In a world that is run by numbers and views people as parts of a machine, it can be so easy to lose ourselves and connect to what matters. Adriana Machado fills in the missing piece that connects the corporate world with purpose: systems thinking. Adriana is one of Latin America’s most celebrated women business leaders and an outspoken advocate in the impact economy space. She is a former CEO of GE Brazil and Founder of the Briyah Institute, a Benefit Corporation that bridges innovation, practice, and purpose. In this episode, she shares with us how systems thinking emphasizes that instead of machine parts, people themselves are living systems that have the power of self-organization that no machine can ever have. When we apply this to business, we can make a true difference and an even bigger impact not only to ourselves but to the world. Find out more about systems thinking, the importance of spirituality in business, biomimicry, and more in today’s conversation!
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Systems Thinking: The Missing Piece In Today’s Corporate World With Adriana Machado
With us, we have Adriana Machado, who is one of Latin America’s most celebrated woman business leaders and an outspoken advocate in the impact economy space. She’s a former CEO of GE Brazil and Founder of the Briyah Institute, a benefit corporation that bridges innovation, practice, and purpose. Her cross-cultural and cross-sector skills from big business, government, and nonprofits grant her a unique perspective on entrepreneurship, resilience, and leadership. Welcome, Adriana.
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It’s so great to have you with us, Adriana. I met you five years ago when you were launching the Briyah Institute. I know how much love and support you put into it. It was a whole village because it does take a village to birth something new. I know you put a lot of love and care into it. Why Briyah?
Thank you, Ina. It’s a pleasure to be here with you again. Having a pandemic in the middle, I hope we can see each other face to face soon again. Briyah is the result of multiple contexts coming together when I moved to the United States. I left a big corporation. I was working for GE and Intel. Previously, I had worked for governments. I have served on boards and also not-for-profit boards. When I came here, I realized that I wanted to stay and share. That’s what happened after lots of different attempts to do different things.
That’s where I found my North, in Briyah. I was studying Kabbalah at that time. I was looking for a name that meant innovation and purpose because I had learned from all those different organizations I worked for that innovation was important, but there was something missing in promoting innovation for the sake of it.
I thought that because I had done some interesting projects before, we had the intentionality there. I had learned about impact investing and I had served in lots of organizations that did care about people on the planet. That was where I wanted to go. I was looking for this word and I didn’t find a word that meant exactly that. When I was studying Kabbalah and I learned that there was this world of creation called Briyah, I said, “A-ha. That’s what I want to do.”
I want to create this company as a B-Corp, a benefit corporation, that will enable us to share. Briyah is this vessel for sharing, creating, and holding the space for people to also be creative and be more coherent, and meet people where they are in different phases and stages of their careers. Coming from the business world or the corporate world, I thought it was easier for me to meet people in the corporate world in this nexus between corporate and impact, and work together and co-create from there.
That was the intention behind Briyah. We started in 2018. In 2020, right before the pandemic, we launched the first leadership development program, which you came to. It was awesome to have you, and now we’re getting ready to launch the second one. It’s evolving very nicely and I have learned a lot from the experience. We have touched on more than 300 leaders in 38 countries already with the first program. We hope to continue to do more of that and exchange more ideas and ways of doing things, especially doing business without damaging so many people on the planet.
I know, Bonnie, you want to jump, but I want to ask Adriana two follow-ups. One, I’m curious why you were studying Kabbalah. Two, you said that there was this thing missing in business that you found through Briyah as a way of encompassing this creation and abundance. What exactly was that you felt missing in business? Maybe you can talk a bit more about that.
The spiritual side is missing. We’re more than just our physical bodies. I had the curiosity and that’s why I started Kabbalah. I’m a very curious person, and that’s a good trait to have in a leader. I hone in on that trait and curiosity is always there. I believe that there’s another dimension that needs to be brought into business.
We need to understand a little bit about why we’re here and why we do what we do. Question those assumptions that, “We’ve done this because it’s always been this way.” Why are we here to begin with? Why do we wake up every day? Those are questions that have always been with me. I have tried to answer them by studying different religions, lines of thought, and philosophies. I am very curious to learn from different perspectives.
