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Build Adaptive Capacity
Historically, autumn has been considered the season of harvest. Summer’s stretch transforms water, sunlight, and nutrients to create the bounty of harvest. In autumn’s folding, we celebrate the abundance that will feed us during winter’s resting times. Autumn has been honored in many traditions as a time of thanksgiving for this abundance. A quick perusal of the Internet provided me insights about these kinds of celebrations around the world, at different times, in both the northern and the southern hemispheres.
Teaching & LearningCollaborate to Create Community
When Glenda Eoyang, Founder and Executive Director of Human Systems Dynamics Institute, invited me to co-facilitate an HSD Adaption Action Lab focused on transcending racism and “othering,” I immediately said yes for a couple of irresistible reasons.
November 3, 2022
Native American stories distinguish “mouse eyes” and “eagle eyes.” Like other tensions in cultural wisdoms, both of these perspectives are rich with possibility. Each one also comes with risks and challenges. If you make mouse eyes a habit, then you miss the rich context and long-range interactions. If you always play the eagle, you will miss glorious details of the moment.
When we are swamped by our problems, we tend to get stuck with the mouse. We face complexities of life every day. We experience a challenge or face a barrier and take the steps we believe will get us past that problem. Rarely do we step back to look at the larger patterns through the eyes of the eagle. Eagle eyes will help us understand the dynamics of our problems and see our complicity in their origins. While many mouse-level surprises are beyond our control, some of them we can see, understand, and influence from the eagle’s view.
Join Glenda Eoyang to consider how to use HSD to see from both perspectives and turn problems we can’t solve into patterns we can influence.
Collaborate to Create Community
In re-reading Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown, Royce was reminded of the way fractal behaviors shape patterns at all scales in human systems. In today’s blog, she reviews the HSD Simple Rules and suggests tools that can be used to help frame and live out the fractals Ms. Brown describes.
October 6, 2022
We are connected to others in massively entangled networks of family, friendship, community, work, and social or political groups. These connections satisfy our social, intellectual, physical, and emotional needs. Often, however, we don’t recognize or leverage the potential of these networks. In today’s world, traditional networks are becoming less connected and new ones are emerging. These changing patterns matter because robust connections determine the strength of our responses in complex and unpredictable situations. Connections allows us to reach out, to build reciprocal relationships, to give and get access to limited resources. This is a moment of possibility, as new networks emerge and old ones disappear. We can choose to build or maintain connections that empower us and connect us in networks of mutual support.
In this LVW, Glenda shares insights about establishing robust systems. Learn what it takes to build powerful connections that help reduce existential risks of living in today’s complex world.
Build Adaptive Capacity
In HSD, we think about resilience as “capacity to adapt and maintain system functioning in the face of the uncertainty and turbulence of complex change.” In this blog post, Royce explores three important lessons we’ve learned in talking with people about their need for and experiences with resilience in recent times.
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