My new favourite complexity teacher
I stumbled on Jen Briselli’s work the other day. She’s a fantastic writer and communicator, distilling the complexity work that we both know and love and making it approachable and understandable to others. She asks great questions, and is introducing me to approaches and tools that are new and interesting and great process and facilitation debriefs to reflect on her practice.
And her Letter to a Young Systems Thinker speaks to me, drawing from poets, and artists and filmmakers and scientists to provide a really lovely set of thoughtfully articulated practices that are excellent advice for all of us. To wit:
Bruising
Some parts of a system only speak on impact: when you touch it, bump into it, crash through it. You can’t learn everything from a map. You can still trip over the rocks at your feet.
Deep knowing emerges when action and reflection collide, when ideas get tested against lived complexity, and when our models fall apart just enough to let something else poke through.
Consider this a form of gnosis: the type of knowing that arises not from detached observation, but from our own direct, lived experience. Unlike abstract knowledge (episteme) or belief (doxa), gnosis is intimate, situated, and relational.
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. — Werner Herzog
To know a system through gnosis is to enter the dialogue through participation and give credibility to intuition. It requires that we feel our way forward, and let our assumptions be reshaped in real time. This kind of knowing cannot be abstracted or outsourced. It is slow, iterative, and deeply personal. And it changes not just what we know, but how we identify the future outcomes we want to amplify.
Nice to meet you Jen.
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