An experiment with an AI-powered digital avatar — I love data of all sorts and it is a great source of aesthetic and intellectual pleasure to be able to sense, alone or in collaboration with others, meaningful patterns in them. I guess that is one of the systemic sensibilities that anchors my systems-thinking-in-practice. My valued team member Santiago…

Introducing our 2023 edition of Alive in the Anthropocene — Alive in the Anthropocene (AitA), our free series of online talks on humanity’s contemporary predicament, is in its third edition [1]. In 2021 we explored what Andri Snær Magnason called a mythology of the present. Last year my colleague Christophe Kempkes curated a series devoted to the interaction between a…

A Systems Library, Vol. 30 — What a stirring read … This not standard academic fare, but a scintillating, 130-page long prose poem that revolves around one big, touchingly beautiful idea: the pluriverse. By and large this concept foregrounds a view that reality is fundamentally plural and diverse, rather than singular and unified. Emergence of the…

Practising photography as ‘soul work’ — I just published a new book. I refer to it as a cahier, which is French for ‘notebook’. 64 pages, 24 images, and 2 poems from my own hand. The modesty belies its long period of gestation. …

A gap between demand and supply, discourse and reality. — In this short piece I’d like to flag an issue that is becoming a serious headache to people in our kind of professional practice. We like to see ourselves as consultants working in an enabling niche of a much larger professional field that is often operating in a relieving mode…

A close reading of four long reads from a Dutch general affairs magazine — I am a big fan of the Dutch weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer (DGA). The first issue appeared in 1877, so soon it will celebrate its 150th anniversary! An impressive achievement as it continues to this day to pursue an independent course, free from political and commercial interests. No adds…

A Systems Library, Vol. 29 — This book thoroughly knocked me of my feet. It goes to the heart of the matter in making our existence on Earth fathomable and it does so with such a grand sweep! The clarity and erudition of Berque’s argument are quite simply breathtaking. Although barely 200 pages, this tome has…

Moving beyond systems, to manifesting potential. — We recently rewrote the Our Approach section of the shiftN website. “We used to introduce ourselves as ‘strategic management’ or ‘systemic change’ consultants. We thought our job was ‘to increase the quality of organisational sense-making and strategic conversation’, and ‘to enhance people’s agency in complexity and uncertainty’. We didn’t make…

A Systems Library, Vol. 28 — In this new addition to the Systems Library, I focus on two books — Composing a Life, and Composing a Further Life — published 20 years apart by the same author, Mary Catherine Bateson. Mary Catherine, who died early in 2021 at the age of 81, was the daughter of…