Rehearsing for theater and Design Research

/0 Comments/in , , /by

 

A conversation this morning, and this happened between long-time friends from the amateur theater world in Bangalore India, prompted this post. It occurred to me that rehearsals, which often lasted a couple of months or more, provided a direct experience in what it might mean in order to ‘make’ in a design studio for insight.

If a theater group stays with a production, then there is more that happens in terms of learning over time, as the play evolves and matures in its later iterations. I will come to that aspect of learning in some later post.

Here is a little background. Almost forty years ago, I got to become a part of an amateur theater group, Gnatak, in Bangalore, India. Pronounced ‘Natak’ (naa tuck), the Indian word for theater, the ‘G’ in the front of its spelling had many interpretations, left deliberately open. Every now and then, people would wonder and come up with some interpretation of what that letter might stand for —and in the process it seemed to provide a constantly evolving construction of identity.

That is a fascinating thought to explore, perhaps later — how posing an enigma creates a new language and grammar, opening up spaces for conversation and leaving a mystery in its trail for ongoing wonderment and fluid redefinition.

The motley group of college students, professional engineers, activists, artists, journalists, business people — fluidly came together around some sort of a permanent core of maybe eight or ten regulars, to produce on an average three to four plays a year. I happened to be there for almost five years during this intense period, until professional and other personal forces did their centrifugal magic.

At some other time, I will perhaps also write about the amazing productivity of the group’s informal organization, a concept I leveraged in my role as a Business Leader in an American Multinational to great success. It works!

The thought that got me to write this morning has to do with how the rehearsal process, a subset of the totality that was Gnatak for me, was a fascinating creative experience, a process whereby dead scripts and texts were brought to life.

The scripts, often written for a foreign, non-Indian context, (because we were all WAIP — Westernized, Anglo-Indian People), needed to be in English, the language we who came from across the country shared and were fluent in, often were about second hand-experiences.

These narratives were about strange contexts that we only had second-hand information, knowledge or understanding of. We were global citizens in some sense because of our upbringing and schooling, even though most of our knowledge beyond India was second or third-hand. However, we were merely in the face of huge unknowns that we needed to navigate over the course of the rehearsal months.

The not knowing too much about the context perhaps was an interesting prerequisite for our creativity — as we could make whatever meaning we wanted, giving it the accents of our looks, worldviews, ideas, and Indian-English manners of speaking in the process.

Somehow, through a process of initial probatory readings, a play was picked, because it produced some intuitive sense of its potential — it supposedly had ‘ghum’, another fluid word that in essence suggested a kind of radical exciting energy. 

Random contextual conditions would then decide what followed — who was available to act, who had time to direct, what spaces were available for rehearsal etc. 

Amateur theaters did not have permanent rehearsal spaces, which in afterthought is extremely conducive to creativity. All kinds of social networks came to life to find us somewhere we could practice. Often schools would let us use their halls to rehearse after hours, ignoring some of the social life and language that came with what characterized our unique sociality. 

But, when the gates were closed and lights turned off for the evening, there were always the streets lights under which one could go on into the early hours of the morning, timing determined by how late one could find restaurants that served tea. That is another fascinating dimension of an amateur theater ecosystem one must delve into later.

Every day the rehearsals were a revelation. One understood more about some nuance of the author’s intentions, historical context, the particular use of language, strange words that evoked our own made up meanings etc. Sometimes these revelations were radical and surprising. 

But, there was something else that happened that was perhaps more important for me. As we gave birth to these strange worlds as surrogates, who was acting, how they felt that day, and how they felt about each other, changed what happened on a given evening.  And, in that happening, something more opened up in the possibility spaces of the play’s worlds – Way beyond perhaps what the playwright might have had in mind. Every day these inter-personal dynamics changed what the play might have meant and what it meant to us.

This was a unique process of insight generation and it would definitely not have happened without the immersion and its youthful intensity. Some of the best and most interesting performances happened during these evenings and early hours of the morning on a street corner somewhere. 

There is one thing one learns from this process — there are no guarantees, irrespective of how much the idea is to concretize and capture the production of experience in a repeatable manner, that you will see something again. Not even on the day of the performance are you assured of a reproduction of your best rehearsal moments, though there is always the possibility of surprises on the day of the performance itself.

What a gift it is then to witness the evolution of meaning-making during the rehearsal, and not just some notion of a final version on the day of the public performance.

