The System is Us: From Blame to Collective Responsibility

An interview with Strategic Advisor and Chief Weaver Mila Aliana

For our ConsciousU newsletter, we conduct a monthly interview. This is an excerpt, you can watch the complete interview with Mila Aliana here (60 mins). To access all interviews with change makers at the intersection of inner work and collective action, join our free Conscious Tribes Community!

Instead of polarising and looking at who’s right or who’s wrong, we need to adopt a wider lens and become aware of the different factors that allow harmful patterns and behaviour to continue.

**Mila Aliana** is a catalyst for systemic change, operating at the intersection of ancient wisdom and contemporary organizational transformation. Born in Indonesia and raised across multiple continents, her nomadic upbringing instilled in her a bias towards chaos and uncertainty, drawing her to uncharted initiatives and regenerative practices.

Mila serves as Chief Weaver for *IEEE Planet Positive 2030 and is a member of various boards, amongst them the [Inner Development Goals Foundation](https://innerdevelopmentgoals.org/). She has worked with the Global Circle of Indigenous Elders*, who focus on regenerative practitioners, activists, and Indigenous communities to integrate living systems wisdom into modern contexts.

Mila’s approach, which she calls ‘systems sensing,’ focuses on perceiving invisible patterns and dynamics within organizations and communities, often missed by conventional analysis.

It’s a time of multiple crises and challenges on a large scale, and it feels to me like we’re in desperate need of new forms of leadership, especially from women. What are your ideas regarding necessary change?

I would call a lot of what we are witnessing today symptoms of underlying patterns. To look at who’s to blame is a kind of distraction because everything is co-created by everyone. Even underneath patriarchy there are deeper patterns and if we look at those over a long period, we reach deeper questions: What kind of system rewards domination? Why do some people seek power over others in the first place? How do we all together create cultures that allow for power to be extracted rather than shared?

The Epstein case, for example, is a mirror being held up to the system that we’ve all been living inside. This particular pattern of behaviour — power over, extraction, possession — is not really a personality defect but an inherited operating logic of an entire system.

The visible conflict between men and women, between victims and perpetrators, is real. But if we stop there, we perpetuate the same highly polarising narrative.

I invite all of us to look into a pattern that allows for agency and accountability for everyone instead of continuing with this living system that’s been co-created from generation to generation, often unexamined or unquestioned. I often ask, “where do you yourself use power over — over your own body, over your children, over your team, over the land?” It’s not about creating guilt but rather helping to recognise that these patterns live in all of us — from very small to very large scale.

Can you give further examples of these patterns?

Where is the concentration of decision power right now? It’s small groups making decisions, even if they are affecting others. We can see this across the world, including in our own families. There’s also silence around power — people hesitate to challenge authority.

How does status determine whose voice matters? If it’s only a small bunch of individuals, then that’s a pattern: which perspective are we putting to the top rather than other voices that also matter? We need to understand why, if a junior person might suggest something, it’s ignored, but suggested by someone at senior level, it carries more weight.

Another pattern is lack of psychological safety — which is not about the other person making me feel safe. It’s about both of us creating the dynamics of our interaction. And there’s also the information aspect — if information only flows to the ones in authority and doesn’t go downward, it becomes a tool of power.

All the patterns are interdependent with other patterns. We really need to look at the conditions that shape and influence how people behave and how a system responds, and to start small experiments to have agency and shape behaviours that are different from the mainstream. Instead, we are often stuck in a blaming culture.

How do we as women also contribute to this power-over dynamic?

As a non-white, small woman, entering senior leadership spaces with mostly men is very painful because you really feel the lack of power. It’s common to accommodate by being the alpha female. I’ve seen this with other women as well as with myself. We’re all bringing the same system back into itself — the dominance, the competition, and the control — in order to survive.

I watched women, including myself, who had fought hard to be at the table. When they finally secured their seat, they became what the table demanded, shedding all their softness, relational intelligence, and capacity for complexity and nurturing — which are seen as signs of weakness. This led to them behaving even harder than any man, and ruthlessly toward other women because they have to prove themselves much more than the men at the table.

What I’ve learned is that one way to shift the conversation is by listening to my body and coming back to being true to myself. When I stayed authentic to my own inner power — and not aligned to the narrative that the table quietly required of me — people were able to see that we’ve actually been co-creating the same dynamics over and over again, without examining the underlying patterns. It’s useful to name tension in a room when you’re starting to notice it — without the need to fix it or apologise for who you are.

