Systems Dialogues with Eruera Tarena

Eruera Tarena is Executive Director at Tokona Te Raki, Māori Futures Collective in Aotearoa, an indigenous social innovation lab housed under the mana of Ngai Tahu and based in Otautahi/Christchurch.

In this beautiful conversation we talk about how the Māori worldview is shaped by interconnection and interdependency, where natural landscapes are ancestors, about the future making space in Aotearoa, and more.

Jump to the bottom of this article for a glossary of Māori concepts used in this conversation.

Saskia

Let's get started. I'd love to hear from your perspective, what is a system and what are some metaphors that you might regularly refer to in this work?

Eru

I think when we look at our traditions in terms of Māori, the paradigm of our worldview is whakapapa, or genealogy. Our culture is based around the ability to recite your lineage. So as people, we are families, we are sub-tribes or clans, but everyone can recite their lineage and knows how we interact with each other. 

When you take that whakapapa backwards further, we can trace our descent from the gods. It's not just people that have a whakapapa or genealogy. We can trace that to our natural environment, to our landscape. And even intangible things like knowledge, like thought, have a genealogy. So when I think of a system and a Māori worldview, everything's connected and that kind of mauri, that life essence, is connected as well.

Saskia

I love what you said around raising your gaze. I think that's a really nice thing to think about. I had the experience of going down the Whanganui River earlier this month and just knowing that the Whanganui Māori had actually been able to create a legal personhood for the river, as their ancestor, gave me that real sense of interconnectedness and history and whakapapa. It was a very moving experience.

Could you tell me more about some of those metaphors that you referred to - the gods as the ancestors? Are there some metaphors that you refer to in the Māori worldview for systems? Is it kind of all interconnected?

Eru

We talk a lot around Ki Uta Ki Tai. My tribe, we're Ngāi Tahu, we're tangata whenua of Te Waipounamu, or 80% of the south island of New Zealand. We have this long skinny island with a big mountain range in the middle. And so we have in our psyche this idea of mountains to the sea, which for us is encapsulated by this idea of Ki Uta Ki Tai. 

Most of us live on the coast. We’d live there but, traditionally, we would move seasonally into the mountains. A lot of our art, our rock art, where we were teaching our young people or ancestors were passing on, that knowledge happened on those trails inland, when we go to find enlightenment on those journeys up to the mountains. And so we talk about that in terms of that idea moving upstream.

Saskia

Yeah, thanks. And that kind of reminds me of a very simple approach I think I learned on the Regenesis program, which is about how to navigate complex family relationships - how we are always navigating different people's relationships with each other.

Eru

Tribes are like that. Indigenous communities are like that. They’re not like these binary approaches where the left and the right hate each other's guts, tribes are communities and they're way more complex. You're tied to each other, you are interconnected, so you may have very different views, but you have to navigate that complexity because you're still going to be related. There's only one way you leave: in a coffin. 

And so I think understanding interdependency and navigating some of the complexities and tensions that brings is really powerful because, again, you can't have a binary or an absolute view of things. While we navigate multiple perspectives, multiple agendas and priorities, we have to find some way in which we can achieve a commonality of purpose and vision. That's really hard work, but as I said, communities are working on that all the time.

Saskia

If I asked you to bring an object or a prop to the conversation that would help describe what a system is, what comes to mind?

Eru

I think of a spider’s web, where it's all about interconnectedness.  

I'm by no means an expert in whakapapa, but that's the way in which we can order our universe, both tangible and intangible, from people to the natural landscape. And so for me that's a good metaphor in thinking about the complexity of systems and trying to understand how when something happens in one place, the impacts of that and the consequences of that can be felt in other areas and in quite unpredictable ways. So I suppose that would probably be my main thing - trying to find ways in which you can visualise interconnectedness.

Saskia

And I love the way that you were able to use something tangible like the spider web to describe whakapapa being intangible. That's beautiful.

Saskia

So, how do you understand how systems change?

Eru

I suppose it’s sometimes easier for me to think about this in terms of what doesn't work. 

I came to systems through programmatic work, spending 10-15 years working on different projects that were all really positive and meaningful and impactful. But as soon as you turn the tap off, everything stops. And when you really look at that, you see we're not really manifesting changing the conditions. We are helping people to survive conditions rather than changing the conditions themselves.

So despite the seduction of a silver bullet, the desire to have that one solution that will rule them all, in terms of that deep sustainable scalable change, that's never worked. 

And so we talk about weaving as a way of thinking about the layers of change. We talk about kawa, which is kind of your foundational principles, your mindset, your ideas, your beliefs, your values. Tikanga is the processes, the strategies, the structures, the systems within. Kawa is kind of a societal level, what's that big societal narrative? What are the institutional strategies and systems and structures? Ritenga is the human behaviours and practice and then putunga, visible outcomes you can see in the real world. We ask, what are the real world outcomes? 

And so we try to think about it like a chain where, particularly in our context when we have a history of racist ideas, racist policies and racist practices that created racial inequities, how do we work our way backwards to the source and understand that there are several threads to this: there's data, there's practice and training, there's systems and structures and flows of money, and then there's just big ideas.

When we try to understand our current state, how do we unweave everything? When we look at things like racial inequities, it's always like ‘oopsadaisies, somehow our indigenous population are at the top of every bad statistic and the bottom of every good one’. How do we unpick the cause of that? What are the ideas, policies and practices that created those outcomes? 

