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Build Adaptive Capacity
Every day we experience tensions that are driven by the diversity of our complex lives. What are those tensions, and where do they come from?
Business & IndustryBuild Adaptive Capacity
Working in conflict resolution, I get to hear a lot of stories about why some individual or group is worthy of being hated. Without a doubt, these stories are often bolstered by pulse-raising examples with the potential to provoke even the most skilled facilitative mediators into an evaluative stance. At the same time, beyond these stories lay patterns, many of which shed light on the dynamics of why we hate.
In my observations, there are three main reasons we hate others.
May 5, 2022
Two things sustain a complex system: Similarity and difference. The similarity holds the system together with coherence and identity. Difference introduces the potential energy of tension and possibility. Most tools of applied social sciences focus on “common ground.” Similarity becomes the platform for building a shared future. We avoid difference. We fear it because we don’t know how to capture and channel its power. In HSD, we recognize difference as a source of energy. It is the driver of change. It is the root for learning and growth. It is full of promise and possibility—if we just let ourselves use it.
In this LVW, Glenda Eoyang shares tools from HSD to help us recognize and leverage the possibility in difference. Bring your most wicked issues and leave with a plan to see and leverage the possibilities that hide in the differences you dread.
Business & IndustryLead in Complexity
Competition assumes a finite game with winners and losers. And, that is great when the game is winnable.
Teaching & LearningCollaborate to Create Community
This extract from Eoyang's dissertation gives the foundation for the CDE Model of Conditions for Self-Organizing in Human Systems.
This morning, the first news I heard was about a meteor crashing into earth's atmosphere in Russia. I saw this event mentioned on twitter, along with links to video capturing a variety of perspectives of a fireball streaking across the sky. Naturally, I wanted to see what the locals saw, so I began looking at those links.
I am finally able to get a moment to respond to an emerging conversation in which Dave Snowden critiques one of my tweets and the rest of human systems dynamics as if it were captured in the same 140 characters. It is always interesting to read a critique of my work, if only to tease out what it says about the critic from what it says about me and the work my colleagues and I do. Our practice in human systems dynamics (www.hsdinstitute.org) and adaptive action encourages us to turn judgment into curiosity; turn defensiveness into self-reflection; and turn conflict into shared exploration.