Deepen Your Systems Practice – In Community with the RE-AMP Network
Are you an impact network practitioner — a leader, catalyst, consultant, or funder — looking to deepen your capacity to help others think and act systemically? Have you also been curious to learn more about the frequently cited RE-AMP Network?
This year’s RE-AMP Systems Thinking Academy offers a rare opportunity to do both.
The Academy is designed primarily for RE-AMP members — a long-standing, multi-sector climate equity network working in the Upper Midwest. These members may not be fluent in systems language yet, but they’ve been doing system-change work for years. Many are the very kinds of people, in the kinds of networks, you serve.
This isn’t about teaching systems thinking — it’s about practicing the relational art of holding it steady when complexity gets uncomfortable. How do you help others connect the dots without losing the thread yourself? How do you notice when a group’s direction might quietly undermine their systemic goals — and find a way to name that relationally, without shutting down the field?
You’ll sit alongside RE-AMP members as they explore foundational systems thinking concepts interactively. Your role isn’t to lead, but to accompany — to support their learning while practicing your own. And yes, you’ll get an inside look at how RE-AMP thinks together, structures itself, and adapts — insights you can’t get from case studies alone.
Consider bringing a colleague or collaborator. The concepts we’ll explore are meant to be practiced relationally, and you’ll get more value from the Academy if you attend with someone you already work with. Whether it’s a co-facilitator, project partner, or team member, learning these approaches together means you can continue practicing and refining them when you return to your shared work
Because that’s often where our practice is most tested. It’s one thing to understand systems ideas in theory — it’s another to stay with them in the moment. To help others navigate complexity without losing your own footing. To be the kind of systems thinker who doesn’t just know the map, but can walk others through the terrain.
The Academy runs November 18th-20th at Loyola University Retreat and Ecology Campus (LUREC) | 2710 S Country Club Rd, Woodstock, IL 60098
Space is intentionally limited to maintain the intimate, relational learning environment that makes this work possible. Registration is first come first served.
A Field Guide for the Journey Ahead
Over the next 8 weeks, I’ll be sharing the series of articles I wrote as foundational reading for the Academy. Think of them as a coherent map for navigating complexity — whether you’re joining us for the Academy or simply deepening your own systems practice.
Welcome to the Systems Thinking Academy
This series was created to introduce the key frameworks, language, and ways of seeing that support working with complex human systems.
You don’t need to master it all.
You don’t need to read every word.
What matters most is that you have a coherent map to return to, whenever you feel lost, curious, or ready to deepen.
Why This Series Exists
Human systems — networks, organizations, movements — are not machines. They are living, dynamic, complex adaptive systems. This means that change doesn’t happen in straight lines. It happens through patterns: through the way people relate, respond, and adapt together over time.
To engage those patterns wisely, we need more than tools or techniques. We need to pay attention differently.
That’s the real heart of systems thinking — not just mastering new models, but unsettling the illusion that we’re already seeing clearly.
Even the most “smart, well-meaning” people resist complexity when it threatens their sense of competence or control. It’s not curiosity they lack — it’s where that curiosity lands.
We ask:
How can we make curiosity feel like an invitation rather than a threat?
This series aims to help answer that question — by offering concepts that ground us without reducing, and by inviting practices that build our capacity to stay present and responsive inside the messiness of real systems.
How This Series Is Structured
The eight articles build from basic context to practical application:
Articles 1–3: Understanding the Terrain
These offer core insights: Our minds form habits that shape what we see and miss. Those habits aggregate into shared paradigms that reinforce the status quo. Human systems behave as Complex Adaptive Systems — shaped by patterns of interaction, not linear plans.
Articles 4–5: How Systems Change
These bridge perception to participation: The Stacey Matrix helps us recognize what kind of complexity we’re facing. The HSD Theory of Change introduces two core meta-approaches — Adaptive Action and Pattern Logic — ways of engaging with living systems, not just thinking about them.
Articles 6–7: The Two Core Practices
Now we get practical: Adaptive Action offers a simple rhythm for pausing, noticing, interpreting, and responding in complexity. Pattern Spotting retrains our attention toward patterns, relationships, and emergence — rather than isolated data or fixed categories.
Article 8: The Underlying Dynamics
Finally, the CDE Model — Containers, Differences, and Exchanges — reveals the deep structure that shapes every complex adaptive system.
How to Use This Series
- Skim or dive deep — follow your energy.
- Pay special attention to the “Why This Matters” sections — they distill the key takeaways.
- Use the appendices if you want more background or are hungry for nuance.
Most of all, know this: you don’t have to hold it all at once. These articles are here to offer anchors, not answers.
Final Thought
This work isn’t about theory — it’s about sensemaking in motion.
It’s about noticing what we’re part of.
It’s about staying open to patterns we didn’t expect — and learning how to participate in systems change with more clarity, humility, and coherence.
Let this series be a companion.
And let the real learning begin.
Next week: Article 1 explores how our individual mental habits shape everything we see — and how systems thinking begins with unsettling the illusion that we’re already seeing clearly.