And again, you can have people that can have good intent, but we'll still kind of have a racist idea that Māori are inferior, Māori aren't capable of leading a solution for themselves. And so we have to understand and unweave those bad ideas, bad policies and bad practices in order for us to create new ideas, new policies, new practices, and then weave those together so that they are bound nice and tight.

Saskia 

You also made me think about the dominant mindset - having this very linear approach to time and very much wanting to look forward rather than going back to the origins of that weaving.

Saskia 

Next question - do you have a definition that you use for systems change? 

Eru

I think we need to get a lot better at communicating the need for more systemic approaches in really simple ways. So yeah, we've talked about systems change, social innovation, collective impact... ideas that really come off as gobbledygook to most of our community. So we just use the term future making and Māori future making as ultimately that's what we're trying to do.

We are trying to reclaim our ability to be self-determining, to determine our own future and to choose our own path. And again, we have to acknowledge that requires systemic shifts and transformational shifts. 

That's where we see that the fusion of complexity, systems thinking innovation and our own cultural worldviews is where we can achieve the best chances at creating our own future. And so as I said, we largely try to talk with that as future making. We have lots of youth that we employ and we train in these types of techniques and they refer to themselves as future makers. I think that makes a lot more sense, even though it can sound a bit airy-fairy, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than "systemic change" or "social entrepreneur", "intrapreneurial innovator" in a lot of our communities. So trying to keep it simple.

Saskia

That, and that reminds me of what I saw on your website - Te Korekoreka being a way to reconnect and reclaim the future making mindset of our ancestors. 

So we've talked a little bit about lineages into this practice. What are your lineages in systems change? What are the divergent and different histories of systemic practice?

Eru

How did I get into this stuff? Probably through organisational design, co-design, Stanford dSchool and I somehow bumped into things like collective impact, systems practice, social labs. 

We actually did a map of this once - how we got into this via different frameworks - it started getting a little bit too much for my brain to compute! We sort of said, well, geez, how about we just scrap this and think about our own approach. And then we mapped our own lineage. 

When we think about examples of systems change, I think of the treaty settlement. For every dollar of land we lost, we got less than one cent back. It wasn’t insignificant, we got $170 million. That settlement was transformational and it affected more than just systems change.

It totally changed the way our society viewed us as a collective. It changed from no one having a concept of a tribe as a political entity or an organisational entity. They were just those sort of brown people you ignored in that community, you marginalised. 

It shifted from them becoming a corporate identity, which has all sorts of complications in our communities, but it created a centralised political voice that could take people to court, that could build a collective economic base. And so when you look at those things, we have elders that really changed the fortunes and destiny of our people. 

That was never viewed through the lens of systems change. That was just them settling our land claim, re-establishing our face in the landscape. And so I think really, again, coming back to that, the further back we look, the more examples we can see of those game-changers, those ancestors, great grandparents that really changed the destiny of our people.

How do we reclaim that type of leadership and spread it? How do we grow that times a thousand? Because it's that when we look at these big global challenges that both our tribe and our nation and our planet are facing, we need people that are wired to tackle complexity and to tackle these big grand challenges that are becoming more and more interconnected. And at the pace of that change is exponential as well. 

I always say to our young people: problem solving is a growth industry and if there's one thing we know is that we are going to need our youth to be really good at collaborative problem solving, to be able to make sense of complexity and to identify the changes that are going to make the biggest difference.

Saskia

I love that. Yeah, problem solving is a growth industry is a really good way of putting it.

We talked a little bit about them. What are the best examples or stories you have of systemic transformation?

Eru

We've tried to map some of them - like our tribal land claim, which was a major systemic shift. Sometimes we have quite interesting ones like corporal punishment. Our teachers used to hit children, the thought of teachers being able to strap and discipline children today is just abhorrent, but it was just a societal norm. There was a prime minister who said, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. 

We've tried to understand when you get those shifts that kind of seem quite subtle, what is the whakapapa, the genealogy, how did that come about? Because it looked like it was just one person - that prime minister - who created an edict and now suddenly everything has shifted. It’s the same with wearing seat belts, we've tried to look at examples of that and understand, and in those cases where it looks really simple when you look at the detail of it, there's a whole bunch of things going on - the mechanics of policy, laws, funding, organisational shifts, social norms.

Saskia

And how are you seeking transformation or creating transformation?

Eru

I'd say half of our work is focused around equity for Māori. And the way I think about that is that it’s about removing barriers and, where possible, boosting protective factors. So that's our external focus at a societal level - trying to identify those big changes that will make the biggest difference. 

The other half of our work is tribal stuff, and that's really probably my passion, though I’m passionate about both. That's really about that future making space. How do we build a clear, coherent, shared vision of the future and the capabilities within our own communities to make that happen? The two are different but they go hand in hand. And as I say, one is more around equity, which is really important for a just society. 

Saskia

My last question seems really obvious, but I'm going to ask it anyway. You're working on systemic transformation. How is your practice itself systemic?

Eru

It's kind of like Neo in the Matrix, when he gets the red pill or the blue pill. Once you start to use systems thinking, you can't go back. You're constantly looking at that kind of layering. You're constantly trying to understand, well, what's the root cause of this? What are the mindsets, the structures, the practices, the outcomes? What are the factors that are holding a problem in place, and what are the conditions I would need to create in order to loosen all of that stuff up to free things up for change to occur? 

An interesting part of our mahi is that when you confuse innovation with invention, you just end up adding more things on top of what people are already doing.

So I suppose one of the big shifts for me, and one of the things I always look out for, is how do we navigate loss and how do we identify, well, what are the things we need to let go of? In order for new to emerge, some things need to die.