All change starts with us; even that one little step has the power to create a profound transformation to the larger system. This is just one of the many pieces of wisdom that the Queen of Systems Thinking, Darcy Winslow, imparts to us in this episode. As the Founding President (2010-2020) and co-founder of the Academy for Systems Change, Darcy shares the insights she gained from her extensive corporate career about systems change and systems thinking. She delves into the critical role of building bridges in leadership and, drawing from her experiences at Nike, reveals how collaboration with competitors became a breakthrough in addressing health issues for manufacturing workers. Uncover the power of seemingly insignificant shifts in habit, the impact of having clarity, and the importance of listening to the quiet voice amidst the noise. Don’t miss the wisdom shared today, keeping in mind what matters most in this time we are living in.
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The Impact Of Systems Thinking For A Better Future With Darcy Winslow
With us, we have Darcy Winslow, who is the president and the co-founder of the Academy for Systems Change, as well as the founder of the Magnolia Moonshot 2030. Darcy also worked at Nike for 21 years and held several senior management positions, most notably starting the sustainable business strategies. In 1999, global director for research, design and development, general manager, VP for Nike’s Global Women’s Footwear, Apparel, and equipment division, and senior advisor to the Nike Foundation. Darcy’s a sports junkie and never turns down an invitation to participate in any outdoor sports. Welcome, Darcy.
Being A Bridge Builder Today
Darcy, so great to have you with us. I think of you as the queen of systems thinking and more, but that’s what I like to think. I want to start with a question in general about what matters and what is it at this time that we’re living. You’ve had so many experiences in corporate world, leadership, and working with leaders. From your perspective, what is it that matters the most in this time now as we think about leadership?
I’ve been thinking a lot about how leaders build bridges. I think achieving peace in the world is top of mind for me. When the Magnolia Moonshot first came together, we talked about the importance of building bridges between the ecological divide, the socioeconomic divide, and the spiritual divide, and how important those three things are, and how we can connect these three divides. I think peace sits in the center of all three of those.
If you think about the ecological divide and the impacts of climate change, that is causing wars, that is causing stress, that is causing migration, everything. If you look at the socioeconomic divide, same thing, the stress, the wars, and then the spiritual divide. We could go in so many different directions there. I think being able to see things systemically is important so that you can find the greatest points of leverage. I think being a bridge builder or learning to be a bridge builder is so important right now.
Darcy, can you give us an anecdotal example of a time when someone has built a bridge like you’re talking about?
I can go to some of my work at Nike. This is an odd bridge, but it was a breakthrough for us at Nike. If you can imagine Nike’s slightly competitive from a cultural perspective and from a business perspective. In the early days when I started building our sustainability platform, in this case in the footwear business, one of the innovations that we worked on for four years was to address health issues for manufacturing workers in the factories. We spent a lot of time and a lot of money coming up with this new solvent. We found that by employing this new technology did not solve the problem because our competitors were in the same manufacturing facilities.
The bridge we had to build, especially with the executive team was to collaborate with the enemy, so to speak. We had to share that technology that we had invested in 100% with all of our competitors to solve the problem. That’s one simple example of building a bridge and where competitors can work together in a pre-competitive space to solve these very large complex problems that have benefits in many different ways. That was a real lesson to me, and that was the first of many that came later.
That is such an excellent example. It entails having a vision outside of the immediate competitive drive.
I was thinking exactly that because how did that come to be? How was that put in place to have that vision and perspective? I wonder what was the process to come to that decision.
It was very personal. At that time, I was running advanced research and development having come out of product development. I had my sixth miscarriage, so that’s a whole story. I was in one of our factories in Bangkok, Thailand in the middle of the summer, and it was about 110 degrees outside, very hot. If you can imagine a footwear factory, they employ upwards of 50,000 to 60,000 people and around 80% are women.
I was walking one of the lines, and there was this woman working with volatile organic compounds. It’s basically what sticks the different parts of the shoes together. It’s very toxic and it has a very strong smell. One of the women working at that part of the line was visibly pregnant. I asked through an interpreter, “Can you ask her if the smell bothers her?” She said, “Only on Sunday.” That was the day that she didn’t work and she would get headaches. I went back to world headquarters and talked with our head chemist and shared this story, and he began the process of working on a water-based compound to replace the volatile organic compounds. That’s how it started from a very personal experience from my end.
It’s also putting compassion first. I feel putting humans first. Everything aligns around that. The competition sets aside and there’s a different trajectory at that point.
In systems, we say, “All change starts with self.” Before we can address the larger system, the team, the organization, it has to start with us.
Systems Thinking
Building on the systems piece and you’ve been doing a lot of work with systems thinking. You’re the co-founder of the Academy for Systems Change. Can you speak a little more to your experience with systems and the importance on leadership?
