Stability and change
Stability and change
Nothing is stable, really. Stability is an illusion and only exists in our minds. Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester write in their book 'Dancing at The Edge':
The only distinction in nature between 'structure' and 'flow' is time: the whirlpool coexists with the stream and cannot exist without it; trees, glaciers, even mountains are in constant motion – if we had eyes to see. (Leicester and O'Hara 2019, 123)
In practical terms the notion that everything is in flow does not really help us to act meaningfully in our lives, though. While it is certainly a notion that we mustn't forget, it is still useful to see that some things are more stable than others – and some things are not changing over long enough periods so that we can effectively treat them as stable. For example, the proposition Marcus is alive has been holding true for 40 years and is hopefully going to hold true for a few more. So in that sense, that's a stable proposition I would like to count on (the fact that lots of things have to be in constant motion in order to keep this proposition stable is important but I'll reserve that for another time).
That's what the Cynefin framework is very useful for, it helps us understand these different kinds of stabilities that we can identify. What in Cynefin terms are called 'ordered systems' (clear and complicated domains) are systems where we find stabilities we can count on, stabilities that lead to repeatable and realiable patterns of cause and effect. Yet in the complex and chaotic domains, there are no such stabilities. While there are patterns in the complex domain that are seemingly stable, they don't lead to reliable cause and effect relationships, only to dispositionalities. We need to act differently in the different domains.
The problem is that, at least in a mind that is formed in a Western tradition of thought, we tend to favour stabilities and see things as more stable than they really are. O'Hara and Leicester again:
Western thought has tended to priviledge the world of things and the properties they have rather than the invisible processes of change by which all things are just moments of relative stability. We habitually foreground structure rather than process. In so doing, we limit what it is possible for us to know and apprehend about any situation. (Leicester and O'Hara 2019, 123)
In a lecture at the Naropa Institute in 1975, Gregory Bateson was asked to talk about Orders of Change. What he said struck me. When struggling to think about change – and particularly the it in change – he thought it might make more sense to think about the word ‘stable’ instead.
And this was a big step because I suddenly realized that the word stable—you see, you get into difficulties—you just want to say “the cat is stable” or “the table is stable” or something, the chair—and, well, some parts of the cat are more stable than others. It’s not like the sari with a fringe on top. But the cat is obviously more stable—say in the color of its hair—than it is in its heartbeat. Though I suppose you could bleach the cat and its heart would still go on. But mostly the heart stops before the hair changes color. So, I wanted a way of dissecting the word stable onto what I was trying to describe. And suddenly, I saw that that wasn’t the way I was doing it—that I was engaged in a false natural history of my own procedure. The truth of the matter is the word stable is not applicable to any part of the cat, or the chair, or whatever; it is applicable to propositions in my description (...) you can think what a difference this made to discover that I wasn’t talking about the cat, I was talking about my description of the cat, and that that’s all I ever had to talk about anyway. There are no cats, you know, inside my head. (Bateson 1975)
We live in a world of ideas made up in our minds to make sense of the world we live in. For example the idea of a cat is a very abstract idea if you think of it. All things that make up a cat, from the physical elements of a cat to our emotional recations to the animal are somehow hidden inside this short word 'cat', this seemingly stable idea of what a cat is and how we react to it. We think we know what a cat is even though we have never had a cat in our minds – the only thing we have had is the sensory perception of a cat – and our sensory organs are all but representing how things really are. And this does not only apply to cats, but essentially everything. These ideas pile up over time and become entangled so it becomes hard to get out of them - they feel real and in their totality it is what we – falsly – think is reality. And all these ideas come in the Western mind with some sense of stability attached to them. And that is what gets us into trouble.
This text has turned out a bit longer than I thought it would and I struggled to keep it even that brief. Such a vast topic! Let me know what you think by simply replying to this message.
References
- Bateson, Gregory. 1975. Orders of Change. Naropa Institute. Unfortunately the lecture is spread over a number of different tapes, available here (Tapes 75R002, 75P129, 75R004)
- Leicester, Graham, and Maureen O’Hara. 2019. Dancing at the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century. Triarchy Press.