Thought Shrapnel

I haven’t yet been able to apply my studies last year on systems thinking to my work as much as I’d hope. I remain interested in the topic, however, and this piece in particular.

It was recommended in Patrick Tanguay’s always-excellent Sentiers newsletter. As Patrick points out, it includes some great minimalistic animations, one of which I’ve included above.

It’s the backside of any notion of holistic, interconnected, interwoven networks that often get associated with the overused tag line of “Systems Thinking”. It acknowledges that in order to make sense we are bound to draw a boundary, a distinction of what we mean / look at / prioritise – and all the rest. Only through its boundary a system genuinely becomes what it is. It marks the difference between a system and its environment. And with that boundaries are inherently paradoxical: they create interdependency precisely by drawing a line:

They are interfaces.

What follows is a framework for moving within and beyond binaries in five steps:① Affirmation → ② Objection → ③ Integration → ④ Negation → ⑤ Contextualisation.

This is not a linear path but a cycle, a tool for keeping in motion while acknowledging the gaps along the way.

[…]

In a world of contexts, there is no way for any one actor – be it a planner, a city, or a government – to account for the many contexts they are acting in. Here, we are forced to think and act in constellations ourselves: in networks of mutual and collective contextualisation, of pointing out each others blindspots (the contexts we didn’t know we didn’t see), of taking parts of this complexity and leaving other parts to others.

This is very close to notions of intersectionality, the simultaneousness of difference and the possibility of many things being true at the same time. It also makes our understanding of an intervention or position very interesting - which now becomes a literal intersection, a specific constellation of multiple positions across a system of differences.

Source & animation: Permutations