 recording of this meeting, there are 10 people waiting at all. Yay! Boom! Oh, how's that? Yay! Hi, everybody. When other people show up, are they waiting for you to let them in? So, there's Zoom's new security precautions have added a waiting room and I'm getting a notification. So, now I just admitted one more person. So, yes, I have to end one more. So, I'm keeping an eye on that, but it's up to me to let them in. I can't, I don't think I can set it so that people can automatically come in. Yay! Jacob, Yuri, Patrick, this is cool. Hey! Susan, Clark. Wow, it's a party. It's a party, exactly. Here comes Doug Carmichael. This is fun. We should do this more often. We are here under sort of two umbrellas. One of them is Open Global Mind. Oh, I can turn off the waiting list, says Nadia. Under more. It says enable waiting room. So, I can just turn that off. Is that it? So, if I turn off the waiting room, I have disabled the waiting room. Okay, good. That should be it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I always good to know a new feature. Really appreciate it. So, we are here under two umbrellas. One of which is OGM, Open Global Mind, which is relatively new, and I can go into it, but if you go to openglobalmind.com, you can find that about that. And the other one is Inside Jerry's Brain, which I started a while back, which was a series of kind of video conversations in Zoom talking about mind mapping and things like that. Gene has been in both sets of conversations and is a very experienced hand at mapping of minds with multiple tools. That's why I called him multi-mapstress or something like that. What did I call you on the invite? Something like that. Neologisms are us. What can I say? So, I'm pardon? You're going to be Mapidextrous. Mapidextrous. See, I thought it was a much more felicitous neologism than Mapi, whatever I just said. Thank you. And so, I'm going to, with no further ado, turn it over to Gene and ask him to just tell us a story a bit, because over time, I've had the pleasure of hearing bits and pieces of this as we went through talking about mapping and what is mapping and what's going on. And this session is for all of us to share what systems thinking is like and what the tools are like and what the lessons are. So, let me share my screen. Yes, please. Oh, I need to let you share your screen. How about that? You are now a co-host. Is there a way for me to let people share their screen without making them a co-host or is that the only method? I think it's the only method, but I'm not sure, because I would love to be able to just let people present. I think as long as you aren't sharing, as long as nobody can take sharing, it has to be open and then anyone can take it. You can't take it from someone else. But that was the old way. Now, with the new security, by default, I have to let people share their screen. Exactly. So, they can't just grab the screen. And I'm trying to figure out how to get around that, because I don't mind people coming in and grabbing the screen. And if somebody wants to zoom bomb us, I thought that was a tired meme already. But if somebody wants to zoom bomb us, I'm happy to indulge them for a little while and then just delete them or whatever. Or try to make them part of OGM. I mean, heck, conversion is great. So, after you, Gene. So, I've been developing models about relationships and their implications for well over four decades now. And along the way, there have been a number of aha moments, which I realized that they would have served me well had I had them four decades ago. Some of them have simply waited a very, very long time in coming. And I'd like to share some of them with you so that they may be of benefit and they may not. Hopefully they are. So, and I always talk about trial and learning. I never talk about the other phrase, because I think it's disgusting. So this journey started in January of 1950, 1975, when a professor said, for this course, we're going to read Stafford Beers platform for change. It was probably a mind altering experience, because the world never looked the same after that. Not that I would recommend that you go read this book, because it's terribly expensive and very convoluted. But it gave me a different way of looking at things. I became, I rapidly became an amazing systems event. Well, to say an evangelist would be an understatement to the point where people would ask me what I did. And as I began to tell them, you could see their eyes glaze over as they were asking themselves, why did I ask and how do I get them to stop. So along the way, a blank sheet of paper was one of my worst enemies. I learned, you know, we learned that it's good to do things right and we shouldn't make mistakes. So when I wanted to develop a model L was wanted to start in the right place. So the blank piece of paper, not knowing where to start was a vicious reinforcing cycle that just frustrated me to no end. And finally, it dawned on me that since it's all connected, it really doesn't matter where I start. You can start anywhere to develop the set of relationships that are relevant. And if you continue to investigate them in a in a sensible manner, you will arrive at a model that provides some amount of meaning. I also learned that if I start with the issue that I'm trying to deal with, it will help me guide me to determine which relationships are relevant and which ones are not. Though what after developing tons and tons of models, I stopped and I asked myself this amazing question. How do I do this? So that the best way to learn how to develop models is to develop models. I mean, we crawl, we walk, we run, and some people decide to race. But the only way to get good at developing models is developing models. The same way that you could read all the books in the world on riding a bicycle, but you can only learn to ride the bicycle if you get on the bicycle and ride it and get some bruised knees and whatever. But along the way you learn. So you develop models and, you know, what's the old quip about all models are wrong, but some models are useful or something like that. In the process of developing the model, you learn more about the relationships. And so I asked myself the amazing question after who knows how many models. How do I go about doing this? Which, you know, after, you know, who knows how many models. I was surprised that I had never asked myself this question before. And it boiled down to something that I'll bring back in just a moment because the insights appear as insights, but they're not actually moment. They happen at a moment in time, but they're actually, they seem to be a set of breadcrumbs that all come together at some later point in time. And you don't realize the pieces that happen along the way that contribute to that insight until all of a sudden you have that aha moment and you say, oh, there's a piece there and a piece here and a piece here, and they all connect together. And that's why all of a sudden I had this insight. So because of where I started for years and years, I thought that systems thinking was simply a not very grown up version of system dynamics, you know, things, things, things look like what you start looking at them to be. Though fortunately, someone actually put me on to systems thinking creative wholism by Michael C. Jackson, in which he developed this two by three matrix based upon system complexity and participant cohesion. And I came to understand that there were certain methods that were appropriate for different contexts depending upon how complex the system was and how cohesive the participants were. Though after I came to that awareness, the question was, who possibly can learn all this stuff? I mean, if you go to the actual model that I created for here, there are dozens and dozens of models and processes for each of these boxes on this diagram. So in pondering that in terms of how you're going to learn all this and asking myself how I develop models, it dawned on me that it was simpler than I had ever realized. And I sort of had ingrained it in such a way that I never realized that I was doing it. When I develop a relationship model, it all boils down to one question. And the question is, and, which comes in two forms, what does this influence and what influences this? Repeat, do it over and over and over again, until you get to a point where you run out of things that you are aware of that you understand are related that are relevant to what you're trying to understand. And then you share models with other people. Now, I used to build models and share them with other people because I wanted to impress them with how smart I was. But, you know, they didn't care. And I would send them models in such a way that after the model made them made their head hurt for a few days, if they sent back a comment, it was usually a comment like, well, that's nice. But what they really wanted to say was, why did you send that to me? The insight that showed up was I made a connection between a model and a play. If you go to the play, go to a play. And it was relatively well done. You experience these relationships unfolding between the actors from one act to another. And when the play is finished, you leave the theater, you take the story with you because the pattern connects. So I realized that if I could