Jose Antonio Gordillo Martorell is the founder of Cultural Inquiry, and Catalyst from the Catalyst Lab cohort 2023–2024. With this blog post, he shares his personal experiences that have brought him to where he is now, and how the Catalyst Lab has empowered his personal growth along his journey towards change.

Funders typically go through a cyclical process when fulfilling their purpose. They strategise and make key decisions about what should be funded and how, to what end. Then, those who choose to be transparent communicate about this strategy and the process that enables it, for example with a call for applications or a page on their website explaining their funding approach and who is eligible…

More and more people agree that we need to work towards systemic change. But how can we define it, and where to begin? Systemic change can be understood as a change in how a system operates from the inside out. Besides deep shifts in the underlying paradigm(s), this includes changes in the Rules, Roles, Relationships and Resources that govern a given system (USAID, 2016).

I like to start with a story that impressed me when hearing it the first time, and I am still inspired when re-watching the video footage. It gave me a metaphor and scientific “evidence” for how subtleties can have huge and unpredictable ripple effects:

Systemic thinking is “like a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behaviour of systems” (see more here: Fifth Discipline Fieldbook). With this approach it is possible to get away from the - often only short-term effective - treatment of symptoms and to concentrate on the deeper causes, which are mostly inherent to a system (see also the chapter on Root Causes and the Iceberg Model).

Along my participation in the Catalyst Lab, I have experienced an inner shift in the past months. The Catalyst Lab journey has provided me with valuable insights, a new understanding of my role in my system and deep connections with the most inspiring people. In one of the last modules one of the Catalysts mirrored back to me how he perceived me at the start of the journey and now. It resonated a lot and his correct assumption that I became more open towards other views and in some way more vulnerable allowed me to get into action and activate my ecosystem.

• a laboratory: a container of social experiments with intensive, experimental interventions

• a strategy for addressing complex ground-breaking social challenges on a systemic level.

• a space for multi-disciplinary collaboration, bringing together people from across the system aimed at key leverage points

• Social Labs consist of a team, a process and space(s) supporting social innovation and experimentation.

This blog is the first out of a series of my own journey into the 2nd cycle of the Catalyst Lab. This first part talks about learning how to listen to the echoes of the future through a collective network. It gives emphasis on the first step that preludes crystalizing a project - a step that is often overseen by society and the one that seems to be a must into real systemic change.

This model proposes a frame to think about the inner and outer work needed for impact. It is intended to make explicit what awareness-based systemic change takes and to support in creating as well as maintaining alignment and coherence across levels as we do this Work.

Social Innovation Labs are an emergent framework practiced by different types of organizations that includes governamental, non-profit, for-profit and a mix of them all. The key aspects of what constitute labs and the methodologies used by them can be a powerful framework for those seeking social innovation.

Catalysing systemic change around a particular issue or topic is complex work, a match for the system you’re addressing and activating. There has been some degree of codification, theory and study around which approaches may help us do so. One of the approaches that has gained traction over the past years is the Lab approach, which in this context means bringing together a variety of stakeholders to co-create prototype solutions to complex challenges.

Instead of fighting the symptoms and clinging to old systems that don’t work anyways, let’s use this time to reflect and address the root causes to shape the Switzerland we want to live in. Staying in a state of busyness and jumping to (re)action may be comforting but if that’s what we focus on, we will never be addressing what got us into this situation in the first place. We are kicking off a series of blog posts as exploration around what these times are calling us to be and do

The context of systemic change, societal renewal and its interconnected relationship to personal inner development is highly complex. In order to lead that change, we need robust articulation and depiction of the multilayered systemic challenges and possible pathways to solutions.