Battling the Jungle
Why the jungle always wins!
Oh so often we undertake efforts to change the way things are and for a while, it seems that our efforts produce results. Then at some point, we seem distracted by more pressing urgent issues. As we begin to focus on new issues the gains we had made to institute change seem to fade away into the past as things begin to return to the way they were, and there is little if any evidence that we ever made progress to being with.
When we see something we believe warrants change and we perceive we're in a position to help we attempt to do so, though more often than not we have insufficient awareness of the network of relationships that are really responsible for things being the way that they are. As a result, our efforts are usually overwhelmed by the network.
It should be evident from this simple example that it is essential to first understand why things are the way they are before we attempt to interact with the environment attempting to change things.
What perspectives might evolve the understanding?
Link List…
Battling the Jungle, a Kumu Model by Gene Bellinger
This has been another SystemsWiki's Musings on understanding relationships and their implications. If you found this musing meaningful might you consider sharing it with others?
If you’re not already subscribed might you consider doing so?
Listening to your video stimulates me to free association to current reading or rather listening of an amazing book, Stolen Focus: Why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply again by Johann Hari. He speaks of 11 major trends or conditions in our ever faster environment that fragment us...e.g. it's really hard to do systems analysis in a Twitter Post or in the 3 minutes average attention span of an office worker or perhaps the average time of one of your Systems Thinking videos - that being the time that you've found folks willing to watch. And it takes longer that three minutes to think about your post and to actually post a thoughtful reply and how many of us do that?
And in the book, Atomic Habits, James Clear describes the tools for building good habits and breaking bad ones, which I imagine less than 3% of the adult population have mastered.
We seem to live in a highly fragmented, impulsive, profit-driven-attention-pirating society - where deep thinking and discussion about complex issues is almost non-existant. Politicians have learned that people decide based on emotion and especially fear, rage, and hate-based emotion - so that gun defenders have extracted the phrase "right to own guns" from the 2nd amendment without understanding the complexity of the situation and therefore the meaning of the more nuanced phrase actually written in that amendment...and people seem willing to die for that phrase.
Chris Hedges recently wrote an article and then made a video on The American Fetish with Guns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkJv3_dzGH8 , a video that is 7 min long - so only few will watch it - that describes his view of the complex American history with violence and the current desperate, hopeless future of less educated white men - grabbing at any raveling of control left to them in owning not one but many assault weapons... and indeed no real change will occur.
Can systems thinking diagrams include the emotional factors of hopeless, desperation, and long history of violent memes in American culture in any significant contribution to solving the problem.
Gene, I'm curious, perhaps you can point me to a systems thinking diagram that effectively deals with powerful histories of the DNA of guns in so many aspects of American culture and the driving emotions of hatred, fear so prevalent...not the least in the wide-spread never-ending racism core to the American dilemma?
Just my mental meandering as a I read and listen to your post..... Yes I was trained in rational method, and my specialization is planning. However I have never really incorporated effective skills in working with the emotions of most of the situations I've planned for. Heck, I haven't even dealt with my own psychological and emotional processes that are ever in the way of me implementing what I feel are good rational intentions. Can I or we indeed remove ourselves from this pot of ever hotter water before we are parboiled?
Just joined here. Nice work! I appreciate this.
We need to frame and reframe experience to mine meanings before creating truth and value. I only recently discovered negative network effects (noise) and now I am wondering how this phenomenon is related to diseconomies of scale (as network effects relate to economies of scale), and diminishing returns on investment. Noise and distractions are maybe synonyms? Energy is dissipated in the network so there is insufficient energy to get anything done and so there is no personal reward to re-energize us. A sense of priorities is lost. Path dependence is lost.
I am reminded of the "thrashing" concept as well, in computing and neural networks.
Unfortunately, it seems those of us who are most curious about the world are perhaps most immediately vulnerable to distraction and noise. We want both depth and breadth of comprehension. This takes a lot of work and concentration.
In chaos we may seek the re-assurance of path dependency, moving away from exploring to exploiting existing known pathways. Now there are many paths, or knowledge silos and each of us gets a diminishing portion of all collective knowledge. At some point that tiny portion is no longer viable.
We are all struggling to 'connect the dots'. I feel grateful that I am a big picture thinker and understand that its not me. Psychology is not designed to help the normal person adjust to the abnormal society.
Those who are not able to gradually evolve their worldviews will suffer greatly from eventual Future Shock.
All the more important that we pursue the propagation of systems thinking as a means of simplifying worldviews so we can continue to manage our viability.