I got a book from a friend, God Wears Lipstick, and that was very unusual topic. That was written by Karen Berg, the Founder of the Kabbalah Centre globally. I thought, “That’s unusual. Let me read this.” From that book, I found the teachings. I have a very nice instructor who still takes good care of me and reminds me of a lot of the different teachings from Kabbalah.
I’m not an expert, but I am a curious person. I try to stay in touch with that, as well as with anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner. I had the pleasure of meeting anthroposophy when I enrolled my kids in a Waldorf School a long time ago in Brazil. The first lesson we learned there is when you enroll a kid in a Waldorf School, you enroll yourself together.
I was born Catholic. I had a very strong connection with spiritualism and spiritist Kardec when I was a teenager. I went to a Waldorf school and got in touch with anthroposophy. I have always been curious about Buddhism, then I met Kabbalah. I’d say that I learned from different sources. That’s something I like and it gives me coherence, so I like that.
It’s interesting to hear about your corporate background and you’re a very curious person. This spirituality that’s missing, the thing that I immediately think about is how today’s corporate world looks like an arrow moving always straight up. It’s very linear. When we move into a more soul-centered and spiritual, and ask these questions. Why are we here? Why are we doing this? Very often, those answers require stepping back, so the arrow has to pause.
In terms of productivity, we’ve already got a line, and it’s coming out next spring. We have to continue production. This is challenging to the corporate mind. Asking questions like that might mean, “That’s not going to work. Let’s do something different.” These things are a necessary tension for me. For others, it’s not allowed in the corporate world because it’s like, “Keep going as fast as you can. Fast forward as fast as you can.” What has been your experience about trying to work in that way?
I have been privileged to work with the leader, Jeff Immelt at GE, who was a system thinker. Systems thinking is the answer to connecting both worlds. Let’s go a step back and ask, “Why do we think in linear terms? Why are corporations in this trajectory?” This is a vision that comes with the industrial revolutions that we have been through. Companies have grown in this knowledge or this world view of industrialization.
That is a very mechanistic view. You grow and companies are like machines. People are like parts of the machine. You want protectivity, efficiency, and profit to grow, but you don’t question the results or the impacts of those things. When you bring systems thinking into the mix and you look in a different way, you acknowledge that people are not machine parts. People are living systems. Living systems have a power of self-organization that no machine can ever have.
When you start to acknowledge that talent is important because of that, then you go and try to get the synergy and get all the properties that are more of a living system. Those narratives of machines start to give way and give room to more living systems narratives. You notice that the world has become so complex and that we are in systems. The economy is a system. The companies are a system, and our families are too. We ourselves are systems. We start to go into biology a little bit more and understand this relationship. Understanding that data is not static. It’s dynamic. Things are in movement. There is an evolution.
You notice that even corporations have evolved over time. You would say that, in the beginning, it was all about process and efficiency. The education system was created in this very linear way to prepare people to go to the factories. This has evolved. First are processes, then they started talking about people a little bit and creating these systems to prepare people. At some point around the ’50s, people started talking about missions and why companies do what they do.
In the ‘60s, that was when anthroposophy was beginning to look at how to be in the corporate world somehow with consultancies and trying to create more activities that would help people on the planet. You see an evolution of different things happening until the 2000s when a lot of different things happen. You had the B-Corp movement and the goals. First, it was the Millennium Development Goals by the United Nations, then the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015.
Even before that, it was in ‘94 when John Elkington coined the triple bottom line and started to factor externalities into corporate. There has been an evolution of consciousness in the corporate world. There has been this understanding that we are not machines. This language and worldview of living systems have permeated it. I started saying that I was privileged to work at GE because we had a program called Equal Imagination. This was before ESG or impact. This was 2005.
There was corporate social responsibility and business as usual. You make profits, then you help communities. This was the pattern, but at that point, GE was facing a very harsh and strong impact on the environment and was facing a fine to clean the Hudson River. This way of thinking that I believe is coherent and possible is we don’t want to be perceived as polluters of the environment. That’s not us.
We are imagination at work. We bring things to life that are good. If we are facing this as a result of some practices that were okay, and nobody said anything against it in the past. Now we realize it’s not good for the environment, and the regulatory system has changed and has forced us to do something about it. Others will face the same thing too. Why not serve our clients with products that will reduce emissions, the consumption of energy, and the amount of water that’s needed to run something?
