Meta Rational Ways of Knowing

This webinar is addressed to Metaphorum, a gathering of persons who celebrate Stafford Beer’s application of cybernetic principles to organisations and social systems. My exploration of systems thinking is composed of an equal fascination with two utterly diverse aspects: one – the mental models of cybernetics, with inviolable principles of information and control in recursively nested structures, and two – the fluid and amorphous mind of Gregory Bateson and (to my mind) related ideas of enactive cognition and anticipatory patterning. These two apparently distinct mental models are, in my opinion, both partial disclosures of a single overall reality we are trying to fathom. There are mysteries in these two aspects of reality and in the potential synthesis of these models, which enthral me. My talk today will focus on the second aspect alone: the fluid and amorphous aspects of knowing, which we usually ignore. I seek to share my take on the limits and possibilities of human understanding of complex systems, which can be powerfully multiplied by approaches that go beyond the rational-analytic framework. I come from an unusual vantage point: not that of a systems expert, but of a practitioner who has worked with very diverse communities – often unlettered and marginalised: tribal farmers, fisherfolk, artisans and performing artists. Several elements determine our orientation to knowing – which information patterns we seek to sense or pick up; what sorts of information – rational and affective – and how we cross-verify, calibrate and harness it all. These aspects of our approach to knowing, which vary across cultures and disciplines, can determine how deep our understanding of systemic behaviour patterns can go. Surprisingly, disciplines like action research and cultures outside of the mainstream West fare better (systems thinkers are part of this mainstream). These non- mainstream communities have developed sophisticated wisdom approaches which provide alternate ways of fathoming deeper systemic realities. My talk will proceed as a series of snapshots. These snapshots are facets of useful mental models I have located in sources outside systems thinking literature, which help us integrate additional forms of knowing into the rational-analytic approach to systems thinking. Harnessing the meta rational ways of knowing is, according to me, the most significant frontier now before systems thinking.