Rachel Lilley is a practitioner/academic who has spent over 30 years working at the intersection of social and environmental change, supporting individuals, organisations and communities to engage with complex challenges. Her work brings together systems thinking, behaviour change, neuroscience and contemplative inquiry.

She is an Associate Professor in the Birmingham Leadership Institute at the University of Birmingham, where she has developed and now directs an innovative Masters in Systems Thinking and Leadership. The programme integrates systems thinking and leadership with reflective practice and embodied approaches to support practitioners to work skilfully with complexity and to facilitate systemic change.

Alongside her academic work, Rachel is a yoga and mindfulness teacher with over 20 years’ of experience and has a longstanding commitment to inquiry and contemplative practice. Her teaching creates space for inner inquiry to be fundamentally important to action and change making. This supports more grounded and effective engagement with the world.

Rachel and Gerald Midgley from the Centre of Systems Studies, University of Hull, have recently teamed up to take on the challenge of bringing systems thinking to the emerging field of systemic leadership. In collaboration they have been researching the implications of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology (particularly how cognition, emotion and action combine to form a single anticipatory system in the body) for systemic leadership and systems thinking. This research is at the cutting edge of a ‘new wave’ of systemic inquiry that marries together the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ work required to address some of the most challenging local-to-global issues of our time.