From Mental Models to Embodiment - An Evolution of the Six Conditions of Systems Change Framework

Summary

A decade after co-creating the widely used Six Conditions of Systems Change, John Kania argues that its deepest condition, “mental models”, implies beliefs are formed “in disembodied ways”. Drawing on Indigenous teachers, his own healing and recent science, he concludes that when worldviews shift, “more often the body, and not the brain, is driving the bus.”

Rationale

We say dispositions aren’t “simply software in the head that we can uninstall and upgrade”. Kania, correcting his own framework, makes the same case against ‘mental models’.