provide a model to someone else and unfold it as a story, then they would be able to understand the extent to which I had evolved my understanding. And the reason for sending them the model was in the hopes that they would ask questions that I didn't think to ask so that based upon their feedback, my understanding or our understanding could evolve from where it was. So it's not about trying to impress people. I now look at models as a way to develop an understanding to provide a basis for better questions. And what I know compared to what everybody else knows is a minuscule so that I have to provide something in a way that someone else can connect with it and say, well, did you think about this or this isn't right? Or what were you smoking when you did this? And then the worst thing in the world I could possibly do is argue with them, all right? Because I was looking for their input and, you know, why? The typical response to any negative feedback is defense, though it's the inappropriate response because I'll explain to you why it's just a moment. These are connected more than I realized. So a few years ago I developed a systems thinker certification course. People thought me a bit presumptuous, and I probably was. And the first few people that went through the course gave me really rave reviews. The reviews were so good I began to worry if I was being had or not. And then a couple of people went through this course and they said, okay, how do we sell systems thinking to our organization? And I had a meltdown because I knew I had failed miserably. So after pondering their question and realizing I just wanted to blurt out, you weren't paying attention in the whole course. Don't you realize you can't do that? I went away and spent several days thinking about it and I came up with five essentially quotes that had developed along the way that seemed to provide a sense of why it didn't make sense to try to sell systems thinking to your organization. The first one is a quote by me, so of course it's relevant. And that is people always, always, always do exactly what makes the most amount of sense to them in the context of the moment based on their current understanding. Which is sort of akin to one of Covey's seven habits, which is seek first to understand and then to be understood. Because if I were you, I would have done the same thing or I would have said the same thing. I don't have an understanding of your experience that you're bringing to the situation and in that context in your understanding so that rather than judge, the appropriate response should be to understand. And then there was a book that I once read called The One Minute Salesperson by Spencer Johnson that he said, well almost everyone loves to buy, almost no one likes to be sold. And we have been trying to sell systems thinking since Bertil Amphi's work in the 30s without a tremendous amount of success. Because I acquainted this with you wandering around a department store looking at stuff and the salesperson walks up to you and says, may I help you? And I figured out that the story that runs through a person's mind in about a nanosecond without even realizing it is how can this person be so presumptuous as to believe that I need help. I'm perfectly capable of helping myself. The salesperson just discounted you and the immediate response was one of defense. So realizing that people prefer to buy rather than to be sold, you need to interact in such a way that it provides an opportunity for them to buy. The worst thing that I used to do was go to people and say, you know, everything you've ever learned about solving problems is wrong. You have to learn systems thinking to be able to develop a better understanding of what you're trying to deal with. And the immediate response was go away, don't bother me. And now it's an understandable response. So the next part of this was the first rule of Fight Club is don't talk about Fight Club, which I equate to. The first rule of systems thinking is don't talk about systems thinking. There are ways to interact with a group of people and enable them to look at the situation they're wrestling with in a way that doesn't discount them and doesn't put them off. And it turns out that it has to do with the way that they think about the problems and you sort of lead them with questions. Buckminster Fuller said that you can't change the way people think. You need to give them tools that as they use them, they begin to think about things differently. And in the case of systems thinking, if you are systems thinking attempting to intervene, you become the tool. And as Lao Su said, honor people or they will fail to honor you or some stuff like that. So that you need to interact with people in a way that empowers them and enables them so that when they get to where they're going, they sort of believe that they did it themselves. So I came up with those five quotes that for me was an understanding of why you can't sell systems thinking to your organization and you shouldn't try. You work with people to enable them to think about things slightly differently and you do that by asking questions and asking questions in a way that doesn't annoy them, though develops an understanding. And there was a marvelous book by Chip and Dan Heath called The Power of Moments where they said, if you create a clear insight compressed in time delivered in a way that allows the audience to discover it themselves, it creates an aha moment and they alter the way that they think about something, not because you made them, but because you enabled them to. Which was why I finally got to a point of realizing that for me to do what I was trying to do, I needed a vehicle to be able to unfold a relationship model in a way that tells the story so that a person, when I get to the end of the story, the person is there with me. And as an example of that, some of you have seen this before. It's been called numerous things in the past, but the intent is to provoke thoughts to feel something and it's based on the work of Chip and Dan Heath. So I'm sitting at a kitchen table having a pleasant breakfast and my wife yells down from upstairs, are you finally going to clear up that unsightly growth around the bird feeder today? I'm getting tired of looking at it. And all of a sudden this whole pattern of things goes through my mind about how I got in this predicament to start with. So I deal with a lot of frustration on an ongoing basis and when I have a pleasant breakfast, it helps me deal with that frustration. So for the past several days, I've been watching the birds outside on the railing and it helped create a very pleasant breakfast. So based upon this experience for several days, I decided to install a bird feeder because I figured that it would attract more birds that make for a pleasant breakfast and help me deal with my ongoing frustrations. So I installed a bird feeder which increases the birds at the feeder so the birds are outside and it creates a pleasant breakfast. And I'm going just where I wanted to go and it increases the attractiveness of the garden which attracts more birds which adds to my pleasant breakfast and things are just marvelous. Though I hadn't thought about the need to buy bird seed and if you check the price of bird seed these days, it's not cheap which adds to my frustration. And the bird feeder, the birds at the feeder creates spillage which increases the need to buy bird seed adding to my frustration and the spillage promotes unsightly growth which increases my frustration. And the spillage attracts rodents and I have to figure out how to deal with the rodents. And the bird feeder attracts the universal eating machine called squirrels which decreases the birds at the feeder and increases the need to buy bird seed and the spillage and things just continue to get worse. And then now the birds are pooping all over the reeling and I have to figure out how to clean that up. So the question is, what's the real problem? And I don't want you to answer it, I want you to ponder it, okay? In this set of relationships that I am full, and there are more, okay? If you ponder this set of relationships, where's the real problem amidst this set of relationships? So if we go back to all of this stuff, the current situation or puzzle that I pondered along with some other marvelous people is how do you know the problems that we have to solve today or deal with are extremely complex? And the right people to be engaged in understanding that situation are usually not known by somebody that wants to wrestle with the situation. And if they were known, if you could find the right people, because they're the right people, they're probably extremely busy. And the old ways of working is just not going to get it because it's too slow and awkward and time consuming. So the question is, how does a group of people develop a deeper understanding of something that they want to understand when they can't function the way that we have in the past? You can't just have big old meetings. There's a need to figure out how to do asynchronous virtual collaboration, where the people engaged in figuring this out work when they have a moment. And after some people have worked on it for three months, some other person shows up and has a contribution to make to this piece