I’ll go back to my educational background. I studied Exercise Physiology, Kinesiology, and Biomechanics. If you think about the body, the body is a classic example of a complex system, but I didn’t have that language. It was when I got into my work in sustainability. That’s when I met Peter Senge and we started the sustainability consortium, which was part of the Society for Organizational Learning. It was in 1999 when at that time I was running our global research design development, which included the advanced innovation. I had been learning and working to better understand, what does this concept of sustainability mean within the corporate context?
In 1999, I pulled together about 400 of our footwear leaders to Portland and laid out the goals that I had set for Nike’s footwear business, 2020 goals. One of the first things we did was we brought in a couple of consultants who could help us see the system because you can’t change a system until you can see it. We drew, in this case, a rather simple map of the system that included all the upstream and downstream partners, and then the impact that we had on the natural world.
We overlaid the goals to understand where we had control in the system, where we had influence in the system, and where we had impact. By making that visible and by bringing in all these different voices, we had a much better idea of, “Where do we start? Where’s the leverage?” You have to make that visible. For me, that was probably the most profound experience of learning and understanding the value of bringing in all the various voices to be able to make that system visible.
I wonder if you could share a story perhaps. I know you’ve had multiple experiences with systems thinking, so you started at your company. I also know you’ve worked with a lot of other fellows and leaders from around the world where they used approaches to systems thinking and transformed communities. I wonder if you have a story you can share.
The first one that comes to mind is more local. After I left Nike, I started my own consulting business Designs for a Sustainable World. I worked with the county leaders of the county that I live in Multnomah County and it encompasses eight cities. One of the exercises that I put the leaders through was, I split them into 2 groups, about 20 in each group. I said, “Don’t collaborate, don’t talk to each other, but map your system.” I had told them about the basics of mapping and the value. I gave them one month each group to map the system as they saw it using all the tools and practices. We brought them back together and they each presented their system. To this day, it was the most amazing confluence of thinking.
One group had taken a more insular look at how their different departments operated together as a system. The second group took a macro view and mapped how Noma County drew on resources from around the world. By overlaying those two, they had the most amazing view of how their ecosystem operated. Without any guidance other than, “Here are the tools, here are the practices, here are the approaches,” they came together and created this beautiful map of their system.
That is such a great example. It’s making me think about, I don’t know if you remember, about 15, 18 years ago, I worked with someone. There was a video that floated around at that time called the Story of Stuff.
Yeah, sure.
It did exactly that. It mapped the movement of a thing from its manufacturer all the way to trash heap end point. This person was an amazing person, and she came to me to be coached because she had seen that someone had sent it to her at work. She worked at a huge hospital and someone had sent it to her. She watched it in her break. She was so moved by it. She went home. On her way home, bought a ton of trash bags, told her family, “Kids, everything is going. We’re no longer using chemicals, we’re no longer doing this.” Cleaned out everything in the house. She came to me for coaching because she said, “I can’t even continue the work that I’m doing, so I need to conceive of my next chapter of work.” That was so profound, because she said, “I just never saw it before that.”
One of the other things I’ve learned about how you transform systems is often we look for that one big lever to pull thinking that’s going to change everything. One of the wonderful systems leaders that I met over the years, she runs an organization called Broca. She would do these peace circles with members of the community from people who were in gangs to policemen. She coined this phrase that has always stuck with me. She said, “It’s the seemingly insignificant shifts in habit that begin to transform a system.”
I learned the power of that in 2006, I had the opportunity to be part of a group of 120 people who came together in Vancouver, British Columbia. They chose 60 from the private sector and 60 from the public sector. The three days we were together, we had one full day with the Dalai Lama. The day before we were to spend the day with him in conversation in dialogue, they said, one hour of that day, we will choose twelve people to be in the inner circle with the Dalai Lama.
Most of us had never met each other. We looked around and we were like, “How are we going to choose the twelve?” One of the men said, “Look around, there’s only twelve women.” The twelve of us got to sit in circle with the Dalai Lama and ask him questions. One of the questions he answered, and he tells stories so beautifully, and you never quite know what the answer is going to be. He gets to the end of this one answer, and he goes, “If one person smiles to another person, it makes a difference. It may be small, but it makes a difference. However, if a million people smile to a million other people, it makes a big difference.”
We employed this at Nike, the power of one. The idea was we had four product creation seasons every year. We identified one change that everybody could make in the products that they were creating. Nike creates a lot of products, 500,000 unique styles every year. If every product team and every product employed that one thing, it would make a big difference. We would then build on that season after season. “That was the power of one, season one. Power of one, season two.” These small ships in habit, so to speak, they do add up.
