This presentation addresses the following questions:

• What gives an urban space its character, personality, quality, identity, and its sense of coherence and order?
• What are the characteristics of a sustainable, adaptive, innovative, resilient, and regenerative city?
• What do living systems teach us about the attributes of a healthy and regenerative city and what are the implications for city planning and design?

Here is a high level overview of the 3 sections of my presentation:

Section 1 -  Paradigm Shift: Shifting our Mental Models

While the reductionist scientific method we inherited from Descartes and Newton has proven to be very effective for the development of technological innovations, this approach is very limited when dealing with the complex adaptive challenges faced by our cities today and even more so, by the cities of tomorrow: population density or lack of; social justice issues; poverty; economic issues; environmental problems such as pollution (water and air), watershed health, greenhouse gases emission, waste management; energy issues; food accessibility; and so on.

Systems thinking teaches us that complex systems have emergent properties that do not reside in any of their parts.  In order to understand the whole, we must embrace complexity and focus on the dynamic interactions between the parts (feedback loops).

Complex systems are dynamic and unpredictable; they cannot be controlled or managed.   Most often, addressing a problem in isolation may cause another problem over time.  Fortunately, the understanding of the systemic structures of our urban environments may allow us to find high leverage points where to intervene to positively influence the future of our cities.   The highest leverage points, however, are to be found in our worldviews and mental models.

Section 2 – The Living Systems Approach

This section considers the key attributes of living systems: openness; purpose; autopoiesis (self-creating); structure-determined behavior; diversity and differentiation; adaptation; self-organization; and emergence, and discusses these attributes within the context of a city.

A city that is ‘open’ facilitates the development of connections, interactions and relationships.  Efficient, interconnected physical infrastructures facilitate exchange of goods and mobility of people internally within the city and externally with its region and beyond.  The presence of open/public spaces as well as the elimination of any “walls,” physical or metaphorical, support interpersonal and intercultural interactions.  Communication network facilitates exchange of knowledge, talent, qualified labor and investments.

From an evolutionary perspective, a city that is ‘open’ continuously and dynamically changes and evolves over time.  It encourages community engagement, stewardship and leadership in envisioning the city’s future (a city developed by the people for the people).

An autopoietic city is a city that uses its network of communication to maintain life and its sense of identity, i.e. the culture of the place.  The physical, social, cultural, political, economic structures of a city reciprocally influence one another in a way that is mutually reinforcing.   A city has the power to choose to redesign its (infra)structures and institutions so that to generate new patterns of behavior, thereby enhancing the quality of life and of the surrounding natural system.

Diversity is necessary for creativity and survival.  A healthy city encourages diversity at all levels: culture and ethnicities; physical and knowledge assets; characters and styles; built and open spaces; public and private spaces; and so on.

A healthy city is one that has developed its adaptive capacity and resilience in order to flexibly learn, self-organize and adapt to contingencies.  The transformation of a city over time should increase its level of coherence and wholeness and strong sense of identity.  A healthy, regenerative city cannot be designed or built.  These qualities are emergent.

Section 3 – Implications for Urban Planning, Design and Community Involvement

From a living systems’ perspective, sustainability is a capacity, not merely a set of goals, metrics or criteria, nor a ‘thing’ that can be built.  A living systems approach to urban planning embraces complexity (as opposed to reducing it by focusing on individual parts independently) and focuses on building the adaptive (learning) capacity of the place: it is about sustaining life — an evolving process of continual renewal.  The understanding of the local context is primary to increase the resilience of a city.

One cannot acquire tacit knowledge of a place solely through analysis.  The emergent qualities of a place can only be understood by experiencing the place.  Consequently, city planning and design should support processes that increase participants’ learning and discovery and help people reconnect to the place where they live.

There are no easy and simple solutions to the design or sustainable and regenerative cities.  Urban planning is an adaptive, transformative process that requires us to challenge our beliefs, values and mental models.  The process must transfer ownership and leadership to the community and leverage the collective intelligence that resides locally so that creative solutions emerge out of the collaboration between stakeholders.

“Life accepts only partners, not bosses.  We cannot stand outside a system as an objective, distant director.  There is no objective ground to stand on anywhere in the entire universe.  Our disconnection — our alleged objectivity — is an illusion; and even if we fail to realize this, the system will notice it immediately…Systems do not accept direction, only provocation.”

~Margaret Wheatley, A Simpler Way

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I appreciate any comments or feedback you may have.

Warmly,

Beatrice

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Community Economic Development (CED) approaches that aim at developing sustainable and regenerative communities should be holistic and integrative and must consider the communities’ challenges and strategies from an economic, social, and environmental perspectives, simultaneously.  We believe that CED approaches benefit from the insights of Complexity Science, Systems Thinking, and Living Systems theory.

