Systems Thinking in Practice - A Conversation with Prof. Ray Ison

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It's not that systematic is bad or systemic is good. We frame that as a duality. And so the two together form a totality, a complementarity. But we live in a world that denies so much of the systemic and we lack so much systemic capability that the systematic always tends to take over. Hi everyone.

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. With all the talk about our young people needing systems thinking and systemic capabilities as effective ways to make sense of the complex times that we're in, I think it can sometimes feel hard for educators and school leaders to know exactly where to start with all the various frameworks, approaches, and different schools of thought that are out there. This week, it was a huge privilege to sit down with someone who has been doing this work a lot longer than most. Professor Ray Ison has been a central figure in the systems education work at the Open University in the UK that has been ongoing since 1969. As a cybernetician, systems scientist, and professor of systems, Ray has decades of accumulated wisdom on this topic, which he's developed through his own research, teaching, writing, and practice, and which he shares generously in this conversation. If you'd like to find out more about Ray's work, there are links in the show notes. To his research and writing. And as a great place to start, I would particularly recommend his 2017 book Systems Practice: How to Act in Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Changed World. Thank you, Ray.

It's a great pleasure to be able to chat to you. I had a couple of conversations previously, and, um, I think there's some really, really interesting and powerful work that you've been involved in for many years, let's say, around systems awareness and systems thinking in practice. So it's a great pleasure to be able to talk to you today.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here and it's always great to have a conversation with someone who's engaged with one's work sufficiently to frame some interesting questions.

Yeah, well, let's hope so. So to start with, I think there's an interesting trap sometimes we fall into to imagine that we have all these new and exciting ideas and no one's thought of them before. And there's a particular vogue, I would say, which I am certainly interested in myself around systems thinking and systems awareness or whatever the language you want to put on it. But I was particularly interested to meet you and understand your work, given that you've been in this space for quite a long time. Let's be, be careful about how we, how we say it, but for quite a long time. And particularly with the Open University who have been doing this systems education work for 4 or 5 decades. So it's really a wealth of wisdom, let's say there. So perhaps, yeah, if we could start there, just maybe put some of the kind of current fashion for these ideas into a bit of context about what you've learned over the years or some of the story of where this has come from.

Okay. Well, thanks, Tim Logan. We started a little bit with the history of systems at the Open University. The Open University is a major distance teaching university created in 1969. In terms of student numbers, it's Britain's largest university. And when the university was establishing itself, they were interviewing for a Dean of Science. And one of the people they interviewed said in the interview that actually he was more interested in the possibility of creating a new type of faculty, which was what he called a faculty of technology rather than engineering, because he was interested in the interface between the social world and the technical world, particularly to deal with the crises that were emerging, like the environment. So this is in 1970, so very prescient. And he made the case for creating a Faculty of Technology that combined what he called discipline analysis with disciplines of synthesis. And the two disciplines of synthesis that he wanted to incorporate as departments in, in his faculty were the discipline of design and the discipline of systems. And this impressed the Open University people in its initial starting conditions as a really significant concept. Systems thinking. So these initial starting conditions meant that more things were possible. They were attracted to it and he became the foundation dean of the Faculty of Technology. And a department was created called the Department of Systems, loosely based on understandings that then came from an area of inquiry building on the Macy conferences in the US after the Second World War and a line of inquiry called General Systems Theory. There was a lot of interest in universities in those days in building a general theory of it was happening in most disciplines. People were trying to get synthesis across multiple disciplines, which in the end wasn't actually all that successful. A universal theory of anything is a specious sort of line of inquiry, I suppose. Anyhow, but what the Systems Group was supposed to do was to provide people with the way of providing a synthesis between the analytical and the synthetic, and to engage in complex social issues and particularly bring the relationship between the technical and the environmental. And the systems group was one of the earliest systems groups in academia in the UK, certainly. And they had to invent what a curriculum would look like, what they're going to teach, and put it together. And we've, in my lifetime, we've had modules which have been studied by 14,000 people. And some of our early systems courses were studied by 1,000 or 2,000 an undergraduate level, but therein lies another story, which is probably a rabbit hole I won't go down, but it's how you get placed in the curriculum and where you get situated. And the changing, well, quite frankly, the changing nature of the understanding of the word system. I mean, when it started in the 1970s, system was an intriguing word for many people. And there was more perhaps understanding of the notion of system then than there was perhaps in the late '80s and early '90s, because by then the concept system in most people's mind had become a computer. And so people were not necessarily engaging with the language and the branding and the positioning of modules in the same way.

Okay.

But that's, I mean, that's very interesting to me. As you mentioned, the Macy conferences, even then at the kind of with what was, correct me if I'm wrong, but the kind of inception of cybernetics in the kind of late '40s, early '50s, even then there was a sense around a mechanistic framing of some of these ideas. Is that correct?

Well, the field has always been a field of contestation of what I'll call epistemological contestation about what constitutes the right framing or the right ways of—

Right. Yeah. Which, which is still alive and well, I would say. That exists.

Which is still alive and well. And it's part of what people have to be wary of as they engage in the community.

Yeah.

In fact, on the BBC this morning, I was listening to an interview with an Italian physicist who's challenging the common conceptions of string theory and other things like that. And the idea that there are these contestations about what constitutes valid knowledge or valid ways of knowing is not restricted to systems, but it's perhaps that in the systems field, it hasn't sufficiently surfaced and stabilized. And the individuals concerned are not sufficiently reflexive to take responsibility for where they sit and thus the implications of the choices they make about their own epistemological commitments, which is something I've been railing against for many years.

Absolutely. And I would love to get into some of that with that when we get into the juggling with the different balls. But if I could just reflect on, as you said, I mean, you're talking about the, the early 1970s with the beginnings of these processes around General Systems Theory and putting those ideas of systems thinking into an educational context. In context of an increasing awareness of the problématique, or that, you know, the previously what would now be called the polycrisis, but, you know, these large-scale complex phenomena that we are dealing with, global warming, et cetera. It feels very resonant with exactly the conversations that are happening now. I mean, you know, 50, literally 50 years later. What reflections do you have in the sense of what's happened in the last half of a Senzō.

I mean, this is a profound conversation which could take a whole interview and longer around it. I mean, you, let's just pick up on a couple of things from the Macy conferences. I mean, the Macy conferences brought together this really remarkable scholars from around the world in a way that possibly hasn't happened before or since really. And I guess it was shaped by the experiences of the Second World War, which gave it a particular ethos of momentum. Et cetera. And I mean, Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics and it was picked up by many in it who were concerned about physiology, engineering, mathematics of communication, and other things of that nature. And, and by an emerging, what I'll call doctrinaire attitude to North American science, which was that it had to be objectivist. And it was aided by formalisms, mathematics, and other things of that nature. So out of the Macy Conference, a whole set of lineages emerged and they've not necessarily been reconciled ever since. I mean, it was Margaret Mead who put the challenge to the Macy Conferences and said that if you're going to talk about cybernetics in terms of feedback dynamics and communication and control, then you've gotta ask the question, who is the controller?

