Welcome to the Apocalypse!

#1 Path Notes of a Meta-Modern Systems Tinker-er

Dear Friends,

I’m going to start keeping notes out in the open.

I know…as news goes, that’s right up there with “sun rises on the eastern horizon!” But I’m arriving late to this game. I’ve never had any kind of social media account. I have a few publications in the public domain, but they’re all finished products. I could share reasons I’ve held back. But all that really matters at this point is this; the call to step in and participate in the conversation more fully and freely suddenly feels way stronger and more important than any of the stories I tell myself about working quietly in the background.

I guess I’ve reached a tipping point.

Like perhaps some of you, I have rows of tattered notebooks that I’ve hauled around for years. Looking back at them, they’re filled with dreams, ideas, lists, quotes, book notes, designs, poems, songs, sketches, internal dialogue and attempts to sense-make and pattern-track. I think of them as path notes and that’s the title I’m giving this experiment. Path Notes of a Meta-Modern Systems Tinker-er. I’ll get to the meta-modern bit in a later post. But here’s a couple of ways I’m thinking about path notes.

Path Notes # 1: mapping a path through the poly-crisis. I believe we find ourselves at a critical inflection point as a species. The dreams, discoveries, actions and decisions of those who went before us have led to this moment of fertile and perilous instability.

-       Unstable because many of our socio-cultural and ecological systems have been shaken out of long-standing patterns of equilibrium.

-       Fertile because a system in motion is a system that can potentially be nudged towards new patterns of possibility. Perilous for the same reason.

-       Ecologically perilous because we depend on natural processes and cycles that we have stressed to the limits and in some cases, have already pushed over irreversible tipping points.

-       Socio-culturally perilous because we have few coherent visions of ourselves as a thriving planetary caretaker species and are at risk of being pulled into dismal and fragmented patterns of collective organization that diminish our humanity and imperil our survival.

If I were to describe it more poetically, I might say that humanity stands before the initiatory fires of an evolutionary threshold. And at this point, there’s no way back. We’re committed! Belligerent nationalists and fundamentalists of all stripes might peddle simplistic fantasies about a return to some imagined past but the truth is, we will either walk through those fires together or not at all. It’s always worth remembering that those that went before us endured their own apocalypses and existential threats. But now we face a collective – species level - adaptive challenge that none of our ancestors ever experienced. One that requires us to both draw from the deep wellsprings of ancestral wisdom and to develop new collective capabilities.

To evolve together or perish.

I’m interested in the narrow path we must travel together across this threshold. Much of my life and work is dedicated to supporting the people who are not only building the kind of world I most want to live in but who make the path visible by walking it. That’s my path of service. I feel like I was born for these times and I feel that way about most of my closest friends and colleagues. I don’t imagine I’ll get to see what’s on the other side – but I can taste its possible flavours. And, like one of those people who stand at the side of the trail and hand out water bottles to the passing runners, I can offer encouragement and nourishment to those walking that path. I can share what I’ve learned and what I’m learning. More accurately, what we’re learning because I’m just one small point in a web of relationships and networks. I’ll be making those visible in future posts.

Path Notes # 2: I like the word ‘path’. It’s simple but it contains layers of complexity. It is both the unpretentious literal trail meandering through a landscape and the ‘way’ – the Dō or Dao – we follow a path of self-cultivation or liberation. Most etymologies highlight its obscure northern European origins, but surely it has found its way from the Sanskrit word pāthā meaning both the recital of a sacred text as well as a road or way. Path notes then are dispatches and field observations from the road and the way we might walk it.

I’m on the trail of something here.

A way of working that is also way of living and a way of being. A way of sensing and intervening with greater skill and awareness in the rippling patterns of creation around us. I’ve come to the conclusion that many – if not most - of our efforts to ‘change’ systems not only fail but end up amplifying the very system dynamics we yearn to transform. (I’ll unpack that more in coming posts). I’m on the trail of a way of working/living/being/intervening that I sense is radically different from much of the conceited partiality that passes for ‘changemaking’ these days. I’ve seen it in action but I don’t quite know what to call it yet. It’s a new ‘way’ that I’ve been learning about by watching a diverse assortment of ‘practitioners’ walk its path. I’m guess I’m making my observations – my path notes – more visible as a way to fall into a deeper collective inquiry.

I sense many of us are on the trail of the same thing here.

