THINKING AND ACTING TOGETHER TO ADDRESS COMPLEX GLOBAL CHALLENGES
Robert Burke
The model framework is based on deep listening, dialogue, futures thinking and prototyping
methods intended to bring about transformational change in organisations and social systems. It
incorporates many dialogue-based methodologies including ‘U-Process’, ‘Bohmian Dialogue’,
‘Appreciative Inquiry’, ‘Frame-breaking Reconfiguration’, ‘Futures Thinking’.
QUANTIFICATION & ANALYSIS – ENGAGEMENT PROCESS
Listening
Respecting
Principle of
Participation
Principle of
Coherence
Principle of
Awareness
Principle of
Unfoldment
Listen,
Learn,
Connect,
Co-create,
Suspending
Voicing
Act
Litany
1. Co-initiating
RECURRENT
PURPOSEFUL
EMERGENCE
5. Co-evolving
System
Reconfiguration
and Reframing
Participation
Dialogue
2. Co-sensing
KNOWABLE
UNKNOWN
DISCOVERY:
Appreciate
“the Best of what is”
Frame-breaking
Process
Unfolding
Dialogue
Visioning
Transition
Awareness
Dialogue
Coherence
Dialogue
World View
SYSTEMIC
UNDERSTANDING
DESIGN:
Determine
“what should be”
4. Co-creating
CREATIVE, CRITICAL &
FUTURES THINKING
DREAM:
Imagine
“what could be”
ACTION PLAN &
IMPLEMENTATION
DESTINY:
Create
“what will be”
Myth / Metaphor
3. Presencing
Thinking and acting collectively to address global complex challenges
Source: Robert Burke developed from Appreciative Inquiry, Scharmer, Bohm, Isaacs, Inayatullah, Normann
Thinking and acting together to address complex challenges enhances action learning, learning by
doing, to anticipatory action learning, which is linked to our future and to our experience of purpose
and meaning. The involvement which is possible builds on action learning, experiential learning, to
anticipatory action learning, an inner search for meaning and purpose through a search for a
preferred future. For Derrida (2002 p.94):
“….this not-so-obvious relationship between the everyday utility of philosophy and what it
enables one to achieve in the unique contexts of an infinitely perfectible life-world is what
concretises the value of knowledge and liberates the utterance and circulation of ideas in
the public sphere”.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a philosopher, was also a futurist particularly through his advocating
of ‘deep ecology’, the ecological movement that emphasises raising humankind’s consciousness for
saving the planet. Heidegger uses being (with a small ‘b’) as a reference to entity to events or things
that have an existence of some sort, and Being (with a capital ‘B’) as the ‘existing’ ‘isness’ or essence
of beings (entities) – the primordial source of everything that exists in the universe. (Watts, 2001.
P.91). Heidegger’s ontology of Being and Time (1962) argues that most humans can, and actually do,
wonder about the meaning of their existence.
“…the totality of involvements itself goes back ultimately to a “towards-which” in which
there is no further involvement: this “towards-which” is not an entity with the kind of Being
that belongs to what is ready-to-hand within a world; it is rather an entity whose Being is
defined as Being-in-the-world, and to whose state of Being, worldhood itself belongs. This
primary “towards-which” is not just another “towards-this” as something in which an
involvement is possible.”(Heidegger 1962, p.116)
My colleague, Richard Searle, likens this to deep listening in that you are not only ‘listening to’ but
also ‘listening for’, the “towards which”, the essence of collective engagement.
Our reality is conditioned by each new event and it changes continuously as the effects of the
present shift our view of the past and future. We are therefore always rewriting the past in the
present and rewriting the future in the present. This happens by multi layered conversations about
purpose and meaning, leading to individual action in a collaborative way, culminating in an outcome
that, for a while, contributes positively to those within the organisation and with those the
organisation interacts with and to the ecology we share.
The link to Leadership is in suggesting that leadership often is an act of provocation because
leadership is required when past “things” can’t solve current problems and therefore is an adaptive
challenge to the change that is required. Leadership is about making the choice between when you
do challenge a particular way of legitimising a theme and when you do not. The “deeper” parts of
futures thinking i.e. Causal Layered Analysis and macrohistory give a structure to assist with choices
and are integrated in the model above.
Leadership is something that someone, or a group of someone’s, does at a particular time in the
now that, for a while, enhances the combined efforts of a particular group of people for the
betterment of that group of people as a whole, and to those associated either directly or indirectly
to the decision that has been implemented. Leadership therefore must have purpose and must have
meaning attribution attached to it.
References:
Derrida, J., (2002) Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, Translated, edited, and with
commentary by Peter Pericles Trifonas, Rownan & Littlefield, UK
Heidegger, M., (1962) Being and Time, Harper Collins, Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward
Robinson
Watts, M., (2001) Heidegger: A Beginner’s Guide, Hodder & Stoughton, UK.