Characteristics of a living system that help us to think participatively

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.

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

are vulnerable to self-isolate for their own sakes, the spread of the virus generally within the community is dependent on others socially distancing to save the community as a whole. A mass lesson in interdependence is taking place. But it is not only interdependence between humans and communities, it is also a lesson of our innate interdependence with nature. We are not separate from nature, our survival depends on it and our living in harmony with nature.

The cyclical nature of things

A second characteristic of ecological processes is that they are cyclical. One organism’s waste becomes another organism’s food. Nothing is wasted and this cyclical process ensures the system is kept in balance and is therefore sustainable. Feedback loops in an ecosystem are important for the provision of information to ensure that the system keeps in long-term balance. We can see now, within human communities, that sustainable patterns of consumption and production need to be cyclical too. Most businesses are not cyclical as they create enormous amounts of waste. However, in the current free market, the social and environmental costs of such production are treated as external variables in current accounting. Thus, not only is the environment treated as a free good, but so are the webs of social relations external to the companies concerned. The market, as a result, feeds back partial information concerning impact on the system as a whole, and this failure to add in the real external costs of pollution and exploitation of labour gives rise to the current crises of climate change and widening social divisions. Living systems continuously create and recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. They undergo continual structural change while preserving their web-like organisation, each sub-system nested in the wider system. Living systems are complex and in a state of constant adaptation to the environment.

Regeneration and degeneration

Arising from the importance of feedback loops is the concept of regeneration and degeneration. A sustainable and healthy community is one that makes a positive contribution to the well-being and health of its individuals (Hancock, 1993; Cave et al, 2004). However, communities can be regenerative or degenerative (Bird, 2003; Wahl, 2016). Regenerative communities are communities where individuals have a sense of involvement, commitment, learning and change. They actively encourage joyfulness, creativity, love and a sense of belonging, an understanding of the totality and a sense of wholeness. A core element is a sense of and the creation of meaning. Degenerative communities are those in which members experience lack of satisfaction, frustration, hatred and sorrow. Such degeneration is reinforced by actions within society that focus on instrumentality and consumption, and where emotions and feelings are not allowed to be expressed, resulting in stagnation and even decline. For complex systems to retain regenerative aspects there needs to be some form of friction and an input

of new energy which causes a sense of disorder, otherwise they will reach a state of equilibrium and die (Prigogine, 1997). However, too much change can cause chaos. So, what is required is a combination of stability and change. Indeed, some systems thinkers argue that development occurs in complex adaptive systems, like communities, on the edge of chaos (Pascale et al, 2000). Stability comes from what is called corrective feedback: actions that constitute planned results aimed at fulfilling predetermined objectives. This is the common practice and also a common reaction, manifesting most often in bureaucratic responses to potential change. But it also requires something else: reinforced feedback. This type of feedback is unpredictable and will contain new information. Thus, healthy communities constantly operate through a set of contradictions and paradoxes that construct new information via two apparently opposing types of feedback, both necessary for maintaining dynamism. At its best, regeneration is about enabling living things to become themselves, to develop the full potential of communities to become more themselves and more able to contribute to the larger system of which they are part.

Emergence

According to Capra and Luisi (2014), throughout the living world, the creativity of life expresses itself through the process of emergence. The phenomenon of emergence takes place at those critical points of instability mentioned previously which arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. Emergence results in the creation of novelty that is often qualitatively different from the phenomena out of which it emerged. The constant generation of novelty is a key property of all living systems. In a community, the event triggering the process of emergence may be an offhand comment, which may not even seem important to the person who made it but is meaningful to some people in that community. Because it is meaningful to them, they ‘choose to be disturbed’ and circulate the information rapidly through the community’s networks. As it circulates through various feedback loops, the information may get amplified and expanded, even to such an extent that the community can no longer absorb it in its present state. When that happens, a point of instability has been reached. The system cannot integrate the new information into its existing order; it is forced to abandon some of its structures, behaviours or beliefs. The result is a state of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and doubt; and out of that chaotic state a new form of order, organised around a new meaning, emerges. The new order was not designed by any individual but emerged as a result of the community’s collective creativity.

This process of emergence involves several distinct stages. To begin with, there must be a certain openness within the community, a willingness to be disturbed, in order to set the process in motion; and there has to be an active network of communications with multiple feedback loops to amplify the triggering event. The next stage is the point of instability, which may be experienced as tension,