Yeah.

So you've gotta put the observer back into the observation. And she was saying in other terms, you can't write humans out of taking responsibility for the observations they make.

Yeah.

And this gave the sort of bifurcation, which is some people appreciate and don't appreciate between what is sometimes called first-order cybernetics and second-order cybernetics. So the archetypal metaphor for first-order cybernetics is the thermostat. You have a sensor, it senses the temperature. It adjusts then how it operates and it responds to a type of communication and control. It's a very mechanistic communication and control, but it's exactly the same way that we drive satellites and bombs and planes. And so the military-industrial complex got hold of all of that and used it to great effect, as did designers of computers, I might say, and AI.

And AI. Exactly.

So the biggest challenge through my professional life starts in a way dealing with Margaret Mead's claim and the failure of many to take that claim seriously, because one of the major innovations in our curriculum that occurred from, say, the 1970s through to the current curriculums that we operate is that we've moved from seeing systems as things in the world, you know, out there, there's a, there's an education system, there's a military-industrial system, et cetera, et cetera. Which uses system like a noun, so that there's a thing called that system, to inviting students to see themself as absolutely central to every situation they're in. Our living unfolds any moment in a situated way, and how we act and think is a product of our own history, our traditions of understanding out of which we think. And our curriculum now is to invite people to take responsibility for their situated and embodied ways of knowing out of which, when they think about the world around them, they might think of them as if, the critical words, as if they were a system. And so that's a big difference from saying that is a system to saying, how can I think about this situation as if it were a system? Yeah.

Amazing.

This is gold.

I mean, this, I knew this was going to be good and this is already amazing, but we're going pretty fast. I just, I just want to make a couple of just little connections for people. So Nora, I've had Nora Bateson on the podcast before, just to go back a couple of steps. Margaret Mead was married to Gregory Bateson. Gregory Bateson was there at the, at the Macy conferences with Margaret Mead, both of them anthropologists, bringing that kind of reflexivity of the participant observer, you know, into, into that kind of context. I just wanna make that connection for people so that they can, again, coming back full circle to, to where we are now. People are increasingly interested in many of the people who are talking about systems thinking, or as we said, systems awareness in education. And I just want to kind of make that connection that there's this rich lineage there, which, as you say, with lots of disagreement and bifurcations along the way, but I think, you know, it's an important history, I think, just to connect to where we are now.

Good. Thanks for that clarification. And I mean, it enables me to go back to some of the points that I was going to make before I went off into the present time, but Margaret Mead also took another profound systemic consequences for how we live our life today. I think one of the participants in the Macy conferences was an Austrian scholar, Heinz von Foerster, who eventually went to the US and set up the biological computing lab at the University of Illinois. And his English wasn't so good. So Margaret Mead, who was, I think, presiding or chairing or hosting one of the conferences, gave him the job of writing up the proceedings as a means of helping him improve is English.

Oh, really?

And Heinz von Foerster reflected much later in his life by saying that in writing up those proceedings, he fell into a trap and made a semantic mistake, which had had profound implications that he didn't really foresee. Because in these conferences, you had people from, say, nerve physiology who were interested in how nerve synapses acted. And essentially cybernetics was about communication. So you had this tension between where the communication was systematic or systemic, right, as in, say, the nerve impulse from one sensor to another sensor, etc. He said that he had substituted a word that Shannon and Weaver were making popular in their mathematical model of communication, which went on to inform digital development. He substituted the word information rather than sticking with nerve impulse or signal. And so we live in a world that largely today still thinks that we can transfer information from one person to another.

That's amazing.

But that is not how communication operates between humans. And so the whole so-called information revolution that we lived through in the '70s and '80s was built on a semantic mistake, quite frankly.

That is absolutely fascinating because I think what I was under the impression of in those Macy conferences that you see, you mentioned Shannon. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, very mathematical, and Norbert Wiener. And what I understood was that it was almost like their instrumentalization of information in order to be able to move it from one place to another, or in, in order to be able to take these neural signals and turn them into ones and zeros so that they could then be manipulated in a, in an instrumental way for the purposes of building AI, which obviously now we are fundamentally, you know, just reaping that reward, if you'd like to see it as a reward, but all of that hinged on the ability to decontextualize and move information around, or at least conceive of it as though it was being decontextualized and moved around.

Yeah. And that the, um, that there was a sender and a receiver and what was sent was what was received. So there were all these essentially linear systematic models of human communication, which were mechanistic, instrumental, et cetera.

Yeah. And just to, just to make an educational connection there, cuz I think that's one of the things that I've been really thinking about a lot recently is the implications of some of those ideas educationally, as you're talking about communication and information, the way that those things are used in education based on, as you say, this kind of sender-receiver idea of moving information from one place to another, you know, this kind of idea of a transmission model of education. I mean, that's effectively what that conception is. About, but it's fundamentally premised on, as you say, maybe a semantic mistake, but certainly a falsehood that you can actually decontextualize information, move it, you know, from the teacher's mind into the learner's mind and then into the learner's notebook and then the exam hall. I mean, it's just predicated on so many misconceptions that I think is obviously I'm oversimplifying it to some extent, but I think it's just a fascinating way that that, that idea has then rippled in into education.

Well, I've written quite a lot about this over the years, and there's a lot of material around it, about the different metaphors of human communication, the work of Klaus Krippendorff and others. And I mean, one only has to think about how these understandings get built into curricula, how they get built into huge lecture theaters of 5,000 people being spoken at, all of these sorts of things. But I mean, to pick it back up into, say, the Open University and the curriculum development there. My historical colleagues, John Beeson was appointed as the first Professor, and there were colleagues who are still friends who are still alive today who were part of all of that process. They developed, I think, highly innovative and really exciting curricula, but they sort of, they tended to take things and label complex social, industrial, or technical matters as if systems, and then they gave students a lot of skills to try and understand these things systemically, although they didn't necessarily use in those early days the differences between systemic and systematic, yeah, as I've coined much later. And those curricula were very good, particularly for people, mature age students coming in, any of whom in those days had a quite a lot of experience in industry and engineering and technology and other things like that. And so it brought both a social and an environmental dimension to what had otherwise been curricula that mostly excluded people in, in the engineering disciplines and other things. And in The Open University, in the early days, all students coming in had to do two foundation courses, which are the introductory courses. It was an attempt to make sure all students had some interdisciplinary experience and understanding. And so a lot of people studied the technology foundation course, which had systems material in it, even though they mightn't have known about it, that through that study, they became aware of it and thought this was good stuff. But unfortunately those arrangements and the requirement for two foundation courses in the degree mill that started and the instrumentalization of higher education sort of disappeared. And that caused major problems for us as a group in terms of student numbers, which is the thing that drives investment, et cetera.