It’s a way of sharpening our systems practice and cultivating complexity consciousness. Building skills and metaskills. Competencies and capabilities. So many of us hold important fragments of the map, but - almost without exception - they’re partial fragments. Even the ones that claim to be integral. And at this moment in the human story, our collective inability to sense and move from the underlying wholeness of things is getting in the way of our ability to respond skillfully to the adaptive challenges that beset us from all sides – challenges that arise directly from the actions of those who came before us. Our own ancestors. They left us many gifts and cultural treasures. But, in many cases, they also left us the tools with which they created those challenges in the first place and which we are now trying to use to fix them! Their languages, their beliefs and paradigms, their technologies and social institutions, their maps and models, their religions and cultures, their grudges and grievances, their pain and suffering, their dreams and visions. A mixed bag of tools that we must now sort through and repurpose in real time. Some of them will be critical on the road ahead. And it’s time to lay some of them down. Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō puts it beautifully in his own extraordinary 17^th century path notes The Narrow Road To The Deep North.

“Most of what I brought along for the journey turned out to be an impediment.”

And so I say again, creation has a coherent pattern. An underlying wholeness. A dazzling beauty. A set of surprisingly simple protocols that govern the unfolding of virtually everything. I’m not going to trivialize it with an inadequate description or pretend that I understand it. It is the task of our sciences, religions, arts and cultures to not only perceive and describe it, but to offer ways to align with it individually and collectively. There are many sophisticated lenses that reveal facets of the pattern as well as ways to engage wisely with it. It’s what I’ve been privileged to be exposed to it in the diverse languages and living traditions of many Indigenous peoples. It’s what I sense in the descriptions of unified field theorists and complexity scholars from multiple disciplines – systems ecologists, cosmologists, theoretical physicists, climate scientists, agent-based modellers, stochastic analysts, psychedelic researchers, neurophysiologists and network theorists alike. It’s what I’ve gleaned from the field notes of dedicated students of human development, social innovation and systems change. I’ve tasted it directly in the texts and teachings of Kashmiri Shaivists, Taoists, Shugenja and Zen adepts and it ripples across the traditions that they seeded. It’s what I hear echoed in the genius of Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Chris Thile and improvisational collaborations like this. I’ve felt it directly in the body movements of elderly Japanese ninpō and aikido masters, in the hands of gifted healers and watching skilled practitioners of the flow arts. It’s the underlying ‘thing’ I see medicine people, animal whisperers and permaculturists alike ‘doing’. I’ve sensed it glimmering in the mythic musery and living rhythms of the bardic traditions and I hear it in some of the old stories. Perhaps most importantly, I find myself experiencing it through a deepening intimacy with the living earth from which I feel less and less separate. Original nature. The living grammar of the wild. The original instructions. The ‘laws’ of nature. The Tao. The Tattvas.

I’m seeing a complexity lens as some kind of place-holder or through-line across all of that.

I feel like I’ve bitten off way more than I can chew. But it's the terrain I’m proposing to explore here in Path Notes. A fiercely practical, deeply Romantic, somatically grounded, slightly geeky, clear-eyed and open-hearted applied complexity. Here’s the commitment. I’m going to release something into the wild at least once a month. Maybe more often if the Muse whispers loud enough. Maybe a lot more often if people seem to be finding it useful.

Oh and…..

Systems Tinker-er? Be honest now! When you first read it, did your mind fill in the missing ‘h’? Or did you perhaps think I’d made a spelling mistake? It’s a reasonable assumption. But it’s a deliberate choice of words. I know a lot of very competent and smart systems thinkers. But we’re not going to just think our way across the perilous threshold. Let me be clear. I don’t think we’ll cross without the gifts of the deep mind either. But all too often, the shallow mind and certain aspects of our thinking process get in our way. So I don’t want to over-emphasize the cognitive – it’s only one of our ways of knowing and perceiving. But I do want to encourage people to tinker! To get their hands dirty and engage in a creative and experimental way with the world. With community. With organizations and systems dynamics. With emerging possibility. If I had to describe the essence of complexity leadership it would be about inquiry. Leadership as inquiry….learning, research, experimenting, trying things out, engaging, touching. As they say, if you’re not part of the problem it’s hard to be part of the solution! So with our feet on the earth, our heads in the stars and our hearts wide open, lets step in together and stop waiting for someone or something to come and save us. It’s showtime on mother earth!

Thanks for reading!

Julian