putting that into practice through regenerative and circular ways of living, producing and restoring land.
Explains how natural systems work, the climate and ecological risks nearby, and the idea that the planet has real limits. Connects personal choices to their ecological footprint and begins to act on that awareness.
Connects big-picture ecological trends — biodiversity loss, climate disruption, resource depletion — to what's actually happening in local communities and landscapes. Reads ecological feedback loops, not just isolated facts.
Brings sound ecological science into real planning decisions for organisations or cities, helping choices reduce harm and support ecosystem health. Translates complex science into usable guidance for non-specialists.
Guides large-scale conservation and land policy that restores ecosystems and makes room for many species to thrive across borders. Shapes how institutions understand and respect planetary boundaries.
Acting with Integrity
Learning to act from clear values and care, so that choices, designs and relationships do not extract from people or the living world. It draws on contemplative, ethical and decolonial traditions to work through hard trade-offs honestly.
Develops a personal sense of right relationship, grounded in care and respect rather than what's merely useful or transactional. Begins to clarify the values that guide own decisions.
Connects the goals of a project to a clear commitment to repair, fairness, and responsibility to future generations. Recognises that ethics is rarely a simple right-or-wrong, and works with that complexity.
Works through hard ethical trade-offs in real decisions, weighing who is affected and how, and putting people's wellbeing ahead of convenience or short-term gain. Takes responsibility for both the intended and unintended effects of action.
Anchors large funding and stewardship decisions in deep ethics, ensuring long-term care for people and the living world. Helps institutions hold themselves accountable to justice and repair, not just compliance.
Collective Strategy
These learning areas are about shaping change with others: hosting collaboration, sharing decisions, imagining futures, shifting narratives, aligning money, and redesigning the rules that hold a system in place.
Learning Area
Description
Beginner (0-2)
Developing (2-5)
Effective (5-10)
Influential (10+)
Shifting Narratives
Learning to read and shift the dominant stories in a culture: how media, framing and shared myths shape what people believe is normal or possible, and how new narratives take hold.
Spots bias, spin, framing, and stereotypes in news and online spaces, and asks whose voice is centred and whose is missing. Begins to see stories as something designed, not just given.
Sees how widely-held cultural myths and dominant narratives quietly block social and environmental change. Crafts stories that surface shared values and invite people in.
Designs communication strategies and counter-narratives that shift how people and institutions actually behave, aligning diverse stakeholders behind a shared message. Builds trust and mobilises support through story.
Shifts large-scale cultural narratives across networks and media, reshaping what societies treat as success, wealth, and resilience. Changes the stories a whole field tells about what's possible.
Imagining Futures
Learning to imagine and explore possible futures, using foresight methods such as Three Horizons and scenarios as well as fiction, art and play, so people can see beyond the present and choose what to work toward.
Imagines different possible futures instead of assuming things must stay as they are, distinguishing probable, plausible, possible, and preferred futures. Notices early signals and emerging trends.
Helps groups explore several possible futures together, stretching what they think is possible and connecting it to what is emerging now. Reflects on how cultural narratives shape what futures people can even picture.
Builds long-term thinking and risk foresight into how organisations and cities plan and decide. Examines systems across multiple timescales rather than only the next budget cycle.
Shapes long-horizon agendas at large scale, designing systems meant to hold up and stay just across generations. Helps institutions take intergenerational responsibility seriously.
Reshaping Economies & States
Learning to change the economic and governance rules that shape a place, including ownership, growth, public finance, the commons, and how institutions are designed, so that wealth and decision-making serve communities instead of concentrating in few hands.
Understands how economies and states shape everyday life, and that their rules were made by people and can be remade. Notices who owns what, who decides, and where alternatives already exist.
Works with others to try different economic arrangements locally, such as cooperatives, commons, community land trusts or participatory budgets. Connects local struggles to the wider rules that produce them, including how race, class and history are built into them.
Navigates laws, budgets, and economic rules well enough to spot where real change can be made, and designs strategies around those leverage points. Reads how money and policy actually move through a system.
Reshapes how money and policy flow at large scales to counter extraction and keep power from concentrating in few hands. Influences the rules and financing structures that govern whole sectors or regions.