Sure. Yeah. And I'd love to come back to that a bit later, as, you know, just reflecting on so much of what you are saying, and I will say when we talk about Hawkesbury, is that it was so many innovative ideas that actually some of which were lost or receded somehow because of this shift into much more instrumental kind of management-led approach to some of the way that the systems were run and the institutions were run.

Yeah, well, that's, we can sort of flag the idea that we can talk about institutions. So, I mean, the shift, the idea that you should do two foundation courses in a curriculum for interdisciplinary learning is essentially an innovation in what institutional economists call an institution, and which I prefer to call a social technology, something we invent. And that creates a set of rules which lead people to do something and not something else. And we live in a an ecology of institutions which our ancestors and others have invented for us. And we are constantly inventing new ones, but we often don't know what we do when we create new institutions or social technologies.

No, I mean, so many directions I'd love to go in, but, but I think that's a, that is a really important one in terms of this, yeah, the dynamics of social technologies, but particularly in relation to the economy and neoliberalism and those things. So maybe we'll come back to that, but let's go back to the idea of the systemic and the systematic, because I think that for me, as I was reading your work, was a hugely powerful framing that allowed the insights of the differences in the way that these ideas around systems show up. And just again, to kind of bring it back to the current moment, a lot of my interest in this was coming from, you know, in relation to the IB developments with the Systems Transformation Pathway that they've is a new pilot happening within the IB framework right now. But as I'm so keen to do is there's so much learning that's happened if we choose to look and, and learn from colleagues like you who've been doing this work for a long time. So I think in that context, that idea of the systemic and the systematic, I think is a hugely helpful way of thinking. So yeah, could you firstly do a little bit of that? I think it draws on some of the things we've already mentioned in passing, but what does that mean in terms of those, that differentiation between those two things?

Okay. Thanks, Tim. I, in my answer, I'm going to try and join up two things here. So first of all, let's just provide an explanation for what, how I understand those two terms. These are the two adjectives that derive from the word system. System is a noun, and I've already mentioned that thinking of systems in noun terms presents problems because a noun is interpreted in the Latin languages that we live in, English, as entities, as things in the world. And I need to go back to a strong motivation that has run through all of my research and scholarship from very early days in agriculture and agricultural education, where there emerged a particular professional cadre of people called extension officers who were recruited to help enhance agricultural productivity. And, um, there was productivity before sustainability. Yeah. By getting farmers and rural people to adopt new technologies, and it was built on a linear model. Science produces new knowledge or new technology, which is adopted by some, and then you get an adoption curve, and this leads to new practices, which change things for the better. And my experience growing up on a farm were that this was a simplistic model that didn't really talk to the realities of it. And I and my colleague and close friend, David Russell, I've written a lot in a book and other things, uh, which unpack the fallacy of the linear model in agricultural extension and rural development. But the linear model is related to what we talked about before in terms of the transmission of information and other things. I mean, that it's essentially a transmission model and it was driven by sociologists in the US studying the adoption of hybrid corn in a particular specific cultural context at a particular historical moment. And even in those early days when we were highly critical, I mean, we knew that there were moments when this worked, it was okay. But by and large, as the environmental crisis became greater, sustainability issues began to surface, we knew that this was not going to deal with these complex, uncertain issues that were being confronted. And so I, and there's another concept that came into, into view at the moment and is been with me ever since. And this is the distinction between the concepts dualism and duality. Many people are aware of the mind-body dualism notion, which since Descartes and others separated out mind and body. Uh, and of course, thankfully, this is now being totally reframed in terms of how we understand cognition. And we now understand cognition not in this sort of dualistic way of, of this or that. Which is what a dualism is. A dualism is a pair where one negates the other or undermines the other, as I like to say. And a classic one in academia is subjective and objective. If you want to put down a social scientist and you're a natural scientist, you're saying, oh, you're being subjective. If you want to put, put down a natural scientist, a neurosocial scientist, or it is, you've fallen into the trap of objectivity, which is fails to put yourself in your historical context as an observer observing. So there are, there are problems with dualisms, but we tend to think in dualistic ways still quite commonly in many aspects of our life. And the alternative is duality. A duality is where a pair create a complementary relationship. Classic examples are yin and yang, where both operate to create a greater whole. So there are emergent properties. And I mean, if you take the concept in biology of a predator and prey in ecology. I mean, if you talk about a predator, it makes absolutely no sense without the concept prey. Those two concepts are necessary to create a whole, a holistic understanding of a certain relationship and interaction. So on the back of information and the linear model, we began to conserve in science and other domains of life and everyday common sense, in everyday folk psychology, the idea that the mind is different from the body and all of these sorts of things. And anyone who wants to follow up on this could start with the work of Lakoff and Johnson and Metaphors We Live By and things like that. Yeah. So looking at the two adjectives, I chose to label this whole commitment to the linear model as the systematic world we live in. The systematic is the step-by-step, the linear, the commitment to objectivity, the commitment to dualism. So the word systematic encompasses all of those commitments. To me, which leads us to do much of what we do in the world. When we run a project over a 3-year timeframe and say at the beginning of the project, we will deliver these outcomes, then we are trapped to the linear model and to being systematic. Whereas if you're being systemic, you're recovering the key notion of relationship and relational dynamics in which the linear one may be only a very, very minor component of it. And it could be a circular recursive involving feedback dynamics. It could produce emergence. So there are all sorts of things that operate in a systemic way of conceiving the world. And it makes historical connections with parts of Western thought, say the Heraclitus and, and process thought, Whitehead, process theology, the idea that when you step in a river, you never step in the same river because water's always flowing past. So the systemic tradition is present in the Western intellectual tradition, but it's been sublimated for a long, long time and particularly sublimated post the Second World War as the AI computing information and the emergence of the computer as a piece of technology took off. Yeah. And we began to privilege and live a whole set of metaphors, which were essentially built on the linear model. And I mean, many of these are devoted to war as well. And it's interesting how many metaphors of human communication come from the First World War, for example, in English. Whereas the systemic gets back in touch with some sublimated understandings. Alexander von Humboldt, a great scholar and polymath, I mean, thought in these systemic terms and identified these systemic issues very early on, but in the Western education system, we lost sight of him, or we privileged his brother William, who was less systemic. And of course, we, we didn't take into account, or we didn't connect, and thankfully we didn't necessarily appropriate either, but that's another story, Indigenous understandings. Because as I often write about my experience in the Museum of the Amerindians in Washington, DC, if you go for a trip through that museum, and you read about the understandings and practices of many North American tribes, communities, then you see essentially their cosmology built on a systemic understanding of the world, a relational, including, say, if you go to Hopi, where the Hopi language is built on verbs. So it's a way you're always in process in relating to the earth through the construction of their language. And then of course, there's a resurgence of it in interest of, in Indigenous understandings at the moment. And that's good, but we also need to be careful of our colonizing tendencies in the West to not colonize those understandings, but to— I would claim we should take more responsibility for our own intellectual tradition and bringing those subdued traditions like the systems stuff we're talking about into the mainstream and having a fruitful dialogue with Indigenous understandings. Rather than necessarily saying, oh, well, the Western stuff's no good, we're now going to move over here.