of the puzzle. And how do they figure out where you are after you've spent three months engaged in doing this? Because they've only got time to spend a few hours and add a contribution and they're off doing something else. So I will show you this picture that I am not going to explain to you. So don't start pulling your hair out. A group of us, I don't know, 12, 15, spent four or five months working on trying to understand what are the relationships associated with a sustainable localized rural food system. And in the process, we had some meetings. Nobody ever attended all the meetings. A lot of people worked independently on this. And as people developed pieces, they actually found that they had questions about something so that they would go ahead and begin a discussion about that particular aspect of the model that we were working on. In the midst of this model, we had about 130 discussions amongst the participants all tied to aspects of this model. And this down here says there are two of them that I haven't read yet. So if we had a piece that we were wrestling with, suppose we were wrestling with this particular piece, I could go ahead and grab this piece and I could explain this piece to somebody and say, is there some aspect of this that we're missing? Something that we ought to add to this set of relationships. So rather than have to explain to them this whole puzzle, we can interact and take a small portion of someone's time and get their perspective on some aspect of it, and then figure out how to plug it back in to the overall puzzle. And regarding the overall puzzle, well, there isn't just one, there are many of them that happen to be created all the way from relatively simple to a somewhat less complex. And Brian, who happens to be on this call, happened to actually do some marvelous work in terms of developing presentations of certain aspects of the content so that one could go ahead and read through the presentation to get an understanding of this particular aspect of that model. And the intent was for us collectively to better understand the relationships. And there are some people who are involved who are now off working with other groups of people who are actually involved in trying to do some of this stuff. So that's the presentation. 30 minutes, awesome. Happy less. I'm open for questions. Yes, would you like to stop sharing your screen so we can see everybody together and whoever has a question, please jump in. Feel free to use the chat as well. Where is it? Where is your screen, your control panel? I know where my screen is. After your mouse up, you might have hidden the control panel as you were presenting. Anybody who knows better than me, let me know. Oh, there it is. I got it. Cool. There was hidden. Awesome. I have two screens full of people. We've got 33 people on the call. So I can't see everybody if you raise your hands, but if you use the hand raising thing or just articulate wildly or just unmute and speak, that will work out just fine. Is that published? What you just showed about the food systems? Yes. Everything I have ever done is public. I think, Jane, the way you're using Kumu, all of your Kumu diagrams are available, right? Yes. Exactly. So if you want to put some links in the chat, that would be great because the chat will make a good summary of all this. I love the idea of storytelling with power tools. I think that most systems diagrams, most maps, most things, once they get interesting, they get complicated. Once they get complicated, they get daunting. Once they get daunting, it's difficult to marinate into them. It's hard to find your way into what the thing means. And also, unfortunately, often I find the process of creating them is where the insights are, where the fun is, where the challenge is. And you're like, oh, no, this goes over here and then this is connected. And you don't get that as readily when you're looking at some other finished pie. Basically the finished artifact that somebody else made. So there's sort of this blend between letting people construct the thing themselves. And I think that the food system example you just showed was 15 or so people co-authoring that map over time, which must have been really fun, versus, hey, we've done a map and we're trying to commit a much larger group of people that this makes sense or to do some decision making on that or whatever. I'm interested in anybody on the call if you have any experiences like that or other sorts of things that click into this. Brian, maybe you could share with the group your experience since you were involved in it. Okay, let me try to give. One of the things I found really interesting working with the, I'm going to call it the rural community food system group, is that usually when I try doing a map, I've got two problems with the map. One, I start out thinking that nobody is going to like this map because it's just not going to work out. But then everybody likes the map and says, this is great. It's giving us all the answers. And my thinking is, wait a minute, that can't be right. This is the second problem. I've done two kinds of maps. I've done maps where I am the lead constructor. I do it all by myself. Or I've done maps like we did with Gene and with the rural community food system. And that is we were all participating at the same time, but nobody was really taking the lead per se. We were all kind of like, the map almost emerged out of a group process. And because it didn't come from any one particular agenda, to my mind, it provided all types of new insights, especially when you kept on looking at it over and over again and started realizing, this map is telling you things you didn't realize you were even asking, which I found fascinating. And it's the kind of way my main interest in systems thinking is, how could we integrate it with participatory and deliberative democracy? And how can we use it in order to solve problems from a group process, a democratic process? And the fact that I was able to learn something from a map that I was engaged in, but didn't have control over, I felt rather insightful for myself. And so I've been continuing to use the basic. I've made some new presentations and I'm trying to figure out how best can we, and I think Gene made a lot of really good points. I find it a side is no use trying to argue with people. I mean, it doesn't make any sense to try to keep on arguing because what they're trying to do is not understand, but try to prove you wrong. And it's like, one of my thoughts has been that our problem, it goes back to Socrates and the Sophists. I mean, the idea that we had a group of philosophers were trying to gain advantage in the community, as opposed to Socrates was trying to just understand the truth. And because he knew he didn't know what's the smartest guy around. So that's kind of where I'm coming from now. I'm still struggling with this. I'm still working. I'm redoing the rural community food system platform I've created. And hopefully I'll have it out in not too distant future. But it's a constant relearning or trying to change my framework. So that makes it my two cents. You've just triggered two things for me that I'd love to put in the conversation quickly. One of them, you just said Socrates and the Sophists. And in there, how many people have read Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance somewhere like probably in college? It's a worthwhile read. I think everybody gets something a little different from the book. What I got from the book was, what if the wrong guy is one? So for me, the Sophists were written into history. Sophistry is a bad thing. Being able to take any side of an argument is like underhanded. It's demagoguery, it's whatever. And we think all of society is based on logic and Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and all the greats, right? And I watched the guy give a presentation about this recently where he was like showing how civilization has gotten better. And I actually think we were really smart before these people. And then colonialism much later systematically destroyed this wisdom across the earth. So for me, the lesson from Zen was what if the Sophists were right? And how can I learn more about how they were seeing the world? And I wish I could go back in history and learn from the losers of many encounters because I think the second Spanish Republic, for example, was a really great and interesting attempt to do things. And the aristocracy and the military and the church got really pissed off. So they found Franco brought him in and a lot of bad history there. So that's one thing you triggered for me. And telling these stories with the history and the maps is what I love doing. So I've got all this stuff sort of tucked away in my brain. And then the second thing is, I'm really interested in these maps as memory ongoing, not as a one off thing where we sit down once and sit down and talk about it, but rather as a document, as a boundary document, or as an artifact that gets better over time, that we understand better over time, that we're curating, cultivating over time together so that we're not always doing some new things. So there's a democratic process, a decision making process called deliberative polling that Jim Fishkin invented and runs around the world. It's really interesting. And then it involves sending people out to write white papers for these groups that are going to come in and deliberate on topics. And it's like, why are we writing new white papers? Why are these sort of new issues? And I'm motivated here by sitting in front of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia many years ago when Wikipedia was very, very young. In fact, I can probably tell you when this was because he was telling the story of how the new Pope, Pope Benedict had just been named, Benedict the 13th, I think. And he was laughing because he said he got a lot of congratulatory emails from journalists and said that they were like, can't believe how quickly Wikipedia had a great deep page on the new Pope, right? How did you do that? And he laughs and he's like, we had a page on all the bishops, all the cardinals rather, like we had all the cardinals and all somebody did was go in and say, white smoke. Here's the name he took. Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict. And I look back on our educational system. I look back on our stupid idiot news system, which is always reinventing stuff and creating new artifacts and never reusing them and never trying to help us feed this common thing. And I'm going to throw in a third thing. Sorry. And I see my work with the brain as a lonely ant or termite feeding a fungus in the nest. And I don't eat the leaves, but I have to farm the leaves and I put them on this thing. I eat the nectar from the fungus. But if a lot of us are cultivating a common set of fungi, and they don't all have to, it can be kumu, they can be the brain, they can be whatever. But if we can then better together have a common memory over time that evolves, that is sort of, that we can tear down and rebuild, that we can help tell stories around, I think that takes us to really, really great places. Sorry for so many things at once, but Charles. I just love that. Really resonate with the metaphors there. And Michael Linton, a friend of many of us here, sort of suggested, kind of reminded me that in terms of composting and curation. So he, that's a variation on what you said. I think it was all sort of digestion and composting in various stages of the cycle as exactly that sort of curation and sense making and mapping and everything else. Thanks. Love that. And Jim Burke has his hand up. Go ahead. You have to unmute first. There you go. Thank you. Thank you very much for hosting this, Gene. I really appreciate your persistent, passionate support. And I love the way you approach it in such an understandable and humble manner. And what I'm taking away from this, among other things, is that to show somebody a system map is probably a little overpowering. I know that when I saw the map that you showed, it's like, where do I start with this? And so what I'm hearing is translate that somehow into a story. And the specific question I have is, have you taken maps or a map, I should say, and translated it into different scenarios in a way that decision makers or interested parties can see the challenges from a separate perspective. And a following question is, so what would you do about the unsightly mess? The good news is it's not a real story. But in terms of how that came about is in the story in itself. And that some number of years ago, Scott Fortman-Rowe and I, Scott Fortman-Rowe is the person who developed Insightmaker. We're writing a book about developing simulation models. And we had 400 sponsors for the book. And about three dozen of them interacted with everything we wrote. And after a few weeks, somebody came back and said, you know, you keep talking about building models, why don't you just build some damn models? And that just fell out. And I was amazed because it was just what was needed at that point. It was, you know, rather than spending five pages describing it, here it is. And to your point about developing stories, when I initially started doing the stories, I started doing them in Insightmaker, but Kumu is much better at it for qualitative stories. I used to unfold the model and have people read the text on the left. And Ryan Moore, who developed Kumu said, why are you doing that? The people end up looking at the model. I mean, you're doing this all the time. All right. And I went next straight. He said, why don't you just do a video voiceover and explain it as you unfold it? All the text is there if they want to go to the model and read it. But if you do the video voiceover, then people can just watch the model unfold and think about the relationships as you unfold it. And I did. And the first 50 videos were like pulling teeth. I mean, it was agonizing. And after about 900 of them, it got real easy. And I'm not sure that they're any better than the first 50 were, but they're easier to do. Thank you. Nadia. Sorry, took me a while to unmute myself. And you just remuted yourself. Seriously, go ahead. Stay well. So hello, everyone. First of all, do you thank you so much for your presentation? I don't know if you remember. I'm here because two weeks ago I attended a WPI session and he sent me at the time a YouTube video of his aha moments. And the reason I never emailed you back is because I've been thinking about it. And when you said that you're going to be here, I thought I would love to ask my question. So for those who didn't meet me last time, I'm very new to systems thinking. I love your comments. It went 300 million miles an hour. So hopefully I've opened all the links on time so I can read through them. I come from a policy-making background. So I facilitate mutual negotiations at you. And my question regarding your first two aha moments was the first one you mentioned, people want to know, they always stay within what you want to know. I found that within the policy-making, especially now with COVID, people are trying to find someone else to blame, finding a new solution, trying to find outside of their comfort zones. Is this then the first, my question, not the opportunity for them to present then systems thinking as the way forward? Which leads then to my second question regarding your second point, which is in relation to, you know, you never talk about Fight Club. You don't talk about systems thinking. But there are specific acts within the European Union now that are the food systems framework for 2030, but also the internet governance framework for 2030, they write systems approach in their structures. It's their future. That's what they decided. The sustainable development goals, they all need to follow a systems approach. But nobody knows what a systems approach is, which is how I ended up here. Like I have, I was like, oh yeah, that's great. In the beginning I asked, does that mean we're going to change the system? No, we're not going to change the system. We're going to use a systems approach. So what does that mean? So once you mentioned those two points, I went to your LinkedIn profile and I saw that you wrote as your title, storyteller. So if I were to look somewhere to find someone to teach me about systems thinking or to teach me how to engage with it, I would never naturally follow on your page. If I was a journalist, I would end up on your page, something like that. And so then my question is, is this not the moment to then maybe change, well, to change the perspective, to brand a systems approach? Or like I'm a systems approach, not a systems thinker, but a systems approach specialist or anything like that. And then from what I hopefully correctly understood from your conversation, but I may be wrong, you're talking about how you were designing your models and how do you take that back to policymakers. I've seen a lot of models of COVID on all the Facebook pages that I've become a member over the last few months. And the one COVID model that I really would have loved to see and that I, with very big fear in my heart, tried to like start writing and then gave up like you wrote in the beginning, like, you know, I just sat there and I didn't know where to start and then I just big question marks, very scared. But how it affects you as a person, you know, you as an individual, you, not like the infection rate, but you, your impact on hospitals, your impact, so your individual responsibility within that kind of environment. That's something that people then can relate to the infection rate. People don't, if it's too impersonal, people don't relate to that. Oh yeah, I don't know if I'm infecting people because I can't see that. But you can see that, you know, hospitals are not getting new students because students are not graduating, they're not getting work experience, etc. All the teachers are in the hospitals. They're not teaching. They're not going to be teaching for the next one or two years. So, meaning that if you have like a thousand people who are working in the hospital, this is the thousand people that we have to make do over the next two or three years because we're not getting new people in unless we fly them from other countries. If we are so lucky that other countries can still educate and it's not spreading, then, you know, like our impact on the hospital staff and etc. I, that's kind of the model that I've been missing. So we've been really focused on the science and what the policymakers think but not on