Raphaël Lachiver
Producer at the School of System Change
Background
Raphaël is an enthusiastic learner passionate about sociology, regenerative design, systems change, environmental justice, futures approaches, and many related topics. He earned a Master of Sociology of Organisations from La Sorbonne, Paris, where he studied how group dynamics become human organisations in the cultural, political, and corporate field.
Raphaël started his professional journey as a service designer and a user researcher at a UX design agency in Paris. Thanks to this experience, he learned how to use his background in social sciences (sociology, anthropology) to design effective solutions that help people in their daily lives. Initially trained as a human-centred designer, Raphaël is a passionate advocate of a paradigm shift in Design from human-centred towards life-centred and regenerative design. A new paradigm that centres planet boundaries and takes into account social consequences of the world we are designing.
Alongside this professional experience, he has been an active member of the climate justice movement in Paris and London, campaigning and organising with various non-profit organisations. Very early on, Raphaël was fascinated by the power of grassroots movements and community-led initiatives to challenge and reinvent systems. Raphaël was trained in community organising and facilitation with Make Sense, and applied these skills when participating in community-led initiatives in UK and Europe. In London, he worked on the design of an educational program called the Green Influencers with the Ernest Cook Trust, helping young people in England to create socially and environmentally impactful projects in their communities. A highlight of that experience was seeing how creative and full of hope young people are for their futures.
At the School of System Change
Raphaël is producing several capacity building programmes with systems approaches such as Basecamp for Health System Transformation with the J&J Foundation, and The School of System Change in Finance with AVIVA Investors. He is passionate about convening practitioners from different parts of a system and actively supporting them to unlock power dynamics and irrigate systems change in their ecosystems. For example, Raphaël is supporting the creation of learning communities to catalyse systems change across the health and finance ecosystems.
He is also accompanying teams and organisations such as the BOSCH Foundation in Germany to transform their MEAL (monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning) through a systemic approach. He is working with the School of System Change team on its journey towards transformational governance so we can progress to organise more as a systemic and distributed network, with healthy power dynamics.
""Be vulnerable. Show your eyes, invite others to look deep; make sure there’s enough space, and try to recognize everyone’s own image. Make no decisions you don’t feel excited about. Let yourself fail. Above all, give yourself time and take the long way round. Never ignore what a tree or a body of water has to tell you. Turn in where you drawn to do so, and give yourself permission to bask in the sun. Never mind your relatives, offer support to strangers, bend down to look at trifles, duck into deserted places, don’t fall for the high drama of destiny, laugh conflict to bits. Show your true colors till you prove to be right, and the rustling of leaves turns sweet. Walk about the villages.” - Credit to Peter Handke, Walk about the Villages"
