Between 1992 and 1995, as a university student, I experienced a profound personal transformation and learned about the power of theater to drive individual and collective change through imagination, creativity, and action. This experience allowed me to witness firsthand the impact of communication, dialogue, and collaborative work in fueling movements that increase the resilience of people and communities.
This deep conviction led me to take the risk of leaving the city at age 22, an act that inaugurated more than a decade of voluntary work with youth in rural and urban communities with limited access to services and challenging living conditions. During 1996, I accompanied youth and adolescents as they entered their creative process, redefining their identities and exploring their concerns to challenge their context through stage action. Theater revealed itself as a tool for both individual and social change.
This opened a universe of possibilities and provided a significant opportunity for learning and growth. During this period, I witnessed the intense interest of children in learning to read so they could portray their characters and better understand the dialogue. I saw difficult conversations practiced safely on stage as youth sought to be heard and transform their environments. I saw entire communities gather in the town square to witness stories that opened new possibilities.
This is how this theatrical laboratory shaped my perspective. Although these communities had very limited access to communication or technology at the time, they used the stage to explore, represent, and dramatize their realities and concerns—to rehearse solutions and innovate, thereby strengthening collective resilience. I clearly recognized the idea that transformations, whether in a community or an organization, require innovation processes that involve people in all their dimensions, moving beyond intellectual understanding into committed creative action.
Since that initiation in university and community theater, my path has led to decades of strategic work in Communication for Development (C4D) and Social and Behavior Change (SBC). That discovery and its associated values remain intact.
Over the last 12 years, I have had the opportunity to expand this approach, not without its challenges, through work in international organizations across Latin America and the Caribbean. This has confirmed that complex systems require conscious leadership and individuals who embody their own missions as a foundation for action.
My current reflection leads me to confirm the need to integrate technical approaches with imaginative and creative processes that establish a complete commitment in people and enable them to transform their own reality. Furthermore, even in the role of the expert or technical specialist, there is a need for the “breather” of reconnecting with personal intention and specific creative needs, which constitutes the foundation of high-impact leadership. As the World Bank’s 2015 World Development Report point out, mental models and social norms dictate our decisions much more than pure logic; therefore, leadership reqires reconnecting with these internal frameworks before attempting to transform external ones.
Throughout this journey, I have often left, in myself and others, the burden of the “Expert’s Mask,” which can sometimes limit the approach and action needed for transformative social impact. Every transformation process we attempt to drive outwardly brings the challenge of new perspectives and significant actions from within. From this reflection arises the proposal to integrate the individual and systemic dimensions of change, incorporating the expriential power of Psychodrama (as both a technical and philosophical framework) and the imaginative processes of Analytical Art Therapy into behavioral design.
The complexity of this operation arises when we consider that all socially and institutionally constructed codes are imaginary, constituting an environment inhabited by people playing specific roles and articulating a language. This necessarily requires logical understanding and rigorous analysis, but above all, the rehearsal and active exploration of innovation. Various studies on Social and Behavior Change (SBC) confirm that experiential learning and “deliberate practice” are the most effective drivers for shifting deep-seated social norms.
Today, I understand that there is no real boundary between systemic change and individual process. An organization that wishes to innovate (the system) can only do so if the individuals within it recover their capacity for wonder and action (the individual). My proposal for 2026 is to work at that intersection: facilitating spaces where the technical rigor of behavioral design meets the power of experiential practice. It is about moving from the “analysis of change” to the “rehearsal of change,” allowing both the leader and the organization to inhabit their most authentic truth to generate social impact that is, ultimately, sustainable and profoundly human.
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