What the heck is Nemetics anyway?
This post is co-written by @toughloveforX @ddrrnt @rotanarotana. It is initially published on nemeticsinstitute.com
Big thanks to Ana Cristina Pratas for giving the opportunity for we Nemeticians to share what #Nemetics is about.
“Leadership, dealing with uncertainties, engaging with the flow, learning through interactions.
Approaches for understanding and adaptation.
How does one manage complexity in times of intense change?
Rotana explains how nemetics researches patterns of trends, ways of learning and collectivist learning.” — @AnaCristinaPrts on Mind Mirrors
Hear the interview
What Nemetics is all about
Nemetics is just a code. It is a meta language to allow people in different silos to communicate about complexity science. It initially started in an open conversation about a meta language called Ebdish (Emergent by Design’ish), which sparked a collaboration between Michael Josefowicz, Daniel Durrant and Mark Frazier 5 years ago. Sean Grainger joined in soon thereafter, bringing his insights to Nemetics from his experience as a teacher/administrator at a K-8 inquiry focused school in Alberta.
The purpose was to have a precise language to talk about complex adaptive/creative systems using only 140 characters at a time. We’ve since continued this collaboration with a growing group by using Twitter and Google+ are our primary platforms.
Nemetics can also be thought of as a biomimicry model of communication. Our inspiration comes from the human body. Especially the way signals pass between the brain, the heart and the gut.
Our thinking on Nemetics blossomed via our history of persistent exchanges on Twitter. We kept moving with our intention that nemetical metaphors could explain events and human behavior as a living organism. We continue to extend this view into every field that our team investigates. We created our own jargon since the words that are used in one domain did not make sense in another, yet the patterns interweaving them were nearly identical. The existing terms in use to explain complexity tended to have so many different connotations to different people that it was impossible to talk to each other. As an invented jargon, Nemetics reduces our reliance on connotations that limit our ability to see new connections.
Because the Nemetics code is not a fixed language for explaining phenomena within a single field, it can be applied a bit differently for every person who engages with it. People in our group use elements of the code differently in their respective fields of expertise and interest. Yet we can easily discuss how our interests and expertise connect by applying the jargon.
Complexity underpins most everything, so we find that Nemetics help us highlight the systemic patterns and even sense the no-patterns that may trigger emergent insights.
Why the need for Nemetics now?
From the Plast Project, Pattern Languages for Systemic Transformation (PLAST) by @HeleneFinidori:
This article is an abstract of the proposal recently submitted to the EU HORIZON 2020 / CAPS program. The CAPS program aims to support the piloting of Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation.
(…) A central problem of our time is the separation of knowledge cultures into isolated islands. These knowledge islands typically have an excess of relevant information at their disposal from other islands, but do not leverage this knowledge effectively. This isolation has many causes: academic specializations, ideological polarizations and competing interests among grassroots movements, or simple separation in space, time, natural language or culture. Just as importantly, knowledge tends to be disconnected from praxis. The combined effect is to hinder the expansion of collective intelligence and fragment the systemic impact of sustainability and social change initiatives.
Using the Nemetics language, our networks have been able to talk about political economy, history, design, education, innovation and art across the silos of different kinds of speciality and culture.
How is the role of leadership changing from the perspective of Nemetics?
Many people are doing great work about the new role of leadership. Consider websites such as Forbes, HBR, and the curation of @leadershipABC on the topic of leadership. If you do so, you will notice that all the works are either grounded in, or overlap with complexity science.
Using the insights from many people, we continue to find that leadership is an art and science of managing complexity. What makes Nemetics different from these other works is that vibrations, waveforms and interactions are central to our work. Dibyendu De, based in Kolkata, India, is a renown specialist in vibrational analysis. That’s a central part of our ongoing research. He also brings a spirituality component to our Nemetic sensibility which is hardly ever seen in other complexity approaches.
NEME or Notice.Engage.Mull.Exchange. is not just a model, but a mantra. Anyone can chant ‘NEME’ in a melody that suits their soul. Chant whenever it works for you in whatever way feels best. Eventually you may notice new patterns to engage and mull which feel more exciting to exchange than anything previously experienced. Nemetics will change you.