What then does this have to do with design research one might ask.

One watches a public performance of everyday life, in some kind of an ethnographic study sense. One brings back snapshots, and artifacts, and tries to capture and make sense of what those things might mean, looking for some kind of an essence beyond the literality of the spectacle and through that reflection reveal the scripts and the generative, productive processes — that are the ’sutras’ and the ‘mantras’, the signature patterns of the people we observe.

Gnatak too had a signature style — a very distinctive approach to what plays we chose to perform and how we did them. There are stories about how some other groups tried to do the same plays several decades later, and left audiences yearning for the return of the original.

Those signatures are what one is searching for too in society, the purpose of the research. 

It is the human collective that produces the human agents that is the intention of our understanding and quest. What for example, are the scripts in operation and how do we produce our responses to Covid or Climate Change? 

We can uncover the secrets of our improvisations and we could learn something from theater and the rehearsal process in particular about how to go backstage and get to those invisible authors of our lives.

Strategic Thinking – the need for a philosophical approach to finding creative alternatives.

/0 Comments/in , /by

A colleague just returning from teaching creativity in a Corporate setting expressed the need for logic and philosophy in education as a prerequisite. He seemed somewhat frustrated by the experience. I have had similar experiences working with not just design students, but people in positions that need to make strategic decisions, and need to grapple with and navigate complexity.

One advocates stepping out of the box, taking a broader, deeper and temporally expansive perspective, but almost universally, people in practical professions (managers, engineers, designers) seem to find it difficult.

There is a general cultural anathema to being strategic – what with thought leaders advocating ‘failing fast’ and experimentation as antidotes. Well we have a litany of failures in the world to show that the latter process only works occasionally (statistically low probabilities of success) though it is massively celebrated in popular culture.

In my opinion, t is not a pattern that one should really practice, particularly by those who need to think about bigger issues. This is not an argument against experimentation or probing, practices integral to innovation, and creativity is an important driver.

Questioning and critical practice that go hand-in-hand with being strategic (by strategic, I mean those issues that have broader and deeper impact on the world and demand creative impact making), are not practiced enough in the face of urgent action. Being strategic takes time, and there are no easy solutions often except what gets resolved through conversations.

Somewhere in our broader education system we have lost this foundational ability to abstract in our pursuit of the concrete and immediate. By the broader system, I include more than just formal educational institutions – we find a general societal loss of an appetite for deeper thought and conversations. We were supposed to be an ‘Argumentative Society’ (In India at least). You can only be creative in a culture of creativity in which creative acts happen – creativity is not a private pastime or something you practice in fishbowls.

A recent experience witnessed a design studio with floor-to-ceiling glass and you could see people practicing design – design as spectacle.

Creativity flourishes in cultures of positive dissent and pushback. Clarity of purpose and meaning are the logic that shapes – it can be constraining or creative. I tried teaching people to be creative where they had to return to authoritarian cultures where questioning was the first step to career hara-kiri. And anyway wisdom was expected to trickle-down, or rooted in some antiquity. Of course there were enough marketing tropes about ‘navigating the future’ or some equally insipid marketing blah.

There might be an easier approach than having people study philosophy though – one can arrive at a philosophical attitude through the process of learning to think in abstract terms. 

I found most young designers have difficulties with abstractions and with identifying patterns and meta patterns – being able to get to the essence of something. Architectural thinking is perhaps a good way to begin.

Getting to the essence of something is like getting to the genetic code of that object – locating a generative core. Complex situations need us to find these deeper patterns – conceptual, ideological, even spiritual – for they hold much power to shape or constrain.

Complex humanity (ahh human-centered design!!) – is multi-dimensional, and one seems to want to approach it with little knowledge of sociology, or history, or politics, or civics, or even a deeper why of ones own cultural practices – where blind faith comes from I guess. Such is the deplorable state of our education systems – the depths of siloed expertise being such an obstacle to understanding let alone synthesis – the ability to find connections and relationships and coherence and meaning – to create practical holistic spaces for action.

Only when we loosen those deep structures will creative alternatives emerge. In order to do that we have to get past the literal. We will need language and grammar, and a comfort with uncertainty that is the wellspring of all that is creative. It is where our hope lies – just advocating for creativity – and that is a trope that I do not think popular discourse really understands. Making cute drawings you forgot to make after childhood will not get you there.

