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…

Re-envisioning my relationship to the mountain world in the face of environmental grief, Part I — Here I want to report on an emerging process of first-person inquiry, centered on my relationship with the mountain world. The process is triggered by grief as I have seen the mountains, and the Alps in particular, change as a result of global warming. This is not a new phenomenon…

Giving voice to a polyphonic self — I have been practicing photography for twenty years. However, it took me a long time to genuine feel myself a photographer. In these last few years I have made important strides in embracing my artistic self. I am starting to feel myself an artist through and through. Which implies that…