Why myth belongs in systems change

When I was sixteen I wrote an essay about the parallels between the world’s religious traditions. I had been raised Catholic, and somewhere along the way I had started noticing that the stories I’d been taught as singular kept turning up elsewhere in different clothes: a great flood in tradition after tradition, twelve companions gathered around a teacher in cultures that had never met, figures who die and rise again under a dozen different names. My argument was rough, but the instinct underneath it was sound. These weren’t competing truths. They were different languages carrying the same pattern.

I filed that essay away and spent the next twenty years designing brands, products and platforms, and I kept noticing the same thing in a different form. Every product, policy and incentive I worked on carried a belief about people inside it, whether anyone had said it out loud or not. Systems are never neutral. Somewhere underneath each one sits an answer to what we think human beings are: selfish or cooperative, scarce or abundant, disposable or sacred.

What I understand now is that the old stories were doing something extraordinarily sophisticated. They encoded complex patterns into narrative so they could be carried in the body and passed across generations without being lost. The flood that appears almost everywhere isn’t a shared historical memory so much as a shared psychological truth about destruction and survival, and the figure who dies and rises is every human being’s experience of loss and return, told in the most universal language we have.

Asking whether the old stories were true is the wrong question. The better one is what they were trying to carry.

Through a systems lens

Here I step back from the story to look at the system it belongs to, how the same pattern shows up elsewhere, and where it sits in the Coherence Framework.

Donella Meadows placed the paradigm, the set of beliefs a system arises from, among the deepest places to intervene, and Yuval Noah Harari argues that our ability to believe shared stories is what made human civilisation possible at all. Put those together and the stories stop looking separable from the structures. They are what the structures are built on. Yet most systems change work stays in the layer that can be measured, the policies, the incentives and the org charts, while meaning is treated as private, a little embarrassing and not quite serious enough for the boardroom.

Something important gets lost when we do that. Older cultures knew how to hold people through the in-between. They marked thresholds with ritual, grieved together in public, and gave people a place in a story larger than their own. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described rites of passage as a separation, a liminal middle and a return, and most modern adults move through enormous transitions with only the first part: a redundancy, a burnout, a death, a business that fails, and then nothing to mark it and nobody to witness the long middle. Organisations put people through those thresholds all the time and rarely offer anything to hold them.

Faith matters here in a way I don’t think systems thinking talks about enough. In a real crisis, the thing that breaks people is often less the hardship itself than the sense that nothing they do makes any difference. Faith, in whatever form it takes, is a decision to orient towards something anyway: a value, a practice, a belief that the story isn’t over yet. That makes it an act rather than a retreat. It gives a person somewhere to stand when the ground has gone, and a person with somewhere to stand can move. In the hardest stretch of my own life, what kept me moving wasn’t certainty. It was practices far older than any framework I had learned, ceremony and time on the land and the company of people who believed there was a way through before I could see one.

The same power is what makes sacred stories dangerous. The capacity that gives people meaning in chaos can also be used to justify enormous sacrifice, to draw lines around who belongs, and to put faith in the service of domination rather than love. So the stance I hold is consciousness rather than belief: treating a story as a map rather than mistaking it for the territory, and always asking what it serves, who it serves, and whether that matches the values it claims to carry.

In organisations, the concept is rarely the obstacle. Almost everyone has a layer of meaning that motivates them, a sense of what they are trying to protect or build that goes well beyond their job description. What gets in the way is the vocabulary, so I’m explicit about the layer and flexible with the words. Questions like what this organisation is for beyond its outputs, what would have to be true for the work here to feel like it matters, and what people aren’t willing to compromise open that layer without anyone needing to call it spiritual.

I’ve stopped thinking of the spiritual, the ecological and the social as separate conversations. They sit inside one another, as I write in the thesis, and systems change that leaves out meaning is trying to rebuild the house while ignoring the ground it stands on. The oldest stories were never an escape from the world. They were instructions for living in it, and we need them now as much as we ever have.