We end up in an odd place.
Here, we deliberately leave the old dichotomies behind, but they never truly leave us. It is an explicit rejection of the old categories – a move away from the old, while not yet grasping the new. A liminal space, still defined by its past in the negative: post-capitalism, post-colonialism, post-modernity.
It’s the intentional negation of the binary of master and slave, with both lingering in the background. It’s the “I don’t see color” that points so heavily toward what it aims to move away from. In this space, the old binaries are neither affirmed nor entirely erased—they haunt us, even as we strive to transcend them.
Tag: Systems Thinking
Using Agile software development as a touchstone for linking systemic inquiry and project management.
Doug, I have really enjoyed your current learning out loud with your Masters in Systems Thinking. This piece really stuck with me. I have been grappling a bit with project management and the agile methodology since been asked to complete a course as a part of my change of roles where I work. I think I had thought that I was being agile (maybe little a agile), but was left struck by the rigidity required in actually sticking to the process. (I am guess this is where your focus on being deliberate fits in?) The thing that has struck me is the conflicted nature of the push and pull. I agree with the intent, but unless everyone is onboard and clear about expectations, it all becomes a bit of agile-washing.
The other thing that has really struct me is the world of project management and the lived reality. It feels like a lot of people want to do project management, without actually doing the hard work. Lines are drawn, positions set, but when the game starts and chaos ensues, they are lost at sea. I have been left wondering if project management really exists and if so, what does it look like? I hear the successes and achievements, this pie chart and that bar graph, but the reality feels like something different. I am therefore intrigued by your discussion of system inquiry. It reminded me of Dave Cormier’s discussion of ‘complex’ versus ‘complicated’:
We are confronted by the complicated/complex division everyday in education. Do I want to know if a medical students has remembered the nine steps of a process of inquiry to work with a patient or do I want to know if they built a good raport? How often do we choose the thing that is easier to measure… simply because we can verify that our grading is ‘fair’. How often do we get caught in conversations around how ‘rigourous’ an assessment is when what we really mean is ‘how easy is it to defend to a parent who’s going to complain about a child’s grade’.
Source: Making Change in Education II – Complexity vs. Lean Six Sigma (learning isn’t like money)
Might be something I need to dive into further.
Bateson started out a biologist, and with an exceptional pedigree — his father, William Bateson, had actually coined the term “genetics.” Bateson demonstrated a deep understanding of Darwinian processes that he first learned at home during his earliest days. In the late 1920s, he taught linguistics at the University of Sydney. In the 1930s, he was a high-profile anthropologist and did important fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali (often in tandem with his wife at the time, Margaret Mead). After World War II, he became a well-known psychotherapist and developed his famous double bind theory, which initially aimed at explicating the causes of schizophrenia, but could be applied to a wide range of other areas, including comedy, art, poetry, and organizational behavior. In the 1960s, Bateson researched the effects of LSD at a Veterans Hospital near Stanford University, where he and Dr. Leo Hollister recruited future novelist and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey to participate in his experiments. Later still, he moved to the Virgin Islands and ran a research laboratory funded by the eccentric John Lilly, who wanted to find ways of communicating with dolphins. But through all of this, our intrepid researcher maintained his greatest passion: the study and propagation of cybernetics, which aimed to explain the systems of human behavior and thinking with a kind of precision and scientific rigor akin to what Newton had applied to physics or Euclid to geometry.
Ted Gioia reflects on the life and exoeriences of Gregory Bateson. He talks about the idea of runaway systems:
He recognized that there were two kinds of systems: ones that relied on feedback to create stability, and others that tended to escalate and create runaway trends.
And the double bind:
One of Bateson’s key insights was that the double bind usually takes place simultaneously in two different contexts. In the example cited, the mother’s hostile behavior takes place at one level and the explanation of the hostile behavior operates at a higher level. “[C]onsequently it is of a different order of message,” he explains. “It is a message about a sequence of messages. Yet by its nature it denies the existence of those messages which it is about, i.e., the hostile withdrawal.” This is why the double bind is the source of so much humor: what makes sense at one level is absurd at another.
