Titles are not a fitting way to describe who Mila Aliana is, as her work is more a way of being and transcends conventional categories. But she is a catalyst for systemic change who operates at the intersection of ancient wisdom and contemporary organisational transformation. 

She is currently serving in the board of director in various projects and areas spanning regeneration, loneliness and social connection. She is Chief Weaver for IEEE Planet Positive 2030 and as a board member of the Inner Development Goals Foundation, she brings over two decades of expertise as a strategic advisor and global transformation consultant. In these roles she goes beyond systems thinking, towards sensing and as a weaver of communities. In this conversation in the profile series of the Cohere+ project, she shares her unique approach to catalysing change that draws from living systems wisdom rather than traditional organisational theory.

Born in Indonesia and raised across multiple continents, her nomadic childhood guided her to what she describes as a ‘bias towards chaos and uncertainty’ - gravitating towards initiatives that are uncharted or have failed repeatedly or where others find mere overwhelm. Mila’s way of being is encapsulated in her declaration that "my boss is the universe" - a commitment to following inner guidance.

At the heart of her methodology lies what she calls ‘systems sensing’ - the capacity to perceive invisible patterns and dynamics within organisations and communities that conventional means of analysis often misses. As an emissary to a global circle of indigenous elders and working extensively with regenerative practitioners and activists, she draws from billions of years of living systems wisdom rather than human-constructed frameworks.

Ivo Mensch: First I’d like to get a sense of your background. Can you paint a picture of your history and of the places where you grew up?

Mila Alania: I grew up in Indonesia but at a very young age, I moved to Europe. I started in the UK, but then moved every few years to different countries in Europe, where most of my formative years happened. Then a brief time in Indonesia, like a year or so and then moved to the US. It's kind of hazy now, because I'm so old now that I just don't remember. It's almost like life becomes one little glimpse of moments.

MA: I know I look like 100 years old, but I feel like I am five. That will never change, because I'm very playful. I actually dreamt of a dolphin two days ago, and it reminded me of the kind of essence that I feel I am. Because I like doing processes that bring playfulness.

MA: When I was still young, I realised that what I thrive in is going into initiatives and catalysing. I've worked in organisations, I've worked in startups, and I was always great at doing things that were uncharted or had failed many times before. Because of my background, my bias was towards chaos and uncertainty. Most people would go the other way and feel overwhelmed. I would go right to it, because it fascinates me. It's like play, right? Like, well, what can we play with this?

It's not like I know anything about it. It's more like there's just a fascination with what kind of system it is and what it is about. What is life trying to demonstrate potentially in that space? 

So I look at it as experimentation. All the time. I go into complete places of unknown - industries or sectors that I've never gone before and I wouldn't know anything. That's my deep curiosity, the deep learning. The first thing I do is actually go and listen to that field of people, and start understanding the patterns - hidden, invisible patterns often. Sense into them rather than analyzing. I also analyse situations - drawing from conversations, surveys, or even employee data or of projects that failed. But I would couple that with my own sensing. It is really system sensing or systemic field sensing. I could feel and sense energies and patterns, often invisible. I think everybody has this gift. 

 

MA: It started with this real intuition that I don't belong to any roles. I didn't like having titles. So one of the things that my life has been is that it's been almost given direction. I always joke, but I'm quite serious to my clients, that my boss is the universe. I literally created my own roles and that's to do with the work, rather than Mila and a title.

What really drives me is a lot of inner guidance. When I was younger, my inner guidance often had a lot of noise, because I was listening to a lot of other people about what I needed to be and how I should show up. I made lots of mistakes, because I'm human, but there was just this social construct saying I had to be this - you had to have the house, you had to go to university to get a job. I just kind of undid that, whether by force of universe, because then I got out and started my own way of finding work and creating my own work.

Since I was very young, I deeply believe that each one of us as humans has a capacity to connect to source, whether you need practices or not. I never practised. I didn't do meditation. It's just when I take all of the noise out and just be fully, deeply present from one millisecond to another. You could have access to this blend of intuition, perception and living system knowing. That knowing is that intuition - it's not just that you see data points, but it's how you see trends and themes across relationships.

Since I was a child, I saw because I would listen. I had a big, huge family. So my first experimentation of sensing, analysing and also going deeper than just what the humans said and what was not said, was through the body language of people in my family. When I was younger, I was more introverted, and I just watched and listened to people. It's perceiving the relationship that gets created, the structures and flows of the whole dynamic of humans. Then I started looking at nature - the actual clouds. I used to love looking at clouds, how they moved, how the river flowed.

I started being fundamentally curious of how things came about, not only from the human sense. My parents used to give me dolls, and I would just rip them apart because I just wanted to know how they were formed. That's how my mind thinks sometimes. It's fundamentally the invisible patterns that I start seeing. I don't see it as "Oh, there's a problem." I see it as "Oh, it's showing" - life is showing something that is currently like a snapshot in time that wants to move. To me, that's how life is - it changes constantly. So it's almost pointing to where it has potential, where it wants to move to.