about the individual responsibility that the individuals would see. So my question is then in relation to your to our moments, is this a time where we really should be focusing on and showing the people. So I saw a great picture meme from I think Derek Cabrera. So sorry for the name. I'm not sure if you know, but there was like, there's creative thinking, there's analytical thinking, there's critical thinking and there's systems thinking and then letting people know that this is just one of the different ways of types of thinking and taking a systems approach means having to use systems thinking, which I interpreted as systems thinking, but other people just say, no, we need to just break the system. So this is kind of like the argument that's now happening in policy. Like when we're talking about this, there might have been one person that turned up to a lecture like yours and was like, this is genius. I'm going to write that in a paper and everybody else goes like, what is this? So from your perspective, how would you see to fill in that gap where where policymakers then, you know, are drawing big question marks? What's the systems approach? I don't know if that was clear at all. I'm sorry. My mind as well is all over the place. We're all free as I was sitting here. Go ahead. I wouldn't discount them by attempting to tell them anything. So you said my LinkedIn page says storyteller. Now when people ask me what I do, I say, I work with people to develop stories about relationships and their implications. And they say, well, doesn't that sort of relate to everything? I say, yeah, that's the curse because it does. It relates to everything. It is universally applicable. Though the approach as I talked about in terms of and, all right, if, if you're talking to a policy maker about some policy, rather than trying to tell them something, I once wrote a paper called Change Management, the Colombo approach. And some of you probably remember Colombo is a detective that wandered around all the time, acting very confused about things. And all he did was ask questions, trying to get people to help him understand. So he never discounted everybody. He discounted himself all the time. And the guilty people always fell into the traps in her letter later. So what, what I try to do is simply say, okay, if you're going to do this, how is that going to impact this? Or what's going to be the implication of this? And what will happen here? Okay, rather than, than trying to, to convince them that they should think differently, you sort of, it's very subtle manipulation to get them to think beyond simple cause and effect. While, while Newton's third law of motion is for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. That doesn't mean that it has to be specifically cause and effect. There can be multiple things involved in that action and reaction. So you, you have to to start any place and begin to look at the relationships that are relevant to what, to whatever point you start at. And like Stingy said in the fifth discipline, you can never do just one thing. Any, any action you take has multiple implications, though, back to the thing about the, the bird feeder that I did a little while ago. All right. I installed the bird feeder. It had lots of implications from, from that particular act. And the thing is to, to investigate them. Have a feeling. Did I answer your question? Go ahead, Nadia, if you want to Yes, I mean, I'm just interested to see in all your different perspectives. I mean, in one way, I hope that just my participation in learning more, I would hopefully also feel the gap myself. But also it's in a kind of an open question to all of you if, if you want to, if, if it, if, if it actually is something that you would want to choose to change the narrative for systems thinking within your community to make it more open to policy makers, if policy makers are looking for something new, if they don't want to just stick to what they know and want to, want to be new. Do you know any of them? It sounds like because there's a market for it. That's the part of the point. Yeah. So in my opinion, I, I think there's a market because there are, there are documents that are coming out from the European saying there is a system approach method that we need to use. But then I only see like three or four organizations that are using just like design thinking to, to apply for, for example, grants and things like that. Um, so then my, then my first question is, you know, what is systems thinking? So once, once you label something, people devent begin to develop camps. Okay. I mean, the systems thinking people and the design thinking people have been at war forever. All right. And that will never end. Whatever label you assign to things, people have different impressions of what that means. So if you, if you find 10 people who say they are systems thinkers, ask them to write down on a piece of paper their definition of systems thinking, and I guarantee you, they'll be all over the place. Okay. So I simply, I simply dissolved all that by never talking about systems thinking in conversation with somebody when somebody says system, I say, wait a minute. What does that mean? Right. Because typically they don't know what they mean by the word system. Right. It's just, it's an amorphous kind of thing that this doesn't have a boundary on it. So I simply talk about relationships and their implications from, from my perspective, there are no things. There are bundles of relationships to which we affix labels as a matter of convenience. When I talk about a car, okay, the car is just a bundle of relationships that I bundled together and I labeled it as car because I don't want to pay attention to all the pieces at the moment. Okay. Yeah. I think it was just that my fear is that if the international institutions start making up what their own definition is of systems thinking rather than what I think systems thinking, what we describe here is pretty useful, then that gap gets filled with things that might not be relevant. But I do understand from a, from your perspective why, why branding it in that way is, makes more sense. I just fear for the gap because of their, because of them looking for something that they don't know about. It's interesting. So this is sort of like category drift in organic foods, for example, is, is that sort of the kind of fear you're expressing? Like what used to be called organic or natural food has changed over time as manufacturers started co-opting the definitions? Yeah, something like that. That's the question mark innocence that I have. I think the good news is that if you scratch six people, as Jean just said, if you scratch six people and ask them what systems thinking is, you'll get 10 answers. So we are kind of all over the map. There isn't a consistent definition that I've found. I have a feeling, I put a tiny poll in the, in the chat, if you didn't see it, to say what tools have you used for mapping visualization? If you wouldn't mind typing in whichever ones you've used or built, because some of you are actually authors of tools. And then second thing is, I have a funny feeling this room, this zoom is full of people who have stories about changing minds, showing how systems work, et cetera, et cetera. And Judy, you're raising your hand. So over to you, but you're muted. You're still muted, Judy. Sorry. There was a nugget that Nadia raised that I think is an important point that we be careful because premature identification of what I'll put in quotes as a false system, because there's no one universal system, can mislead the entire conversation and direct individuals toward outcomes that are unsound. And so I think she has an important question point there. I don't have the answer, but it's sort of like usually the best things come out of the biggest messes in my experience. When you have really complicated, controversial viewpoints, and you have to talk those through and try to understand the other person's viewpoint, all of a sudden there's an aha, like Jean mentioned. I didn't realize that was part of this. And so I don't know how we capture that, but I think the desire for people to have quick clarity will cause them to try to pick a simpler solution which will be inadequate and may take us down a rabbit hole. And we do that a lot. We see convenient examples or familiar examples and often don't reach back for the better fit examples. We do that a whole bunch when we're trying to quote history. What is this like? Is Trump like Hitler? That's a conversation. Anybody want to share any war stories about convincing people? Can I ask a question, please? Go ahead. Hi Jean. Thanks for the talk again. So I have two questions actually. So I'm pretty new to systems thinking and I'm using it in India. I want to use this approach in India along with a lot of other interested people for sustainability and for climate change. So one of the things which we're sort of working on is like a systems interaction model of how does climate change affect a city like the city of Bangalore where I live? But my specific questions are since you don't sell systems thinking as a tool to somebody to give them some particular thing which they want and it's a kind of tool for them to understand and explore a problem space. Is there a way