Agamishaala is a peer learning space for leaders working in the field of law and justice. Dekha Seekha is a record of what surfaces in the process.
Shifts in individual consciousness can, over time, contribute to shifts in the consciousness of the justice field - this belief sits at the heart of Agamishaala. Then an awareness of the ecosystem is not simply another leadership competency. It is an essential capacity that enables leaders to move beyond organisational success and orient themselves towards the flourishing of the field as a whole. It changes not only what they see, but what they consider themselves responsible for.
The article is an effort to gather the moments in which participants have given language to this changing way of seeing and being, and to explore how that is, in turn, manifesting over time.
Introduction
Every member of Agamishaala registers shifts that lie on a chequered spectrum, as is the case with any group experience. However, on a long, hard and closer look, from these shifts emerge patterns that tell us something salient about a cohort.
As one of the co-curators of the space, I have the benefit of a vantage point that offers breadth but also the privilege to witness individual learning and unlearning that happens at milestones in a member’s Shaala journey.
Much like Mei in My Neighbour Totoro, who gleefully chases a mysterious trail of shiny acorns, I relish this process of pattern-finding, so much of which involves following the breadcrumbs, collecting shiny, unmistakable and promising seeds of insight and then seeing the bounty - the different permutations and combinations in which they add up for a member and eventually, for the group.
During the 2025 edition of Agamishaala, hosted in Naukuchiyatal, Uttarakhand, while documenting the experience of members through video interviews, I began to observe a recurring theme. Participants were speaking of what was changing in their perception of and relationship with the system. Each interpretation was rooted in the particularities of their roles, which meant that what was unravelling and reconfiguring was uniquely different. The video below ties together some of these immediate reflections.
(A YouTube link to the video can be found here)
What made this remarkable wasn't that this order of shift was surfacing (an expansion in the awareness of the system is wired in the design of Agamishaala) but how pronounced and coherent the shift was in this edition. It prompted me to revisit interviews, notes, and recordings from previous cohorts to build a comprehensive picture of what members described changing for them as leaders as a consequence of this expansion, and the order of change it presents for the field.
The Shifts
From System Thinking to System Sensing
Kailash Nadh (CTO, Zerodha) has reflected on how before Shaala, visualising a system meant boxes and arrows on a flat, 2-dimensional plane.
Practices during the journey introduced dimensions of level, proximity and direction, uncovering a richer spatial sense of where forces and actors sit in relation to each other. “I can’t unsee it now”, he says.
A noticeable change for Atreyo Banerjee (Curator, Praani mission at Agami) was moving from the more commonplace language and approach of ‘systems thinking’ to ‘systems sensing’. Adding heart and hand to the head - noticing the minutiae of interaction, feeling even as we are seeing and registering empty space - all that is not in our line of sight. To him, this presented a new way to approach the same problems, one that resolves the paralysis of not knowing all the actors involved.
Bhaskar Rao (Independent Researcher and Designer) found sensing the system to be an act of appreciation - a salient intermediary step that checks one’s impulse to immediately problem-solve, “almost like letting the system be on its own before we kind of intervene. First we acknowledge it as an organism on its own”. Seeing it as a composite and sentient whole reveals granular details like how individual pieces in a system have intentionality. As Aayush Tainwala (Independent Lawyer) observed, “they want to move”.
Dee (Organiser at Alternative Justice), in a closing circle, points to why this matters specifically in the justice space: “sensing is what allows you to take people along and see one another.”
An alternate view of stakeholders
In a recent conversation, Mehul Sehgal (Program Manager, PUCAR) reflected on how his understanding of ‘community’ had fundamentally shifted. By community, he was referring to the constellation of actors and the relationships between them that together shape a system.
An insight that emerged alongside this understanding was, “No one is a side character”. That almost any actor can have a meaningful role to play in any given problem.
In one problem context where he had previously assumed that only certain actors were consequential, he began to see parents, educators, and others - roles he had initially assumed were peripheral - as equally important participants in shaping outcomes and, importantly, those who wanted to influence circumstances.
Erica Arya (India head, Project Tech4Dev) applied this expanded awareness of actors to a live situation: she had been thinking of NGOs and donors as the users for the chatbot service her organisation was offering. A process of mapping the current reality of the ecosystem revealed WhatsApp itself as a stakeholder - an entity with its own autonomy and decision-making capacity (like pricing changes) that nobody in the sector was speaking to or about. The ecosystem is wider than the ambit of one’s existing interactions within it.
