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Core Stories and Democratic Societies

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I use the term core story to represent the story set each of us has inherited and constructed over time about what it means to be human, living and operating in human groups, and the essential agreements we make as humans regarding our behaviors to promote the well-being of individuals and groups simultaneously.  In other words, core stories are stories about our morals that allow us to discern right from wrong, good from bad, in ways that shape the experiences not only of ourselves but also of the groups we inhabit.  As such we find excerpts from core stories in nursery rhymes, school rules, and legal systems for the purpose of promoting behavioral expectations. Core stories highlight the interactive nature of individuals and groups - individual behavior affects the group, and the group affects individual behavior.  Consequently, core stories represent a systems approach to storytelling.  And because the interactive nature of individuals and groups is dynamic over t...
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Fire and Story

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   Fire is the observable light and heat we humans perceive from difficult-to-observe chemical reactions among fuel and oxidants known as combustion.  Combustion results from a sequential process where fuels (like wood, charcoal, or paper) interact with oxidants and heat to become gaseous, expand, and combust into the heat and light we perceive [1].   The simple system of combustion described above is an important part of a complex and adaptive Earth system in which naturally occurring and human-made fires influence and are influenced by climate, atmosphere, water composition, vegetation, topography, wildlife, and human experiences [2].  Indeed, a walk in any forest will reveal what fire has accomplished over eons.   As an essential aid in the evolution of human society within the Earth system, fire is both a necessary ingredient and a constant threat to human existence.  The study of fire - how it forms, spreads, and can be managed – require...
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Moral Injury in Complex Adaptive Human Systems

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  Dinner parties can be fertile ground for conversation and connection.  Last night amidst the friendly banter of a lively dinner party I listened carefully to an emergency health care provider discuss the highs and lows of his career.  He talked about feelings of love, intimacy, honor, frustration, and betrayal that accompany the care of patients within health bureaucracies.  At one point in the conversation I mentioned to him that an event he was describing sounded like a moral injury had occurred. He was not familiar with the term ‘moral injury’ and so we discussed the meaning. I first learned the term ‘moral injury’ when listening to an episode of Fresh Air broadcast on NPR in 2014.  During the broadcast Terry Gross interviewed military correspondent, David Wood, who said, “I think that almost everyone who returns from war has suffered some kind of moral injury…….and I do not mean by that that they have done something wrong, only that they have seen or expe...
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Stories Need Listeners: Constructivist Listening for Transformative Storytelling

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  I haven’t been writing here lately.  Instead, this past winter I committed to listening more.  So, I have been listening, and reading, and reading about listening.  Much of the reading and listening have been anchored in a desire to better understand how groups can address conflict, mistrust, and open hostility in sectors tasked with improving conditions for children and families.   The graphic above is a proposed model of constructivist listening built from a review of scholarly evidence in the fields of communication studies, linguistics, psychology, and education.  I am not the first person to use the term constructivist listening.  In fact, education scholars have used the term to describe intentional listening strategies that acknowledge the role of emotion in understanding group members’ experiences [1].  Communication scholars have used the term to acknowledge the conscious and unconscious cognitive processes listeners use to make se...
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Collaborative Systems Change and Collective Intelligence

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  Pranav Gupta and Anita Woolley have generated a framework for collective intelligence that informs possibilities for socio-technical efforts that bridge artificial intelligence and human decision-making.  Their framework, a Transactive Systems Model of Collective Intelligence (TSM-CI), uses theory and evidence from human psychological science to define intelligence and posit a plausible understanding of collective intelligence, its components, processes, and measurable constructs (full citations below). From their work we learn that any intelligent system (like a human) manages three primary functions - memory, attention, and reasoning – to achieve goals.  The basic functions underlying intelligence become transactive in a collective intelligence framework indicating that by combining and exchanging memory, attention, and reasoning groups improve their chances of achieving shared goals.  Gupta and Wooley advise that optimal combining and exchanging of memory, atten...
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Weaving our Worlds

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  In his book Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity the physicist Carlo Rovelli writes: “I believe that in order to understand reality, we have to keep in mind that reality is this network of relations, of reciprocal information, that weaves the world.  We slice up the reality surrounding us into objects.  But reality is not made up of discrete objects.  It is a variable flux.  Think of an ocean wave. Where does a wave finish?  Where does it begin? …. A living organism is a system that continually re-forms itself in order to remain itself, interacting ceaselessly with the external world….The nature of a man is not his internal structure but the network of personal, familial, and social interactions within which he exists….As humans, we are that which others know of us, that which we know of ourselves, and that which others know about our knowledge.  We are complex nodes in a rich web of reciprocal information.” (Rovelli, 2018, p...
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Systems Thinking & Systemic Community Storytelling

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  According to Peter Checkland the term systems thinking simply refers to consciously organized thinking using systems ideas (1).  But what are systems ideas and how do they relate to systems improvements, especially those improvements that correct persistent injustices and promote equity?  Let’s start by defining a system.  According to Donella Meadows a system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something (2).    Some people use causal loop diagrams or other mapping tools to visualize system elements and their connections for the purpose of understanding the parts and wholes of systems and to promote systems thinking. Additional tools exist for systems thinking.  For example, Meadows used an iceberg model  as one tool to describe levels of systems thinking with attention to locating leverage points in difficult to observe systemic conditions. Essentially, the deeper you go down into the i...
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