#25: The questions I struggle with
And why, perhaps, they don't need a resolution.
I’m Luke Craven; this is another of my weekly explorations of how systems thinking and complexity can be used to drive real, transformative change in the public sector and beyond. The first issue explains what the newsletter is about; you can see all the issues here.
Hello, dear reader,
Systems thinking is a practice that is full of paradox and irony. The moments of clarity it offers are fleeting and incomplete. Its answers seldom withstand scrutiny from every angle. Its questions often confound their own answering.
For me, this is part of what makes systems thinking exciting. But I’ve also seen it lead to a lot of confusion and anger. As I’ve written before, nowhere is this more true than in arguments about what systems thinking is and what is isn’t. To my mind, anyone that claims to give a clear or definitive answer to these questions is either naïve or wilfully disingenuous. I want you to sit with that last sentence, because it too is heavy with paradox and irony.
Where there are no easy answers, we are forced to ask better, more audacious, more productively unanswerable questions. For me, the ability to ask questions like these is what systems thinking actually means in practice. Gordon Brander’s recent post on questions as tools for thought has helped me reflect on and crystallise what these questions might look like. In that piece, he suggests that questions have multiple purposes:
They are data. We can interrogate them, ask questions of them, and engineer systems that enable them to self-organise.
They are our creative partners. As Gordon says, they can cause us to walk back over familiar terrain, and see it from a new angle, to get lost in the land of ideas.
They enable different ways of seeing. They are a lens around which we organise and structure our modes of perception and understanding.
They create space for other questions that have been hidden from view. They can help us articulate new questions that previous answers have stripped from our consciousness.
So, what are some of the questions—the ones laced with paradox and irony—that I struggle with? How might they be used, in the way Gordon suggests, to create space for other questions and other ways of questioning? What would it look like for us to sit productively with those questions, rather than demand answers that, deep down, we know to be incomplete and fleeting? These are the ones that matter to me:
Where might systems thinking be an inappropriate response to complexity?
What does it mean to be a systems thinker when discourses of complexity are so often imbed with reductionist and determinist ways of thinking about the world?
How might we meaningfully engage with complexity in ways that do not attempt to codify, calculate or control it?
What might it look like to use multiple systems theories in tandem or parallel when their underlying principles are incommensurable?
For me, these questions help me see paradox and irony in new ways. They help me improve the way I deploy systems thinking and doing in different contexts. They keep me humble and modest. They give me confidence—patience, even—that irresolution may be the only resolution. No matter, because what good has a definitive answer ever done us anyway?
By the way: This newsletter is hard to categorise and probably not for everyone—but if you know unconventional thinkers who might enjoy it, please share it with them.
Find me elsewhere on the web at www.lukecraven.com, on Twitter @LukeCraven, on LinkedIn here, or by email at <luke.k.craven@gmail.com>.