that after they get in this understanding through the creations of these maps that they this actually gets engaged into value in some kind of process? Like have you seen this happen and is it something which is repeatable so that if you empower stakeholders for example in a participatory kind of approach they can start engaging the inside they can interact into something which creates value for society. And the second question which I have is when I hear about systems thinking like people have been saying it's quite confusing with the number of different things which are called systems thinking or come into that bracket. So how useful is just mapping relationship between qualitative kind of categories? How useful is that compared to you know the actual systems dynamics simulations tools and so on and so forth? Do you actually need the whole systems dynamics thing in order to create value out of this? Thank you. There are certain situations where a qualitative relationship diagram will tell you enough to begin to act. When you begin to ask questions about when, how much, how long the qualitative model will not help you. The only thing that will get you there is a simulation. Though back to the the two by three matrix that I showed from Michael C. Jackson it makes absolutely no sense to attempt to develop a simulation model with a group of people who can't define what the problem is because you're wasting your time. That's why all of that stuff way over there on the right where the participants, the stakeholders are not aligned in terms of their understanding beliefs and objectives, you got to do something else. They're so far over on the right you can't even do soft systems thinking. You got to do some other stuff. Though from the way that I distilled it down to investigating relationships by simply asking what does this influence and what influences this. You can do that in any context because it's such an undefined method that it works everywhere. You simply are trying to get people to help each other understand what they think the relationships are between things that aren't things anyway but they're okay. So what was I forgot what the other part of the question was I'm sorry. No worries. The other part of the question was have you seen cases where I mean I'm sure you would have but where people under do the systems thinking exercises and come up with you know relationships and diagrams and come up with models and so on and so forth and even though they weren't doing this with the intent of actually you know like solving a problem or they were doing it with the intent of let's say asking better questions and gaining a better understanding. Have you seen you know this exercise and have you seen people leave the room and then engage the insights which they've developed into like. I've seen people in groups have an aha moment where they simply realized that for the past several years they've been shooting themselves in the foot because they didn't understand the structure that they were continuing to support that wasn't going to get them where they wanted to go. Awesome. And you can see the best way for people to understand models is to build them. Forrester said that over and over and over again you know people learn best by building their own models which is why rather than go build a model for people to go work with a group of people and have them develop a model themselves now and you don't have to teach you about systems thinking to do that. I have probably related to a few of you. The most amazing workshop that I have ever done was an accident and that I was going to do was went to a to a conference to do a four-hour workshop and forgot that I was doing a workshop so I had all this material prepared that I was going to present and even I wouldn't want to listen to me for four hours. So at breakfast I realized that I was supposed to do a four-hour workshop and I was horrified that I wasn't prepared so as I was finishing my coffee I invented a workshop. I walked into this room about 35 people sitting at five or six different tables and said take out a piece of paper on this piece of paper draw a dot and label it cat. A couple inches away from it draw another dot label it mouse. Now draw an arrow from cat to mouse and label it chases. You have now created your first relationship map and if you feel faint you should leave now because it's going to get worse. All right for four hours these people were absolutely out of control though over a period of four hours these people developed the ability to draw very complex relationship maps and tell stories to each other about things that they were wrestling with and I didn't spend hours teaching them about the rules of systems thinking. We just talked about relationships and what influences what and what's the implication of this and what else does it influence and they walked away. I probably learned more in that workshop than they did it was absolutely amazing and they were delighted. Love that. Scott had mentioned that he has a story to tell including presenting a visual which actually means I need to go give you permission to take over the screen but I'd love it if you did that. Scott you want to jump in? Can I just ask one question of Jean before we go to a whole story? Yes please Susan. I'm just checking my understanding Jean so one of the things that I have learned over the years or done over the years is to go on word diets and to force myself to not use a word that unless I if I want them to do something it's like my question for you I guess I'll just put this way my question for you is that when you tell us to talk that what works is talking about relationships and implications building a tool to talk about relationships and implications will be shooting yourself in the foot. I'm not sure I understand. You've given us an insight or I have an insight one of the insights I've gathered is that instead of talking about system dynamics right and trying to teach system dynamics you instead give an activity for them to actually do it without explaining it and defining it and I bet in that process I mean you've said several times talking about relationships and implications is what you're doing but my guess is that you don't very often use those words as teaching words you use them to label things in a conversation and activity. Correct so it's the question in other words okay you're looking at this particular situation what do you think is the major thing that's having an influence on that situation and then okay so if that's influencing it well what do you think is influencing that what's causing that to be the way it is so yeah I don't actually say we're going to investigate relationships and implications we're going to figure out you know what what the influences are what yes that leap from something that you understand from insight to tool is not direct in other words if if if what we're trying to do is is develop tools for things and use those tools for things then people it just seems that people will take that and and try to turn it directly into a tool whereas oh okay okay under it as you say and um take it from there I'm sorry if that's not clear this is a good tool a pencil in piece paper is a good tool okay no no I'm just saying what I bet you didn't do was teach them about relationships and implications no I do not no good okay they they they I ask them questions I mean that you know the the cat and mouse thing all right was was an aha all of a sudden you know simply to have them draw that I I tell people that for most people I have come to believe that modeling is an unnatural act okay because to get people to sit down and actually draw a relationship model is like pulling teeth all right because because they're worried they they think they don't know how to do it and as a result they're so concerned about doing it wrong that they won't do anything and they inhibit their own learning and so things connect and I can't restrain myself so cool um years of a couple years ago at a quantified self-conference I met a guy who does the atlas of caregiving uh he has people draw care maps and here if there's somebody in the family who's who's got a critical condition sort of a chronic condition he has them just draw a map pull out a sheet of paper and draw me who is caring for this person and inevitably they discover that the community of people in the series of caregivers whether it's doctors or nurses visiting or a family who comes in with food or whatever is much broader than they thought it was um almost always they're they're like whoa okay you know at the end of having thought about it and rev down at a few times and realizing that oh there's there's neighbors who are checking in to make sure that you know the newspapers inside or the the mails inside whatever it is but but when you when you draw the simplest map with no instructions on what the map should look like that's interesting and a second exercise I've seen that was really really cool was just asking people to draw money in their lives that is a great icebreaker question like draw money in your life and give them no instructions for them that the replies you get are really fascinating Scott do you want to drive the screen for a bit you are muted yeah um so I don't I don't actually need to show