Thought as a System

Jenks, Chris

doi:10.4324/9780203202241

Cited by 57 publications

(51 citation statements)

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“…Perhaps indeed, "a unity with the workings of Nature is potentially within each of us" as Penrose (1994) has suggested, and that our insights and sensitivities resonate with those workings. And perhaps there is an 'ecology of mind' as suggested with collective thoughts and knowledge that, as Bohm (1994) notes, are so automatic to us that we are in large part controlled by them.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Systemic development at Hawkesbury: some personal lessons from experience

Bawden

2005

Syst. Res.

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One of the most significant and enduring ideas associated with the systems initiatives at Hawkesbury has been the inter-connections that were made there between systemic acts of development in the 'concrete world' and the abstract 'epistemic developments' of the actors who participate in them. Each is seen to be constitutive of the other in a profoundly systemic manner, with 'concrete events' being both influenced by and an influence on 'abstract ideas'. The embrace of critical experiential strategies, which themselves are regarded as essentially systemic and reflexive in nature, has been a central feature of the pedagogies, research processes, and engagement strategies that have been designed to better facilitate this inter-connection. As calls for more sustainable and equitable forms of development gather momentum across the globe, and the citizenry become increasingly engaged with issues that are seen to pose significant systemic global risks, the need for collective, communicative experiential strategies as systemic discourse, Somewhat taken aback by such a seemingly reductionistic inquiry at a Systems Conference -for never before had I been asked to either prioritize or personalize my learning -I replied that I would give the matter some thought and get back to him! It would not be an easy task: The whole Hawkesbury experience had, after all, been one long learning journey characterized by a sustained appreciation of the ever-changing braid of ideas and events as our history had unfolded over a quarter of a century -to borrow from the evocative metaphor of Vickers (1983). Furthermore, one of the many extraordinary features of the Hawkesbury systemic initiatives has been their emergent nature through collective endeavours and the continual sharing of new experiences and 3 developing scholarship, and thus it has always been extremely difficult to separate the 'I' from the 'we'. And then finally there was the matter of my own changed circumstancesnot just in institutions and indeed nations as well, but in the whole focus of my attention:At Hawkesbury I had been concerned primarily with the systemic development of one Faculty in the context of its changing role within the systemic development of rural Australia, whereas in my present position I focus essentially on the role of an American Land Grant University in 'international development' within a context of 'sustainability'. Not one to shrink from a challenge however, or to explore a familiar scene from an unfamiliar perspective, I have been giving the question some very considerable thought.What follows here then is a piece in which I try to collect those thoughts into a coherent narrative. It is not the paper that I had originally prepared for Crete -for that was still written within the genre of a third-party historical commentary about Hawkesbury. In contrast, this is a personal narrative that reflects what I think were the most valuable lessons for me from our systems initiatives. The story is essentially the identification and subsequent explor...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Systemic development at Hawkesbury: some personal lessons from experience

Bawden

2005

Syst. Res.

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“…A dialogue should not have a predetermined agenda or a prefixed content (Isaacs, 1999;Senge, 1994;Simmons, 1999). By paying attention to the guidelines or virtues of dialogue, the agenda or issues are said to emerge during the dialogue process itself (Bohm, 1992;Bohm, 1996). Isaacs (1999) discusses four principal virtues of dialogue: listening, suspension of judgment, expressing and respecting.…”

Section: The Bohmian Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stacey argues that the individual and the group are the same phenomenon and that there is no transcendent whole nor a group mind, nor a common pool of meaning outside of it. Rather, common meaning emerges in the communicative interaction between people in their local situation in the present (Stacey, 2001 Bohm, 1992;Bohm,1996) that individual thinking is dependent on cultural structures of thought and that individual thinking has an impact on the common structure and content of thought in a given culture. In fact, dialogue rest on the idea that individual thoughts and collective thought are not separate but necessarily affect each other.…”

Section: Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Systems sensitive dialogue intervention

Slotte¹

2006

Syst. Res.

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“…Although theoretical perspectives seeking to transcend this dualism can be traced to both natural sciences (von Bertalanffy 1968;Prigogine 1977) and social sciences (Murdoch 1997;Manuel-Navarrete and Buzinde 2010), many approaches to the problems discussed above nonetheless fall prey to "maintaining a dualistic separation of ourselves and nature, economics and ecology, subject and object, present and future" (Sterling 2011, p. 108), and point towards the need for deeper inquiries into the assumptions and beliefs underlying such approaches. Bohm (1992) pursued such an inquiry and found incoherence in perceptions and the fragmentation of thought to be at the heart of such issues.…”

Section: A 'Circular' Revolution?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The working group members brought a familiarity with a number of such processes and tools to the inquiry, including tools for addressing our "inner" blind spots. Based on a review of a broad literature on change processes, this was considered to be an important prerequisite for a self-organizing revolution in education and capacity building (Boudon 1984;Gunderson and Holling 2002;Von Foerster 2003;Scharmer 2009). Scharmer's "Theory U" approach points to one way of reorienting the axis about which we seem to continuously revolve (Scharmer, 2009).…”

Section: Promoting An Axial Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

You say you want a revolution? Transforming education and capacity building in response to global change

O’Brien

Reams

Caspari³

et al. 2013

Environmental Science & Policy

102

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This paper considers the changes in education and capacity building that are needed in response to environmental and social challenges of the 21 st Century. We argue that such changes will require more than adjustments in current educational systems, research funding strategies, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Instead, it calls for a deeper questioning of the assumptions and beliefs that frame both problems and solutions. We first discuss the challenges of transforming education and capacity building within five key arenas such as interdisciplinary research, the primary, secondary and tertiary education systems, researchers from the developing world, and the public at large and politicians. Our starting point is that any type of revolution that is proposed in response to global change is likely to reflect the educational perspectives and paradigms of those calling for the revolution. We differentiate between a circular revolution (as in the "plan-do-check-act cycle" often used in change management) versus an axial revolution (moving to a different way of thinking about the issues), arguing that the latter is a more appropriate response to the complex transdisciplinary challenges posed by global environmental change. We present some potential tools to promote an axial revolution, and consider the limits to this approach. We conclude that rather than promoting one large and ideologically homogenous revolution in education and capacity building, there is a need for a revolution in the way that leaders working with education and capacity building look at systems and processes of change. From this perspective, transformative learning may not only be desirable, but critical in responding to the challenges posed by global environmental change.

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Thought as a System

Cited by 57 publications

References 0 publications

Systemic development at Hawkesbury: some personal lessons from experience

Systemic development at Hawkesbury: some personal lessons from experience

Systems sensitive dialogue intervention

You say you want a revolution? Transforming education and capacity building in response to global change

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