Category Archive for Systems Thinking

In the New York Times and in his blog yesterday Daniel Goleman wrote an excellent description of performance and stress in the face of testing. It was a message to those considering the No Child Left Behind Act soon to be up for Congressional debate. I made the following comment:

No Child Left Behind is a last ditch Industrial Age attempt at a simplistic, socialistic-style solution to a complex problem. It goes along with the Bush administration’s focus on prisons over education and war over human development.We are a culture in rapid transition, where none of the old industrial systems are working all that well. School is one of them.

My book Men Are Easy describes the evolving system of marriage and how to live in it creatively and mindfully. The same advice applies to work, school, and all other continually evolving systems.

The best thing parents can do is to practice mindfulness and then teach mindfulness to their children through example and practice. This world demands the ability to respond thoughtfully to one’s own reactions, to open up and calm down in the face of threat and failure, to think clearly in emotionally-charged situations, and to learn to trust one’s self to do the right thing in spite of surrounding craziness. Often we have to design our own systems of support on the run, as we go, and that requires skills that are not taught in our expensive universities.

The good news is that out of the breakdown and chaos much more interesting and creative educational systems will emerge. Our digital age children are going to show us how to do it.

Conniff’s blog, Accentuating the Negative in the New York Times this morning starts with,

“One of the most daunting and widely repeated insights from recent social research holds, in essence, that your marriage is doomed if you and your spouse can’t muster up five positive interactions for every negative one.”

My response:
Life is more pleasant when you are pleasant to others.
This is an epiphany? I love the NY Times.

I also love the way you (Conniff) picked up on your friend’s comment about positive actions and marriage. It supports my contention about relationships and the title of my book: Men are easy.

Here’s my logic as a systems researcher:

Love is the feeling associated with the clear flow of information, matter, energy between people that results in the formation of social groups. It’s physiological, genetic, and required for our survival. Open up to increase the flow. Close down and decrease the flow. Closing down is a protective mechanism, but any perpetually closed human system, whether a negative spouse or North Korea, fails to thrive.

So, yes, say something pleasant in the morning. Don’t skip the hug when running out the door. But five positive things? In marriage, nothing should be required before the first cup of coffee.

Arianna Huffington, single woman with two daughters, alive and well in L.A., blogs Fearless Voices: featuring a fiction writer with three autistic children, a gay woman raising a boy, an Iraqi woman writing about war, an award-winning reporter turned nursing mom blogger, a single mom with the boyfriend moving in, on and on.

Who the hell am I? A housewife on the fringe, living in privilege in one of the most beautiful places in the world. My big challenge: My husband wants to start a lychee farm in Australia or spend a year doing Africa in a Land Rover. I want to move to L.A. and write. A stalemate in the design space. Not in the same league as having 3 autistic children and surviving war zones.

But life on Maui’s far from perfect. I saw early on, when my children were little, that life on Maui was unsustainable for far too many people. Behind the insecticide-soaked, Disneyland-perfect resorts are real people: soccer moms, struggling immigrants, crystal meth addicts, neurotic seekers of wisdom, dentists, surfer dudes, retired plantation workers who make quarterly trips to the Californian in Vegas. Schools, health care, policing, and government can’t keep up with needs.

We have problems that can’t be solved with the systems in place. It has to come from somewhere else. And that’s what I’m all about. Read the rest »

These are the notes from a teleconference with the Coachinc business coaching SIG (open to the public) run by Denise Kirk-Murray. I was the guest speaker last Thursday. If you were on the call, please comment on it, pro and con! Here we go:

I grew up in retail grocery stores, I started a small business in my twenties, and I now sit on the boards of two startups and three nonprofits. I know that business is not easy. But I also know people for whom business is easy. It seems to come naturally for these people.

I am going to present a few ways of thinking that make business easy. They are:

1. Communication is not the key.
2. Don’t work at it.
3. Embrace chaos.

Read the rest »

I woke up thinking about this site and what I really want to write about. On Friday I called into my Comparative Systems Analysis class with Len Troncale at Cal Poly Pomona. The topic of the week was emergence and origins–What they are, how they are defined–We are looking at general processes seen in all complex system and then applying them in our own work.
Then on Sunday I watched Richard Dawkins speak on Book TV about his new book The God Delusion. Among other things, he mentioned how in some families atheism is harder to confess than homosexuality. And then I read John Brockman’s intro to edge.org.

First I thought, “Big ideas. Big thinking. And here I am writing ‘he said, she said’ stuff.” And then I thought, “No. There are very big ideas in ‘he said, she said.’ ” In fact, the biggest ideas are in the smallest interchanges.

As I’ve said before Gandhi said that everything he learned about nonviolence he learned in his marriage. India. Marriage. Equally complex.

I am going to change the subtitle of this blog. It’s going to soon be something like, “Reframing Reality Using Systems Thinking” or “Reframing the Reality of Relationship.”

I believe that the real power for women is going to come from realizing how the small things change the world, how birthing and childrearing, combined with an active mind, give up the secrets of the universe. So I’m going to run on that.