Combining, by Nora Bateson (Alan’s raw highlights)

At first, it appears that it is the parts of the system that must be made better or fixed.

Then it becomes clear that the system is not in the parts – it is in the relationships between them.

So, it seems like it is the relationships that need to be made better or fixed.

But relationships, it turns out, are made of communication.

And then – The communication becomes the place to address the needed adaptations,

And then – You realize what is communicated is not what is expressed or even what is not expressed – It is what it is possible to express.

That is where the limits move, in the combining,

How shall I tend to the premises of what is possible to communicate?

You don’t do a thing in a living system and get the direct results you may have hoped for. You cannot fix the parts to fix the whole as you can with a machine.

You do a thing and then something happens, so more things happen, mostly in ways that are impossible to track or correlate.

The variables excite the other variables into incalculable storms of consequences and consequences of consequences

It is tricky because these consequences of consequences can unfurl and tear apart relational interdependence as well as generate possibility.

It is no longer possible to count how many changes make other changes in how many contexts and directions

Since the number of contexts and directions is unspecified and large, it gets called nth order quotes, which is an awkward term, but at least the word invites less underestimation of recursive, looping, entangling and always moving conjoining processes that ecologies are.

Systemic change happens in ways already there, but has yet to be in specific configurations.

The pathways of emergence are determined by the contextual particularities of the moment

What is needed is an understanding of ecological processes and a response that meets the runaway, the runaway of nth order implications

Combining in new ways across and among contexts is required in these runaway circumstances, not static, calculated, predetermined solutions

As such, very few organisations, governments or committees are adept in this ability to address runaway and nth order change

Perhaps the more ridiculous, incomprehensible, unreasonable possibility is to perpetuate the familiar?

What makes deductive sense from this moment is unlikely to continue to make sense

Being locked to a goal obstructs the ability to perceive other responses

It is much easier to look back and see causality

Continuing on page 14, possibilities are not static

They shift and reshape in response to the inevitable movement in the relationships in play

The removal of context, the cutting from dependent relational connection, the objectification that comes with pulling the identified topic, be it a person, a nation, a meadow or even an idea from its entangling with other relational entities becomes a violence to the necessary movement that life requires

The abstraction is the decontextualisation

while I am in absolute agreement that all the above mentioned crises require urgent attention and must be addressed, the failure to perceive them in their nest of causal tributaries results in responses that only exacerbate the problems and often further distribute their dangers into other contexts

When something is not understood it is commonly described as abstract.

Perhaps the term is an indication that the net of relational context around the topic is obscured

Not perceiving those relationships may be what produces the sense of abstraction

The shape of the response needs to meet not match the shape of the trouble

Meet equals many connections in motion

Match equals singular static connection

Emergence is the term that captures this complex vitality of blurry relational possibility

It is what happens when countless streams of interaction come together

Emergence is a treasured source of possibility in this era, gilded by the new age and imported into organisational management as the next it thing

But emergency is also emergence

to do this [understand the complexities of context], one must notice the warm data, the contextual and relational information

It is not enough to simply list the various sectors of socioeconomic structure that are needed to provide food and stream them together in hopes of gaining an understanding of context

That information may be productive for some projects, but to get at the warm data is to look for the relationships between the contexts, the connective tissue

This kind of information is often not measurable or repeatable and is undoubtedly not quote objective quotes

The observer matters

supporting and building relational health within living systems requires peripheral vision, indirect actions and wide angle observation that catches not only the results, but also the rhythm, emotion and warmth

It is called warm data because it is information that has its relational nest included

When I ask, “How can I be a better person?” – the question carries an illusion that is out of kilter with families, cultures and histories that we are all responding to

I would rather ask quotes, who can you be when you are with me? This is a more ecological question

I do not want to be part of any project that has at its core the idea that people can be told how to live, think or feel

I am much more interested in situations and relationships that allow people to express themselves in new ways

Then let’s see what happens at nth order

How do those conversations and interactions inform other conversations? And how do they shift the tone of other interactions?

