MetaDesign – Transdisciplinary Practices beyond disciplinary simplicities

There is an urgent need to address complex societal challenges, and while each discipline makes valiant efforts to rise up to the task, they are bound to find themselves inadequate.

The Complexities of Social Challenges cannot be understood at the level at which they were created, nor can they therefore also be solved by the disciplinary thinking that created them. It is necessary to follow Einstein’s admonition and find a vantage point that goes beyond any particular disciplinary boundaries.

There is a tendency to appropriate this vantage point as a redefinition or renaming of one’s own favorite discipline – Design aspires to become strategic, as does Foresight, or Innovation, or Systems Thinking, or Technology. Who does not wish that the impact they make on the world to be anything less than strategic – disruptive, Game-changing?

However, it is also natural, that while they appropriate some of the Methods, Tools and Techniques from the other disciplines to address the gaps, these efforts eventually turn out to be simplifications – the same broader challenge of narrow disciplinary focus that contributed to the situations in the first place.

Richard Normann in a business context and in his book ‘Reframing Business’, called for the use of a Crane – a metaphoric device that lifts you out of the debris of the current landscape to find that other vantage point.

I personally have no preference for one or the other discipline.

In my professional career I have tried to sincerely change the world through Technology, Innovation, Systems, Foresight and Design among other things and I have always found them individually wanting in some way of the other.

So, when I term this new vantage point, MetaDesign, I am using the term Design in a much broader sense – as the act of Intentional Change-Making, as a verb rather than a Noun.

It is the act of and the Practice of Making Better Worlds and Realizing Better Futures, a continually evolving effort, just like the Complex Evolutionary System that Living Enterprises are. And if Systems Thinking is the art of synthesis, then MetaDesign is the causality that makes better futures, and the trans-disciplinary synthesis that puts you on that trajectory.