Podcast: How “Healing Systems” Happens
The Collective Change Lab (CCL) podcast explores how healing is central to transforming systems. Each episode will feature reflective conversations with partners, practitioners, and change-makers reimagining what becomes possible when healing, compassion, and relational practice are brought into systems change. Hosted by Louise and John Kania.
Episode 1
From Disconnection to Belonging, with Radha Ruparell
In Episode 1, Radha Ruparell shares how healing-centered leadership transforms teams, organizations, and whole systems through connection, care, and courage.
Episode 2
Healing as a way of being, with Rebecca Sinclair
In this second episode, we are joined by Rebecca Sinclair, Honorary Research Fellow at Toi Rauwhārangi, College of Creative Arts at Massey University, Wellington, for a deeply embodied conversation on healing, decolonisation, and systems change.
Drawing on over 27 years of experience in creative education and decolonisation work, Rebecca explores how dominant Western worldviews, mechanistic, hierarchical, and control-oriented, shape not only our institutions but also our bodies, relationships, and sense of self. Together with Louise Marra and John Kania, she invites us to reorient from “fixing systems” to “tending living systems ” through presence, care, and right relationship.
The conversation moves from theory into practice, exploring embodiment, somatic safety, leadership vulnerability, and the role of islands of coherence, small, relational pockets where new ways of being can take root and spread. Rebecca also introduces her framework of the scalpel, box, ladder, and crown to name and soften dominant system logics without creating further polarization.
This episode is an invitation to slow down, return to the body, and remember that healing systems happen not through control or certainty, but through relationship, humility, and collective care.
Episode 3
Moving beyond “fixing” systems, with Tien Ung
This episode features Tien Ung, who explores what it truly means to build healing-centred systems. Drawing from her lived experience and professional work, she challenges dominant approaches to systems change that prioritise efficiency over humanity.
Tien argues that systems must move beyond performative care and instead transform their behaviour—how decisions are made, how power is shared, and how accountability is practised. She introduces key concepts such as relational disciplines, slowing down in the face of urgency, and treating tension as a source of learning rather than failure.
Through real-world examples like Accountability Dialogues, the episode illustrates how healing becomes possible when systems create conditions for trust, proximity, and meaningful change. Ultimately, the conversation reframes healing not as an abstract idea, but as something tangible, observable, and built through intentional design.
Episode 4
Ancestry, Healing and the Future we Inherit, with Monique Miles
In this episode, Monique Miles reflects on the relationship between healing, spirituality, ancestry, and systems transformation. Through stories of influential thinkers such as Harriet Jacobs, Howard Thurman, and Pauli Murray, Monique explores how people across generations have transformed profound pain into moral imagination, solidarity, and hope.
The conversation also turns deeply personal as Monique shares her own journey through grief following the loss of both of her parents, and how that experience led her into intentional healing work rooted in identity, ancestral healing, and Internal Family Systems practice. Together, the hosts and Monique explore the idea of “transmutation” — the process of transforming inherited trauma into healing, connection, and future possibility for generations to come.
The episode concludes with reflections on the work of the Opportunity Youth Forum at the Aspen Institute and how healing-centered systems transformation can be grounded in belonging, meaning-making, well-being, and purpose. From youth justice reform to racial healing and collective care, the conversation offers a powerful vision of systems change rooted not only in strategy, but in love, dignity, and restoration.