Questions to Support Learner-Driven Systems:
- What leadership behaviors can we demonstrate to ensure our learners will continue to bring their best ideas forward (even if they might not be perfect)?
- If every decision needs to be immediately scalable, how will we ensure we’re nimble enough to remain relevant to the learners we serve?
- To what extent are we living up to our mission, vision, and values, and are there multiple pathways to create more learner-driven schools?
- What are the unintended consequences of standardizing personalization or innovation?
- Is there a way we can say “yes” to an idea while still ensuring other organizational goals (e.g. alignment, consistency, scalability, budgets, sustainability)?
- Could our commitment to student safety also be personalized, so it’s not a barrier to the kind of culture we want to create?
This is such an interesting post Brad. Being in a more of a system role, it can feel demoralising at times to say no or to limit the flexibility of a given solution for the sake of equitable scale-ability. I see the system as an often invisible foundation (hopefully) allowing for innovation to prosper. I think that we have issues when we push innovation that works against the system.
In regards to your actual conundrum, I find it sad that we often have to rely on the generosity of donations to fund such ‘innovations’.
The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of ‘agricultural revolution’ remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors.
The thing that stood out to me in this lengthy post was the idea that the past was or is not always as we seem. David Graeber and David Wengrow unpack notions of inequality, that agriculture means sacrificing power and the chaotic reality of history.
The first bombshell on our list concerns the origins and spread of agriculture. There is no longer any support for the view that it marked a major transition in human societies. In those parts of the world where animals and plants were first domesticated, there actually was no discernible ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic Forager to Neolithic Farmer. The ‘transition’ from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production typically took something in the order of three thousand years. While agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the time between, people in areas as far removed as Amazonia and the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East were trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you like, switching annually between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth. Moreover, the ‘spread of farming’ to secondary areas, such as Europe – so often described in triumphalist terms, as the start of an inevitable decline in hunting and gathering – turns out to have been a highly tenuous process, which sometimes failed, leading to demographic collapse for the farmers, not the foragers.
Myths are so interesting. Even when we supposedly debunk them, they live on in our memory. As Roland Barthes explains,
Myth is imperfectible and unquestionable, time or knowledge will not make it better or worse.
One of the comments that I found interesting was that around the idea of revolutions. So often we associated revolutions with transformation, yet Graeber and Wengrow explain that they are rooted in tradition.
We must conclude that revolutionaries, for all their visionary ideals, have not tended to be particularly imaginative, especially when it comes to linking past, present, and future. Everyone keeps telling the same story. It’s probably no coincidence that today, the most vital and creative revolutionary movements at the dawn of this new millennium – the Zapatistas of Chiapas, and Kurds of Rojava being only the most obvious examples – are those that simultaneously root themselves in a deep traditional past. Instead of imagining some primordial utopia, they can draw on a more mixed and complicated narrative. Indeed, there seems to be a growing recognition, in revolutionary circles, that freedom, tradition, and the imagination have always, and will always be entangled, in ways we do not completely understand. It’s about time the rest of us catch up, and start to consider what a non-Biblical version of human history might be like.
via Doug Belshaw
Playing for Team Human today is world renowned social scientist and systems thinker, Merrelyn Emery. Emery, with her partner the late Fred Emery, advanced Open Systems Theory and applied it to manage
Merrelyn Emery discusses systems thinking with Douglas Rushkoff. In particular, she unpacks the difference between managed and self-managed systems, explaining how larger companies can break the heirachical model by spitting the decisions up. As Emery explains:
By working together with collective responsibility, people can regain control over their own affairs, in their own communities and organizations, by cooperating to meet shared goals rather than competing or peeling off as individuals to do ‘their own thing’.
This reminds me in part of heutagogy.