Cultivating Collaboration
Learning to host groups well: designing conversations, building trust and shared norms, and facilitating so people can think and work together. Who holds power over the group’s decisions sits with Deciding Together.
Hosts balanced group conversations where quieter voices are heard and the work is genuinely shared. Co-creates norms and agreements that reflect the group's needs.
Facilitates workshops that help diverse community groups reach real agreement, using participatory methods that make power and decision-making visible. Adapts the process to meet the group where it is.
Guides high-stakes meetings between groups that don't easily see eye to eye, holding tension long enough for shared direction to form. Designs collaborative processes, not just runs meetings.
Leads large multi-party gatherings where even rivals or competing interests can design solutions together. Stewards the kind of collective spaces that move whole systems forward.
Engaging Capital
Learning how money shapes systems change: where funding and investment come from, how their terms shape the work, and how to align grants, budgets and investment with long-term, community-led change, including flexible and blended funding that can change as the work does.
Understands where money comes from in their field and how funding terms shape the work. Can describe a project's needs plainly to a funder or investor.
Builds trusting relationships with funders and investors, and helps peers navigate funding terms. Brings community voice into conversations about money.
Designs funding or investment models that support long-term, adaptive work, with money that is patient, flexible and shared. Aligns organisational finance with systems-change goals.
Shifts how capital flows across a field by organising funders, shaping markets or influencing finance policy, so that resources reach the people and places driving change.
Deciding Together
Learning to share real decision-making power with the communities most affected by a problem, so they help set priorities, shape the research, and decide how resources are used. Participatory research and shared governance are ways of doing this.
Asks the people affected by a decision what matters to them before deciding, and does not assume to already know best. Notices who is usually left out when decisions are made, and starts to make room for them.
Facilitates group processes where affected people set the agenda and make decisions together, in ways that give everyone a real say in the outcome. Reflects with the group on how power shapes who speaks and who decides.
Builds shared governance into how organisations, programmes and public services work, so that the people affected have a lasting say over priorities, budgets and research. Holds the organisation accountable to the people it serves, not just to its funders.
Shifts the norms, funding rules and policies of a whole field so that affected communities hold lasting power over priorities, research and resources. Helps redefine who gets to decide, and whose knowledge counts.
Designing for Complexity
Designing interventions for systems that cannot be fully predicted or controlled: trying several options at once, building in feedback, and creating the conditions for change to emerge, so that designs renew rather than deplete the people and places they touch.
Recognises when a problem is complex rather than complicated, and resists designing a single fixed solution. Asks what a design might set off beyond its intended effects.
Co-designs interventions with the people in a system, trying several options side by side instead of betting on one. Builds in ways to notice what changes and adjust.
Designs programmes, services or organisations as adaptable systems, with feedback loops, room to change course, and attention to the conditions that sustain them. Moves work from extracting toward renewing.
Shapes the infrastructure, institutions and rules of whole sectors so they can adapt and regenerate over time. Helps fields design for emergence rather than control.
Systemic Action
These learning areas carry the work into the wider system: testing in practice, working through conflict, advocating for policy, developing leaders, learning as you go, strengthening networks, and telling the story of change so it spreads and lasts.
Learning Area
Description
Beginner (0-2)
Developing (2-5)
Effective (5-10)
Influential (10+)
Prototyping & Innovating
Learning to run small, safe-to-fail experiments in a real system, watch how it responds, and use what is learned to decide what to try next.
Tries small, safe-to-fail prototypes — a pop-up, a pilot, a quick test — to learn fast from real feedback rather than over-planning. Treats each attempt as a probe, not a final answer.
Runs a steady series of experiments, refining each one based on how people actually respond. Builds the discipline of iterating in public and adjusting course.
Secures the backing and resources to pilot new ventures or ways of working inside organisations. Designs portfolios of experiments so the system can learn while staying safe.
Creates the funding and policy conditions that let whole networks prototype alternatives. Builds the experimental spaces and permissions that allow a field to try, learn, and adapt at scale.
Transforming Conflict
Learning to work with conflict inside groups and alliances, using approaches such as nonviolent communication and deep democracy, so that tension becomes a source of understanding and trust instead of a reason to split.
