Our Journey
This didn't start as a consulting firm. It started as a question about what organizations could become. Between us, we bring doctoral-level research and years of on-the-ground experience inside nonprofits, classrooms, boardrooms, and communities. Living Systems Consulting grew out of what we kept seeing, and what we knew could be different.
What works in a learning community works in organizations too.
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Living Systems started as a curriculum. It became something larger when we watched students take a relational, systems-based way of thinking and apply it to how they led teams, ran organizations, and built communities. The results were striking enough that we couldn't ignore the implication.
Organizations, it turns out, are living systems: relational, dynamic, and far more responsive to care than to control. Living Systems Consulting is the natural extension of that insight, bringing a living systems approach to the structure, culture, and relationships of the organizations ready for it.
We borrow the term from Maturana & Varela (1980), two Chilean biologists who studied how living things are organized, not as separate parts, but as networks working together. Think of your heart: it's not one thing operating alone, it's made up of cells, forming valves and muscle walls, working together with your blood vessels, lungs, and the rest of your organs to body to keep you alive.
We think about people and communities the same way. What if organizations and groups worked less like collections of individuals, and more like that heart, each part essential, all of it interconnected? What if we're far more connected to each other and to the earth than we've been taught to believe?
Right now our economic, political, and cultural systems are pushing us toward climate collapse. But what would it look like to build systems organized around sustaining life instead? What stories would we tell about ourselves and our place in the world?
At Living Systems Consulting, we believe the shift starts with how we see ourselves: not as isolated individuals, but as essential members of a living, interconnected world - already in relationship whether we notice or not. Just like your heart needs your whole body to function, you need, and are needed by, the communities and systems you're part of.
Q:
A:
What is a Living System?
It's a way of understanding life where every living thing, (people, plants, ecosystems, etc.), plays a role in keeping the whole alive. We breathe out what plants need, and they breathe out what we need. We're already in relationship, whether we notice it or not.
Belonging isn't something we have to invent. It's something we must recover, and living systems teach us how.
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How we orient
The Dream
Vision
Living Systems Consulting exists to revive an ancient dream: remembering ourselves as part of the ecology of living systems, members of a relational reality where caring for everyone and everything else is also in our own best interest. We believe that as we rediscover this inherent belonging — and redesign our organizations, businesses, and relationships around it — life on earth becomes something to nurture and revere, not control and exploit. The systems we depend on become more attuned, effective, and sustainable as a result. We invite you to dream with us: how might relational care and a living systems approach show up in your personal and professional world?
Praxis
Mission
Living Systems Consulting designs and facilitates processes that help you, your work, and your community remember your value, role, and potential as members of a living ecology. Through theory-based praxis and relationship building, we lift the veil on what's possible for your site-specific goals and dreams, working toward more just and abundant lifeways and work practices.
Relationality
Dignity
Emergence
Rigor
Repair
Repair
Rigor
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