DOUBLE TAP TO ZOOM WITH PHONE OR TABLET 16  |   CHAPTER ONE of which we are a part. We also must develop dispositions and skills for engaging with colleagues to imagine an alternative future for ECE. Engaging with Systems-Defining Questions The work starts with scrutinizing our individual and field-wide mental models. By changing our mental models, we can alter our relationship to change. 45 By expanding our grasp of systemic relationship possibilities, we extend our potential to think differently. Simultaneously, conversations with intent will ripen the field’s readiness to move beyond the status quo. 46 While an increasing number of us endorse the need to restructure ECE’s present configuration, its urgency has yet to be recognized by the ECE field as a whole. This book steers the field’s collective inquiry toward five overarching questions whose answers are fundamental to advancing ECE as a professional field of practice: 1. What major choices will be required to move ECE forward as a profession? Are we prepared as a field of practice to make those choices? 2. What principles or values should guide the formation of ECE as a profes- sional field of practice? 3. What options are available for ECE’s structure as a professional field of practice? 4. What should be the starting place(s) for structuring ECE as a profession? 5. What else do we need to know to move forward? Who else can we be learning from? HOW TO USE THIS BOOK This first chapter has summarized both the reasoning and need for moving ECE into its next era. It identifies the field’s tough challenge and why addressing it matters. It explains why conversations with intent should be the field’s first step toward developing a shared agenda for systems change. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL