Worldviews and complexity: my Human System Dynamics (HSD) learning journey (so far) Part 1
I have been drawn to Human System Dynamics (HSD) for some time now and connecting into the HSD community I have engaged in a range of experiential learning activities over the last couple of years. The community, and the thinking they engage in, holds a strong attraction for me. Something of a surprise as I tend to run a mile in preference to joining this or that particular ‘club’, often citing the Groucho Marx quotation ‘I would never want to be part of a club that would accept me!’ as one of my life-long guiding principles! I think I do understand the nature of its attraction for me: It’s simply its culture, methods, and application which have a sense of being open to all possibilities. I really like that. I do not feel so much as if I am learning about HSD. Instead, I am experiencing it and am able to integrate it into my own way of working and being.
The importance of ‘experiencing in learning’ was described by the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist who said the following when discussing the accumulation of knowledge, ‘The idea that we can have a simple coherent body of information that is, if you like, third person, and therefore can be inserted into another person without them needing to have any experience is part of the problem, because there are many things that can only be learned about by having an experience of them.’ I have likened my experience of HSD to the ‘Room of Requirement’ Harry Potter brings into being when he needs it, to find a way forward in moments of baffling complexity! I don’t have access to magical powers yet the principle still holds!
To test my own understanding I thought to write and share some short pieces on aspects of HSD. Sure, these will be entirely derived from the work of experienced HSD practitioners, yet I am hoping that the process of expressing them in my own words will deepen my understanding. In sharing I hope they might offer you something of value too perhaps because the connections I make trigger something similar or different in you.
Let’s start with some fundamental world views. Nothing like jumping in the deep end and I think it appropriate to issue an oversimplification alert as I feel more novice than expert in the use of some of this language! One such is the atomistic world view, alternatively known as the reductionist view. At its most simple this approach is one based on the belief that if we can fully understand the fundamental building blocks of life then all reality can be understood by assembling our understanding of these fundamental building blocks in different ways. It is the methodology that came into being during the Enlightenment when the power of the church was usurped by the power of reason. As Francis Bacon put it ‘up until now truth has come from authority, but henceforth authority will come from truth’, meaning a transition from being told what to think to a period of reason and evidence seeking. The scientific method has served us very well for around 400 years and yet it is only one world view, one to be celebrated yet not considered as the only truth, as reality is not that simple. While science can arrive at certainty in a time bounded sense some make the mistake of it thinking it achieves a permanent state of certainty.
A second world view is one of holism. In this instance the view is that all things that come into being derived from a single whole. Holism has ancient origins and many would experience this as the territory of philosophy, tradition, and mysticism. Instead of evidence-based reality there is an expectation that reality for each of us will emerge from this whole.
A third mindset is one that says there is no external reality. Instead, reality it is created using the sensory input we collect in huge amounts every second of every day, feeding our brains which create our subjective reality. The following quotation seems to have resonance here, ‘we have an experience of perceiving so much more than we do, our perceptual systems picks up some clues and then we are in a 3D movie and we don’t know how little we know, we don’t know how it’s being cobbled together and being handed to us’. This speaks to this subjective reality while adding that know less than we think we do, and raising the question of what it is that is doing the ‘cobbling’ and ‘handing to us’. If this form of reality was experienced by all of us in its purist form the world would be a chilling place as ‘not only would there be no good or bad, there would be no better or worse’. I can feel the chill of that place and relate it to how I feel about the place called ‘perfect’. Both offer a future of no learning, no improvement, no evolution and that is a place I don’t want to be. I will never be, or do anything, perfect and I will not experience perfection in others and that’s just fine. Happily, while neuroscience is making the case that we do create out own reality, even predict it, we integrate it with all of the attributes we have evolved to help us manage the social interdependencies central to our ability to survive.
Whichever of these worldviews we tend towards the very fact that we tend towards one or the other is a challenge to our experience and understanding of our reality. The scientific method behind the atomistic world view cannot make sense of all of reality. I can’t put it any better than Rik Peel, a modern-day Dutch Philosopher when he said,‘The narrowest scientific view says that only natural scientists can provide knowledge about the world because they have these methods that can be tried and tested, and they formulate hypothesis which can be confirmed or refuted. What they fail to understand is the multifaceted nature of reality, the variety of reality, and the variety of the ways to know reality. Aside from the physical objects of the natural sciences there are also human minds, traditions, emotions, democracy, abstract entities like numbers and propositions, mental states like belief, consciousness, properties like good and evil. These just don’t lend themselves well to the methods of the natural sciences, they require a different approach. They are not objects in time and space and if something doesn’t exist in time and space there is no way you can measure it with natural science methods’. Of course, it’s equally true that adhering just to the holism worldview is going to have its limitations too.
Is there a way of experiencing reality that allows for the harnessing of both these world views. HSD’s belief is that yes there is, and it comes from complexity science in which reality can be described in terms of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).
In a complex adaptive system (CAS) there are parts (or agents) which interact with each other. You might think of these parts as being the measurable aspects present in the atomistic worldview. In fact they can be any part, measurable or otherwise. The result of the interaction of the parts is a coherent pattern whose characteristics influence the behaviour of the parts (or agents) with the purpose of ensuring the pattern is reinforced. In any CAS the pattern is like ‘the whole’ experienced in holism. The interdependent nature of the parts and the whole in CAS mean that they are both accessible in our exploration of our reality. At any moment in time we might be seeing reality from the perspective of an interacting part, or from the perspective of the pattern. They key is we have the opportunity to engage effectively between part and whole through independent activities like reflection and curiosity, and collaborative activities of co-exploration, enquiry and challenge.
What then are complex adaptive systems? They are you and me. They are the interrelation space between us. They are in the connections between each and every one of us that form groups, communities, nations and cultures. They are in the environment we live and our relationship to it. They exist at an infinite number of scales which you might envisage as layered like leaves of paper or nested like an infinite set of Russian dolls. Whether layered or nested they are entangled because the same part (or agent) will have a presence in multiple systems at multiple scales. CAS are in any situation where the reaction to an action is not predictable. They are grounded in uncertainty. They can be influenced, yet cannot be solved.
All this is fascinating yet what is really interesting is what you can do to influence a complex adaptive system, most particularly ones we engage with everyday, ones in which it is not just about theory, instead being about the practice and behaviours of us humans. That’s what Humans System Dynamics is all about; taking the theory of a range of complexity sciences and building a bridge between then and an accessible way of using them to understand the dynamics of human systems.
While the detail of this story is for another time (more likely, times!) the core of it is to support taking action in complexity rather than becoming stuck within it. How can you bring about the change you want to see if there is no certainty your action will achieve the desired reaction?? In the absence of certainty, the choice available is to observe, choose a course of action, and observe again. How have the patterns changed within the complex adaptive system you are observing, and how might that inform your next decision? HSD calls this process Adaptive Action, a sequence of action, observation and enquiry cycles in which the outcome is not the answer, or an answer. Instead, the outcome it is the next question to be asked based on the observation of how the patterns have changed. The HSD approach supports taking wise action in scenarios which are complex and uncertain. In my experience it replaces fear of failure with hope of being able to contribute to something better. Anthony Gormley captured this when, in a programme talking about the accumulation of knowledge, he said, ‘we are a part of a system of perpetual change, and the acceptance of that deep in one being allows a kind of blessing, a kind of release’.
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At the outset I mentioned that my storytelling was derivative. The two main sources for this one are Adaptive Action by Glenda Eoyang and Royce Holliday, who established the Human Systems Dynamic Institute in the early 2000s, and The Long History of Ignorance with Rory Stewart, Episode 1 (BBC R4 and BBC Sounds).
I enjoy bringing this thinking into my coaching practice when there is the opportunity for it to support my client’s thinking and feeling. Get in touch with me if a coaching partnership exploring the dynamics of your human systems holds appeal for you. Just reach out to me at Alpamayo Coaching Ltd (jeremy@alpamayocoaching.com).
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