The participatory worldview
this lens of the ecosystem – or living system, as it is sometimes called – that we can draw on to understand participatory thinking. When we start to look at the world in an ecosystems way, through a lens that sees the world in relationship to ourselves, new understandings and actions are generated. We also begin to move from a social reality based on outmoded models of thinking – what Scharmer and Kaufer (2013) call ego-system awareness – to one based on ecosystem awareness.
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Can you think of examples of ego-system thinking and ecosystem thinking?
Characteristics of a living system that help us to think participatively Everything comes into form because of relationship. We are constantly being called into relationship – to information, people, events, ideas and life. Even reality is created through our participation in relationships. We choose what we notice: we relate to certain things and ignore others. Through these chosen relationships, we co-create our world. If we are interested in effecting change, it is crucial to remember that we are working within the webs of relations not machines. (Wheatley, 1999) Interdependence A fundamental characteristic of ecological relationships is that the behaviour of one member of the community depends on the behaviour of many others. Thus, the success of the whole community depends on the success of its individual members, while the success of the individual members depends on the community as a whole. To nourish a community means that you need to nourish relationships that create this interdependence. However, those relationships are not straightforward or linear. A small change introduced into an ecosystem can have a major effect. Small changes can spread out and be widened through ever-increasing, interdependent feedback loops, which may in time obscure the original source of the disturbance. At the time of writing, we are in the middle of a global pandemic and governments are struggling to persuade people to self-isolate and socially distance to prevent the spread of the virus within the population at a rate that would outstrip the ability of society and the health services to cope with increased levels of sickness and deaths. The virus cannot spread without people coming into contact with other people. Some people are finding it difficult to understand why they should obey the requests; many only see the issue as a matter of taking risk themselves and judge (whether rightly or wrongly) that they are not likely to get the disease or are likely to experience only mild symptoms. However, this is a perfect lesson of our interdependence. Although you can ask people who 79
