Why I Blog: A Taskonomy for Making Sense of, and Coping with, Complexity

1. Sensing and Probing: Listening, observing, paying attention, reading, intuiting, appreciating, and opening ourselves to information, sensations, ideas, and our own instincts.
2. Learning and Discovering: Using the results of our sensing and probing by ‘making sense’, playing, imagining, speculating, entertaining (=holding ourselves open to), interpreting, synthesizing, integrating, creating models, trying stuff out, letting ourselves believe and be empowered, and in the process developing new capacities (for sensing, learning and responding).
3. Reacting and Responding: Using the results of our learning and discovering by understanding, letting-ourselves-change, acting (rationally, emotionally, instinctively, and both consciously and subconsciously), realizing (=making real), allowing to emerge, collaborating and innovating.

This is quite different from the way we make sense of, and deal with, merely complicated systems (a knowledge-gathering/ analysis/ implement change process that draws on more complete knowledge of relevant variables and causality, where events and results of actions are more predictable, and where we have enough control over the system to be reasonably sure that the ‘change process’ we invoke will be effective). One of the major reasons for the prevalence of ‘wicked’ intractable problems in our society, and for the dysfunction of so many of our human institutions, systems and processes, is that we mistake complex systems and situations for merely complicated ones (or deliberately oversimplify them) and hence use the wrong, complicated system process to deal with them. This rarely works and often makes things worse, as our recent actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and New Orleans so clearly demonstrate. In business, we make the same mistake, which is why most ‘change projects’ in business fail.

The purpose of my AHA! project, and my more recent proposal to draw together the various complex system methodologies of Snowden, Scharmer/Varela, Open Space, Wisdom of Crowds, Princen and Brody, is to develop a theory and Let-Self-Change based approach to cope with complex systems and situations. The taskonomy in the graphic above is my first stab at a model for such a theory/approach.

While the three-stage sense-making/coping process shown in the blue, orange and green boxes above is, I think, appropriate for dealing with complexity as individuals, I wanted to expand it to also show how we deal with complexity collectively and interactively. The purple box at left is an attempt to do this. At any point in time, in coordinated, facilitated, cooperative and collaborative activities, and in conversations (including the tacit conversations between writers and readers), we alternate between two roles: the speaker/relater role and the listener/reader role. In the role of relater (=bringing to), by telling stories, showing, helping imagine, informing (=adding meaning to), bringing attention to, entertaining (=holding others’ attention), contextualizing, adding insight, inciting, provoking/persuading, synthesizing, suggesting, creating models, enabling and facilitating (and combinations of these activities such as teaching and coaching), we enable and enhance the listener/reader/student’s sensing and probing (stage 1), and learning and discovering (stage 2) sense-making and coping activities. And in turn, others enable and enhance our own sense-making and coping activities through their relating activities.

Does this strike you with the same aha! as it did me? Is this the foundation for a framework for making us all more effective at dealing with the pervasive challenges of complex systems, including the natural, ecological and social systems we seem to be screwing up the worst with traditional merely-complicated approaches? Or is it (no pun intended) more complex than this — is this just Dave Pollard’s model of learning in complex environments, unsuited to others who learn differently?

Another reason I intuitively like this model is that it can accommodate our Genius (what we love doing and do uniquely well) and our Purpose (why we’re here), and give us some ideas how to apply our Genius to achieve our Purpose. In my case, for example, my Genius is imagining opportunities, which maps to the helping imagine relating activity in the purple box above. My Purpose is fomenting/provoking change — especially if it brings about the Let-Self-Change and Realizing activities in the green box above.

My reasons for blogging include all of the relating activities in the purple box above, but most importantly (for me) I blog to help people imagine possibilities (such as a better way to live, and make a living) and to provoke or incite them to action. Recently the former has become much more important to me, and the latter less important, because I’ve realized that there is not much point in provoking or inciting people to be dissatisfied if it just makes them unhappy — if they can’t ‘see’, or can’t make, the changes needed to act upon that dissatisfaction.

Bringing this all back to my Tables of Contents, I’ve looked at each of the 46 subjects in my existing ToC taxonomy and reframed each of them as gerundives (action words ending in -ing) to suggest how the articles in each category might be used. Here’s the result, shown as a mindmap:

I’m not sure this makes my Tables of Contents more useful, largely because in their relater role, my articles often try to do more than just one thing — they may, for example, endeavour to synthesize information, then help the reader imagine some possibilities, and then suggest someactions that could realize those possibilities.

What do you think?