From learning to leadership, living systems teach us.
Generative systems learn, grow,
adapt and change as life does.
Living Systems Principles:
IDENTITY
Autonomous, meaning-making and self-referencing.
INFORMATION
Information-seeking and generating; open and responsive to meaningful
environmental disturbances that inform our identity.
RELATIONSHIPS
Interdependent, intricately networked and relationship-creating and sustaining.
EMERGENCE
The confluence and synergy of system identity, information and relationships, creates the landscape essential for individual and system wholeness, meaning and connections.
STRUCTURES
Structurally flexible, spontaneously adaptive and driven by the system’s identity.
PROCESSES
Boundlessly creative, exploratory, and self-organizing; and novelty generating and order-creating.
PATTERNS
Pattern-seeking , densely network, and attracted to wholeness and order.
What questions do living systems ask?
Who are we? What is the Self around which we organize?
What is our fundamental purpose?
What shared beliefs, values and commitments define us?
Identity (Integrity)
Identity (Integrity)
Who are we? What is the Self around which we organize? What is our fundamental purpose? What shared beliefs, values and commitments define us?
Information (Vibrancy)
What do we need to know? What data do we seek and measure to ensure our purpose is manifested with fidelity and integrity? How do we invite disruptive information essential to our identity into the system?
Relationships (Interdependence)
Who are we as a community of learners and leaders? What are our agreements for belonging together?
How is our system available and continuously connected to itself?
Emergence
(Self-Organization)
How do we ensure the conditions essential for emergence are created and sustained: Clarity at the core, continuous access to abundant information around system purpose, and multiple networks and feedback loops for stimulating innovation and communication?
Structures (Stability)
What evidence do we see, to ensure our system’s identity is the ground—the root and the driver—of our structural designs? How do our structures embody and sustain our purpose?
Processes (Coherence)
How does the mission-driven work of our system actually get done? What processes might we create to increase our potential for thinking creatively and divergently; for discovering what is important to us, and for collaboratively integrating our work?
Patterns (Sustainability)
What is the hidden geography — landscape and culture —of our system? What are our patterns and networks of communicating, sharing and generating information and ideas? Is the intricacy of our networks and the diversity of our system sufficient to sustain our shared purpose?