Yeah.

To get back to your question, that's one of the reasons one needs to be cautioned about. So there's a whole growing enthusiasm to think and act systemically and to talk about systems. Now, I've talked about the concept system going feral, and its feral nature has its problems. And the problems are that many people who use it use it in a naive way as a noun to describe what they perceive to be essentially something oppressive, something which is a mess, something which is sort of all interconnected, which is fine. That's, that's good.

Yeah.

But if you stop there, you don't, in my view, gain much traction towards moving towards purposeful action to transform the situation, to make it better or to change it for good.

Yeah.

So that's why naive engagement with the word system is problematic. And just to top and tail my conversation about systemic and systematic, we don't see this as a dualism, either/or. It's not that systematic is bad or systemic is good. We frame that as a duality, just like yin and yang, or, and so the two together form a totality, a complementarity. But we live in a world that denies so much of the systemic, and we lack so much systemic literacy and systemic capability that the systematic always tends to take over. And so how we begin to flip our world into a trajectory of living with both the systemic and in special cases, the systematic is the great challenge and is at the core of much of my writing and recent scholarship. I love it.

They're amazing. This is amazing. So if I could just focus in on a few things you've said. One is, one of the, the reasons I find it really interesting, that duality framing is because of the, as you say, they're both adjectives of system and the systematic, yes, is linear and yes, is mechanistic and reductive and all the things you've said. But I think it's important because there is a, a way that that can almost look like a systemic approach, you know, and I think, you know, I've, I've talked about this with Nora and, and others, but that idea that a systemic approach could actually just be a slightly more interconnected, linear, and reductive approach where you take lots of things and you, you know, you interconnect them, you draw systems maps of them. You, you kind of, it still has the logic of the systematic, in the way that systems thinking approach is taken. And I think that is one of the dangers as these ideas come into education, is that we then say, okay, we want to teach our young people about interconnected systems, but really there's not enough reflexivity about that idea of the systemic versus the systematic. It looks systemic, but it's not really. It's just a glorified version of the systematic. That's one thing. I don't know whether, I don't know whether you You would agree with that or you've seen—

Well, I agree with you. I agree with you, but I'm out of sympathy with many funders and bodies, I mean ministries and other things of this nature who of course still want to believe that they can act systematically. And the systematic tradition is of course related to how we understand command and control and operations. Exactly. Yeah. Government. And it's still on the linear model and it still feeds into the way we want to evaluate we did X, which caused Y, and therefore we claim Z.

And that was actually my, that was one of my other reflections as you were talking is that there's this thing about control and, and going back to the Macy conferences and what I was saying about the, the will to power in a way, the will to control in order to develop AI. There is just this, this thing that won't go away about human beings and they want to try and control. Sorry, I include myself in this. We want to try and control our environment. Right. And, and I think there's something really profound in that. It's easy to vilify and it's easy to pathologize, but actually there is something in humans that wants, and that's the whole idea of techne, right? In a way of the way we sharpen a flint in order to try and use a tool to control an environment. There's something, there's something, I feel something very deep there that I think it's important to acknowledge and not just pathologize as bad in inverted commas, and therefore, you know, systemic is good, systematic equals control equals power equals bad, which is obviously crude and ridiculously simplistic.

Well, I agree with you totally. In fact, as you speak, it reminds me of an anecdote from my early days of experience at Hawkesbury. So forgive me jumping forward, but I mean, one of the things that as a young staff member at Hawkesbury Agricultural College in the west of Sydney, in the late 1970s, uh, one of the things you had to do to join this program in a, I mean, a fulsome and intellectual way was that you had to reframe yourself not as an academic dispenser of knowledge, but to become a facilitator of someone else's learning. And to become a facilitator of someone else's learning, you had to create the circumstances where the learner could take responsibility for their claims about knowledge or knowing. So you are essentially managing for emergence, i.e., that a learner can make claims about how they've come to know. Whereas in, in that group of people who weren't recruited to this innovation, they were there historically and all sorts of other things, about 50% of the staff could reimagine themselves as a facilitator of learning and to see successes when the student starred and you were in the background. Whereas the other 50% couldn't get rid of their egos because they always wanted to claim, I caused that to happen. Yeah. And so a lot of that particular dynamic that I encountered way back then still operates in a very profound way and it shapes a lot of practices and it is fed by a lot of social technologies that we've invented around evaluation, project cycles and all sorts of things.

Yeah.

We introduced an innovation which was designed to reinforce that shift from a more systematic to a systemic. And that is that we, working with the students in an action research mode, we invited them to help design the assessment procedures. And we had a, we'd built a competency matrix, which was about knowledge, skills, and values, I think, down one side, and then across the top, responsibility and learning systems, agriculture, and effective Communication. So we've, we, we claimed that students had to take responsibility for their own learning. So they therefore had to have a theory of learning. If you want to take responsibility for your learning, they had to engage with agriculture in systemic and systematic ways and improve situations. And thirdly, they needed to work with others. And so therefore they needed to be effective in their communication in all sorts of ways. But we said to the students, we won't test you on these things. We will invite you to apply to progress or graduate, and you will provide us with the evidence that you're ready to progress or that you're ready to, uh, graduate. And so that changed the locus of responsibility, and it feeds into a nice little, uh, heuristic, which is to be responsible requires the capacity to be response-able. And so the role of an educator, in my view, is to create the possibilities for response-ability by a student. Yeah.