Communities are Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) or Living Systems (LS) whose components (the individuals, organizations, institutions, and all the diverse social-technical-political-ecological systems that are present within the community) continuously interact with one another to exchange information and resources; collaborate; compete; self-organize; and adapt under the influence of diverse economic, social and environmental pressures.

An LS approach to CED embraces the complexity of the community ecosystem. Understanding of the issues faced by a community can be gained by considering the complex interrelationships that exist between the community and its environment.  An ecosystem map is a useful tool to visualize the diverse interactions within the community and between the community and its environment.  This map can also be used to assess the level of diversity within the community—diversity that is critical for the system to thrive—and to determine what entities need to be added to rebalance the system.

LS theory provides insights on how to improve the adaptive capacity of communities by designing communities structures that facilitate the flow of information and the development of communication networks; connect diverse assets and resources to one another; support the development of collaboration; decentralize power and decision-making; and increase resilience in times of economic stress, hardship, or downturn.

A living community is a learning system, continuously searching for creative and innovative solutions to its problems and ways to generate value.  In the process, the community develops and grows.  Innovation is an emergent process that takes place when individuals, organizations and institutions self-organize while engaging in collaborative activities and collective actions.  Consequently, an LS approach to CED focuses on designing structures that facilitate the collective coordination of action and the development of mutually beneficial relationships.

Finally, the design of living communities is an adaptive challenge—a challenge that requires individuals, organizations, and the community as a whole to redefine long-held values, beliefs, and mental models and to embrace a new world view.   The role of the adaptive leader(s) is to mobilize and empower the community to do “adaptive work.”  This means engaging the community members in dialogue that supports the development of shared-understanding of the issues to be addressed; the development of relationship based on trust; and the co-creation of shared meaning and purposes from which a new vision can emerge and new strategies can be designed.

Open dialogue, transparency, accountability, and constant evaluation of the process and its outcome—the qualities of reflective systems—are essential to the development of purposeful and conscious living communities.

Yet, we must remember that living systems cannot be directed but only influenced.  There are no single prescriptions for success.  Strategies must be context-specific and their implementation carefully monitored using feedback loops and other evaluation systems so that to continuously adjust and improve the system.

It is well known that we only see what we are prepared to see.  In the book “The Art of Possibility,” authors Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander recall an experiment with indigenous people of Ethiopia who had never seen a two-dimensional image.  When presented for the first time in their lives with a photograph showing people and animals, the indigenous people were unable to actually distinguish the characters represented on the picture.  Instead, “they felt the paper, sniffed it, crumpled it, and listened to the crackling noise it made; they nipped off little bits and chewed them to taste it.”*

What I find most amazing about this story is not that the indigenous people could not “read” the photograph.  No, what amazes me is the realization that I am just like them—that there is an entire world out there, made of things that I am unable to see because my worldviews are preventing my mind to begin to imagine those things even exist, and even less comprehend their meaning if and whenever my eyes are eventually able to notice them.  We might be a very developed specie, yet we must nevertheless admit that we are still very much like the cavemen in Plato’s Parable of the Cave, mistaking the shadows we see on the walls of our “caves” (i.e., our minds) for reality.  Albert Eistein was no fool when he exclaimed: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

The ability to empty our mind to make space for a new reality is a critical capacity in any developmental and transformative process.  But how can we develop that skill?  Before answering this question, let me present a bit of theory that will shed some light onto the nature of the learning and developmental process.

Living systems theory teaches us that the behavior of a system is less influenced by external forces than by the specific organization of its internal structure.  For a human being, the structure consists of the mental models, assumptions, beliefs and values that the particular individual has accumulated overtime through her education and diverse life experiences.  A living system learns and adapts over time by changing its internal structure while maintaining its identity.  Over time, the history of structural changes in a system defines the system’s development path.  Moreover, it is the structure of a living system that selectively determines which perturbations or information in the environment the system will notice or ignore, and which new interactions will be created between the system’s components.  One says that a living system is structure-determined.  This explains why the indigenous people of Ethiopia—having a completely different life experience than ours and, thus, different mental models—were unable to identify the objects photographed and only saw a shiny paper.  The structure of their minds selected what they were able to see and dictated how to interpret what they saw.  In other words, the mind constructs its own subjective reality.

The concept of structure-determined systems allows us to reconcile the notions of freedom and determinism within human beings.  Indeed, this theory implies that our development path is both determined and free: we are determined by our own structure (i.e., mental models), yet we maintain the freedom to define what in our environment triggers our learning, adaptation and change.

