I don’t see any shortage of space in that regard. The question is about how the process of writing has changed me. Nobody has asked me that question before, and I am not sure how to even approach answering it. I have also had a few beers…
Can I ask a counter-question first?
Are you particularly interested in writing and language?
I certainly read a lot, and I write quite a lot as well. I have six research books in print at the moment (five of them written jointly with research partners) and I have written many papers, articles and book chapters. During Covid, I created a website and blog: https://insearchofwisdom.online/. I belong to a book club, and have belonged to a writing circle. I have received Awards for a couple of my pieces.
On the other hand, my knowledge of English Literature is not great, and I always feel ignorant in comparison with people well versed in the titerary arts.
So, I suppose my answer is no and yes, or “it depends”
Ah yes - the vines!
It was Vanessa’s chapter on “the house of modernity” that cut through to me at multiple levels, and made me realise just how deeply my own thinking had to change if I were to take genuine part in conversations about taking advantage of what Michael Mann calls this “fragile moment”.
For practical ideas (to pick up on an exchange you had with @GeoffDann , I turn to writers like Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics), or Elinor Ostrom (management of the commons), or many of the circular economy projects that are gathering momentum.
+1 on Kate Raworth. Here are more expansive thoughts on all that:
Thanks a million for this. I’ll respond more fully later today when I have read it and thought about it.
I’ve been practicing ‘Bildung’ all my life, although I only recently became aware of the way the term is used in Scandinavia. Coincidentally I bought two books by Lene Rachel Andersen on the subject two days ago (triggered by a Jonathan Rowson Substack item), along with the Dao of Complexity. Two of my published books are on complexity (albeit in terms of how it relates to managing projects - and I’m beginning to see projects as one of modernity’s dysfunctional superpowers, with “sustainable project management” as a term joining ‘military intelligence’ in the oxymoron stakes.
Terry
That’s an interesting article, @RobertBunge, and one that rings true in my own lived experience both back in 1961 and again last Autumn. Thanks for posting it.
Terry
Have you ever worked with Dave Snowden by any chance? Snowden came to my school last November (day after the election, as it happened). So I’ve had about 12 hours of Cynefin training online, another 12 in person, as well as some social encounters. Anyway, the Cynefin distinction between simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic looms large in my current thinking. Project management makes perfect sense in the complicated domain. It makes much less sense in the complex, and no sense at all in the chaotic.
Lately I learned of Peter Pogany and his world-systems theory of “chaotic transitions”. Connecting that to Snowden’s work, classic project management (with milestones, preset requirements, etc.) is really rather hopeless given current geopolitical volatility. So my current action program begins with Snowden’s act-sense-respond for the chaotic domain.
Anyway, the sort of pure intuition that Vanessa Andreotti seems to favor comes in rather handy in the chaotic. But I would not bother trying manage a city, or a transportation system, or a farm-to-market network, or anything substantial on such non-modern intuition alone.
You asked me how writing had changed me. I am still not sure how to answer that, because writing has been so important to me for so long. As I struggled in my teens I wrote poetry. In my 20s I expressed myself musically – I wrote songs ( The Redeeming Creatures: This Sickening Thing (that’s me singing and playing the bass, and it is my song). When the the internet was invented I spent a lot of time on forums talking to people about the state of the world, and that’s when I really learned how to write, because I wanted people to be able to understand what I was trying to say. One day somebody on one of those forums actually told me I was a writer – that was the first time my writing had been appreciated in that way, and it gave some meaning to my life at a time when I was badly in need of meaning.
As for the book that I’ve been quoting from – that’s been a monumental struggle. Three times I started it, got tens of thousands of words into it, only to run into unsolvable problems, either with my own argument or with making it a viable book. But I couldn’t let it go, because I felt I still needed to say whatever it was I was trying to say. Which meant I had to go off and do a lot more reading about whatever area had stopped the show, and a lot more thinking. So I guess the answer is that putting it into a book forced me to do a lot of work trying to figure out what it actually is that I wanted to say, and how it could be said. I have spent a lot of time just walking about thinking.
Writing keeps me sane, I think. I don’t have any plans for a fourth book (the first two were about foraging), but I will set up a new website and intend to post on it at least once a week. It will be called “The Ecocivilisation Diaries”.
I don’t read novels either. I find it very difficult to get past the author into the actual story.
No, I’ve never had that pleasure. I have followed his work since he was Head of Knowledge Management at IBM about 20 years ago. I have read some of his books and papers, and watched some of his videos on YouTube. And I have followed with interest his development of the Cynefin framework. I envy you your recent contact with him.
