Systems Leadership in Human Scale
Editor’s Note: My Mastery of Systems Leadership Fellowship is coming to an end. It’s been an incredible journey. As a part of the fellowship, I wrote this introspective piece on what does systems leadership mean to me. This might be the most personal thing I have published in these spaces for it bares open myself, what I do and why I do what I do. It has been my deep conviction that systems change work must address both inner and outer dimensions to create meaningful change. And hence besides regular publishing cadence that tracks how smallholding food systems are evolving, I am publishing this here with the hope that it might resonate with fellow changemaker brethren grappling with systems change.
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Systems Leadership in Human Scale
For reasons that barely made sense, signing up for Mastery of Systems Leadership coincided with the Augustan life circumstances when I turned forty. My father had passed away few days earlier. The grief was raw like an active volcano. My dad’s death rituals were coinciding with the inaugural London retreat schedule. Jung’s famous quote kept hovering my head. “Life begins when you turn 40. Until then you are doing research”
I’ll be honest. It wasn’t easy. I kept ping-ponging between dropping this outlandish idea to explore the subterranean roots of the tree of my work and trusting my gut to push my boundaries. Given the course fees, I knew that if at all I would sign up, it would have to be sponsored by the community that I serve through my systems change work. Imposter’s voice took over. Have I done enough to audaciously ask few of my community patrons to take care of the course expenses, including my travel to Australia and London to attend the in-person retreat modules?
I kept procrastinating the fundraising campaign letter. One fine day, after a beautiful Yoga practice, I was done with it. It took me five minutes to draft five emails to five patrons. The responses came swift like a rocket. Three responded with a tentative outlay within the next hour. I totaled them while counting my stars. I was all set to go.
When I signed up for the Mastery of Systems Leadership (MSL), the 2025 self had two straightforward objectives viz.,
1) Can I formally learn the language of systems change? I had been speaking them informally in my work and wanted a rigorous validation.
2)Does my agritech ecosystem engineering – an ecosystem led approach to solve the pressing problems in smallholding agriculture - thesis make sense from a formal system change lens?
On the last day of the inaugural London retreat, where I was asked to write a letter to my future self who would have completed the course, I articulated my underlying feelings more honestly.
“Dear Venky,
I am glad you chose to step out of your comfort zone and explore the limits and boundaries of being native. Can you explore what it is to be native within a global context that holds a question of systems change?
You have explored systems thinking to your heart’s content. You have experienced the withering of the boundaries of culture and got in touch with the corest essence of being human. You have also explored what it takes to explore systems thinking through food and agriculture systems.”
Today, while navigating systems change, being a native insider has become an equally comfortable inner stance as much as being an outsider who sits at the boundary of a global system. I’ve travelled a long way to dissolve every ounce of tension that once existed in the polarity of an insider native and an outsider observer.
When this inner stance shifted, it didn’t take much time to rebrand my business from an outsider-frame “Agribusiness Matters” to an insider-frame “Krishi.System”, despite many of my customers warning me that it would be a brand suicide.
It also helped that MSL was beautifully curated to look at both inner and outer dimensions as two sides of the same coin called systems change. Whether it was shifting sectors, places or capital, the underlying gestalt remained the same. Today, when I observe this mind-body envelope drafting this essay, I see that my praxis has shifted significantly.
P.R.A.X.I.S.
Derived from ancient Greek, it represents the continuous, cyclical marriage of theory and practice—where abstract ideas are tested through real-world action, and those actions then inform and refine the theory.
I’ve come to see Systems Thinking as an evolutionary instinct sitting as the feeble, but powerful voice of a dreamer quietly watching the drama beneath the incessant chatter of the judge, beckoner, victim and guardian that animate my everyday life theatre.
Just because it is an instinct doesn’t mean that it becomes second nature. Instinct needs lived experience to merit its stay inside the sinews of the mind-body envelope. It needs to be forged by the fires of real-world action.
Even though “Entrepeneur” is a terrible inner stance for systems change, entrepreneurship thankfully ensures that the contact of reality happens always at appropriate resolution levels to discover your inner gyroscope (not compass)
I am going ahead of myself. Perhaps, I need to slow down here a bit.
Why is “Entrepreneur” a bad stance for systems change? The vast, mythical conditioning the word “Entrepreneur” carries doesn’t help one bit in systems change. It might help in early days when you are deprived of kinetic energy to push the hard walls of the system. But, once you are experienced enough to see the dust it kicks up, you also start to see that the dust gets in your eye, and you’re not focusing on the core purpose of your work.
Why does gyroscope/compass distinction matter (I learned it from Venkatesh Rao) when it comes to understanding systems leadership?
A compass orients you relative to an extrinsic coordinate system (say for instance, the Greenwich meridian or any other fixed external landmarks), while a gyroscope tracks orientation intrinsically, relative to your own prior state of motion, not any external reference.
Can you trust your inner gyroscope to know who you are, where you are and whether you are part of the problem or the solution? In doing what you are doing, what are you really doing? Can you trust that feeble voice of evolutionary instinct while seeking for the direction you need to go in your systems change work?
When I started my work, I thought “Agritech Ecosystem Engineering” meant seeing the reality outside the reality distortion field of agritech founders and investors. Few years later, it evolved to navigating the contradictions between those who were wired to see the profitability of the food system as opposed to the sustainability of the system. Few years later, it evolved to navigating the contradictions between those who see it through a for-profit and not-for-profit lens.
Today, I am able to navigate through each of these polarities and place myself lightly at the centre of the storm with a playful spirit. The facilitator’s role becomes critical here in quietly, but steadily holding the container infrastructure while navigating the polarities and boundaries.
The playful spirit becomes sine qua non here as it is the opposite of a formal posture that one often encounters in systems leadership theatre.
When I was growing up, I never wanted any inch of formality in the calendar of my life. Today, I got what I wished for. Informality has become a non-negotiable factor in my systems change work. It has become my north pole barometer: The harder the systems change problem I chase, the lighter I must feel from inside while tackling them. If that’s not happening in my inner climate, surely, I must be doing something wrong.
This informal playfulness flows in not just how I situate myself, but also in everything I do.
Every Agripreneur meetup across the world I host is friends catching up in the city with no airs of founder egos. Every relationship is personal. When Agripreneur friends are unable to reach out to someone in the Agripreneur community I steward, I become the social check-in register they inquire to see if everything is okay.
Every retreat I host starts with a Kabir song, replete with indic cultural rituals and symbols. Every time I host a convening, I take great pains to ensure that every one entering the room removes the trappings of their work identities and enter the “sacred space” as a human who is willing to sit with their vulnerabilities and the double-binds (I am damned if I do, I am damned if I don’t) they are painfully sitting on.
This is also where Yoga becomes an integral component of my systems change work.
My Yoga mentor’s definition of dharma has been my personal north star in my years of practice: Dharma is any action that enlivens me, the other, and the context all at once. When you ponder over this definition, one discovers something profound. Any sufficiently advanced systems change is indistinguishable from Yoga.
This is no romantic ideal. Let’s look around and be honest. It’s an ugly chaos we have created and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures.
As vitally committed human beings concerned about the quality of life we have created for ourselves and will create for the next generations, we must penetrate to the source, the roots of chaos.
Is not the source of the collective misery of our broken food and agriculture systems that neither serves us, farmers and consumers, nor the planet the acceptance of a very narrow, superficial view of the totality? Are not the roots of our chaos in our ignorance, denial of wholeness?
The question Yoga keeps putting to me is the same one I ask in the middle of any hard systems problem. In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?