In order to open our mind to a new reality, we must become aware of our own mental models; accept the fact that there isn’t an objective reality of the world and that, consequently, none of us owns the truth; understand that complete freedom is an illusion, yet we have the inner power to choose to challenge our assumptions; and know that our mind can be “unwired” and “rewired” to generate new thought patterns.

Here are some useful tools that can help in the process:

• The “Ladder of Inference,” developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, is helpful for understanding how our mental models are formed; it helps investigate what data from the world we select and how we interpret it to build meaning and take action.
• The “Eye of the Needle,” developed by Nancy Eubanks Oelklaus, is especially useful within the context of difficult conversations.  The tool helps identify the parts of a conversation that remain unspoken and the feelings that underlie those responses so that by integrating our emotional and logical response we can communicate completely and from the heart.
• Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD) is a system modeling technique that provides a language for articulating our understanding of the dynamic, interconnected nature of our world.
• Meditation and other Buddhist mindfulness/awareness practices help free the mind from thoughts.  With an empty mind, we can better connect to our Inner Self and Creative Source.  (Note that in the Buddhist tradition, “emptiness” (sunyata) relates to the notion that all objects are empty of “inherent existence,” which is another way of saying that the way we perceive and experience the world is fundamentally different than the way things are.)

Finally, emptying ourselves to learn requires us to be very intentional in our learning process and to practice humility.

I wish you the best in your journey.

* The quote is from J.B. Deregowski, “Real Space and Represented Space: Cross-Cultural Perspectives,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1989), 57, cited by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, in “The Art of Possibility” (2000), Penguin books.

This blog is an exploration of business, organizational, and theoretical topics I am fascinated about: living systems and the related theories of complexity, chaos and evolutionary biology, organizational change, adaptive leadership, sustainability, strategy, and innovation are only but a few of the topics I may cover.  While this is a broad and somewhat ambitious set of topics, my goal in exploring them is very straightforward: to provide individuals, groups, and organizations a better understanding of how they can transform themselves, adapt to change, and bring more consciousness into all endeavors.

For the time being, I have to confess that my main objective is to use the process of writing as a means to deepen my understanding of those topics.  While I love theory, my interest is in how theory informs practice and vice versa.  So, my intent is to bring theoretical concepts to a level that can be understood by anyone.  I do hope that you will enjoy the reading and that you will find the posts interesting and useful.  I encourage you to engage in the conversation and explore with me all these fascinating fields.

In this first post, let me tell you a little bit about myself and how I came to be interested in the topics I just mentioned. (For a more complete and linear description of my intellectual and professional journey, please refer to my biography.)

It has been a little more than 14 years since I moved to the U.S. from my native country, France.  While I was trained as an architect, destiny seemed to have decided that I would not practice architecture.  A Masters of Science in the Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley shifted my career toward communication technologies.  For about 10 years, I worked for Bechtel Corporation, one of the largest engineering and construction organizations in the world, deploying web-based tools to support project team collaboration and knowledge management.  Since my background is not technical per se, my interest has always been centered on the understanding of the synergy between social and technical systems.  The critical questions I addressed were how to help groups and organizations align their work processes to emerging technologies and, what new functional requirements should we develop for technology to better support work activities.

During my tenure at Bechtel I became increasingly concerned with the organizational issues associated with work process performance and those organizational issues became central to my Ph.D. dissertation.  Eventually, I came to the understanding that organizations are living systems and that, like living systems, they operate in a very complex and uncertain environment.  Living systems’ survival depends on their ability to adapt to change.  The question is: what are the external forces as well as the internal organizational characteristics that influence a system’s ability to adapt and evolve over time?  To answer this question I investigated fascinating theoretical fields including living systems theory, complexity and chaos theories, evolutional biology, and cognitive science among others.  My doctorate dissertation, which I completed in 2005 was titled: “Managing Architectural /Engineering/Construction (AEC) Project Organizations at the edge of Chaos: An Analysis of AEC Project Adaptive Capacity from a Living Systems Perspective.”

My Ph.D. research not only broadened my theoretical understanding but it also impacted me, very personally.  Indeed, since then, I have no longer seen the world with the same eyes.  My values and mental models have shifted.  To use Thomas Kuhn’s terminology in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” I have gone through a “paradigm shift.”  Sustainability has become a personal as well as professional focus and I am currently investigating how to re-orient my career toward facilitating organizational transformation and change and where to apply my knowledge and skills to the service of organizations and individuals taking a leadership role toward more sustainable and conscious practices.

I look forward to the next steps in the journey toward fulfilling my personal purpose.

Until next time,

Beatrice

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  The University of Chicago Press.