A Year of Systems Mediation: Reflections, Learnings, and Inquiries

As 2024 draws to a close, I’m reflecting on a year that marked an organic shift in my professional journey. For the first time in 22 years, I stepped back from international work in democratic systems, political movements, and collaborative data governance. This wasn’t entirely intentional but felt rooted in something deeper—holistic, fundamental, and interconnected. Instead, I immersed myself in community closer to home, in so doing embracing the principles and emergent practice of systems mediation to navigate complexity and foster transformation.

This year has been about grounding myself in local action, exploring the competencies of systems mediation, and aligning personal growth with collective change. Building on insights from multiple disciplines, traditions, thought leaders, and humble practitioners: systems mediation discerns the practice of facilitating dialogue, fostering mutual understanding, and resolving conflicts across diverse actors, scales, and systems. For me, it involves naming the instincts and dynamics that often lie beneath the surface of collaboration, challenging causes and consequences, and opening new horizons of possibilities by activating personal and collective abilities to get stuff done together.

Themes of decolonization, relational balance, and the interplay of complementary energies—intuition and action, care and structure, nurturing and decisiveness—have been central to this work. By engaging with these forces and tension, I’ve sought to uncover deeper truths within systems and myself to foster connections that honor both complexity and collective transformation.

These reflections inform the six projects where I’ve applied systems mediation this year:

1. Enabling Collective Climate Action Through Data Collaboration

加拿大肯高迪亚大学 and Open North | Nord Ouvert 's Climate Data Hub for Greater Montreal hosted by Partenariat Climat Montréal are building a federated data-sharing model to enhance cross-sector collaboration, harnessing collective intelligence for integrated and intersectional climate action. Its proof of concept addresses four cross-cutting priorities: reducing emissions through resilient building retrofits, linking mobility data with climate vulnerabilities to decarbonize transportation, addressing socio-economic inequities with geospatial insights, and aligning community needs with systemic change to empower local action. More than just data sharing, the Hub exemplifies the critical role of trust in collaboration, with results to be showcased at the Montreal Climate Summit 2025.

?? Learn more about the Montreal Climate Summit 2025

?? Explore the Climate Data Hub for Greater Montreal

2. AI and Storytelling with TeC, INM, and Columbia University

In collaboration with Transition en Commun , Incite Institute at Columbia University , and the Institut du Nouveau Monde (INM) , we began exploring AI-powered storytelling for the “Climate Dialogues at Scale” initiative. Expanding in 2025, this project hypothesizes that NLP and LLMs can amplify marginalized voices and foster collective climate action. The work balances innovation with ethics, asking how technology can elevate agency without losing the identity, authenticity, and meaning that make storytelling a fundamentally human ability. By centering human connection, it aims to ensure technology enhances, rather than diminishes, the depth of diverse narratives.

?? Discover Incite’s Climate Dialogues at Scale

?? Explore Transition en Commun

3. Building Multitudes: Mobilizing for Systemic Transformation

This year, I began contributing to Multitudes, a movement reimagining democratic, ecological, and economic systems in Quebec. In these early stages, I’ve engaged with its decentralized approach to mobilization—an engagement ladder that transcends typical political controls by prioritizing distributed leadership, relational support, and interconnected participation. These reflections shape how I help create spaces where members align their values and capacities with meaningful roles, challenging hierarchies and fostering collaboration rooted in care, accountability, and equity.

?? Explore Multitudes

4. Governance and Hybrid Spaces with ATSE

Les Ateliers de la Transition Socio-écologique integrates affordable cooperative housing, co-working spaces, and a tiers lieux—an innovative, community space for and led by local residents. As an ad hoc advisor on governance, I focused on supporting the ATSE board by emphasizing relational work—building trust, fostering alignment, and co-developing governance structures rooted in a shared vision. For the tiers lieux, the challenge has been to safeguard the citizen committee’s autonomy while ensuring stability through a strong, supportive relationship with ATSE. This dual approach reflects systems mediation principles, honoring the complexity of fragility of innovative models that build critical community resilience.

?? Learn about ATSE

5. Researching Empathetic and Holistic Communities

Through Quartiers Empathiques, led by Numana , I explored what it means to create cities that are not just smart but empathetic—centering human connection, care, and equity. By integrating participatory co-design and empathic governance, the initiative defines a model for a complex urban community that bridges innovation with accessibility, ensuring technology serves as a tool to foster trust, amplify voices, and enhance community care. For me, an empathetic city embodies systems mediation, balancing complexity, interdependence, and relational intelligence to build resilient, equitable, and regenerative urban futures.

?? Visit Numana’s website for more on Quartiers Empathiques

6. Embodying Systems Mediation in Collective Sense-Making

Collaborating with fellow co-stewards of the Transition Bridges Project to lay the groundwork for a shared leadership collective around an emerging practice has been a transformative journey in sense-making, rooted in diverse cultures, experiences, and perspectives. Together, we’ve explored the tension between structure and emergence—what we described in our white paper as balancing nurturing and decisive energies, while unpacking the interplay of the Divine Feminine and Masculine. This process has focused on aligning values, fostering collective stewardship, and addressing trauma as integral to systemic change and the evolving practice of systems mediation.

Webinars with the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement have enriched and validated these insights, sparking conversations across diverse communities of practice about how systems mediation fosters resilience, self-knowledge, and equity. This experience has reaffirmed the importance of creating spaces that embrace complexity, enabling grief and hope as individuals and systems transform themselves.

?? Learn more on the Transition Bridges Substack

?? Watch the Tamarack Institute webinar

The Emerging Practice of Systems Mediation Anchored in Innerwork

This year has reinforced that systems mediation is not just a methodology but a way of being. It invites us to navigate conflict, co-create narratives, and integrate healing into our collective responses to the polycrises of our time.

As I reflect, several guiding inquiries have shaped my learnings this year. I share them here in the spirit of fostering collective self-reflection, especially for others in my network who are also committed to transformative systems change:

1. Collaboration and Trust: What practices have deepened trust and alignment among stakeholders?

2. Equity and Decolonization: How can decolonial and equity-driven approaches take deeper root?

3. Healing and Transformation: What role does trauma and healing play in systemic change?

4. Technology and Narrative: How can technology support collective sense-making while staying human-centered?

5. Personal and Systemic Growth: How does balancing relational energies influence broader systems work?

Thank you to everyone who has joined this journey, with heartfelt gratitude to my fellow TBP co-stewards Louise Adongo , Patrick Dubé , Lara Evoy , Stéphane Guidoin , and Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed . As we enter 2025, I look forward to continuing this exploration and contributing to pathways toward a more equitable and regenerative future.

Happy holidays,

— Jean-Noé

#SystemsMediation #ClimateAction #NarrativeChange #Governance #Collaboration #Decolonization #Transition