Once we learn to see and appreciate patterns, we begin to understand similarities and differences and what is universal and what common, and what deeper causes that are generally hidden from our perspectives are operational in our lives. The ‘logic’ of living human patterns is what we need.

And, from that practice comes the practice of meta-patterning, and that is where hope lies. That practice of meta-patterning is the foundation of philosophy or at least being philosophical and not necessarily being a philosopher in some academic sense.

Strategic design touches all branches of philosophy, except not as it is practiced. One must think about phenomenology, epistemology, ontology, ethics, axiology and so on, in order to be a good strategic designer. If you truly are a good strategic designer, you must be a philosopher too – chicken and egg of causality here.

Grappling with complexity as practice in search of patterns and reflecting on patterns back in the studio in search of meta patterns, that is philosophical and that can lead to strategic creativity. Those that can deal with MetaPatterns can begin to become Strategic MetaDesigners.

 

Note: – (MetaDesign is a framework I have been developing – a practice that lead complex Human Evolutionary Social Systems to better futures – a mouthful alright – CHESS, Living Enterprises, Better Futures ).

Lessons from Afghanistan – Realizing Better Outcomes

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The Taliban have done horrible things in the past, when they had an opportunity to govern. The things that most stand out as signatures are their brutality, intolerance, misogyny, among other things.

They came in to restore order, and in the midst of institutional failure, delivered on some basic promises of stability and order.

Their vision however cannot create a flourishing, vital society – one that can grow beyond whatever traditional models of world-making they have in mind.

Yet, the models they offered, won against the alternatives that the Western countries had to offer – in Afghanistan as a whole, not just in the pockets of Kabul.

Why? Why did the institutions people abhorred, that created a vacuum into which the Taliban stepped, not create alternative institutions?

That is our learning #1.

The deeper archetypes that inform such structures remained latent and their corruption is also their weakness – they cannot even defend their own pathologies (I mean In Afghanistan. In North Korea, they have mastered that, and in a number of countries that are in between and soon becoming like their polar extremes above).

The Taliban will eventually die, and they will most likely take the society and nation down with them. Because, what they have to offer is not generative – nothing based on their ideology can be generative except in a medieval world.

Accelerating that inner breakdown is a priority for the world – for they cannot become exemplars of failing order elsewhere, but we must also have better alternatives to offer – Not just Visions, but practices for realizing better futures.

What kind of an attractor can the world create that Afghanistan and many others like them will find compelling. Clearly whatever we have is not working.

Strategic Design – Shifting the Locus

/0 Comments/in , , /by

When we think of Strategic Decision-Making in complex social situations, which I think of as synonymous with Strategic Design, we tend to see body of decision makers – people in positions of authority. In the case of civic services, the idea of decision makers, merges with the agencies providing the services.

A post on social media by Benjamin Taylor, who runs a group called ‘Systems Community of Inquiry’ got me thinking about this issue, and in particular the question of where the locus of decision-making should ideally be.

This is his post – Benjamin Taylor Post.

As decision makers, civic agencies are constantly challenged to keep up with evolving needs. These services come in a large variety of forms, and the more complex the society they serve, the more complex the corresponding portfolio. How then should these be designed so that they are in some sense ahead of the needs curve?

I think of the role of these services as creating a design platform for society to engage in its own acts of world-making. The ecosystem of service providers then can include a number of different entities in the Value Creating Ecosystem (VCE), including private and non-governmental agencies. In fact, citizens themselves are also a part of this VCE, in fact central to it. 

When seen in this manner, clearly the VCE exists to serve the Citizens, and it is they then who should be empowered to make strategic choices – the implication of the idea behind the notion of ‘everybody designs’. This is a shift in the locus of strategic decision-making.

Clearly this is non-trivial and not all citizen bodies are capable of making such complex decisions. But, as the complexity of society increases, I believe that this is essential and inevitable. 

This is also the idea perhaps in the notion of a p2p commons, where increasingly citizens would take responsibility for designing and defining what they need for their world-making.

My final thought therefore is the need to separate the idea of governance from that of providing civic services, or ecosystem services in general. The Governance of the VCE has the task of designing the platforms and keeping ahead of the curve. It must therefore also take on the responsibility for building such capabilities and practices that can steer this complex Living Enterprise to realize better futures on an ongoing basis – to shape it evolution.

MetaDesign – Transdisciplinary Practices beyond disciplinary simplicities

/0 Comments/in , /by

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.

