Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns

To be a participant in a complex system is to desire to be both lost and found in the interrelationships between people, nature, and ideas.

It is impossible to separate my experience as a daughter from my experience as a mother; it is also impossible to separate my cultural identity from my professional, personal, or social selves. All of those contexts are simultaneous, but reveal vital differences in the knitting together of my transcontextual life. Parts and wholes do not sit still

But most importantly, in this moment, art can teach us the value of information that does not demand proof.

The models, graphs, and charts that communicate this methodology carry ‘fact’ packaged in such a way that its authority is unquestionable. It says, “this is serious,” “this is how things are done,” and most insidious, “this is how life works.”

Complexity does not divide itself, and therefore life requires calibration within multiple streams of information and interaction.

Apocalypse is a linear idea, and we do not live in a linear world.

otherwise. I thought that since we came from the same culture and spoke the same language we would and should have less confusion about one another’s intentions. On closer inspection, this was not the case at all.

The primary limit of the word ‘system’ is its invocation of ‘arrangement’ (inherent in the Greek prefix ‘sys’). This, as we have just seen, relates to the way in which we have culturally been trained to explain and study our world in terms of parts and wholes and the way they ‘work’ together. The connotations of this systemic functional arrangement

Leadership for this era is not a role or a set of traits; it’s a zone of interrelational process.