anything on the screen I sent a link I went ahead and while I was listening to you all I just put together a webpage so that I could share it um and a couple of things real fast before I get into that so the visual literacy that I just put in there it's something that I'm actually trying to develop myself and that I realized that most people learn how to speak then they learn how to write and their visual conceptual ability gets stuck at like four four years old six years old whatever they learn at the basic level when when art starts to split between you're an artist or you're not an artist and it's you know cavemen had visual concepting ability it's not advanced drawing it's just the ability to represent an idea so I 100% agree with that um something that had also been mentioned was about that that spontaneous cat and dog class I was watching one with the cabrera research lab and they were teaching young children systems thinking through their own model of how of what that was and and the teachers were all just raving they were saying this was the fastest lesson we ever taught because they just got it right away because as you understand uh gene that it's it's fundamental it's it's under everything else and and so it's it's almost built in you understand that things have relationships and you understand that things are parts and holes and you don't have to really even be taught that it just is naturally there so I think that's one of the things that I'm noticing you know how to teach this I think is absolutely correct because we tend to think well what software are you using um and I'll just use an example from one of the comments we have interoperability and disambiguation and yeah absolutely but nobody knows the people that that I think this could benefit from this are are people who wouldn't have they would see that and say no but when you're talking about dog and cat I think that's a you know okay draw a line oh I understand and and I think it makes it more accessible so what I wanted to share with you um was this brain swarming process and hopefully everyone was able to see that link that I sent so what was fascinating to me about Gene's comments about we're looking for a a way to have an asynchronous collaborative visual problem solving method so what I found from this process Dr. Tony McCaffrey invented this he's uh he's got a um a book called remove any obstacle to creativity or something it's actually a fascinatingly dense and a very accessible book but brain start being swarming is this diagram that he has created and the way it works is you have across the top you have your goal and then you'll have sub goals so it's kind of a top down approach so we're trying we have systems thinking and then we have how do we do our teaching the systems thinking and then we have okay well how do we do that at a simple level how do we do that at an advanced level how do we teach systems thinking without using the word systems thinking okay so that's at the top down and it starts to build a tree down from the top on the bottom you have resources so we have software we have pencil and paper we have people who already understand systems thinking and those start at the bottom we have classrooms where lessons are already being taught and maybe they could be analyzed those lessons from a from a systems thinking perspective in parallel so we're learning about butterflies but we're also understanding we're using systems thinking to win the lesson and so what happens is here's where the asynchronous and collaborative method comes into it detail pieces and parts people will start from the bottom and they'll start putting resources at the bottom and start well I you know I I have pen and paper okay well what is that maybe I have the software I have a classroom full of kids I have a lesson plan and then people who are the strategic thinkers will start from the top and and eventually they start to connect and it doesn't happen usually from the descriptions that he had written about it doesn't happen in the moment as much as it as much as it happens over time you build the structure a little bit and then people can come back to the structure and add bits and pieces and they they know where they fit and instead of the map that I see when I see a lot of systems maps my I tend to get overwhelmed because I wasn't part of the creation of them and so it's hard for me to know what's the entry point and this I thought was a fascinating very simple structure that you could you could go into one instantly and see how it worked it just you understood the structure of it just inherently and anyway I thought I would share it as another model of how to diagram and you you know so I'll stop talking that was probably more than I should have said but anyway I'll open up the Florida to other people so thanks Scott um anybody else familiar with brainstorming who had seen it before I had noted it in my in my brain uh do you want to comment on it there uh yes if I if I can say something please okay I am working for myself in the subject of how to how to make it more easier for students to learn system dynamics so this aha element which we can find also as Eureka or there is a pedagogic theory of learning thresholds which call that passing the liminal stage or liminal passing the threshold of knowledge so one thing which here is important in this workshop which Jim mentioned is related to some psychological results which psychological research of the system of sympathetic and parasympathetic systems which we have in ourselves and when they are applied to learning to teaching they are very much influencing the learning of the subject so sympathetic is when usually which we used in teaching that we impose to the young people to the students our theory parasympathetic is approach which is not it is relaxing approach we were the students actually are not oblige obliged to teach to learn the subject in terms of uh having a so I would say activity which is difficult for them so they get some activities which are which are more relaxing which are actually related to their interests and another thing in it's that we usually learn much easier the issues which are interested for us so if we if we connect this with left and right brain or even with the division of brain in four not in two but in four areas then if we have one connection with how to say interest of our professional interest in one one field of the brain let's say in one field then we will have difficulties to get into the another because our brain is like that our brain is I would say if we if there's one very good book why students don't learn from the willing hand if you you can find it in internet and he said our brain is lazy he doesn't want to think we have to make engage him to think we have to put him something which he's interested for otherwise he will just get out so I am very much interested in what you're doing jean thank you very much he's very good thank you thank you jean let me pass the mic back to you we've been talking for a while about a bunch of different things what do you think what do I think yeah about any of these topics um not you missed my presentation at wpi called systems thinking bahumbug um no um I would say that that if you get together with one or more people and begin to develop relationship models you will have aha moments that you didn't expect though you have to you have to approach it without having a predetermined agenda because otherwise you try and drive it in the way that you want it to go you do it as an exercise in ferriting out a deeper understanding of those things that are relevant to a situation that that concerns you and if you don't know two or three people who are interested in something that you want to pursue just advertise it and people will show up it's amazing it's interesting I you just drew the analogy in my head that it's a sort of like unschooling um and in unschooling like you don't start a day of unschooling by thinking today we're going to learn fractions and that's what the kid gets it's like no at some point that's at some point the kid will be motivated to learn fractions because something that showed up that is passionately interesting and they're curious and in order to solve something they need to figure out this stupid fraction thing um and and I think we're talking and part of it is that the educational system and you know I'm one of those people who doesn't like the word schooling teaching education and loves the word learning um the education system demotivates lops off basically all the genius that's in the room and we're kind of doing that for grown-ups here we're trying to say hey there's complicated systems afoot we're sitting in front of it in the middle of we are we are entangled in wicked problems complex systems whatever framing you want to give it vukka banny whatnot um how do we do this better together and in order to even have that conversation we've been we in some cases need to begin with trust it has little to do with the situation it has little to do uh with with what's going on in the system it has a lot to do with whether I'm even willing to talk to you um I was at a meeting a long time ago where the rainforest action network was talking about their first meetings with Mitsubishi they were meeting with