What I believe – a credo for my practice

/0 Comments/in , /by

Note:
It has been a while since I have posted something here. I have used the time of the Covid Pause to further clarify my thinking. I just wanted to quickly put down some of my thoughts – mostly for my own sake. Will come back to edit and clean up.

 

Realizing Better Futures – What I believe.

All Human Enterprises are Living Enterprises. They are best understood as complex Evolutionary Systems – There are no simple answers to Life and the [[Living Enterprise]]

For a Living Enterprise to flourish and thrive over time in a changing context – it must have certain Capabilities and Capacities.

In the face of our challenges, [[Realizing Better Futures]] is what matters – it is an incremental/evolutionary and practical thing, not an idealistic thing – Realizing alternatives is what Innovators do – therefore the discipline of Innovation Management Matters more to Realizing alternative and better Futures than just design.

This ability to flourish [ remain whole, healthy and vital ] is a result of Practice and something that matures over time – This Practice is [[Meta Design]].

Empowering the Living Enterprise is what is important – Create an Autonomous, Autopoietic Enterprise. Social Challenges are best addressed collectively by the Enterprise as a whole.

The Meta Design Practice spans several modes of Being and Becoming – These include the ability to discover generative external and internal structures, dynamic behaviors, foresight, representations, change-making etc,.

Because the process of Realizing Better Futures is Transformational and requires paradigmatic Shifts – Transition Leadership becomes critical to success – Leadership can also become ingrained in an autonomous enterprise.

To be such an Enterprise that can evolve and change, you need certain characteristics – [[Cx]] – this comes from the understanding that [[Living Enterprise]] are Complex Evolutionary Systems, embedded in Complex Realities – particularly because these are Human Enterprises. Developing such Capabilities happens through Practice.

Social Challenges come about due to pathologies in [[Meta Design]] Practices. The [[Integral]] nature of the Living Enterprise is compromised in some ways – often due to inappropriate interventions (Designs). They can also happen unintentionally.

How to critique and analyze Complex Evolutionary Systems is a separate Body of Knowledge. It informs Meta Design, but is not a part of it. Briefly, CES are multi-dimensional, multi-scalar – and not very easy to reduce to simplistic representations. Experts have many theories that provide explanations as well as Ideas for how to making things better. These ideas are usually siloed and aggravate the fragmentation.

This is because, social realities are not only described using Complexity or Evolutionary Ecological thinking. We are in the Search for Better Explanations and Understanding – particularly a Casual Explanation that can help us design interventions and Drive Change. We uncover hidden and invisible, things, forces, relationships.

Nothing should be held sacrosanct – always question – the more strategic the challenge – the deeper the questioning. The [[Meta Design]] Practice dismantles existing structures, thus opening up spaces and offers alternative representations for Strategic Choice and Decision Making.

Designing is essentially a task of making choices – Some of these choices are Strategic. This act of making Strategic Choices, is pivotal to [[Realizing Better Futures]]. Better is not [[Normative]] – though there are certain Universal Principles that can be leveraged.

Strategic Design is best addressed at the Enterprise Level using Ecological and Evolutionary thinking. This is what makes it unlike traditional design. That changes how your approach Interventions, Architectures and the orchestration of Transitions.

There are no global answers or solutions – all answers are specific to your contexts. Depending on the seriousness of the Challenge – there is a need to go Upstream before one goes downstream. An enterprise must take its evolution in its own hands. Learning, something that is included in the idea of Meta-Design practice is critical.

From the Moribund to the Strategic – an Invitation to Conversations that matter

/0 Comments/in , , /by

How does one understand and grapple with complex intractable issues such as poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, violence, etc. in order to create better and more enduring outcomes?

These challenges cannot easily be traced to simple causes – and therefore are not amenable to superficial treatments. One needs to go beyond the current world of order, into the deeper layers of society – in order to explore other dimensions of reality, such as the Social and Cultural.

What is your current portfolio of capabilities for understanding spaces beyond your current world of Order? Can you understand the Complex? Is the landscape of your world Complex?

Most of those who deal with Ordered Systems – are either responsible for dysfunction, get less than optimal results for their work, are facing complex intractable challenges, or, are looking to create new Value, but not sure how to do that. All existing avenues have been exhausted. They also anticipate and increase complexity and uncertainty and do not know how to navigate it.

