Last week’s article on World Peace and Happiness could be interpreted as a little depressing.

It talked about why so many of us are unhappy about the way life appears to be happening today, what many are calling the perma-crisis, meta-crisis, or poly-crisis (can everyone see the common thread in all those terms?). Based on the two-loop model, many of our society-wide systems have passed their peeks, and their persistence, their inability to provide us with the comfort and security we feel entitled to, along with social media and AI have placed us in times of VUCA, Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen articulated what is happening, and in this piece, I’ll pull from her ideas of what to do, along with the ideas of Dr. Vanessa Andreotti. From her LinkedIn bio:

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is a professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. A leading voice in the ethical navigation of complexity at the intersections of education, global justice, and emerging technologies.

If you’re feeling depressed now, or even when you finish reading this, blame them. Or me. Or the world.

Both Dr. Hansen and Dr. Andreotti call for action. And before action, a mindshift.

First the MindShift

Dr. Hansen notes that society has encouraged one-sided thinking, rationalism, left-brained thinking, or a Cartesian-Newtonian world view. Dr. Andreotti calls this ‘narrow boundary intelligence.’ In this way of thought, everything has a cause and a result that can be observed or reasoned from observation.

When we think this way, we break things down into their pieces until each piece is understandable. We reduce, we analyze, we conclude.

Human beings are capable of another way of thought. What Dr. Hansen calls right-brained thinking or ‘holistic-indigenous thinking’ is also what Dr. Andreotti calls ‘wide boundary thinking.’ The focus of this kind of thinking is looking at the whole.

But we can never fully understand the whole through logic and reason. In the Orient stage of his OODA loops for iterative problem-solving, John Boyd called this thought process synthesis.

Rationally, Michelangelo’s David is a slab of marble that has had much of it chipped away and polished. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a bunch of sound waves produced by rubbing or banging different types of matter in unison.

Wisdom would be through each person cultivating both ways of thinking. With wisdom we are comfortable in complexity. It’s knowing that each of us is insufficient and also indispensable to the tasks at hand.

Wisdom is leaning into the fact that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves, and there is a mystery about our existence that we will never fully understand.

Before diving into how to do that, let’s examine what that looks like as our systems crack and break.

Evolving our Systems and Services

Dr. Andreotti says that for a society, culture, or system to change, it has to be ready for change, and it is ready for change when what used to work in not working anymore. As we are realizing that healthcare, government, education, business, media, etc. are not providing what we need and in fact are breaking, the Four Turnings predict that we pass through denial and then yearning for what worked in the past. People tend to rally around those who promise a return to the past, whether that’s a return to a US way of life of the 50’s or a return to indigenous natural cultures.

These movements always end in disappointment and disruption, sometimes in revolution. We need a way forward; there is no way back to a romanticized past.

At the same time, there are outliers who are trying out new systems. If you look at the lower curve (which eventually rises) in the Two Loop Model, there are innovators who start things, but most of those do not take hold, they do not reach sustainability.

Wisdom would allow us to hospice our current systems without letting go of what is working, move forward without losing track of what we’ve learned and done, and provide prenatal care to the systems and cultures that are not fully formed.

Education and Mindsets

We have established that to break out of our discontent we need a Mindshift. We know that with this mindshift we will be working towards hospicing our systems that don’t work while nurturing emerging ones that don’t work yet. And we know that this is complex, so we can’t predict what’s actually going to happen or what will result, but that each of us is indispensable and insufficient.

Where do we start?

Possibly with education. Possibly with our own mindsets.

Industrial-model schools focus on narrow-boundary intelligence: facts, dates, replicable methods, outcomes that can be tested and quantified. The drive is to produce a uniform educational outcome for all students, which is, of course, impossible.

Let’s imagine a schools that prepare kids for a world of ambiguity, where they find joy in the struggle, and where they can build relationships based on trust, respect, reciprocity, and accountability. As Kunlun | Playful Brains put it on Substack, we all want kids to grow up to be healthy, kind, curious, to live with joy, and to grow into themselves freely.

Dr. Hansen writes,

At its core, education is about teaching people how to live, find fulfillment and meaning, and form meaningful relationships to the world.

At a practical level, viewing a school as a community changes the way in which it operates as an organization. Relationships are no longer purely functional, based on the exchange of knowledge and the maintenance of discipline. Encouraging personal relationships in schools leads to flatter and more networked organizations with less power at the top.

Dr. Hansen warns that we can’t just bolt holistic education concepts onto into industrial model schools, the dominant culture will destroy the nascent attempt. She recommends examining and codifying what is working.

There already are models of holistic education that work, such as Montessori Schools, Expeditionary Learning, Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, Iowa BIG High School, The Met High Schools in Providence, Rhode Island, Brockwood Park School, and  The AlfaCoop School in Braga, Portugal.

In Chapter 8 of MindShifting: Conflict and Collaboration, I describe how two schools built holistic communities of learning, AlfaCoop by redesigning a school from scratch, and Central School in Maia Portugal by starting with a critical mass of excited educators and building from there within an existing structure.

We can connect, nourish, and illuminate schools that promote kids’ wellbeing into adulthood by

• Codifying the models that are working
• Exposing more educators and decision makers to those institutions
• Organizing competency goals by age-band rather that by grade
• Tracking learning in ways that promote self-direction
• Developing the skills for accountability through self-direction rather than compliance
• Supporting multiple pathways for successful transitions to adulthood (as opposed to focusing on college/university)

How do we build the capabilities within ourselves to adapt to our VUCA world?

Self-awareness and curiosity are probably the keys.

MindShifting and Your Brain

Under pressure, our brains fall back on old defaults — we push harder, defend faster, or shut down.

It’s human.

But it doesn’t solve today’s challenges; it usually makes them worse.

In The Ideological Brain, Leor Zmigrod states,

Under habit, the brain forges a tight connection between a cue and an action, until the mere presence of the cue—without careful deliberation—activates the action.

In our certainty-seeking brains, incongruities get fought with efforts to suppress truth-seeking, and our attraction to ideologies gives us scripts to follow.

These tie to us to our beliefs and groups we belong to, even when they no longer serve our ability to reach our goals.

Understanding that gives us the ability to change.

Change starts with the ability to get of our own way, to be able to quiet our learned and habitual instincts that cause us to do what we’ve always done, to go along with the group, or to fight or flee.

MindShifting starts from the fact that our brains have default settings — automatic reactions meant to keep us safe, not to help us grow. We all fall into them: defending, shutting down, or tuning out without realizing it.

Mindfulness is an important technique in this process, but there are over 30 other techniques that are described in the book MindShifting: Stop Your Brain from Sabotaging Your Happiness and Success.

The American Psychological Association, or APA, defines mindfulness as “a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience without judgment.” Mindfulness is promoted by practices such as meditation, yoga, and breathing exercises. In fact, many people use the terms mindfulness and meditation as synonyms.

The APA points out that mindfulness builds self-regulation and executive function practices, and we know how important self-regulation is. They’ve found that mindfulness brings mental processes under greater voluntary control. When mental processes are under greater voluntary control, this fosters general mental well-being along with development of specific capacities, such as calmness, clarity, and concentration.

MindShifting trains you to spot those survival or limbic reactions — in yourself and in others — and shift into a state where you can think clearly, communicate better, and solve problems without the friction.

Once you can meet those moments differently, conversations and challenges start unfolding in completely new ways.

The result is better outcomes, stronger relationships, and more satisfaction.