Appreciate this framing. I’ve begun to use it in team development work alongside “emergence” (through system-thinking and design justice lenses).
I serendipitously just read a very resonant segment of Bill Isaacs’ Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together explaining Gregory Bateson’s notion of “ecology of mind”:
…every living system has a “mind” — which emerges as a function of an evolving pattern of communication and meaning. This “pattern which connects” gives it form, shape and direction. Bateson sought an explanation for the underlying pattern of relationships that linked living things, and found it in his notion of mind, which includes …living relationships, where information (and, more importantly, difference) is registered and which causes energy to be released.
[bold my own, italics original]
Bateson was a well-known anthropologist that some of you (Theodore, for one, via our shared reading of Fred Turner) will be familiar with. Thanks for the lovely article Theodore Taptiklis.