Let’s start ourselves by offering those things. Let’s first clean our masks, but also in parallel, let’s do something for our clients. Ecomagination was a movement and this business strategy where every business of GE had to invest in R&D to develop products that had those three characteristics. There was measurement and something very specific that leaders understood and needed to follow because their evaluation reports were based on this.
From 2005 to 2017, about $20 billion was invested in R&D for those products, and $270 billion in revenue came from those products. It is business as usual, but with this intentionality in a systemic approach with good metrics for leaders that they understood. There was a transformation in the ecosystem. Lots of other companies started doing this as core business.
You can offer technology that can help deal with those issues. The more we know about those issues and the interconnectedness, and this meta-crisis that we’re going and we’re combining all of this information into understanding the bigger plot. This is possible and companies can do that. I truly believe that this example helped me understand the power of systems thinking for business. That’s why I say that the silver lining in Briyah is the systems thinking.
I try to learn from different authors from different sources, not only the spiritual side but the practical side. I go to Harvard Business School, and I learned from Clayton Christensen. I see the systems thinking element there too. Although he’s not considered a traditional system thinker, I combine that with Humberto Maturana from Chile, who was a traditional and very well-known system thinker. I bring those things together to offer leaders the opportunity to do differently.
There’s a lot in that story. I love that you have that grounding because knowing the possibility can move you into spaces with not just clear intention but with a sense of assurance. I’m curious though because you’re working with organizations, businesses, and leaders. Where are we now? Where are the necessities, and what’s the possibility to shift the needle? What are you seeing?
We have advanced a lot in terms of this awareness. We can’t do things the way we can to this point because we’re causing a lot of different disasters. There’s the climate and the social. There is the pollution. We’re polluting the waters. We need water to live. They say it’s a meta-crisis. Lots of different crises everywhere.
On top of that, we have the conflicts. We have war. We have people fragmenting, dividing, and separating. I would say that where we are now is a place and an opportunity for us to think better, think deeper, ask deeper questions, and refrain from the assumptions that have guided us to this day. Businesses have the economic power at least to make such a difference.
Right now, we are in a place of opportunity to think better, to think deeper, to ask deeper questions, and to really reframe the assumptions that have guided us until this day.
There is a lot of crisis going on, but there is a lot of opportunity too. We are eight billion people. We are eight billion leaving systems. We can do better than this. If we continue to engage more people in this systems thinking approach and try to do whatever they can from the space where they are, we can move this from the bottom up. Hopefully, we’ll get some leaders on the top that will also understand and meet us in the middle. I am optimistic. Although sometimes, we do get depressed by what’s going on. I was listening to a podcast by Daniel Schmachtenberger. I don’t know how to say his last name.
He’s got a very long last name. I know exactly who you’re talking about.
He’s saying that we do need to sit with our depression and feel the pain so that we get to action because that’s also a movement that is important for us to have. We’re at an interesting point in history.
We are. On that note, you’re talking about systems, systems thinking, and how we are a system without so within. If there is this separation and division and all the things that are part of this meta-crisis, as you laid out, it’s also in each one of us individually, so healing that. I’m curious because you have this leadership development program that you do. Can you talk a little bit about that? Is that part of working on the individual?
It starts from within. We know from different lines of coaching or spiritual teachings that it starts from within. I was having a conversation with Meg Pagani. She was giving this example of the lighthouse. There’s dark around, but the lighthouse lights and enables you to see this contrast and avoid the danger of hitting the shore.
She was saying something that we are all lighthouses. We can light our lights within and help see the contrast and deal with the situations that come much better if we do so. There is this collective process, but there is this individual process. If we can start with ourselves and not complain about the other, we will be able to listen to the other much easily too. There is this movement from within that is important.
If we can start with ourselves and not just complain about the other, we will be able to listen to the other much more easily.
At Briyah, what we try to do is work like that. We do work with corporations that have a problem. We try to help them see from a systemic point of view and understand the alternatives better so that they can choose better. We also work with leaders so that they see other opportunities from where they are and try to engage without judgment.