During his time at Shaala, Mehar MP (Co-founder, TinkerHub) found himself keenly noticing his own perception of people in positions of power. He wondered, “Where are the spaces for them to be vulnerable”? It made him think of how TinkerHub has not engaged with teachers at Universities, partly because of how culturally we get beholden to a certain image of a teacher.
The presence of diverse Shaala-mates is what fundamentally changes how people see certain roles. Unstructured, agendaless time spent with the person behind the designation, sitting at the windowsill of their world.
What the structured spaces do is hold up a mirror - front, rear and side - to see both biases and blind spots clearly. Ananth Padmanabhan (Founding Vice-chancellor, Sreenidhi University) succinctly articulates how embodiment, in particular, lands this: “It leads to biases being called out in a very deep, visual and physical way”, which in compels one to reflect on how damaging and limiting assumptions about how a stakeholder should behave can be.
A difference in the roles we see for ourselves
There are two questions that Manish Srivastava (Chief Facilitator at Agamishaala, Senior Teacher SPT, Presencing Institute) explicitly asks us to reflect upon during the Shaala process: “What does this mean for your role in the work you are doing?” and “What is the field asking of you?“
It took me some time to understand the distinction between these provocations that are posed not just in words but also through many of the exercises. What do you want to do / what does your partner need you to do? Where do you want to go / What is the group beckoning you to pay attention to? This tension at the precipice of determining one’s next move is made evident when a system is felt - when the charge of longing, agency, action and forces among stakeholders is sensed.
What follows then is informed by both an attunement with the self and a haptic interface with the field.
Erica understood her own role at the periphery. During an exercise, she observed how she physically moved towards the edges of a system to get a fresh perspective and a particular vantage point. And walking along the boundary revealed that she often is the keeper and, in many ways, the protector of the invisible containing shape of the system.
Saurabh Karn (Founding member, Sarvam AI), who identifies as a maker with an instinct to build, found that the complexities of an ecosystem demand a different orientation.
In a system with many stakeholders, “for some period of time, you might not even know what your role is. But what is important is to show up and continue on that journey.”
This is a profoundly different way of operating. One which isn’t just within the confines of a familiar garb but evolves in response to circumstance.
Pushing this insight further, it alludes to a ‘dissolution’. Aditya Gujarati found this instructional, “giving oneself less importance in the larger scheme of things, not being the ultimate solutionist.”
Bharat Chugh (Former Judge and Lawyer, The Chambers of Bharat Chugh) articulates it as an ‘effacement of the self’. He describes the opportunity that presents in the clip below.
Both Aditya and Bharat offer an important reminder for so many of us working in this field of urgent problems.
Conclusion
In his paper, The Invisible Dimensions of Systems Transformation: Field Notes from Social Field Cultivation in the Law and Justice Sector in India, Manish articulates what becomes possible when the whole system is seen and sensed together:
Participants become aware of their own role and responsibility, which activates personal agency. They begin to appreciate how others are contributing, which creates the basis for collaboration. And they rest in the knowledge that they are not alone - which generates collective wellbeing.
The identity shift is from an isolated actor to a member of a collective social body. Leaders naturally emerge here not as problem-solvers, but as ecosystem stewards. Anshul Tewari’s reflection, “I am not just a small player; I can see my role in shaping and serving the whole ecosystem”, captures something essential about what this awareness offers: it restores agency within complexity, without collapsing that complexity into the illusion of a single solution or role one can offer.
Justice work is inherently about complex, multi-stakeholder, historically layered systems where power, care, exclusion, and solidarity are all in play simultaneously. A purely analytical orientation risks reproducing the same fragmentations it seeks to address. The lens with which we see it and build a relationship with it needs to be recast.
Manish Srivastava (AI CoE for Sustainable Cities - Airawat - IIT Kanpur), who has many years of experience shaping governance at large-scale systemic levels, ties together the many threads that are opened in this article and articulates why this is crucial:
“I think as we grow, we acquire knowledge, and the more we acquire knowledge, the way we interpret what is happening in the world outside is based on the knowledge that we have. And so in many ways, the knowledge that we have also limits us in terms of absorbing what is happening in the world. One of the things that we basically learn in Shaala is how to let that go and to have an open mind to be able to allow new knowledge to come in.
Large parts of the systems we deal with involve people. If you listen very carefully, multisensorily and through your body, you can feel what people are going through. And collectively step out of the echo chamber that is formed. That’s where compassion and empathy become fundamentally important too, and give you new knowledge to understand the system more deeply.
We need to give a chance to a different interpretation of systems. I think this opens up a new way of thinking, new ways of framing problems, and new ways of solving them.”
