Sensing Change, continued
Sensing Change continued
I asked in my last weekly email and on social media how we know that living systems (societies, organisations, ecosystems) are changing on a level that Dana Meadows called ‘paradigm’ (Meadows 1999) and Gregory Bateson called ‘attitude’ (Bateson 1966). I received a quite a few interesting responses.
One thing that is clear is that in order to find some sort of answer to the question, we first need to find the right framing. We need to get some clarity about some terms. For example ‘know’ or ‘change’ or ‘effect’. Also we somehow need to decide what we mean when we say something is becoming ‘better’. The two aspects of ‘knowing’ and ‘change’ are linked through the idea of learning.
First of all, there are layers and layers and layers of coding that are hidden beneath what is visible, but show on the surface as behaviours and actions of people (remember the famous systems iceberg?). The code is embedded in our institutions like family, law, social norms, markets, etc. But even below the institutions, there is further code. It’s our cultural narrative or what in Batesonian terms is called the premises. Depending on how many of these layers we are able to peel away, the more profound the change is. (And just to make it clear, just because they are layers does not mean that there is a linear causality between them, how the layers co-evolve and influence each other is a whole other story.)
But even before exploring these layers, quite a deep question to ask is: can we ever know anything for certain? It is not the first time I am asking this question (see here, here or here). I agree with my thinking buddy Shawn who often says we can be more certain about some things than about others. Things like gravity we can be pretty certain about. Science is a good place to look for areas of higher certainty. But, importantly, as every schoolboy and schoolgirl should know, “science never proves anything.” So there is no final objective truth that is not to a certain extend negotiated between people as being more credible, or, as Bateson says: “there is no objective experience” (both quotes from Bateson 2002).
If this is true, we need to find different ways of knowing that are not dependent on an objective truth as a final verdict. Rather, we need to see truth and the idea of knowing as processes that are on-going and ever-evolving, that are, indeed, relational. Or as Iain McGilchrist puts it when talking about how the right hemisphere of the brain experiences truth: “Rather than conceiving it as a thing, it would experience it as a process, one that, in this case – not just for now, but in principle – has no ending.” (McGilchrist 2021). So knowing is a process and it is always partial.
We can add resolution to our knowing by adding different ways of knowing – not just different perspectives, as different ways of knowing are adding more difference to deeper layers of coding so reveal more blind spots. There are ancient ways of knowing and there are embodied ways of knowing for example. Some people might struggle accessing different ways of knowing that require deep steeping in another culture or deep questioning of one’s own culture, but we can bring different people together in the relational process of knowing. Using different ways of knowing also helps to avoid convergence on a dominant position or ‘group think.’ Rigour, then, comes from being transparent on the information we gather and use and from being disciplined in thinking about and making sense of the information.
Yet that means it is hard to use this kind of knowledge to convince somebody that is not part of the process. We need to be inside the context and experience it with multiple senses and engage in the process of becoming, rather than just reading a report that only provides a snapshot in time. If knowing is a relational process and what we know always partial and evolving, it is hard to observe it from the outside in a seemingly objective way (and we know the observer does have an influence on the observed). That is why I generally say about systems change that if it happens people who are in the thick of it know that it happened. When a new paradigm is establishing itself or the premises and attitudes change, you will know, if you are steeped in the system. To ‘prove it’ to an external observer is a completely different matter.
And with regards to knowing when something is ‘better’, that is also a matter of judgement so we need to be aware who is judging. But I like the quote of one of the elders of a community Tamkeen has been working in, saying, “What you do is good if I feel in it the heart that I feel in my community.”
Reference:
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Bateson, Gregory. 1966.From Versailles to Cybernetics. California State University, Sacramento.
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Bateson, Gregory. 2002. “Every Schoolboy Knows.” In_Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity._Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
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McGilchrist, Iain. 2021.The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.
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Meadows, Donella. 1999. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” The Sustainability Insitute. http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf.
The Paper Museum
A part of a recent piece by Nora Bateson titled Self Portrait.
And when we meet you will see another set of images, a woman in shoes and accessorized in the thing-ish world we live in. I will dress for the occasion of our meeting in something bought in a store that covers me in a culture of signals so you will know where to put me in your library of codes. And you will do the same. Hundreds of years of messages are flying between us.Respectable? Lovable? Worthy? Status?
But which codes have we chosen to message each other within? Which signals are obscuring the others?
Can you still feel the texture of my math? Can you breathe the ink of my wool? Can you be a blade of grass with me? Implicitly, in the waft of us, in the style of us, in the way we are… makes the weave of our communication.
Changing the code changes more than the message… these are portraits of possibility.
Why have I added this to my paper museum? We never meet anyone without evaluating their appearance against what we know. We never do anything without it building on the way we do things. So when we think we do something new, it builds on what is already there. Becoming aware of that exposes layers and layers of code that influence what we do and give our behaviour a certain disposition. Can we break free from that code? How many layers can we peel away? Can we reach the layer of our cultural coding or will it remain hidden from us because we see it as ‘just the way things are’?
Image
Photo by Marco Savastano on Unsplash