Stop the whole judgment first and let’s look at it. Let’s look at this lens. What we’re doing in Briyah is giving these lenses or at least trying to offer possibilities of different lenses so people can see differently. There is a calling that comes from within. It will depend on each one of us how we deal with it and what we do with it, but I agree that it comes from within. There’s this power there. Different traditions, religions, and philosophers will say something different about it. At the end of the day, it is the way for us to change what we don’t like, but we have to look inside first.
Adriana, as you’re talking about offering these different lenses and perspectives, I know you also talk about nature as a lens or as a teacher. Can you say more about that?
There’s a discipline. I don’t like to call it discipline because this is so trans-disciplinary, but a new science called biomimicry. I had the pleasure of meeting Janine Benyus. She gave a wonderful talk in Brazil not long ago. I have been curious to learn this and what I learned about this movement, which is more than just a discipline as I said, is that we can look at nature as a mentor.
What biomimicry does is it looks for how nature deals with something in terms of function and brings this to the design table. You can design based on something that was tested 3.8 million years ago. I don’t know how many years. We always say that nature exists before us but for so much longer than we have. It is a way of not using nature to extract resources from nature. It’s a different perspective. It’s looking at nature, the animal, the vegetable, and the plate world as “What can they teach me that I can apply here that has been tested already that may have a chance to work?”
It’s a mindset of not extracting from nature but learning from nature. The more I read about biomimicry and the different examples that are out. There is a network of people who have been trained to do that and who have been applying this in corporations and governments in physical products, processes, and social situations as well.
I believe that there’s a lot more that we can do with this. I praise the work of the biomimicers in the world. I hope that every child can have an opportunity to have a biomimicry class or be given this opportunity to look at the environment around him or her this way because this will spark innovation in a different way.
Bonnie and I have interviewed Anna Breytenbach. She’s an interspecies communicator, and she talks about communicating with beings other than humans. Learning from nature through nature and seeing nature as a being is quite foundational. Not just the function and how they work but also to connect with them at that deeper level of connection. I’m curious if you have an example that you’ve used, maybe biomimicry or this particular lens of observation, that has yielded a new way or a new perspective in a situation.
The traditional example of biomimicry, the one that I repeat the most, is the one for the bullet train in Japan. Engineers designed it and they had this train ready to go, but they were having an issue with the sonic sound that it made when it went through different pressures, like tunnels or CDs. It wasn’t going anywhere until one of the engineers there, a bird watcher, knew that a kingfish could dive without making any ripple and get the fish.
By studying that bird and other animals, they were able to reshape the beak of the train. Notice now that it has a very long beak based on the beak of the Kingfisher. This is a practical example of how nature can inspire design at the engineering level. Also, there are many examples of team organization or team alignment based on how bees or ants and other colonies of animals work or how you create a company as a forest.
There are so many lessons from how trees group together. The big tree or the mother tree can help the other trees around in this connectivity underground that the fungus helps flow food and nutrition that we don’t even see, but it’s out there. How can you translate this knowledge that nature offers to us every day into our organizations, products, and services? Having this idea or this dimension of it’s all interconnected and what I do here might have an impact.
What is this impact? Having the curiosity to understand what this impact could be down the road, and it’s not only a first-order impact. What’s going to happen to my consumers? Am I going to sell more? After they use this product, what’s going to happen to it? Is it going to go somewhere? Is it going to ruin or damage something? How do we expect this to be collected afterward so that it doesn’t damage the environment or do something for people? Having this broader, let’s zoom out and zoom in and balance both in our decision-making process.
Along those lines, and this is my own personal musing and philosophying about things, but as I look at least the Western corporate landscape, I feel like one of the next frontiers is to tackle the idea of rest. We’re a completely sleep-deprived culture that puts a tremendous amount of energy and effort into work and less into rest and recuperation.
If we look at nature, it rests. Their seasons of rest. Pretty soon, we’re going to enter winter. Animals rest in between doing activities, and we’re completely out of sync with that. I feel like it is not just biomimicry in the sense of creating products and having product design, which is phenomenal. Also, nature that remains in balance incorporates rest in its cycles of doing. I would love to see that be one of the next big things. If there was an industrial revolution, now we can have a rest revolution.
We need to question the growth we’re getting because it’s not only good growth. There’s a study that was done 50 years ago about limits to growth. Now we see the scenarios that they did with computers back in the day, and it’s all happening now. Part of what that team used to say is that not all growth is good growth. That’s something that Kate Raworth is saying also with her Doughnut Economic model.