Abductive process is the way in which the information derived in one context becomes the basis of information in another context, which may not appear to be in correlation

Peirce introduced the notion of hypothesis in abductive process, i.e. the experience in one context gives information about another

For example, after going through the school system, students can hypothesise what is wanted from them on forms and surveys in other contexts like health or social service institutions

Interestingly, there is not so much talk about how emergency is related to emergence

Somehow, in emergencies, discussions of emergence lose their complexity and become pivots of linear solutioning at warp speed

What has become increasingly clear through these processes after hosting hundreds of warm data labs with thousands of people is that it is necessary to re-examine what is meant by change in living systems, such that the change might be distributed throughout the system in unseen ways

Instead of isolating cause and effect, goal and strategy to produce a particular change that is explicit and perhaps measurable, there appears to be a realm of potential change, a necessarily obscured zone of wild interaction of unseen, unsaid, unknown flexibility

What happens between hints? Between which tendencies and habits were the connections brewed? Explicit actions fail to touch this process

You cannot tell someone not to be racist or corrupt or sexist or greedy

Those insidious ways of being in the world are produced through a conjoining of experiences and unseen impressions

They are out of the reach of any direct corrective

The goal of a linear strategy may be to generate respect, optimism or trust, but the culture of strategic productivity is ill-equipped to meet the wildness of life

To produce the goal without the readying undermines the depth at which respect, trust and optimism are the consequences of relational possibility, not mental states to adopt

Another approach to the idea of change is needed

Below the preliminary gestures of such a shift in approach are suggested

Leaving the familiar world of mapping change, measuring change, defining intentional change and even specifying change, instead we must tend to the unseen flexibility of living systems that produce a readiness for change

We must move from change as an outcome of particular actions to change as a consequence of systemic readying

The difficulty will be that there is no way to know what change has occurred or in which direction

When working with complex systems, it is imperative that this movement in second-order and nth-order change be an accepted understanding of how change takes place

Prescripted outcomes cloak the ability to perceive trans-constitutional change

This is not a comfortable position for the current epistemological understanding of change which requires pre-defined outputs

Yet, in order to enter into substantive inquiry about this kind of systemic change, it is critical to address the limitations within research methodologies that cannot account for nth-order change

As noted above, William Bateson found that the responses to responses to responses of multiple and simultaneous contexts are obscured when reductionist outcomes are required

This has been a problem for systemic studies and a friction that is perpetuating measurements and methodologies that can only track first-order changes

Behaviour change in systemic process is especially difficult to articulate in terms of causality and directionality

The importance, therefore, of addressing the nature of systemic change is relevant to the inquiry around aphanipoiesis which, as a theoretical basis, offers the possibility of discussion and further exploration of unseen combining responses that generate systemic change

It remains difficult to predict or even qualify the direction of this change

The issue is that the movement within the system is neither quantifiable nor qualifiable

It is beyond the reach of these two tropes and is better described as a trans-contextual coalescence

The rigour of this description is not to be underestimated as it demands not only a multi-perspective approach but also a multi-perspective approach focused on the combining, not just the parts

The combining is alive, unstill and reshaping through many pushes and pulls in the system, most of which are unseen

Because the abductive process that is the brewing place of perception of change is unseeable, aphanipoiesis provides a way to understand the unseen coalescence as a necessary aspect of how living systems continue in multiple interdependent relationships simultaneously

In this sense, the word learning and the word change are held to be equivalent

What has become evident is that most theories of change seem only to perpetuate existing systems of thought and action

In the face of the current urgency, it may be necessary to explore outside of the realm of the familiar and into a realm where flexibility for potential change is produced

The movement from a theory of change that is located in action to a theory of change that is located in readiness is a shift of attention from what can be done to achieve an outcome to how to nourish the conditions into which the organism learns to be in its world

The readiness is not findable or definable by anyone

Most of the time, in the case of human beings, the person has no idea whether they are ready or what they are ready for

Some readiness is like a ripeness, whereas another readying is not

Sometimes what is needed is unready, the voice of the children, a sapling

Something about this is sacred territory

It is truly alive and alive with what makes life keep living, lifing

Attempting to manipulate, predetermine or shape this aliveness is a violation of its own possible learning

Rather, we can create the conditions for trans-conceptual mutual learning into which new adaptive processes are possible

From there, life makes itself

The kind of leadership that I want to explore may not be identifiable as leadership at all

I am interested in a kind of mutually alert care and attention to the well-being of all people and ecological systems

This kind of leadership cannot be found in individuals, but rather in between them

It cannot be found in organisations, nations, religions or institutions, but rather between them

I have called it liminal leadership to highlight the relational characteristics

Agency

Change-making

Collective intelligence

Consciousness

Deliverable

Development

Energy

Ethics

Function

Impact

Incentive

Interconnected

Metrics

Prototype

Parts and wholes

Pattern

Purpose

Scale

Solution

Stewardship

Strategy

We

How can we be careful this word does not denote an objectified, instrumentalised notion of action? Why does it matter? Because it blocks the perception of contextual interdependency

How can any organism do anything not informed by and existing within the communicational and relational processes of its context?