No, amazing. And again, just to put a flag in it, this is the early 1980s we're talking about, Hawkesbury Agricultural College, right? And just to flag again, exactly these conversations are just happening now again and again, and about how do we innovate with assessment frameworks in order to get these virtuous cycles of these kinds of responsibility and learning competencies and all of these things. I mean, again, it's like there's just such a fascinating lack of learning sometimes in these social technologies that we've built, right? Fascinating. But if I can, one of the other reflections that I had as you were talking about the systemic and the systematic was that, and I have this regularly in, you know, in the work with Nora Bateson and the warm data work, is that there is something much easier in the invitation to work with the systematic, because it, it's not that it's necessarily more simplistic, but there is, there is an invitation to, to move parts around and, you know, work with these kind of, these connections and these cause and effect relationships, which at a certain level of granularity or a certain, you know, in certain situations are effective, you know, very common. And therefore there's a, sometimes it, it's easier to know what to do when we're thinking about working in systematic ways. Whereas if we take this idea of being systemic, then it invites in a whole other set of, well, what, what exactly are we talking about in terms of competencies around systemic awareness? I mean, that, that to me, as you said earlier, there's a lack of systemic literacies, but that's why I think your work and the way that you have framed the idea of the juggler and the different balls that are being juggled is a really useful and very kind of clear way of framing some of those, what can be quite, in, in certain people's language, it becomes a bit fuzzy around, or we've, we've got, we're doing this noticing. You get into a certain discourse sometimes around systemic approaches, which to many people don't feel clear enough, or they're quite, quite jargon heavy sometimes. There's an interesting issue that I think that needs to be worked with in that systemic space, which I, I feel your work is really contributing significantly towards.

Well, thank you. Yes, I hope so. Well, the question has sort of prompted a number of thoughts. I mean, there are several important people in the development of my ideas, and of course, everyone stands on someone else's shoulders in this intellectual world. Umberto Maturana, in my own case, and Peter Checkland, I mean, if you take Checkland's sort of development of what he calls soft systems methodology, which is more than a technique or a tool, really, it's a much more profound than that and is a whole theoretical framework. I mean, he, he was the first one to really try and break away from the trap that much of the systems community was in, in the 1980s about seeing systems as things in the world, what sometimes is labeled as ontologies, but A lot of people don't like that word, so I don't use it all the time. But in SSM, he sees systems as epistemological devices, devices that you invent as a way of knowing about a situation that you want to change for the better. And the agency and creativity comes in thinking about, well, how do we understand this situation? What's going on in the situation? So his, he always starts with situation, as do I, rather than system. And that's one of the difficulties of the traditional discourse is that if someone is starting with the system, then you know, well, that's good because they know that there's something wrong, something needs to be improved. But beyond that, the next steps become problematic because you've got to say the system as seen by whom, the system as containing what interacting elements, the system as bounded in what way. And the danger, if you stay with the word system as a thing, is that you go in and map it from a narrow perspective and you say the, the food system has all these elements in it and here's the map of it and it's got all these sorts of things. And you can say this node is related to this node and all this sort of stuff, but that leads you absolutely nowhere with doing anything about it.

But does it— that articulation is exactly what I was trying to get at when I was talking about getting that lapse back into systematic. Would you say that that approach is actually just not really leaving the systematic?

Yeah, no, not at all. I mean, and I don't think it's actually all that effectively systematic, quite frankly, because it's systematic within itself, but it's not systematic in terms of its relationship to the situation that you're trying to model.

Yeah. Okay.

But I mean, the thing about the duality between systems and systematic, as one German professor said to me in a workshop I was running about SSM, and we're trying to get SSM out, he said, he said, I think I've got it actually, to be really good systemically, you've got to have some good capabilities to be systematic as well, in the sense that the whole thing about systems thinking is to be able to move up and down levels of abstraction. When you move up and down levels of abstraction, you're moving different boundary judgments. You're moving to where you're putting a different boundary. And you're also moving to different levels of thought because at one level, this relates to why, another level relates to what, and another level relates to how. But one observer might have their levels about why, what, and how operating at different levels. If you sit in a meeting of academics or of people in an organization, you often encounter them talking completely past each other because they're operating at different levels. And And someone's why is another person's what and another person's how. And I mean, one of the questions that comes up later is what are the implications for public policy for failing to think systemically? Well, one of the great failings of public policy is thinking that there's something common over all contexts. So you want uniformity, that you can roll something out. And that's a classic systematic metaphor, which crushes people in the process. Yeah. And that. You can't allow enough scope for emergence of how in local ways, in public policy terms, you can speak about the why. We want to address the community's capacity to respond to flood events or something of this nature. That's— we want greater capability for that. That's the why, because we want to save lives. But then what and how, the agency to enact and to define what those should be should sit with local communities, not with centralized command and control. So this is one of the great failings of much contemporary public policy because contemporary governance people don't realize where, where control can operate and where they should see control as managing for emergence or creating the context for emergence, which is a completely different form of control. Yeah.

Ah, interesting. And so to bring it just to some things that people can get hold of, let's say, in the form of some balls, your juggling isophor that you use. And I, as I said, I do think it's, it's really powerful because it, the juggling metaphor or isophor, which you, you can explain the difference if you want to, but based on Maturana, I think, but it situates the juggler as well as the balls, right? And I think as you've been reflecting, it's that idea that, you know, as Margaret Mead said, whatever positionality you have in relation to the situation or within the system, that's a really important part. So the juggler is there, but there's also multiple things going on in relation to things that they are juggling. So they're being, engaging, contextualizing, managing as your 4 balls. Is that a fair introduction for you to then take over and just maybe give a little bit of a sense of what, why that's important and what those different balls are?

Well, the juggler, ISAFOR, and I'll say a bit about ISAFOR in a minute, I called it a metaphor for a long period of time, but I've changed and I'll explain why I've changed. But this is a really good example of significant innovation and scholarship arising out of curriculum development in the style that The Open University was historically capable of. And my colleague and dear friend Rosalind Armson and I sat on my study floor and played around with how we were going to shape the opening of a new module called Managing for Complexity. And we came up with the essence of the juggler isophor, and we have together run workshops around with jugglers and we invite people to think about juggling and all that sort of stuff. So I want to acknowledge Rosalind's contribution to this. And it was built into that module at the Open University, which was studied by quite a few people. And then it came time to move into a postgraduate course and I expanded and grounded the material much more in the historical scholarship. Another thing, which is in the book Systems Practice. Which you read. I became aware when I took up the role as Professor of Systems at The Open University that one of the great missing things in our curriculum was the awareness that despite all of the profound learning that was going on with our students, it often left them in a lurch when they went back to their workplace or went back to their lives because they found the workplaces and their lives or their enthusiasm not welcomed or people were not receptive and other things of that nature. So the number of stories I told of people who changed their lives as a result of studying with us, I thought was, well, at one level very significant, but another level problematic because we were disturbing these people's lives and we needed to take some responsibility for it.