In order to do that, they need to look beyond their worlds of Order – Beyond their current understandings in Healthcare, Finance or Education, for example. They are uncertain about how to do that – there is not much clarity. The emerging world seems very complex and no clear paths are visible. Purely rational models (ways of constructing knowledge)of the modern, industrial era do not work.

Knowing how we know
For this one needs to revisit the way one constructs knowledge of the world in which we propose to intervene – because we have exhausted the potential of what used to be an Ordered World, and this new world that we propose to discover, is unfamiliar and not amenable to conventional ways of knowing and understanding.

Bigger Picture – Divergence – Opening up Strategic Options Spaces:
Having acquired new ways of knowing, more conducive to knowing complex situations, one needs to understand a complex reality – something that includes a complex landscape of possibilities.

The opportunity to create New and Novel value lies beyond the borders of current regimes of order. One then gets an understanding of a new whole, which can be described and a way to speculate possible pathways through that complexity.

This new whole that includes the world beyond the worlds of order is complex, and does not necessarily reduce complexity or uncertainty – if that is what you were trying to get a handle on – it just describes the real nature of the whole world and in some cases the possible reasons why it is so.

It however enables you to have much richer conversations that include several perspectives, or rather, does not ignore or leave out any perspective just in the interest of simplification or reduction. It points to the errors in the current models of the world of order.

Through these expanded and richer conversations it becomes possible to move forward in a better-informed path-finding. The process therefore ends in an Invitation to a strategic conversation, which would include deeper insights and therefore result in more strategic outcomes.

Carve out New Opportunities and Intervene
Now you can carve out opportunities from a richer landscape and develop interventions being guided by a new Strategic Architecture – a new set of Principles.

An Upside to the Down – systems, foundational to Strategic Impact

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The practice of Strategic Impact Making, particularly in complex contexts, touches on many bodies of knowledge and practices. However, this brief note talks about how Systems Practice is foundational to such work.

Assuming that all such work begins with a certain objective, an issue or challenge that needs addressing, the System/s associated with that issue become the ‘Text’ that one tries to understand and decipher.

The heart of the Systems Impact making task involves understanding the natural evolution of the system in the face of Contextual Forces and the kind of interventions one might or must make to shift the System’s trajectory in a desired direction, towards a better outcome.

In order to understand the impact of any system of forces, whether contemporary, emerging or future, one would need to have an understanding of how the system would behave in its interaction with those forces. It would naturally be impossible, for example, to say anything about the future of such a system, without that foundational understanding.

For complex systems that implies understanding the system in its many dimensions, at many scales – from micro to mega and the interactions among and between them.

It also implies understanding the Context. Now, there is usually much literature, of a generic nature about Contextual issues – such as one might find, the Future of an Industry, a Sector, or some other Social or Environmental issue as an example.

However, most such discourses are of a generic nature. They make claims that are varied, depending on who makes them and they change with time. They have implied in them ideological paradigms, worldviews etc., which might be worth examining critically.

However, they serve a limited purpose. The issue that you might be working on or interested in is often a specific issue, located in a specific local context. Understanding such an issue might benefit from the Generic descriptions mentioned above, but basing your actions purely on these would mot certainly be problematic and likely sources of serious error.

This is why an investment in discovering and understanding the systems you are engaged with is crucial. A deliberate attempt should be made in this process to correct for any errors in understanding by going broad and deep.

When dealiing with complex challenges, the discovery process leads to the uncovering of a complex reality, and an ecology of systems – wide in variety.

This uncovering turns your world upside down, but to borrow from an eponymous title of a book (Homer-Dixon – The Upside of Down), there is great strategic advantage in this process – An Upside to the Down.

Charting the Corporate Mind – What’s in the book

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

In my last post I had mentioned my rediscovery of the book, “Charting the Corporate Mind” by Charles Hampden-Turner (CHT), and how I find the whole topic of dilemmas particularly relevant to my practice of Strategic Impact Making.

I am documenting here some of the key points that I see as pertinent and noteworthy. While this is not a book-review, I will also make observations about how I see dilemmas playing a role in complex situations where leaders have to make strategic choices.

The Introduction by Ronnie Lessem in an interesting read in itself. Most people might not know of him, but during the 90’s when this book was written, he too was considered a Mangement Guru.

The author CHT is taking on an ‘existential’ challenge most managers face – having to make difficult choices from among myriad complex alternatives. CHT has separately written about his vision of the Radical Man.