In Nemetics the new role of leadership is focused on learning by exchanging what we’ve noticed, engaged, and mulled. We hope that it will enable an accessible form of distributed leadership that remains situated in the contexts where people must adapt quickly to change. Leadership that is framed in the art and science of managing complexity can help us think more creatively and purposefully amidst uncertainty.
Is Nemetics another band wagon expression of our times?
No. It won’t become one either. We’re not trying to go mainstream or viral with it because at this point few would get on board with it anyway. We have found that there are very few people who are actually curious about how complexity science applies to them and their world. But the few people who are curious have a chance to become the nemetically minded leaders of tomorrow.
There is a new understanding that is going mainstream: knowledge is embedded in everything. The old zeitgeist is “I am think, therefore I am.” We would say “I am therefore I think. [nemify]” We are shifting from a view focused on mind and body to an ecological view point, which is complexity science coming to a new synthesis. Nemetics is one expression that we seek to embody through the work of our emerging institute.
The book, THE SYSTEMS VIEW OF LIFE — A Unified Vision, is another expression of complexity thinking that we deeply appreciate. We are presently translating it so that everyday people can get a better handle on everyday complexity. In addition to Nemetics as a language, we hope to make a contribution to the ongoing discussions of complexity by bringing the maths and visualizations of vibration analysis and thermodynamics to the table.
The Nemetics conversation has now persisted over four years via Twitter and Google+ and is leading, we hope, to the emergence of a Nemetics Institute based in Kolkata, India. The model for the Nemetics Institute has a couple of revenue streams. The most interesting to us involves consulting practitioners on the ground and their thinking partners in the cloud. Over the last 5 years a high performance team has emerged from our persistent conversations over Twitter and Google+. No emails. No meetings.
As of the today the most active parts of our team is @niberca, of Dominican Republic origin, in New York, USA. She is leading the design of the NIASK journal. She has been teaching design, runs her own studio and is a Nemetics Research Fellow exploring how creativity can be nurtured using the latest insights from brain science.
@PredictSwan, the leader of the Institute, based in Kolkata, India, has been teaching Vibrational Analysis for over 20 years. He also has a thriving practice in leadership training and continuous improvement in manufacturing and organizations in general. Dibyendu De also brings the spiritual tradition of India to our work.
The curation and creation of transmedia contents, and mapping of insights, are done collaboratively and artfully by @toughloveforX, in New York, USA, @ddrrnt, Eugene Oregon, USA, and @rotanarotana, France.
At the near edges of our team are people in Bueno Aires in Argentina, Barcelona in Spain, Alberta and Québec in Canada, Lusaka in Zambia, Atlanta in Georgia, who work in the United States and South Africa. At the far edge are the networks of each person. When connections are made and nurtured, they weave together possibilities and communities emerge. As the community continues to engage and grow, we discover our common Intent.
Aligning with common Intent and collaborating have always been how the world has changed. Margaret Mead famously said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” History bears out the wisdom of her statement.
Put simply, the social vision for Nemetics is global life long learning by using free platforms of today, e.g. Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, as well as those that will be commonplace tomorrow, involving such technologies as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The intent of our nemetical learning is to enhance our human ability to see complexity using Arts and Science.
Everyone intuitively understands complexity. If you have grown up in a family, or had a loving relationship or managed a design project, or had a start up that went to scale, or managed a chronic condition, you know how complexity feels.
About a month ago, we did our very first pilot of a publication called the NIASK journal on the topic of SLOW. With our relationships and dialogs vibrating all over the world, we exchanged in a critique that included our world wide network of peers who also share a common mindset, culture, stories, language and platforms. The emerging Nemetics Institute in Kolkata, India, is a well bounded social construct that concentrates our energy so that it can then be dispersed through our publications.
To get the best understanding of Nemetics, consider reading the book, The Power of See by Dibyendu De. It is our founding text. We also had a Twitter chat, #nemichat, facilitated by @NEMETICS, on this book with Dibyendu as our guest. Feel free to slowly mull over the transcript.
The products we co-create will be published under a Creative Commons license. For profit making organizations, we will charge a reasonable fee which will be fairly divided between practitioners on the ground — who do the hard work — and a small piece to the thinking partners in the Cloud, who will donate whatever they earn for our startup NGO — The Nemetics Institute.
Exchange @NEMETICS