Yeah.

So we conceived of a curriculum of which the Jagla Aishaphur is part in which we, we felt for a number of reasons that we had to get sufficient reflexivity on the part of the student to be able to situate themselves as central to their own learning, but to also their own practice of systems thinking and practice. And in a way, that's an extension of the Margaret Mead sort of notion that you have to put the observer back in the observations. So it's a, it's another extension. And of course, there've been significant changes in a whole range of different areas of scholarship. Not least of which is cognition and the whole idea of an activist or embodied cognition and all of these sorts of things. And the other thing is that we decided that the curriculum needed to be sufficiently reflexive that we could move from equipping people to develop their systems literacy, to have sufficient capability to change the circumstances in which they were going to do their systems thinking once they left our program. Right. I.e., that they could think about themselves in their post-learning situation so that it wasn't disastrous for them or it wasn't— we felt this was an essential ethical element of our curriculum development, which we referred to as taking a design turn. So how can you not only do systems thinking, but how can you take a design turn to design the context of doing your systems thinking in practice? Yeah. Interesting. I mean, that's actually a manifestation of being responsable, of being responsible, circumstances for someone to be responsible. And the jaguar metaphor appealed because we felt that the central first ball was one's own being. I mean, so you, to, uh, that you are the center of your own existence. And so you had to understand yourself and you had to understand your own being and how you engage with the world, which includes your history. And I make the being part of this manifest in another exercise I do, which is with PhD students, in which I invite them to think about how they arrived in their research situation and take them way back to their, their birth and their evolutionary past, because we, we are born into a world, we're born into a language, we carry with us evolutionary characteristics, and, uh, the language and the culture we're born into shapes our cognition and our traditions of understanding out of which we think. We then enter primary education, secondary education, which shapes how we know and not know other things. And then we go into a university, et cetera. And then we, if we go into a particular curriculum or a particular supervisor or a particular subject matter, we're told we've got to be objective. And if we, we go down to another line of study, we might influenced by social constructionism or constructivism or whatever. And Maturana has a systemic distinction between those where he calls, you follow the path of objectivity or you follow the path of objectivity in parentheses, which is essentially an as if. I'm aware that there are these pathways. I'm aware that they have implications. I can go down this pathway acting as if I believe in objectivity. Yeah.

Yeah.

Or I know that I, think and act all the time out of my tradition of understanding, and I'm always situated in my research situation. There's no outside view.

Yeah. Interesting. Just as an aside, I was listening to Indi Johar today. I don't know if you know Indi Johar, and he was talking, he said something beautiful, which I was really struck by, that we are not from anywhere. We've just made different journeys. And it just really resonated with what you were saying there, that idea that actually we're just, we are so much a product of how we have got to here. And I think the idea of this false objectivity that we try and muster somehow, this logical positivist, you know, obsession with we must remove ourselves from it, that we affect the context and our situatedness is not— it feels that that is an ongoing battle that we fight.

I mean, it's worth saying that again, the as-if position is essentially an acknowledgement of the shift between being systematic and being systemic. So it's the ability to negotiate the duality of those two positions and move around and take responsibility at any moment in time. And I mean, I depict this as a sort of ladder, you know, sort of yin-yang type figure, which you've probably seen. And I mean, it's a question of how in particular moments of our doings we move up and down between those positions. And it's not to throw the systematic totally out, but it's at the moment we are locked into that mode of being for most of what we do, and it's inappropriate for our current circumstances. So to go back to the ISOFOR, I mean, the 4 balls that we came up with are our own being, and an important aspect of our own being is the culture and the language where we live in. And again, following Maturana, I've, or I've actually gone a bit further than him and claimed that languages are social technologies that use us. We don't use language. So these are things that have been historically invented in a particular culture and the nature of the language structures who we are. It structures our mouth, it structures our biology. And if you ask any person in my workshops who speak multiple languages, and many people do, they will all acknowledge that they are different people in different languages. So the realization that we are, we can be different people and that language uses us should open our eyes to how AI uses us as well. Now, a metaphor— I've done quite a lot of work on metaphor, had PhD students doing metaphor. Metaphor theory is really important and it's quite central to my work and how we move from one metaphor to another is important. But a metaphor operates by taking us from one domain into another domain. I don't know, marriage as war or some, some other things. Operates by a displacement of domain, and that can be very creative. I was giving a talk in Quito in Ecuador some years ago, and Humberto Maturana was also giving a talk, and I talked about how we were using the juggler metaphor. And he came up afterwards, and we knew each other quite well, and he said, I really like what you're saying here, and I think it applies to how you think and act systemically, but I'd invite you to think about calling it an isophore, cuz I coined this term isophore some years ago, because an isophore is the enactment of a set of actions in one domain, the same set in a different domain. So enacting juggling in the living of life in an organization as a juggler in our daily living, in our marriage, in our family, in our, um, work life is that it The same elements are entailed, but they are in a different context or domain. So I think, I mean, in everything we do, we're juggling our, on a daily basis, our being, because our being is how we bring forth our living and our worlds and the extent to which we carry some sort of reflexivity in it, the extent to which we do what we do and claim we did that, but actually we may not have done that. Yeah. Uh, as seen by others. It, uh, shapes our, our traditional understanding, shapes how we, um, hear and see others in our engagements with them. And underpinning all of that is our flow of emotions, because the emotion we're in governs so much of what we hear, what we see, what we do. Anger, love, fear, et cetera.

Yeah.

And I mean, we, we live in a world at the moment where fear and is a tremendously dominant emotion. So that's, that's being, and then if we take it that we as embodied beings are always situated, then we've got to take responsibility for how we think about the situations. And we're born into a culture where when we learn language, we often get labels for situations, which we take for granted, but these labels have historical connotations and other things. Including reality. The word reality is merely a label for a particular type of situation, which is not to say that we can't accept that we live in a material world, but one person's reality is different to another person's reality. So, and these are all framing choices we make about situations. Yeah. And so many of the contemporary framing choices we make are based on going back to that first-order cybernetic understanding, the linear model. What Rittel and Weber call tame problems, a problem to be solved. So how you have sufficient reflexivity about how you engage with situations is a critical issue, because in that framing choice, you are taking responsibility for how you move forward, how you take action, how you understand others, how you compare how you understand the situation with how others understand the situation, which will always be different unless you've checked it out and had enough conversation to say, ah, we're seeing this fairly similarly. But it takes a lot of work to be able to say to someone else, ah, you understand me, is a really profound journey.