A manager is a social being in relationships with others – their capacity for synthesizing, symbolizing and exploring frees them from being ‘stimulus bound’. Such capacity permits them to rebel against the absurdity of atrophying cultures and empty forms and enables them to create new meaning and renew themselves in their environment.

He goes on to list other qualities about this ‘Radical Man’ manager, such as quality of perception, self-awareness etc., but the one I found interesting was something about ‘suspending their cognitive structures, permitting their own structures to crumble in the face of contradiction.

This is a quality that will be pertinent to the issue of reconciling and resolving dilemmas. This is the idea in Strategic Design – one discovers the complexity that underlies a seemingly simple situation, that it has many dimensions and scales – and often issues that do not seem to reconcile easily. These dimensions then must be brought into a dialectical process – perhaps that is the process of making/prototypiing – that then tries to find a reconciliation between various dilemmas – the only way one can do that is to perhaps transcend.

Another interesting thought goes – ‘When there is no initial dilemma, there is no gain from designing a solution’. This is for me the starting step of the Meta-Design Process, the one I refer to as Q0 – something you must do before you even engage on a Strategic Impact journey – The need to clearly identify the challenge that creates a Case for Action.

In critiquing the use of Profit as a measure, he highlights why it falls short, mostly in systemic terms as not serving the cause of organizational learning, such as, it comes too late for it to help in the learning, it is too narrow in its scope (the system has many more dimensions to pay attention to), there might be other things more important and that it does not deal with societal or environmental issues.

Here is another interesting statement – The hunt for the unicorn is a doomed quest – no pure unambiguous essence of virtue exists.

We are like jugglers he says – the more balls there are the more we are likely to drop them if we get fixated on just one.

CHT, as the book title suggests, uses Charts to make the dilemmas Visible, something people can periodically review to check progress. I have personally used such visualization in managerial group setting and confirm how effective it is for faciliating conversations about contentious complex topics.

The journey of resolving dilemmas has a direction – towards an ever richer synthesis of values, towards mounting complexity, towards packages of knowledge more intensely and aesthetically organized, and towards the expansion of the mind itself.

In essence, dilemmas are an existential reality, resolving them requires a certain mindset – the kind a ‘Radical Man’ possesses, particularly in the sense of being willing to set aside cognitive structures, recognizing the need to use devices to facilitate conversations among diverse stakeholders and finally to see the whole proces of resolution and reconciliation as a learning journey.

Book Cover - Charting the Corporate Mind

Navigating through Complexity – grappling with dilemmas

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

In recent times there has been growing awareness of the concept of Complexity, with a corresponding increase in the number of publications that advise us on the need to embrace it, as a necessary condition of our times, and even more so going into the future.

Complexity is the very nature of the reality on which we layer aritificial and human/social systems often obscuring it in the process. At some juncture, the alienation and misalignment between reality and our constructs leads to dysfunction, often serious. Complexity also arises within the systems we construct to counter and master complexity, one of the hallmarks of our times.

This happens through all the interconnections and interdependence that we build and live with and continue to grow every passing day. I do not mean to write here about the nature of complexity, and all that is implies but just bring attention to what that realization or discovery leads us to.

On the one hand is the awakening to a certain kind of underlying beauty – a sense of awe. On the other hand is the realization that there is a reason we encounter so much intractability in our times, and that, if we accept this ’truth’, embrace it so to say, there is hope.

For all that I have read and heard, I have seen very few recommendations on how to actually deal with the many possibilities that such challenges rooted in complexity expose. We recognize that there are many possible pathways to navigate through the situations – many possible dimensions and possible points of intervention. The recommendations then have to do with experimentation, probing, and building rapid learning organizations, among others. There is more to the various approaches and I will deal with that in some other post.

One of the things that occurred to me, was that complexity posed the decision maker with dilemmas – of course in this case a multi-horned multi-lemma so to speak. That train of thought led me to thinking about dilemmas and the work that has been done in dilemma theory.

I was reminded of a book from several years ago – “Charting the Corporate Mind”, by Charles Hampden-Turner. I had referred to this book in the early 90’s when I was pivoting my career from business management to consulting. The book is certainly targeted at the Corporation and the role of the Manager. However, during my recent reading I realized that much of the book’s discussion of dilemmas and how to approach them remains relevant to our complex contexts in general.

Over the next couple of posts I will review some of the key concepts from the book and how I believe those concepts and approaches might be relevant to our need to deal with complexity in a somewhat systematic manner.