Narratives such as “I’m too much” or “I’m not good enough” exist as internalised voices in women and men across the world — in different forms, but similar. And they keep reproducing until we do the inner work to make them visible and understand what the conditions are that allow us to shift consciously to a different behaviour. When I become mindful and learn to trust my inner compass, I can lead from a very different place.

What does that inner work look like?

When we can see the patterns in ourselves, we stop needing a villain or other projection to carry the blame. Once we understand the hidden system we’re operating in, there’s freedom of choice and response-ability — as an individual and as a collective — to act and develop differently.

What I’ve realised over time is that any triggers from outside are truly a reflection of what I have not yet worked through inside myself — my own personal bias, driven by fear, insecurity, or a need to perform. Those patterns also show up in how we are interacting at organisational and societal level. It’s about recognising all of the inner, often unconscious, programming that’s running our day-to-day behaviours.

Consistently receiving feedback as a leader is often uncomfortable. But I realised that every feedback holds a grain of truth and allows me to step back, reflect, and be very honest with myself. Now, when I get triggered, I first focus on self-regulation because my amygdala is going crazy. But after a moment of pause, I ask myself, “what is that trigger trying to tell me?” This gives me much relief because it allows me to look at and be accountable for the pattern in which I co-create the dynamics. It’s not about rejecting it but embracing it and becoming clear about in which context showing up this way might be useful and where not.

For example, I’m very familiar with my two polarities in the tension between being soft and strong. And I learned, through mistakes, that it’s not about choosing one side over the other — I need both, depending on the context, and they also inform each other. How do I allow my softness to listen deeply and stay connected? And how can I access my assertiveness to create clarity, speak truth, and set boundaries? Good leadership requires groundedness, assertiveness, and compassion. It’s about navigating, like dancing with whatever context is coming at you, and deciding how you want to show up.

It took me a long time to really integrate this. Neuroscience teaches us that what was once wired won’t simply disappear. You have to actively wire new connections into your system which requires not only motivation but a whole community of people who support each other. I had people help me by acting really openly as my mirrors — which was very painful at times. Eventually, I realised that the softness isn’t weakness, it basically is flexibility, compassion, empathy. And the assertiveness isn’t really hardness, it’s love that refuses to look away from truth.

Can you talk a bit more about the role of communities?

New neural pathways don’t form just through individual self-development. You need a whole community to help you reintegrate and establish those patterns as dominant. So, as a leader, it’s about understanding which conditions are needed to enable certain behaviours and build an environment to do things differently.

A very simple but powerful understanding that many Indigenous cultures share is: my wellbeing is tied to yours. We are all interdependent, everything matters. And this is not just some philosophical statement, but it’s a cellular, generational, deep understanding. My actual wellbeing really is tied not only to yours, but to the whole community that we sit in.

This is often expressed in the way decisions are made collectively which impact not only other humans, but also the natural world and past and future generations. There’s no illusion of separation — which I see as the root cause of many power-related problems. In order for you to be successful, your whole ecosystem and its nested ecosystems need to be successful because they are interdependent and reflect each other. Many Indigenous societies don’t celebrate individual achievements, but rather ask, “how does this serve the collective? How does it impact nature, future generations, and society at this moment?”

The principle is not what is best for the most powerful or the most vocal, but what maintains the whole web of life. A community that refuses to allow certain behaviours to continue because they don’t serve the greater good can have a significant impact.

There are many different rituals for this across Indigenous cultures, but fundamentally the central question is, “which behaviour currently doesn’t serve life in our community?” During this process, the individual is never named — even if they harmed or killed. And then everyone is invited to reflect on their own behaviour. That simple shift from blaming others to reflecting on one’s own role and accountability allows for a completely different quality of conversation.

What would you recommend as a first step when it comes to changing patterns?

Instead of polarising and looking at who’s right or who’s wrong, we need to adopt a wider lens and become aware of the different factors that allow harmful patterns and behaviour to continue. We need a form of accountability that brings the whole community on board — so that we, as a collective that co-created this dynamic, start acting differently.

Some specific questions to consider are:

• How do you create spaces where people across all levels and contexts can have their voices heard?
• What does distributed leadership look like in an embodied way?
• When decisions are made, are there conversations about the unintended consequences of those decisions?
• How can we all co-create psychological safety; what does everyone need to feel safe?
• How do we set clear boundaries regarding escalating conflicts?

The invitation is to experiment with whatever you think serves to dismantle some of the conditioning and societal narratives that have been going on for a very long time.

To access all interviews with change makers at the intersection of inner work and collective action join our free Conscious Tribes Community.

The Conscious Tribes Community supports you with ideas, practical tools, and workshops to develop your consciousness and to build deep and authentic relationships.