That's back to the marriage, right? Yeah. It's interesting because just as you're reflecting on reality, it makes me think we just, we get so caught up sometimes in arguing over the the truth or the reality of things. But actually what you're talking about is a, is almost a pragmatic move of just being, well, yes, we are situated. Yes, we're making framing choices all the time. Your, yours are different to mine. And we're trying to navigate this entangled complexity constantly rather than ultimately once and for all, you know, just try and resolve that there is this external reality and this, this realm of truth out there. I mean, Maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but actually what matters is that we are these situated beings engaging with the world, juggling these balls in these entangled systemic situations.

I'll go on with the other balls in a minute, but I need to make a point here for potential interpretations made by listeners who may think that I'm advocating a rampant sort of relativism.

Exactly.

I need to pick up on another aspect of Maccharana's work, where he said we humans live in language, uh, with a desire for explanation.

Yeah.

And so a scientific explanation of a phenomenon is a particular way of offering an explanation, which has become culturally accepted in certain ways. It's got to satisfy certain criteria to become accepted as a scientific explanation. And so what or what isn't become an accepted explanation is culturally determined, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be rigorous and robust about the types of explanations we offer and what we consider as valid explanations. But those, that's a very different dynamic than trying to establish a truth.

Exactly.

Yeah. And, and actually potentially it leads us into the C ball, the contextualizing ball, because then we start talking about the way in which we know and the patterns of knowing that I think is, is part of that.

Right. Yes. And it's in our interactions. I mean, it's in our conversation, which is operating. I mean, the conversation you and I have had has been mediated by a piece of technology, a couple of pieces of technology, a thing called a book, a Zoom, and a number of unfoldings. And it's through that, that we begin to move closer to saying, well, we understand each other and we can agree. What might be a good strategy to do things in a particular way or coordinate our actions. And at the heart of communication is the coordination of coordinations of actions, again, a Maturana sort of notion. And it's, it's only through the dance of communication that we can affect significant change because it's the essence of being social. And when you encounter another as a legitimate other, when you, um, And many of the failures we live today are the failures of the encountering of others as legitimate others.

One of the questions I had, which I think takes us back a step but also forward a step, hopefully, is that as you were talking about earlier, that the systematic is a special case of the systemic. So the systemic, yes, it's a duality. They are yin yang and, but actually the, the systemic contains the systematic because the systematic is a special case of the systemic. And similarly to that, you've talked about the fact that knowledge is a special case of knowing, which I think is, is a really interesting idea, particularly, I mean, that for me as an, as an educator, I, I find that very interesting cuz we're obsessed, particularly certain education systems obsessed with knowledge, right? And this fixed idea of knowledge, maybe it takes us back to that idea of kind of decontextualizable information, but that actually the knowledge is this particular case of this idea of knowing, which is back to your process ideas and verbs and movement and flow and Heraclitus and all of that, that I think there's something really important there. I think that, that we need to acknowledge that the systemic and the knowing are the containers in which these very particular and more fixed categories get placed.

Yeah, well, absolutely. And thank you. That was, that's always where I was trying to head. I frame knowing and knowledge as a duality, or I think it's a useful way to think about it. And that you require that the thing we call knowledge is a manifestation for a moment in time of the reification of processes of knowing. But the problem is that the reification often lasts too long and it's built into curricula as if it is universal and stationary and static and forever.

Yeah, well, if it takes 3 years to build a curriculum, of course it's going to—

Well, no, what should get built into the lives of learners is the dynamic, the enactment of the duality of Knowing and knowledge.

Absolutely.

And so it, the key skill or capability is to engage in acts of knowing with others. And the reification are the special moments of stabilizing what we might call explanations that arise from knowing or particular claims that arise from knowing for particular moments in time. Yeah. And this is extremely important at this particular historical moment because we live through a period of human history where we could stabilize knowledge for quite long periods of times and lots of things were relatively okay. But we've run out of time to maneuver around this because the Anthropocene world that we humans have created is delivering such change that all of the knowledge on which many of our, uh, social technologies, our governance arrangements, and other things were built are no longer adequate. So all of that is in a way up for grabs. We've got to engage in a massive re-knowing of our world and produce particular short-term ramifications for action, but knowing that it's got to— you've got to be on this constant loop.

If I could just, I would say yes, and there is also, going back to your point about the systematic rolling out and kind of rolling over other ways of knowing, Right. There's this, this kind of, this colonizing imperial urge as well that I think it's important to bring back into the room with us because yes, the knowing is moving so fast with AI, et cetera, that the knowledge or the knowledge is being outdated, et cetera. So, but also in the last few hundred years, a particular way of knowing or a particular conception of knowledge has been particularly valorized and, and allowed to be completely dominant and violent to other ways of knowing, ways of knowing which are much more, as you said, processual and that move. And I, I just— different ways of people knowing their world but haven't been attached with the same kind of power, cultural power.

Well, let me tell a little story about this. I mean, back in 2000 to 2004, I was head of Framework 5 research program in the European Union called SLIM, Social Learning for the Integrated Management Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale. Right. And we had 5 country participants, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, English. And, um, we did all this really good research and the research was about social learning in river catchment management. But, but we also walked our talk in that we ran the research program as if we were building a social learning process and social learning community amongst the researchers. And, uh, when it came time to write up the final research report, we had probably one of the main fights, in inverted commas, uh, that we'd had in the group because I, and supported by a couple of others, argued that producing a synthesis report, which synthesized all the learnings from all of our partners in the particular cultural context they were in would be an act of reduction and an act of losing the differences that make a difference. Yeah. So instead, uh, what we did was we created a heuristic device which enabled the different understandings from the different cultural contexts to be explored and the differences realized so that the final report didn't say, this is the finding. These are the findings from these cultural contexts and these differences have these implications.

Yeah. Interesting. And I would, if I could as well, just as you were saying about that slide into relativism, actually what you're talking about there and something I've been really interested in understanding more deeply is the idea of pluralism and requisite variety and, you know, healthy ecologies function based on diversity. Plurality of species or whatever it is. And there's something different happening. It's not relativism that everything goes in and, you know, that's a misframing. Actually what's happening is there are situated emergences in relation to where those things are coming up from, whether it's educationally or whatever, whatever we're talking about, we, you end up with a variety, healthy variety and diversity and plurality. And that's something important, I think, in that idea as well.

And I guess the point I'd make is that it happens within the Western intellectual tradition. I mean, how our French colleagues understood knowledge and knowing and how they acted in their being as scientists was fundamentally different than the way the English people acted, really. And so, I mean, it's impossible to merge those into something that is common because you lose so much. And that difference is important, just as it will be disastrous if in this new flurry of interest in reviving Indigenous ways of understanding, we A) colonise it and appropriate it, or B) we don't gain better ways of articulating our own ways of knowing and being able to engage in a meaningful conversation around manners of knowing and knowledge that each tradition produces, because otherwise it will end up in great big fights and arguments because one community will be holding on to notions of objectivity or a particular cosmological position about what constitutes knowledge, which are incommensurate.