That takes a lot of paying attention, self-observation, and reflection. I know you’ve had your own practices with that and brought them to the organizations. Can you talk a little bit more that and things that you do to continue to pay attention and be present?
Another story. The year after I left Nike, I was invited by the CEO of British Petroleum’s Alternative Energy Division, Vivian Cox, to go to the Antarctic on a climate expedition. Originally, she was going to invite leaders from the energy industry. Peter Senge was asked to come down to be the leadership expert. I was invited to be the sustainability expert.
Long story short, we decided, “Why not invite emerging leaders?” We put out a competition to universities around the world, and we chose 50 graduate and PhD students who were studying some aspect of climate. It was an amazing experience. Robert Swan, who runs the organization 2041, he’s the only person on earth to have walked both the North and South Pole unaided. He is all about the preservation of the Antarctic. No mining drilling in perpetuity. He said, “By virtue of being here in the Antarctic, you now have a responsibility. That is to go back and share your experience with others.”
I put together a slideshow and invited about 50 friends and family and told the story and shared stories from that. At the end, it was dead silence. I thought I’ve put them to sleep. A woman then raised her hand, she said, “What can I do to make a difference?” I thought about that, and what I ended up doing was on the back of my business card, I put, “Here are the ten things you can do.” I gave them the website and the resources. It was little things, “Do your carbon footprint. Do your water footprint. Take alternative transportation.”
It was these little things and they build on each other, but people are often overwhelmed by the complexity and the magnitude of what we face, if we take climate as one example. Helping people understand, once you know, you can’t unknow. If you can help people take that first step, in my experience, they become curious. “If I can do that, what else can I do?” The lesson there is don’t overwhelm. Help people step into broadening their understanding and their awareness of the impact that they have on all the systems that they rely on to thrive.
What’s so interesting about that is one person can make a huge difference and getting the support of larger systems to aid and abet that change. I have a friend who was tasked with, he’s in Scotland, making his region 85% involved in recycling. At that time, they were something like 8%. He started this massive campaign to get people to recycle their glass, their plastic, etc. People started to come into doing that more frequently, and then they realized there was a major challenge, which is the government was picking up the regular trash two times a week and the recycling trash one time a week. The government had to flip that, and that made a massive change. It made it easier to adopt that change they were asking them to do.
That’s right. That reminds me of another story. The last year I was at Nike, the janitorial services came up with this idea. If you can imagine Nike’s campus at that time, I think we had about 2.5 million square feet of offices in many different buildings. They used the building that I was in as the trial for this. What they did was they took away all janitorial services at night. They didn’t come into your cubicle or your office and empty your trash. You had to manage everything on your own. At the same time, they set up recycling centers, composting centers, and everything you would need. It was very handy. They were everywhere, so you didn’t have to walk across campus to do it.
They announced that this was what was going to happen. Everybody had to manage their own waste. Two weeks into it, they started getting calls, “I’ve got fruit flies in my office.” “What are you going to do about that?” It started to change people’s purchasing habits and what they ate. That had a ripple effect to their family, to their communities, and to their schools. It also saved an incredible amount of money. It’s these small things and it teaches people that maybe there is a different way to live life.
Making The System Visible
Try something different. Sometimes it takes, as you said, that one little step. Sometimes you need to make it visible, like your story in the local governments. I would love to come back there for a minute, but I was curious from that practice of helping this organization to see and make the system visible whether there was anything that they did differently, a tiny thing.
I wish I could answer that, but I can say this. One of the other efforts that I was part of at that time was founding board member for an organization that was called POSI, Portland, Oregon Sustainability Institute. We were housed within Loma County. We had three mandates that we were going after. One was the green print, so how to make Portland reliant on green energy solely. This was an effort that was being implemented in eight cities around the country. Portland was one of that, and all of Multnomah County departments had to be part of that.
The second was, there was this vision to build the most sustainable building in the world. That never happened for a lot of different reasons. The third one, this is probably one that impacted the different departments at Multnomah County, the most. It was this notion of eco-districts. How to create 20-minute walking districts where you had all the services that you need within walking distance. That became a huge success.
We would have conferences every year invite in cities from around the world to share their best practices. POSI ended up becoming EcoDistricts.org. What we learned from cities Stockholm, it was the biggest learning community around implementing more sustainable policies and practices community-wide. They were connected, but I can’t answer specifically the question, what changes Multnomah County leaders did.
Yeah, I understand. That’s a good example. Bonnie, I think I’m seeing you wanting to ask something.
Sacred Passages
I want to talk about, for a moment, what we were chatting about before we started to record is this practice that you have of going out into nature and the importance of having a nature practice to understand these things and to develop oneself.
