Systems don’t only organise us. They form us.
We enter institutions long before we have any capacity to question them. Families, schools, universities, workplaces, governments and markets teach us what counts as success, which knowledge carries authority, what a responsible life looks like and which futures are realistic. By the time any of us is asked to help change an organisation, we have spent decades learning how to belong to organisations like it.
Education shows this clearly. Schools can open worlds, cultivate curiosity and help people discover capacities they did not know they had, and many teachers work for exactly that. But educational systems are also tied to economic life. Young people learn to perform, qualify, compete, become employable and secure a stable place in the order as it already exists. A teacher can encourage radical imagination and still have to grade. A school can value intrinsic development and still be measured on attainment. A university can champion critical thought while its students take on debt for credentials that make them safer in the labour market.
None of this requires a conspiracy, and none of it makes educators hypocrites. The architecture exerts formative pressure regardless of anyone’s intention. Paulo Freire distinguished between education that adapts people to the world as it is given and education that helps them perceive that world critically, as something still in the process of transformation. The question that follows is structural rather than moral.
What kinds of people does a system need in order to continue being itself?
The systems that formed us were themselves formed.
Today’s institutions did not appear from nowhere. Many of the ways the modern world organises knowledge, property, labour, land, authority and education were developed within histories of empire, colonisation, extraction and separation. Spread across much of the world, they came to feel like the only way a world can be organised. Their formal structures have changed, but some of their underlying logics continue: in how knowledge is ranked, whose ways of knowing count as expertise, how land and life are treated as resources, and which ways of being are made normal while others are pushed to the margins.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith has shown how modern research and classification developed alongside colonial power, and how the institutions and logics of colonialism persist long after formal colonial rule has ended. Decolonial, Indigenous, ecological and psychological scholarship across the world has traced how these inherited structures remain entangled with inequality, racism, alienation and ecological breakdown. They are not the single explanation for the crises we face. But they are not merely history either.
This matters for transformation for a simple reason: what was introduced can be changed. An economy organised around extraction, or an institution organised around control, is not a law of nature, however often we are told that this is simply how the world works. Treating these structures as historical rather than natural is where the possibility of transforming them begins.
Systems reproduce themselves.
If systems continued only because people believed in them, changing minds would be enough. It rarely is. People routinely reproduce arrangements they consciously recognise as harmful, and the reason is seldom stupidity or bad faith. Over time, a system’s continuation becomes entangled with what people most need: income, housing, credentials, belonging, professional identity, legitimacy and a sense of being a responsible person.
A sustainability professional can see what extractive economies cost and still depend on organisations that run on them. A manager can believe leadership must change and know that saying so to the people above her may end her prospects. An NGO can recognise the distortions of funder power while its survival depends on the next grant. Recent discussion papers from the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) describe how fear of loss, uncertainty and exclusion can activate defences that preserve continuity, even in people who oppose the system they are preserving.
A system’s capacity to reproduce itself may depend partly on making participation in its continuation feel safer than participation in its transformation.
This is a working proposition, and RIfT holds it as one. If it is right, it changes what transformation has to attend to. The question is no longer only whether people want change. It is what change would cost them, and whether anyone has asked.
Transformation has a threshold.
Many cultures developed practices for moments when an established identity could no longer carry someone into what came next. Initiation, in this older sense, was not a programme of self-improvement. It involved leaving a known identity behind, entering a stretch in which familiar certainties no longer held, and returning differently, to a community that had prepared to receive the person who came back. Gloria Anzaldúa named such an in-between nepantla: a condition in which inherited categories can no longer organise experience while whatever might replace them has not yet taken form.
Systems-change language often asks people to tolerate uncertainty, as if uncertainty were mainly a cognitive discomfort. Initiatory traditions suggest something harder. Thresholds can cost us status, belonging, identity, certainty, authority, income, legitimacy, and sometimes an established account of ourselves as good people. The identity that was adapted to the old world may not be the identity able to live in the next one.
And the cost is not shared equally. A senior leader who challenges the existing direction may risk reputation, authority or a future position. A precariously employed worker who challenges the same system may risk next month’s income. Both can be told that transformation requires them to embrace uncertainty, as if they were facing the same risk. They are not.
Transformation therefore has to ask who is being asked to risk what. Who can refuse, who can leave, who can speak without losing their place, who can afford not to know, and who carries the consequences if nothing changes at all.
Those of us trying to change systems are inside them too.
We have built an enormous change industry around helping systems change while protecting the identities, distributions of power and definitions of success through which those systems reproduce themselves. Programmes teach resilience to people exhausted by conditions that remain untouched. Participation processes invite residents in after the boundaries of what can change have already been set. Feedback is gathered, thanked and filed. Much of this is done in good faith, by people who care, which is exactly why it is so hard to see.
RIfT does not claim a position outside this problem. It grew partly from working within the very fields it now examines: design, brand and product strategy, participation, organisational change and public administration. That work began with the question of how to get people to move. Over time the question became a different one: what is an institution asking people to become, and what happens when their experience contradicts what the institution believes it is doing?
And so, a question for you.
This brings the inquiry back to where it began. What have the institutions you have lived and worked within taught you to become? What did you learn to secure, to protect, to stop saying? And what might you have to risk, relinquish or unlearn if those same institutions are to become capable of something different?
These are not questions to answer quickly, and RIfT does not claim to have answered them for itself. But they mark the distinction that runs through all of its work.