My own background in complexity came through the Systems movement. When I embarked on my PhD in 1994, I intended to use System Dynamics as the underpinning framework for it but life had other plans. It continued to play a role, but was shunted off centre stage by a systemic review of the worldviews of the project management profession’s documented standards contrasted with the data I had gathered on the actual practices and results achieved in 150 or so of the world’s largest companies, and what the gulf between them showed. I was deeply immersed in Ralph Stacey’s work on complex responsive processes of relating.
Later, between 2004 and 2015, I worked closely with Mark Winter to deliver courses in complexity as it applied to the world of projects through Cranfield University, and became a Visiting Fellow at UCL. Mark had studied under Peter Checkland, and has since developed the Soft Systems Methodology and its theoretical basis, drawing on the work of Sir Geoffrey Vickers and John Dewey. I describe why I think that is relevant to 2R in the following blog post: In the Blink of an Eye: Lessons from Nature, Machines, and Cybernetics - In Search of Wisdom
With regard to Vanessa Andreotti, I have now finished reading Hospicing Modernity - to great personal gain with deeper personal learning, greater awareness of my own complicity and convenient confusion, much less personal certainty about what we need to do next (i.e. increased humility), a clearer view of modernity’s problems, some new models (Bus, Compost, House of Modernity, Horizons of possibility, Radical Tenderness etc. etc.), and a host of interesting journal articles to read. A very profitable week’s work.
However, just because it was really helpful to me at this stage in my ‘Bildung’, it doesn’t mean it will be for everyone. We’re all unique - that is one of nature’s miracles.
PS after I had bought her book, but before I read it, I learned that she will be attending the Realisation Festival at the end of June. I am also registered for this, so I’m very much looking forward to meeting her.
Thank you for this. I really felt your voice in this reply—not just your ideas, but the person behind them. That’s such a rare thing to receive, and I’m grateful.
I resonate strongly with what you said about writing keeping you sane. For me, too, there have been stretches of life when writing was the only way I could stay in touch with something deeper—some thread of coherence or meaning I couldn’t access in conversation or thought. And like you, I’ve had to walk, read, and wrestle through the blocks—not always to reach clarity, but sometimes just to honour the muddle.
What struck me most was your honesty about the struggle to write the book—not as a linear project but as a series of collapses and rebuildings. That sounds familiar. There’s a strange humility in admitting when our arguments falter—and a deeper kind of strength in going back to listen more deeply, rather than pushing through. That, to me, feels like a kind of intellectual and spiritual maturity.
As I wrote to @RobertBunge in this same conversational stream, I have now finished reading Hospicing Modernity—to great personal gain, with deeper personal learning, greater awareness of my own complicity and convenient confusion, much less personal certainty about what we need to do next (i.e. increased humility), a clearer view of modernity’s problems, some new models (Bus, Compost, House of Modernity, Horizons of Possibility, Radical Tenderness etc. etc.), and a host of interesting journal articles to read. A very profitable week’s work.
However, just because it was really helpful to me at this stage in my Bildung, it doesn’t mean it will be for everyone. We’re all unique—that is one of nature’s miracles. Incidentally, after I had bought her book, but before I read it, I learned that she’ll be attending the Realisation Festival at the end of June. I’m also registered, so I look forward to meeting her.
I’ll be very interested in seeing The Ecocivilisation Diaries unfold. The very name suggests a different rhythm—something looser, perhaps more emergent and alive than a bound book. Diaries, after all, don’t
need to prove anything. They just record what shows up.
Your comment about novels also gave me pause. I find fiction helps me step outside my own mind—when the writing is good, I disappear into it. But I can understand how that kind of surrender might be harder if you’re always alert to the author’s hand. It makes me wonder what kind of storytelling might still feel alive for you—perhaps oral traditions, myth, or music, where the author is less visible and the story is more like a shared atmosphere?
I’m really enjoying this exchange, and I hope we can continue it—wherever it wants to go.
Exactly. It will allow me to write about whatever seems to be the right thing to write about, whether that is practical stuff like growing basketry willows or how to hatch goose eggs, theoretical stuff like we’re discussing here, or whatever insane things are happening in the world. The rate at which the unthinkable is becoming normal is astonishing. I guess I have a goal of trying to carve out a niche along the lines of JM Greer.
The only sort of story telling that ever really appeals to me is believable science fiction. Which reminds me that I did read a good novel not so long ago – The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu.
Music has played an important part of my life, for sure. During my teens and 20s it was the only good thing in my life. Shane MacGowan was my ultimate songwriting hero – he certainly knew how to tell stories. He was one of the few songwriters who could tell other people’s stories better than the original: The Band Played Waltzing Matilda - YouTube
Have a nice Sunday. I’ll offer one more song in conclusion: