From Mapping to Sensing: What Supriya Taught Me

I was reminded recently of a conversation I had many years ago with Supriya from Agami. We were talking about seeing and mapping systems. I was very much in my frameworks-and-causal-loops phase back then. She said something that I didn’t quite understand: that she didn’t really see systems in that way and what she did was sense them.

Over the years, and through a fair amount of friction, I’ve come to realise the quiet wisdom in that. Because if you haven’t experienced the tension and mess of fragmentation, if you haven’t had to hold it in your team, feel it in your body, and try to reconcile it in your budget, you probably don’t really know the system.

Not in a way that’s lived. And even seeing it clearly isn’t the same as recognising that you’re part of it. Being part of it means staying in relationship with it, through all of the attendant tension, ambiguity, and discomfort. It requires humility and curiosity to stay inside it, to keep showing up and to resist the urge to define and control.

People like Supriya seem to do that naturally. And what I am learning from them, slowly, is that that’s often the only way through.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 2 September 2025. View original →