the chairman of Mitsubishi and um after two really kind of bumpy thorny meetings and the rainforest action network was trying to convince Mitsubishi to stop farming palms down in Borneo because that was orangutan habitat and it was going away very quickly so at the third meeting at the beginning of the third meeting the two sort of leads exchange business cards they're kind of a ritual form and the japanese chairman had printed had had his card printed on recycled paper and the the head of the rainforest action network had had his information printed in japanese on the back side of his card so as the exchange and and it turned out that the japanese chairman had traveled to Borneo to see firsthand what was going on and they suddenly had a meeting of their minds but the thing that that got to the meeting their minds was sort of patient conversation and then a gesture of acceptance of a gesture of taking a step toward the other that had little to do with the complexity of the system and a lot to do with some understanding of i need to say i get you and i'm moving toward you or something like that right and to me so so much of what happens in the conversations that we're talking about in systems mapping diagramming whatever we want to call it is about humans and their fears and vulnerabilities and trust and and all that good stuff and if we pay at least as much attention to that as we are to meticulously diagramming something we're probably more likely to get somewhere in the end anyway we're near the end of our of our call time gene is the other things that you'd like us to have dived into that we didn't have time for or reflections on this or other other things you've learned in over time i'm tapped out at the moment excellent and i love your presentation that was awesome thank you the good news is we can do rewind and pause on the youtube which i will post afterward if anybody's interested in joining the open global mind conversation please do is anybody who's here would you like to add sort of a wrap up kind of comment uh just your own perspective on on this conversation or whatever else uh yuri sure i i really enjoyed it and it's it's it's been very great and it's quite clear that people been thinking about these things for far longer than i was aware of so kudos it's amazing there are signs of intelligent life in the universe i like yes yes yes it's like the joke you know i thought i'd be mad people thought i was mad all along in half of my life and the other half i discovered that all my great discoveries be made by many people so that's the moment yes that's lovely and i think there is something about this moment you know there's there's whether it's morphic resonance or whatever you want to call it but um sometimes something is in the air right and and there was i think it was Malcolm Gladwell or somebody was talking about how Bill Gates and and uh Steve Jobs and Michael Dell and all those they happened to graduate college at about the same year and that's that was their lucky break is that they entered the world right at the moment when the chips were coming available software like like a pc of some form was in the air and the the dynamics of what happened on the ground are complicated and now we have you know i'm staring at you through this mac and i've got a a little slab of anobtanium by my side that i never imagined i would own and get to like play with every day when i started as a tech industry analyst in this business so these things are complicated and interesting um anybody else with uh wrapping comment uh charles just to kind of lobbying a casually uh big question which maybe we can pick up on in different forms i think we start to touch on the question which we got to your brain of activating it but it's literally like making the kind of sense that's actionable and you know generates to do this in a priority sequence of some kind and iterates sort of daily weekly whatever um so i don't know it's just i'm just reflecting in all of this amazing stuff and thank you also gene um what i didn't hear clearly and maybe i just didn't listen with that filter but you know what where's the actionable stuff in there and or how does that connect to open global mind and jerry's brain and and sort of just the general actionable um imperative let me give that a swing and then gene if you want to um partly um the open global mind is really trying to think about um a what are different sorts of mapping models and methods and best what what can we learn from mapping but be how do we have these conversations with people we consider the other like like if people are very like-minded and they're really good at power tools they're gonna use tools and get there and that'd be great we'd love to help them but i'm really interested in sort of the global dilemmas the lock up the log gems that we're in socially and across the world that are endangering us and how how do we penetrate those sorts of things so i think this conversation um fits in that in in 15 different ways and then we're going to have a bunch more conversations including the next one sort of like this that gene and i are are trying to figure out who to invite with what tools which is be more of a tools comparison so we'll take one issue one topic and totally open for suggestions for what topic um take one topic and then map it in six different tools and then have each person take over the screen and say here's what i did uh you know and to learn what is each tool good for what are they kind of like you know a quick tour to compare and contrast and to and to brainstorm what how we might bridge between them for example so that that's a to do item and then i think gene presented a bunch of nice to do things about just best practices for talking around systems thinking and systems diagramming go ahead gels no just to flash on on this idea it sounds like a great exercise to go go around um with the same topic and see what people come up with with different tools it just occurs to me maybe the obvious it's not just about the tools it's about the people and their styles and everything else in terms of of approach so just just to keep the balance of the of the view not just on the tool but the combination of the tool and the person exactly and where do we all fit what do we like how do we use it uh jewell hi sorry i'm just in the spirit of closing comments please that's right wonderful yeah no i just um i really wanted to express gratitude gene i think um so systems thinking is something that i that i've been sort of working in for the last year or so and we're sitting exactly with a dilemma of how do you take um what what we sort of affectionately call our spaghetti diagrams and make them more meaningful to wider audiences um because unless that insight can be disseminated or i mean ideally those people are part of the process all the way through um yeah like how do you spread the meaning beyond the people in the room um but i a lot of the barriers that we encounter is sort of the preciousness that people in some of the systems communities here have around um you mean it needs to be in this methodology and does it comply with this set of standards and what i really appreciated in your presentation was like the accessibility that this is really about like getting stuck in learning the principles and that it becomes intuitive and that the way of thinking almost surpasses the um the the the preciousness of the methodology um not to under not to underplay how important it can be but just that it makes it more accessible to people to think in this way so um thank you for your presentation it was really encouraging thank you thank you that's awesome jean any any final words um i would say that that um my absolute delight is when other people's light bulbs go off right that that's that's what it's all about right so that to to work through deepening our understanding about something that's important to somebody and getting to a point where they go oh i didn't know that because in in the midst of all of these spaghetti diagrams there are typically one or a very small number of systems archetypes that are responsible for the overhaul overall behavior of the structure and we get lost in the detail and we don't see them though the the structure is driven by them and there's only a handful while there's a couple that that does number so that when you come to understand you know i used to work in high-tech organizations and the politics used to drive me crazy and once i learned the systems archetypes the organizational politics became a source of humor because you knew where they were going and you knew which ones to avoid because there were no ins and areas so to to understand the archetypes the archetypes are are absolutely marvelous because they're they're very well-defined structures that have a very characteristic pattern of behavior and they have well thought out strategies for dealing with them so that if you find them and realize that they're operating you get a sense of of how to address it thank you um and thank you all for being here uh really appreciate it i will post this video online and we'll try to get it to everybody uh we're going to have more calls like this so um let's be careful out there well jean thank you so much bye bye thank you appreciate it thank you