The 57th meeting and conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences focused on the meta-theme of Curating the Conditions for a Thrivable Planet. The event was conceived as a living learning lab for collective intelligence that aimed to provide its participants with a set of total immersion environments in which to explore our role as systems scientists, and beyond that, as members of a globalizing species at this time in history. As such, the conference provided individual and collective opportunities to foster that basic feeling of being connected, to explore what it means to be appreciative systems (as Sir Geoffrey Vickers would have it) to manifest new levels of community and fundamentally, to evolve the narrative of our role as authors of the conscious evolution of our species. This paper presents the stage-setting remarks presented at the opening of the 57th annual meeting and conference of the ISSS, inviting members and conference participants to address the principal theme of this conference that took place in Vietnam: the search for systemic leverage points for emerging a global eco-civilization. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
