In this 90-minute interactive webinar, we will explore how systems and complexity thinking can help us move beyond the restrictive habits of binary, dualistic, reductive, overly linear thinking that so often shape our personal lives, relationships, institutions, and cultures.
Drawing on ideas from Taoism, such as a more accurate understanding of yin and yang, and bringing an Indigenous lens of high-context awareness and pattern disruption, the session invites participants to notice how perception, meaning, and decision-making change when we shift from either/or frameworks toward more relational, context-sensitive ways of seeing.
For those already familiar with systems and complexity, the webinar will offer fresh and philosophically grounded perspectives on how these ideas show up in everyday cognition, social dynamics, and collective sense-making.
For those newer to the field, the session will provide an accessible entry point into the core question of systems thinking: how do we understand wholes, relationships, context, and emergence without reducing everything to isolated parts?
Throughout the session, we will examine how default patterns of thought such as judgment, exaggeration, denial, and quick conclusions can narrow our field of possibility and potential, and how simple practices – practiced consistently - can open new pathways for insight and action.
Participants will be invited to consider how complexity is not a barrier to understanding, but a more accurate way of engaging with the world as it actually is: dynamic, interconnected, and continually changing. The webinar will weave together conceptual reflection, lived examples, and practical small-group work to support deeper inquiry, greater cognitive and emotional flexibility, and more relational ways of working with uncertainty.
About Ian
Ian Sanderson, Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan, has spent 28 years inspiring awareness and reconnection to self, community, and the rest of the natural world by exploring confluences of principles, patterns, and philosophies found in Indigenous, Eastern, and Western traditions to realize empowered personal transformation and socio-ecological change.
Building off a love of the outdoors and a degree in Indigenous Studies, he started his professional life in outdoor and experiential education with the Canadian Outward Bound Wilderness School. Following a move to Sante Fe, NM, he worked for many years with The Mountain Center, creating community-based social-ecological change programs with many Indigenous communities, designing and delivering De-colonization programs, and much more. Having moved to Colorado in 2010, he is currently a faculty member with the Environmental Studies program at Naropa University, where he has taught for 15 years, and served for the last two years as Earth Guardian Fellow with the Joanna Macy Center for Resilience and Regeneration.
Over the course of his career, Ian has facilitated many hundreds of single and multi-day group programs and other engagements, locally and throughout the country, and across extremely diverse populations and contexts. At any point you could find him with a group in the backcountry, in downtown office buildings, in the dojo, with non-profits, grassroots organizations, or schools in both the pre- and post-secondary educational levels.
In addition to his facilitation and academic work, Ian has long been involved in martial arts and is a former owner and current teacher at Quest Self-Defense, where he teaches To-Shin-Do ninjutsu, a martial art that brings ancient principles from Japan into modern contexts, and which is focused on practical self-protection, resilience, and personal transformation. He has studied martial arts for more than 25 years and is approaching the rank of Godan, or 5th Degree Black Belt.
His work in the world has expanded in recent years to include the integration and application of complexity science, Indigenous relational systems-thinking, and regenerative design frameworks in the hope of inspiring the inherent potential that resides in all of us, so that we can meet the myriad challenges of modern contexts with grace, power, and integrity.
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