Why myth belongs in systems change

I started questioning the stories we inherit when I was very young, but religious studies in my teens was the first subject where the pattern really stood out to me. 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, a miraculous birth told of one teacher after another, figures who die and return under many 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. Everything I worked on had an assumption about people built into it, whether or not anyone had said it out loud. A sales target assumes people only work hard when they’re paid to. A sign-up flow built to be hard to leave assumes people are there to be captured. And I was inside the same logic as the one doing the work, measured by my output and my utilisation, on the assumption that a person is worth what they produce and that rest is time lost. None of this is neutral. The incentives trickle down from the economic system, and that system has already decided what human beings are and what they want. We become commodities, managed in service of the economy and the people with the most money and power in it.

That is a myth as well, though we rarely call it one, and it has been doing the work the older myths used to do: telling us who we are and what a life is for.

What I understand now is that the old stories were doing something extraordinarily sophisticated. I no longer think of myths as entertainment, or as the naive beliefs of people who came before science. They are closer to encoded truths, maps of consciousness that people carried in the body and passed down through generations without losing them. The flood that appears in so many traditions isn’t a shared historical memory so much as a shared psychological truth about destruction and survival, and the figure who dies and returns is every human being’s experience of loss and return, told in the most universal language we have.

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 Wholeness Ledger.

Donella Meadows placed the paradigm, the set of beliefs a system arises from, among the deepest places to intervene. In his book Sapiens, the historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that what sets our species apart is the capacity to believe in things that have no physical existence and to coordinate around them, and that money, law, nations and religion all rest on it. We are a storytelling species, and the stories we tell at scale become the systems we live inside. The myths aren’t separable from the structures. They are what the structures are built on.

We are a storytelling species, and the stories we tell at scale become the systems we live inside.

This matters because it means the stories can be changed, though never easily or quickly. The belief that underpins a system is itself a narrative, and narratives can be rewritten. The question is always who is doing the writing, and toward what end.

I think about what the same systems would look like written toward love, with wholeness as the north star: nobody having to leave an essential part of themselves at the door in order to belong. A target would reward what the work did for the person on the other end. A product would be as easy to leave as it was to join. A person’s worth would come first, with rest and care counted as part of the work. None of that is a new story. It is what the oldest ones were already telling us about belonging and return, and every one of them is an account of how people become whole again.

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. Arnold van Gennep, the folklorist who coined the term rites of passage in 1909, described them as a separation, a liminal middle and an incorporation back into the community, 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 my thesis, Remembering Ourselves, 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.