Compassion in Holistic Systems Practice

"Holistic Systems Practice identifies the causal loops and variables of systems thinking to enhance agency in 'edge of chaos' conditions. By participating in the inherent intelligence and purpose of dynamical wholes evolutionary emergence to more coherent order is enabled." ? ??

Invitation:

We will be commencing with our Holistic Systems Practitioner training program on Sunday evening 13th April 2025 @ 18h00 CET. For further information about the comprehensive curriculum and fee structure please email [email protected]

Avoiding finger pointing

The observation in this posting https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/climate-disasters-etc-real-reason-missing-sdg-claudius-van-wyk/ was that it does not help to blame any one person, industry, nation, or even history, for the condition in which we find ourselves, received some meaningful critique. Yes, our prevailing socio-economic paradigm has contributed to this condition. However, since our current human state is a function of a broader definition of evolution, on-going evolutionary development starts nowhere else but here.

Directed passion

The title of Achebe’s famous novel,?‘Things Fall Apart’, a?simple story of a "strong man" whose life is dominated by fear and anger, was? borrowed from Yeats’ poem 'The Second Coming’.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;?

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,?

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere ?

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; ?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst ?

Are full of passionate intensity."

At the precipice

We understand that passionate intensity - we stand at the precipice of something enormous.

Decades back, biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the controversial 'Population Time Bomb’ (1968), was criticised for his bleak view of humanity’s future. Yet he continued arguing that a shattering collapse of civilisation was a 'near certainty' in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of ‘...the the natural world that sustains all life on earth.'

More recently, Jem Bendell, author of ‘Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos’ (2021) offered that not only is societal collapse due to climate change on its way, it is, in effect, already here. At a climate change conference organised by the European Commission he declared:

“Climate change will disrupt your way of life in your lifetimes”.

He predicted that devastating consequences, like '...the cascading effects of widespread and repeated harvest failures' are now unavoidable.?

Role of leadership

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 we drew an analogy from the role of disruptive plagues in enabling the liberation of the Israelites in their Exodus from slavery. We correlated this narrative to our potential 21st century exodus from the slavery of a soul and life-destroying mechanistic and materialistic paradigm. ??

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/21st-century-exodus-from-reductionism-holism-claudius-van-wyk/?

For us the role of leadership in society towards a sustainable future is less about re-arranging the extraction, distribution and utilisation of earth's material resources, it's more about guiding humanities' return to natural order.

That is why our presentation to the UK System Society Conference at Portsmouth University suggested that overcoming a barrier to systems thinking endeavours to support a transition to a sustainable world required a shift to holistic systems practice.?

What would define such practice is a shift from modelling problem-spaces in an endeavour to identify defined outcomes. Rather holistic systems practice is focused on place-based participation - empowering local agency by facilitating and enabling the emergence of what Daniel Christian Wahl describes as 'regenerative cultures’.?

Essentially it represent a deep shift in societal mindful living practice, and as such could represent the next evolutionary leap for humankind.

Getting involved

A further analogy from the Biblical Exodus narrative comes to mind, A barrier encountered en route was the Jordan River in flood. Notwithstanding the priests were instructed to enter the water.?

"Now the Jordan?is at flood stage?all during harvest.?Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge,?the water from upstream stopped flowing ... So the people crossed over opposite Jericho.?The priests?who carried the ark of the covenant of the?Lord?stopped in the middle of the Jordan and stood on dry ground,?while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground.” Joshua 3; 15 - 17

The great lesson is that the priests stepped into the melee. That is the challenge of holistic system practice - get involved where it counts - notwithstanding the powerful currents of institutionalised practice that are still raging.

And that is why in the paper to the UK Systems Society International Conference we questioned the notion of global sustainability as a viable goal, and rather ?suggested that we should prepare for fundamental disruption by enabling local agency with regenerative cultures. And that demands the transformation of consciousness to embrace the holistic perspective.?

We’ve argued that evolving systems thinking to holistic systems practice could be enabled by integrating them with the ‘edge of chaos’ concept. ?This edge between order and chaos provides the conceptual context for a fundamental shift from striving towards ‘sustainability’, to enabling ‘regeneration’. Now, enabled by the holistic perspective, the inherent self-organising (autopoietic) capacity of living systems can be supported. Living in such a way that enables life more abundantly.?

We are suggesting the magic factors to holistic systems practice could be developed in the interstitial spaces between systems thinking, edge of chaos, and the holistic perspective. We begin to explore this opportunity on-line on Sunday 13 April 2025 @ 18h00 CET.

For further information about the comprehensive curriculum and fee structure please email [email protected]