RIfT Research Initiative for Transformation Follow the inquiry ↗

What would it take to move from Systems Change to Systems Transformation?

RIfT studies how we are individually, collectively and culturally formed by the systems we live within, and what transformation might ask of us and of them.

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RIfT Formerly the Center for Regenerative Change

Systems rarely feel like systems from the inside.

  • We want to build a sustainable business, yet we get caught up in its growth to keep it viable.
  • We want our children to find what they love, yet we still steer them towards what will get them financial stability and safety.
  • We know we need more rest, but we still measure our worth by how much work we get done.
  • We want to contribute to something meaningful, something that matters, yet we spend most of our energy trying to keep our own lives going.

None of this feels like a system. It mostly just feels like being responsible.

But the systems we live within don’t only organise the world around us. They form us too. They shape our thinking and our feeling.

They shape what counts as success, what feels responsible, whose knowledge feels more like authority, what we can afford to risk, what belonging requires from us, and what seems possible in the first place.

Most of us were formed within these conditions long before we were able to question them. And those conditions have histories. Colonisation, industrialisation, patriarchy, capitalism and modernity have shaped not only the institutions we inhabit, but ways of seeing, knowing, relating and valuing.

These are large histories and larger bodies of thought. RIfT’s research enters that conversation from a particular question: how do those histories continue to live through the institutions, relationships and people they helped to form?

Here, they lead to a simpler question.

We keep asking: How do we change the system? RIfT asks the question underneath it:

How has the system already changed us?

But seeing how we were formed is not yet transformation.

If institutions participate in forming people, then formation is not only something transformation needs to overcome.

Formation may also be how transformation happens.

Every institution asks something of the people within it.

Sometimes explicitly, through roles, rules and expectations. More often implicitly, through what is rewarded, what is ignored, who is believed, what can safely be questioned, what belonging requires, and what people learn they must become in order to remain inside.

People adapt to those conditions. And through those adaptations, they also participate in reproducing them.

This makes transformation a different kind of problem.

It is no longer only: What structures, behaviours or processes should we change?

It also becomes:

What are people being asked to become here?

And what would have to become possible between us for something different to emerge?

Seeing what needs to change doesn’t mean we are free to change it.

  • Our income may depend on it.
  • Our colleagues may expect us to protect it.
  • Our family may need the security it provides.
  • Our identity may have been built around succeeding within it.

Sometimes what keeps a system in place is also what keeps our lives together.

Because transformation can put something at stake:

  • Status.
  • Belonging.
  • Identity.
  • Certainty.
  • Authority.
  • Income.
  • Legitimacy.
  • An established account of ourselves as good people.

And what each of us can afford to put at risk is not the same.

What are people willing, or able, to risk when what needs to change is also what keeps them safe?

Perhaps you recognise this.

You’ve worked inside organisations, institutions, communities or systems and begun to suspect that the usual language of change doesn’t quite reach what is happening.

  • You’ve facilitated better dialogue and watched the hierarchy remain intact.
  • Changed the strategy and watched the same patterns return.
  • Created participation without significantly changing who gets to decide.
  • Watched people learn to survive an institution that simultaneously claims it wants them to flourish.
  • Or encountered that strange moment when almost everyone agrees something needs to change, yet somehow the old pattern reappears.

Perhaps the problem isn’t simply that change is difficult.

Perhaps we’re trying to change systems without fully understanding how those systems continually reproduce themselves through us and between us.

If you’ve noticed this too, we’re probably asking some of the same questions.

The inquiry

RIfT’s work currently moves through three closely connected questions.

How do institutions form people?

What do people learn about themselves inside institutions? What kinds of identity, agency, responsibility and belonging become possible? What gets rewarded, suppressed or made necessary? What must someone learn to become in order to belong here?

How do institutions reproduce themselves through relationships?

Structures matter. Policies matter. Governance matters. But institutions also exist in repeated encounters between people.

Who can speak? Who is believed? Who decides? Who must adapt? Who can refuse? Who carries the consequences? And what happens to people’s experience after it has been expressed?

RIfT calls the pattern created by these conditions Relational Architecture.

What does this mean for transformation?

If systems reproduce themselves partly through the people and relationships they form, transformation cannot only mean redesigning structures.

It must also concern the conditions through which people and institutions continually become what they are.

This brings the inquiry to the question underneath much of RIfT’s work:

What makes a system capable of becoming something it could not become while remaining organised as it is?

Working Papers

RIfT publishes working papers to develop its ideas in public: not as finished answers, but as arguments that can be examined, challenged and developed.

Working Paper No. 1 · October 2026

The Missing Account of Institutional Formation

Why organisational change theory struggles to account for transformation.

Read Working Paper No. 1 →

Organisations routinely describe change programmes as transformational, yet influential theories offer limited agreement about what transformation actually is, or how we would know whether it has occurred.

This paper argues that part of the problem is a missing theoretical object: institutional formation.

Institutions don’t merely provide settings in which people behave. Through repeated relationships, permissions, expectations and obligations, they participate in forming perception, identity, agency and responsibility.

The paper develops Relational Architecture as a way of examining these formative conditions and asks whether institutional transformation requires more than changing structures, behaviours or culture: whether it requires changing the conditions through which the institution continually produces itself.

Essays & ongoing thinking

Not every question is ready to become a paper.

Essays are where the inquiry can move more freely: following observations, contradictions and connections that may eventually become part of the research — or may simply remain questions worth asking.

Essay

The System That Learns Not to Change

David Hoogland · 27 October 2026

We’ve spent decades developing better ways to change organisations. Better leadership, better dialogue, more participation, greater psychological safety. And yet, institutions can become remarkably good at changing how they operate while leaving untouched the arrangements that determine who holds power, whose knowledge matters, and what can be questioned. In my latest essay, The System That Learns Not to Change, I explore why this happens, why institutional preservation isn’t always about resistance or bad intentions, and what it might mean for an institution to become genuinely capable of being changed by the people whose lives it shapes.

Read more →
Note

How do we change systems that have taught us who we should be?

David Hoogland · 8 October 2026

We often talk about changing systems as though we stand outside them. But what if the systems we want to change have already helped shape our ideas of who we should become? We talk a lot about changing systems: changing education, organisations, our economies, government, and the systems contributing to ecological breakdown, inequality and exhaustion. Usually the question is what needs to change *in* the system: its structures, incentives, behaviours, leadership, policies or culture. But there is another question I keep returning to: How do we change systems that have taught us who we should be?

Read more →

View all writing

This is an unfinished inquiry.

RIfT is currently an independent research initiative.

It isn’t a consultancy pretending to have the answer, a university, a think tank, or an established institute with a team of researchers behind it.

The work is being made public while it develops because the questions RIfT is asking cannot be answered from one perspective, one discipline or one person’s experience.

An inquiry into relationship, power and transformation would contradict itself if it eventually became one person’s theory of how everyone else should change.

So the work needs friction.

It needs other disciplines, experiences and histories. It needs people who recognise the questions from places I haven’t stood. It needs practice that exposes where the theory fails. And it needs disagreement.

If something here makes you think yes, write.

If something makes you think no, you’ve got this wrong, definitely write.

If you’re researching something adjacent, encountering these questions in practice, or see a connection the work hasn’t made yet, I’d like to hear from you.

From Initiative to Institute

Perhaps one day RIfT becomes the Research Institute for Transformation.

But if it does, it should happen because a field of people has formed around questions worth pursuing together — researchers, practitioners and others bringing different disciplines, experiences, challenges and ways of knowing into the work.

Not because I changed the word Initiative to Institute.

Because people have gathered around the question.

Join the inquiry Read the research →

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