A linear outcome, a hearkening of metrics, and impossible to define within projects that engage complex systems change

Forget it

After decades of trying to define the impact of work in systems change, it is time, I would argue, to give up on deliverables

Deliver questions

Energy is a word from physics

Be careful

Be specific if you are talking about motivation, enthusiasm, feeling, sentiment or aesthetics

I suggest using words with relational meaning to replace words from mechanism or physics

When impact is applied to living systems, unexpected relational consequences abound

Culture is relational and thinking about making an impact on culture can blur the possibility of taking into account the interrelational consequences

Even if what we mean is make a difference, be cautious as it carries ghosts that confuse our understanding of systemic change

Social, cultural and other living systems do not respond to impact like billiard balls

I suggest using the words influence or create conditions for new interactions

This is a perfectly good word and has brought us a long way

It is, however, better suited for a description of Legos or dots connected by lines than for living systems

In living systems, the connections are relational in ways that are constantly refitting

I use interdependent, interrelational, interlocked, entangled, interacting, conjoined or symathecy

To measure something requires decontextualization

There are too many variables moving in response to too many variables in the interrelational processes of complexity

Forget metrics, they simply do not correspond to dispersed consequential calibrations of systems change

Metrics are fine for some things, but not this

This process is outside of causalities that are obtainable in numerical forms

Just know, contextual information is necessary to study living things

The habituated idea triggers mechanistic metaphors and suggests that change can be made by tweaking parts

What we know is that systems produce mutual simultaneous responses within the interrelationships across and between contexts

I tried to stay attentive to my use of these terms and how they tag into ideas of design, arrangement and engineering, all of which give false insights

I created the term vitae to better express the idea of living aspects that we might have called parts

But using parts and holes terminology is a difficult habit to break

I have not succeeded

Patterns change, particularly in living systems, so I prefer fluid patterning

A critically important aspect of systems work is the recognition that change in the system will change the way the system changes

For that reason, purpose is something to hold lightly

No matter how acute, crises in complex systems are emergent and therefore are spinning from multiple contexts, constantly moving into new relational conditions

Sometimes the idea of purpose is necessary as a starting point, but in systems work the purpose is bound to transform

Only tiny bits of the larger systems of life across time are visible from a given perspective

Therefore, the benevolence of the purpose of a project is easily misjudged

Solution Instead, let’s talk about changing the conditions within which interrelational interdependence can take place

Most problems today will want solutions

Proposals that some promise solutions to systemic issues are a kind of betrayal to others working in systemic ways who are attempting to stay honest about the benefits of this work

Obviously, the person whose proposal offers solutions is more likely to win the grant or contract than someone whose proposal offers ambiguity

I stand in loyal admiration and solidarity with the latter

The world needs to get used to systemic work having outcomes that are not visible, measurable or guaranteed

I am pushing hard on this and I think it is high time we all did

As an alternative, I use the idea of improvement in responding to a systemic or complex problem instead of solving it

It is certainly nice to try to be the change, but even that statement, as lovely as it is, infers the causation at the individual level again

Inherently, it reveals that the common sense is centred on the illusion of the individual, which is not how life is

Life is interdependent

While it is easy enough to use this vocabulary, the depth of the implications of interdependency is unfathomable

Getting complexity begins at home in the communication and perception within our most intimate relationships

As a host of warm data labs, I would never want to manipulate that combining process or declare what I, as a host, believe to be a more desirable soup

For me, this is a matter of crucial integrity to the process

I am not hoping to change minds or alter people’s lives

Instead, the process lets them meet the details and underpinnings of their world, and from there, the movements begin

My father spent his days and decades practising perceiving complex relational processes through anthropology, information science, ecology, psychology and art

He could do this better than anyone I have ever known

His communication from the breakfast table to the conference keynote was an endless, curious, caring and passionate artistry of moving the ecology of communication toward a little more possibility of life to make more relations wherever he could

Why not? Because it is manipulative and inherently violates the ecology of communication and dignity of relationships

You can’t lie your way to integrity

The ecology of the communication is wild and must remain open-ended

The best I know to do is to ensure my contributions to the brewing future are careful, thoughtful and warm.