Yes, they’re called sacred passages. How I got involved in these in 2005, Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Betty Sue Flowers, and Joe Jaworski wrote a book called Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Peter had interviewed me for a small piece of that and he sent me an advanced copy. I’m reading this in November of 2005. It’s emblazoned in my brain.
I read about Joe Jaworski’s experience of doing a sacred passage with this guy named John Milton with The Way of Nature. I was fascinated. It was a point in my career where I was ready to make a change. I called Peter and I said, “How do I get ahold of this John guy?” Three months later, I found myself on a 12-day sacred passage in Baja, California, just outside of Toto Santos. It became the first of many that I’ve done. It’s a 12-day reconnection to the natural world using practices. Different types of meditation, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, but deeply connecting to the natural world.
Working with John, he would share these practices with us for the first 3 days, and then he put us out on solo for 7 days in nature. In this case, I was on this small little isolated beach on the Pacific Ocean, just south of Toto Santos. During that seven days, I was sitting with the question, “What’s next? What is my path? What is my journey?”
At that time, I had, for two years, worked to redesign how Nike’s women’s footwear apparel equipment business operated. It was very successful. I realized, “Is this what I want to continue doing? Where is the next billion dollars in sales coming from?” I realized I didn’t care. I went on this sacred passage. During the seven days that you’re on solo, he encourages you to not take distractions, books, music, or journals. He even recommends that you fast. It’s this whole cleansing process.
What it revealed to me was how much noise there is in the world and also attachments. I’ll give you an example. When you get attached to something, you block out so many other things. In this case, it’s very simple, but it was a profound lesson. I chose the Baja location because in February is when the whales come through, and I have a very deep connection to whales and dolphins. As I was preparing to go out on solo, I thought I’m going to spend seven days with whales coming through.
I hike in three miles and find my spot. You have a check-in partner, but you never see the check-in partner. It’s a whole process. The first day, I get set up, do my practices, and start looking for whales. There were no whales. Second day, there were no whales. Third day, there were no whales. I remember going into my tent that night thinking, “I’ll bet everyone else is seeing whales and I’m not seeing any.” I then thought, “Let go of that. What else am I missing in this incredible experience?” That is one of the best gifts I’ve ever given myself. I woke up the next morning, crawled out of my tent, and there were whales everywhere. It was that lesson in attachment. Becoming aware of what you’re attached to.
I’ll also share one other. It was a life-changing experience. On day five, I remember having this absolute clarity and calmness about me and it came to me, it’s time for me to get back on my path and my work and sustainability. I listened to that. After the twelve days was over, I went back to Nike and I walked into the president’s office and I said, “It’s time for somebody else to run the women’s business. I need to get back on this path.” It took two and a half years to leave Nike, but the message was so clear once the noise of the day-to-day world cleared. I’ve been on that path ever since. That was 2006.
The message becomes clear once the noise of the day-to-day world is cleared.
Darcy, I want to very quickly ask you, when you say that it was so very clear once the noise was not there, how did the information come to you?
It was almost like a voice. I know exactly where I was sitting. Not to be overly dramatic, but it was like everything else disappeared around me. All that was there was the ocean right in front of me, the sand beneath me, and the rocks behind me. Everything cleared, and it was like, this is your path.
That was it.
That was it. It was that simple. I could have ignored it, but I chose to follow it. It wasn’t a simple path.
That’s powerful.
That is the second step. The first step is to receive it, but then the second so critical is to do it.
Do it.
Just do it.
That’s a great closing, Darcy. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful to receive your wisdom. I have some things that are at least bubbling for me in the little steps of doing, so thank you.
Thank you, Ina. Thank you, Bonnie.
Thank you, Darcy.
Important Links
- Darcy Winslow
- Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future
- MM2030.org/darcywinslow
- LinkedIn.com/in/DarcyWinslow/
About Darcy Winslow
Darcy Winslow is the Founding President (2010-2020) and co-founder of the Academy for Systems Change.
Darcy also founded the recently launched Magnolia Moonshot 2030 (MM2030), a new narrative for women’s leadership, creating the conditions to activate our collective power to address the greatest challenges we face today. By convening networks of women leaders urgently addressing the climate crisis, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, deep equity, conscious leadership and the divine feminine, MM2030 amplifies our collective ability for positive impact.
Darcy worked at Nike, Inc. for 21 years. She led large scale systems change efforts within Nike, and held several senior management positions, most notably starting the Sustainable Business Strategies in 1999, Global Director for Research Design and Development, General Manager/VP for Nike’s Global Women’s Footwear, Apparel and Equipment division, and Senior Advisor to the Nike Foundation.
Darcy participates as a Board Member for The Carbon Underground, The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, and Regenerative Earth. She is an avid athlete and draws inspiration from her time in nature.