Handles disagreements constructively, easing tension through listening and finding common ground. Engages with conflict without avoidance, aggression, or collapse.
Works through divides inside a group, recognising both the surface dispute and the deeper structural drivers beneath it. Notices early signs of tension and acts to de-escalate before things harden.
Mediates entrenched disputes between organisations or interests toward outcomes that genuinely work for everyone. Maps the actors and dynamics in a conflict and designs a path to repair.
Guides reconciliation across deeply divided regions, sectors, or interests, helping rebuild trust where it has broken down. Transforms long-standing conflict into shared, generative direction.
Advocating for Policy Change
Learning to influence the laws, policies and public institutions that shape a system, through campaigns, coalitions, civic participation and direct work with decision-makers, so that changes last.
Takes part in civic life — petitions, local actions, voting, councils — and learns how decisions actually get made. Understands the paths through which ordinary people can shape policy.
Writes clear policy proposals and runs advocacy campaigns aimed at concrete local change. Builds the case and the coalition needed to move a decision.
Works with officials and lawmakers to write better standards and fairer rules into law and institutional practice. Translates community needs into durable policy.
Shifts policy priorities and secures lasting legal protections for the common good and future generations. Helps reshape the rules that govern whole systems.
Developing Leaders
Learning to lead in ways that share power: growing leadership in others, holding space for emergence, and building the self-awareness, presence and practices that systems leadership needs.
Leads among peers, organising shared work fairly and celebrating the whole group's effort. Recognises the difference between complicated and complex challenges and adjusts accordingly.
Practices letting go of control so a group's own strategies can emerge, helping others stay engaged in uncertainty without rushing to premature answers. Uses reflection and feedback to guide action.
Leads teams by setting clear values and direction while leaving real room for experimentation and self-organisation. Balances clarity with flexibility as conditions change.
Guides large networks through deep, paradigm-level change, modelling steady, trust-based, learning-in-action leadership. Holds shared purpose across many actors without dominating it.
Adaptive Monitoring Evaluation & Learning
Tracking what is changing through data and people’s stories, spotting positive deviance, and using what is learned to adjust plans, budgets and timelines as the system responds.
Reads public data and basic statistics to build clear, evidence-based arguments for change. Asks what the numbers do — and don't — actually show.
Combines numbers with people's stories to track progress and spot 'positive deviance' — the places quietly succeeding against the odds. Pairs quantitative and qualitative evidence honestly.
Builds measurement and evaluation systems that capture real social and environmental impact, not just whatever is easiest to count. Designs metrics that hold up to scrutiny and inform decisions.
Overhauls how large funders and institutions judge success, shifting from rigid targets toward measures of genuine systems change. Reshapes what a whole field treats as evidence of impact.
Strengthening Ecosystems
Learning to weave separate organisations, initiatives and institutions into networks that share resources, learning and strategy, so that the work holds together across a whole field rather than inside one group.
Connects nearby groups to organise shared events or support each other's work. Begins to see the wider ecosystem of actors around an issue.
Weaves grassroots groups and local hubs into alliances that share resources and strategy. Builds the relationships and trust that hold a network together.
Manages partnerships across sectors — public, private, civic — aligning very different organisations and cultures around shared goals. Navigates the tensions that come with collaboration at scale.
Builds large cooperative networks and platforms that coordinate resources and advocacy across regions and borders. Helps a whole field act with more coherence than its parts could alone.
Telling Stories for Systems Change
Learning to tell the story of a change effort as it unfolds: making the system visible to the people in it, sharing evidence and what is being learned, and keeping communities, partners and funders connected. Shifting Narratives works on a culture’s stories; this works on the story of one effort.
Describes a situation being worked on in plain language, including how its parts connect, without reducing it to a single cause or hero. Shares what is being learned, including what did not work.
Gathers and shares stories with the people involved, so a community can see its own system and progress. Uses lived experience, simple visuals and data together, with consent and care for who tells the story.
Builds storytelling into how an organisation reports and learns, so updates to boards, partners and funders show contribution, uncertainty and what is shifting in the system, not only outputs.
Helps a whole field tell a shared story of systems change, making long-term, collective progress visible and credible to the people who fund, govern and join it.