There have been many follow-ups to the ISSS2025 Conference in Birmingham. One-to-one emails, text & telephone or LinkedIn exchanges, some formal publisher / institutional contacts, many more informal and personal, some specifically part of the writing project(s), most more generally around our Systems Thinking topics.
One particular set of FB-Messenger voice-message “groups” was initiated by Chris Chase – mainly amongst people relatively new to ISSS or Systems specifically as-a-discipline, who had met each other for the first time in Birmingham. Especially those who – one way or another – saw “Eastern” (or other ancient, NB in “scare quotes”) thinking and practice as an important addition to the systems “Sciences”. It initially started as an attempt to replicate the ISSS “Round Table” in-person, short, shared, non-critical, listening experience in an asynchronous technology environment, but these have morphed through multiple FB-Messenger channels to discussion on establishing “flow” in on-line platform discourse – with multi-modal, voice, text and communication media content. Feeling our way.
What’s missing from these threads so far are any of the experienced ISSS (or any federated IFSR organisations) leadership participants. Learning experience for those actually participating, starting with the knowledge limitations of new participants, but in danger of being silos not “joined-up” communication-wise to our wider ecosystem.
So this post is me “breaking out” from one to the other. Let’s start with some observations:
Firstly, personally, the idea of joined-up-thinking being “an ecosystem for systems thinking, incorporating multiple world-views” pretty much sums up my research and writing agenda. The idea that this be dynamic and evolving, and that our motivation is a response to our 21st century “polycrisis” – poly-crises (plural) plus meta-crisis (underlying these) – being a given?
Secondly, the multi-view system idea turned out to be quite a common agenda at the conference (see this previous post) and, more specifically, a platform for this being Leah Bogen‘s explicit research agenda.
Thirdly, when it comes to multi-modal channels and platforms, real-time and asynchronous voice can only be a part of a greater kaleidoscope. Personal preferences for creating and communicating in voice over text and other documents/files, is ultimately a personal style preference, and a mixture – Requisite Diversity – is inevitable and essential. However an important difference is in the receiver / consumer value and effort. You cannot skim over a previous collection of voice messages by eye to recap where dialogue has got to in terms of (say) shared-understandings, nor can you cross-link internally between contributions, without voice-to-text transformation also in the pipeline.
Fourthly, when it comes to multiple world-views or perspectives, the East-West “dichotomy” has been a growing part of ISSS agendas, epitomised by (outgoing president) Gary Smith adopting the Lao Tzu catchphrase “the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao” and the fact that more contributors to the 2025 conference – myself included – brought “Eastern” content with them – in plenary sessions as well as topic-specific streams.
So to bring these together, cross-link the silos, join the dots, confluence the flows … choose your preferred fluid dynamic metaphor … I want to address issues under just two of the topics touched upon:
The Channel(s) / Platform(s)
Whilst we’ve been playing (experimenting) with FB-Messenger group voice-channels, most of the professional systems world is increasingly using LinkedIn and associated blogs, and ISSS itself has only recently created a “Wiki” space as promoted by incoming president Yiannis Laouris.
ISSS itself, up to the 2024 Conference in DC anyway, in capturing its “Systems Body of Knowledge” as an on-line resource, used the technical services of (amongst others) Daniel Friedman for shared repositories (like Coda say) and a collaboration platform in Discord. It would be a shame to overlook these efforts. Daniel’s work with Discord is particularly impressive in the AII (Active Inference Institute) environment. (The importance of “AI” as Active Inference – as opposed to Artificial Intelligence – can only grow as the current AI-Hype bubble bursts – but I possibly digress prematurely.)
The point here is that, technology-wise the idea of multi-channel, multi-modal, real-time & asynchronous, open, shared communication & collaboration platform(s) is already being solved and implemented out there, by people already in our Systems community. (And many of us are participants in such channels in other contexts too.)
The East-West Aspect
This has become both popular and contentious at the same time.
The contrasts and connections between so-called East and West worldviews have been evident throughout the 4000+ years history of philosophy and natural philosophy (science) since the pre-Socratics right thought all our “footnotes to Plato” via Islamic scholars & the enlightenment to modernism, post-modernism and beyond.
Popularity in “the West” was driven by the 1950’s Beats and 1960’s Hippy “countercultures” which, very similar to our 21st century response to the “polycrisis” (see above) was a reaction to the hopelessness felt in the face of the “military-industrial-complex”. There are many parallels, and the resurgence of Eastern mindful practice(s) on an almost industrial scale is one of them.
We need to be careful what we think we mean when we invoke the East-West distinction and beware artificial dichotomies that might divide or distort our efforts at the real-world level. (My own 2025 presentation majored on dichotomies and #GoodFences in this context.)
Current views out there vary between extremes.
“As a Westerner, I’ve worked with many people in the Eastern and other cultures and they don’t really espouse different, less-scientific world-views. In fact it’s an insulting hangover of Western (North-Atlantic) colonialism to suggest otherwise.“
“I’m from the Far East and have studied this question, and the difference is not really such a big deal for us, more implicitly embodied in our everyday experience.“
The reality intended by those of us that espouse an East-West balance is much more nuanced than either and East-West, as used here, is just figurative short-hand for that complex subtlety. The Westerners who first popularised that wave of Eastern thought and practice in the West (the North Atlantic) from the 1950’s to the 1970’s were Alan Watts and Robert Pirsig, but their agendas were quite different.
Suffice to say, one was very much about promoting mindful religious practice, the other about integrated systems thinking. Both were about dynamic process integration. At the conference one important speaker who exhibited the necessary balance and subtlety in both expression and action on this axis was our host Rachel Lilley but she is not alone. Shared understanding is possible.
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