In this systemic sensing, let me include invisible beings. Some people call them guides, spiritual guides, animal guides.  Because all my life, I definitely sense that I have had invisible beings around me. What I mean by this is where you could not describe how something happened or literally know that you didn’t act on it but something happened - right time, right place, right people. Synchronicities - serendipitously happenings. Something was done behind the scenes for that to happen, beyond human interventions. I can only speak of my own experiences but I’ve heard other people share the same experiences.

People talk about coincidences - I don't believe in coincidences. I believe that there's a whole wave of confluence of invisible actions that leads to that particular moment of many different relationships, whether visible or invisible, to make those coincidences happen.

MA: I like to talk about the forest. The mycelium, you cannot see it. But it's across the world, the mycelium. It shapes what grows, and yet it's invisible. If you have a time-lapse movie, you will be able to see it constantly working underneath the soil. It's like a huge marketplace. There's so many things that are interacting. I see invisible beings doing the same. I see humans doing the same. There's a couple of things with this deep knowing inviting us to go there. First, to take out all of this reductionist thinking and siloed thinking, take out the illusion of control, the illusion of separation.

The illusion of control includes my own - the arrogance of thinking that we know something by analysing it or looking at history and thinking that would inform the present. Or that we can control life that constantly changes, and that there's only one outcome. In any perturbation, there's many outcomes from best to worst case scenario. None of us know what the output of any influence to the living system is. We can influence it through navigating with it, but not control it.

The other is the illusion of separation, and this is why we have divisiveness, we have polarity, political agendas, ego. Everything we say we do, even intentionally thinking, has ripple effects, whether we can see it or not. Everything is interdependent on each other, and it’s not just the elements. It’s the relationships, the chemistry formed in relationships that matters in living systems. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Everything matters!

MA: When you are in a culture, community group, or organisation, what I noticed was the blame game. You look at another person or a couple of people, and you think, "These are the people that are toxic." But that toxicity exists as a co-creation of the people that created the culture. Whether the people have already left or are still there, that culture has never been really made visible, to then make possible taking responsibility for what needs to move forward.

Conflict or culture that is toxic is literally what I said - it's patterns demonstrating potential that is no longer serving the ecosystem. It will keep repeating itself until the lessons are learned. What tends to happen is to oust the person or persons, where the culture or group would say they're the ones that are the problems. Yes, there's personal responsibility, but that culture would not be able to have that toxicity if those behaviours weren't allowed, such as through silence.

People see the behaviour, and we see this at societal level where silence is actually creating the toxicity. In non-violent communication, there's a saying: ‘silence is violence.’ It's this understanding - it's the chemistry that's created between elements, including humans, that we need to watch out for. It's not the humans themselves, because if you oust those elements of toxicity, you will just bring new people that will land in the same toxicity because it's never been talked about, it's never been made visible, it's never taken accountability that we partially co-created that culture.

MA: People need the human way of analysing, but understand it within the context of how living systems work. I move beyond systems thinking. My go-to is the living system, because it has billions of years of wisdom. Systems thinking - a lot of it is a human construct. I don't say it's wrong, but there is still something about it that's still only human constructs. So I go to wisdom that's been around beyond our own existence.

Those are the insight on how the Earth co-creates - and I say co-create because it co-created with all the different elements - 4.6 billion years, and beyond that, the universe itself. Everything. People talk about Earth as if it lived on its own, but it's connected to the sun and the moon and the relationships inbetween. That was my curiosity - to really understand how these are all connected through all the other elements.

For me, in the last few years, what I've been driven by mainly is, what is the compost that I need to leave during my time here, to be ready for my transition. When the tree dies, they become more nourishing as a tree in death than in life. It nourishes the whole ecosystem. What I want as compost is not the typical Mila Foundation, or Mila podcast, Mila website. It's more the compost that nurtures the ecosystem beyond my lifetime.

My whole focus is, what is the compost? It's the work, not my name. The work isn't just my life purpose - it's how does it fit with others' compost or others' work while they still exist in this life. Because for me, I'm already looking at transition. I'm not afraid of death. I saw it since I was a child, when I die, how I die. It's okay. If anything, I welcome it, because I'm always curious. I like going to adventures and journeys.

For me, it's really knowing deeply that there's a compost that I need to put in before I die. That's probably my only fear, is that I don't get to do the composting. But then again, that's my illusion of control. It will happen naturally in divine timing. I guess I'm doing it now.

The patterns seem so disparate in the work that I do, but they're all connected somehow. Sometimes I don't know, sometimes it reveals itself in years to come, or sometimes it will never reveal itself. I've come to accept that sometimes it's not for me to know. Maybe in my transition stage, when in my last moment of human life, I look back into my life, I’ll be able to see the ripple effect of my life - my interactions, my work - on how it rippled beyond my lifetime, however small the ripple was. I’ll be able to see those ripples. But now my focus is doing what’s needed in the now that would continue beyond my lifetime.

 

The more I know, the less I know. That’s the humility part that I have to work on and be aware of constantly. I know I have to work on my own development until my last breath, because I need to constantly balance between consciousness and human ego. But it’s not about a battle where I have to ignore my ego so my consciousness or spirituality is more prominent, or my ego has to be more than my consciousness, the spiritual. It’s actually how do I balance and embrace both at the same time, knowing the complexity, the paradoxes that I hold as a human, as nature, myself.