Play your own game. There's the true power.
If you want to transform something, you must go beyond its boundaries. You have to work on the structure itself. This means playing your own game.
Fifteen years ago, I was part of a group that founded a school based on the ideas of Rebecca and Mauricio Wild.
That school was a failure. I aimed for a school that was socially inclusive, open to the entire community, and willing to embrace the tensions and problems we face in order to transform them. It turned out to be just another kind of elite school, accessible only to the middle class who could afford it and constrained by the beliefs of its founders.
It was a failure and a gift, presenting me with two invaluable insights. The first one: if you want to transform something, you can never do this within its boundaries. Whatever you do within a system or structure is always limited by the paradigms and beliefs that govern it. In the worst case, your effort may reinforce the dynamics that you wish to overcome.
The second insight: when conceiving an idea or a project, it is the quality of your mind and your thinking—whether it is your own or that of a group—that shapes and defines the unfolding of the idea in ways that we often do not see.
Everything we create as humans is defined by its framework—by the paradigms, beliefs, and rules it establishes. In our case, it was the concept of schooling that we couldn’t overcome: children need to be educated and evaluated from the outside. These were the rules we had to adapt to if we wanted to establish that school. No matter how great our ideas about alternative learning methods were, they were overshadowed by the existing legal system's paradigms. To transform paradigms, it isn't enough to work within the structure; you must work on the structure itself.
But most of the time, we simply accept these structures as given and fail to acknowledge two crucial things:
a) The power that exists outside the structure, in working on that structure and its rules, paradigms, and beliefs.
b) The freedom and power we truly possess. I have never experienced a situation, neither with myself nor with anyone else, where the actual freedom we had was as limited as we believed. It has always exceeded that by a factor.
This post is part of the project’25: a year dedicated to profound societal transformation. Join in and raise your ability to act with impact.
Going outside a system means playing your own game according to your own rules and not obeying the rules and the game of someone else. It means being able to shape directions instead of being shaped by them.
It demands the inner freedom to distance ourselves from the current situation, and our beliefs about what is given and what we can change. It demands the power to envision something different, to think big, to think beyond all existing ideas, and to tap into the unknown. It asks us to have the courage to step outside the societal consensus and simply try things out.
There is one challenge on this voyage, and that is us: we limit ourselves. But we should remember that whatever we aim for, the freedom and power we have are always much, much brighter than what we think we have. And what we stand to gain outshines everything.