Exactly. And it's that idea of Albert Marshall's idea of two-eyed seeing, or, you know, many-eyed seeing, you know, I think it really connects with a lot of what you talk about in relation to the way that we make framing choices and we are coming at the situation from very different situated perspectives. That's— of course we are.

So just to summarize, the, the juggler isofor contains 4 balls. It's about how we understand our own being and our own situatedness, our own embodiment, and our own tradition of understanding out of which we think and act. Uh, the e-ball is about how we engage with situations, how we choose to frame situations, and the implication of historical framings, and which leads in my latter book to a sort of a set of practices, which I call deframing, reframing, framing. So it's about how you play around with those notions as practices, because quite frankly, a lot of language traps us into ways of acting that we have to get rid of. So that means deframing exercises. And then there's the seaborne, it's about how you contextualize actions to make it effective and profitable and draw others in and create effective performances. And managing is about how you hang all of your practices, all of those juggling activities together in a sort of mode of enactment.

Amazing. I'm very conscious that we're trying to squeeze decades' worth of very deep and thoughtful work into a very short space of time. And this is—

Been fun.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I, I love it. And I think it's, as we said at the beginning, I think there's just really important to acknowledge you and all the work that you and all of your colleagues have done in that space. As we come to these ideas of systems thinking, as though for the first time we think, you know, let's teach young people about systems thinking, but there is so much here that I think is really rich and important for people to be aware of as they kind of go into this work. So no, I, I, I really appreciate it.

I mean, there's one other, just a few sort of notes to strike cautions on. I mean, I'm president of an International Federation of Systems Research. So historically, like, it's what does it mean to research systems? That, so that provides interesting sort of modes for reflection. There's a lot of discourse historically around systems science. So what is the science of systems again? And then there's systems practice. I mean, and we reframed our program at the Open University as Systems Thinking in practice, primarily to break out of the trap of people outside thinking of systems as computing. And we were located in a technology and later on an engineering and innovation school. So how people perceive you becomes important. And I guess the other aspect of our, a lot of our curriculum work historically has remained hidden. It's only been exposed to those people who've studied those programs. And as you and I have discussed, there's a lot of very valuable material and learning in all of that historical material.

Yeah. But I, if I could just, that, that idea of practice and praxis, you, you talk about theory engaged practical action, right? And I think that's also a really important concept for now, obviously to differentiate from a more kind of techno-scientific engineering approach, but also just to acknowledge some of what we're talking about, which is complex embodied systemic work, which takes practice.

Right?

It's, it's not that you're just gonna read a book and you're gonna understand a concept and then you can go out and, you know, systematically solve your problem that you've decided, you know, you're gonna be the, the conqueror of. I mean, what we're talking about in terms of governance of systems or just any of the complex issues that we're talking about is ultimately, I think, gonna require deep human systemic complex work, which we're gonna mess up quite a lot of the time. And that there's something about practice that I think a really important idea.

Well, I agree. And I mean, the burgeoning interest in systems and systems ideas at the one hand is very encouraging, but we've had these flourishes in the past and they've come sort of crashing down and not gone particularly far because the mainstream paradigm always tends to bite back. I mean, our history, our current circumstances create a greater need and a greater urgency. So perhaps things this time around may be different. But I'm not overly optimistic. And I would say that the three insights or the three concepts, ways of thinking that have come out of our 50 years' experience for me, and which enabled me to coin the terms systemic sensibility, systems literacy, and systems thinking and practice capability, is that many people who are concerned about our world and turn to systems ideas have got the inkling of a, what you might call, of a the beginnings of a systemic sensibility, but it may be a very naive or simplistic systemic sensibility. And if I can, I mean, just run a simple exercise with students when I'm talking to them in lectures, which I don't particularly like doing, but if you ask people the question, how does walking or how does swimming arise as a practice? Then most people will give an answer, which is systematic in nature. Something happens in the life of a child and you put a foot in front of the other and something happens. And then you walked. But I've only ever had one person in an audience answer the question that walking happens in the relational dynamics between a person with a body and a medium called the floor. And if you change the relational dynamics between those two, then walking as a practice doesn't happen. Yeah. And so to really have a systemic sensibility, you've gotta be able to break out of the linear way of seeing cause and effect operating everywhere and to see how relational dynamics operate. I mean, our body, all of our molecules and different parts of our body system all operate in that systemic relational way because it's how one component operates in relation to another component that determines how our body functions. And, and of course it's not just us, it's our, with our microbiome, other species, and we're completely interdependent with other species, et cetera, et cetera. Exactly.

Yeah.

We don't exist as an individual. We exist as a network of relationships and things of that nature.

So yeah, they're deep and challenging ideas, aren't they, to our fake security and safety that we've kind of set up for ourselves to imagine that we are unitary individuals with strong boundaries and, you know, sacred uniqueness.

Yes. We need to deepen people's systemic sensibility in that to become aware of that relational thing. And related to that is how people make boundary judgments and how they see connections and relationships. And you can't do that by primarily by yourself, or if you do it by yourself, you've got to share it with others and expose it to consideration. And it's in that process that you become aware of how you perceive a situation. And that's part of the shift from the B-ball to the E-ball of how you engage, because how you share your mental models of a situation, how you see relationships, all that sort of stuff is part of getting into a more meaningful conversation, which builds on systems literacy, the history of systems ideas, and moves it towards systems thinking and practice capability, because it's about how you design and conduct effective performances for transformation. That is ultimately where we want to end up in this historical moment.

Amazing. Absolutely. I love that. And that, that idea that somehow there's this kind of, yeah, this collective dialogic or metalogic process of inquiry together through these things. Again, I think, yeah, lots of educational implications there and really profound and important. Yeah. And I don't feel, I mean, maybe I haven't seen it happen as many times, so I may be just naive and optimistic, but I'm not, I am slightly more optimistic than you seemed to be a moment ago in relation to just how much, and I think you referenced it a few times, just how much the cognitive science and the, the emerging science is understanding that kind of relational coupling that you're talking about and the autopoiesis and, you know, the embodied knowing, the enactivist, more and more is coming into mainstream scientific understandings that we really do have to take these kind of, this biological, ecological dynamics much more seriously. Again, there's traps there, but no, I thank you so much. This is fabulous. And I very much hope to continue the discussion.

Great. Good.

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