The rest comes from this biological need of ours. Some companies do rhythms, but they’re overlapping so many rhythms now that the pause is not there. You need to be conscious of that pause. I’d say rhythm, cycles, seasons, and the pause that’s needed that we learned from meditation. That is so healthy these days. This was something I didn’t believe in when I was in the corporate world. I didn’t think that I had time to meditate.
When I started meditating, it made such a huge difference in my life because that is where you detox all of the information that’s out there that you don’t need. You can focus on what you need to focus on, and you get much more productive at the end of the day if you meditate and if you pause. This has been now mapped out by science. That is important. Hopefully, people will pay more attention to that. I hope corporations will allow it. Some corporations are doing that. They’re creating meditation spaces for hours. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s like, “This is here for you to see, but that’s not what I practice.” There’s a disconnect.
I teach dreaming. That’s my work to bring to organizations, dreaming and imagery. It requires rest. There are so many stories of people having hit the wall, then stopping and going to their dreams and receiving the Insight that takes them further. The sewing machine was invented this way. When Howe went to sleep, he saw a bunch of cannibals coming to get him with spears. The spear has this very interesting hole at the very end of the spear in the tip. He understood how to get the return on the string in the sewing machine. Benzene ring happened this way that’s going to create insulin to use in diabetes. All of these insights and breakthroughs happen because of stopping.
Science has been mapping these level dimensions of intelligence too. Now that we have the knowledge, people might be able to go into the practice. I love to see that you’re doing this and helping people get there. What is the highest form of intelligence that you need for real wisdom? Is this imaginative intelligence? You can process information as computers do, but what differentiates humans from machines is intuitive intelligence and also this more imaginative intelligence. We will never acquire that intelligence if we don’t stop, dream, and offer ourselves the conditions to be imaginative and creative.
We’re about at our end. I would love to build on that and ask you what keeps you imaginative and creative. What are your practices?
I have two dogs, and I spend a lot of time with my dogs, especially when they do something wrong. They’re calling me out on other things. It makes me think, “How can I do it differently so that I don’t get disappointed with them for some reason or not?” I always love to stay in nature and walk. I do that. Whenever I’m feeling a little too stressed or not, I go for a walk with the dogs or by myself.
I have the privilege of living relatively close to a beach. I love to go to the beach. That is where I get even more of the clearing of my mind. Not only because I do the movement of walking but because I can hear the waves and the birds. That is something that regenerates me a lot. I try to do that as well as read the different perspectives and authors, respect the different traditions and the different religions, and try to learn more about them.
There is never a day that I don’t at least stop and meditate and read something different. That is how I try to regenerate my ideas. There’s not a day that I don’t move. Even if I can’t go swimming or walking, I do at least the sun salutation of yoga, which moves all my body three times. I tried to be disciplined about that.
It’s been just great to be with you, Adriana. Your energy has that sun energy. It’s quite present and subtle. It’s always inspiring to be with you. Thank you.
Thank you. This is an inspiring conversation to have. I hope it will inspire other people to start doing the work. It doesn’t take much. You start one step after the next. Listen to different suggestions from different people. It might help you get one that helps you. I hope this goes to a lot of people.
Thank you so much. Thank you to one of your dogs because he or she has been with us during this conversation.
This is Buddha. He’s very close and needs attention. He’s always around, but he participated as well. Thank you for mentioning it.
Important Links
- Briyah Institute
- God Wears Lipstick
- Kabbalah Centre
- Janine Benyus
- www.LinkedIn.com/in/adrianalmachado/
- www.Briyah.Institute/pages/adriana-machado
About Adriana Machado
Adriana Machado is one of Latin America’s most celebrated woman business leaders and an outspoken advocate in the impact economy space. She is a former CEO of GE Brazil and founder of the Briyah Institute, a Benefit Corporation that bridges innovation, practice and purpose. Adriana serves on the board of the United Nations Association (UNA-USA) Miami Chapter, America Solidaria US, and “Conselho de Cidadãos Brasileiros na Florida”. She also serves as the Executive Director for the Brain Health Project (BHP), an initiative aimed at preventing Alzheimer’s Disease by promoting brain health and slowing cognitive decline.