Thank you, Cynthia Kurtz
I just recently launched a book about changing your life by changing how you think. I could not have done this without a ton of help from a lot of people.
One person I want to thank for her help is Cynthia Kurtz.
Cynthia worked with Dave Snowden on the Cynefin framework for leadership decision-making, which was featured in Harvard Business Review in 2007. (I interviewed Dave also). She is an established researcher, and I think she qualifies, as much as anyone can, as an expert in complexity.
Cynthia had a tremendous influence on the book. In fact when I first shared my ideas with her, she (very politely) shot it down. I realized she was right, and practically had to re-write the book from scratch.
Luckily, she also held the rope that saved me. She works in an area she calls Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI), which is all about making sense of complexity by understanding the stories and narratives we use to understand and describe reality to each other.
Her book, Working With Stories, was a huge help to me as I re-made the book. It gave me a way to go back through all of my interviews and research and make better sense of what I was learning.
I never actually met Cynthia face to face, nor did I speak to her by phone or Skype, as I had done with every other expert that I spoke with.
But she was incredibly kind and helpful, and we entered into a sort of 18th-century-style correspondence, through email, where she, with gentle charm, deconstructed, or maybe I should say, tore apart, my theories and arguments, leaving me frustrated at times (mostly because I knew she was right!), but always wiser.
Those emails could easily be a book in their own right. At any rate, her kind persistence over many months helped me rescue the book from what would otherwise have been a rather mundane contribution to the book I’m so happy to have written today.
So you can only imagine how happy I was to see her publish this review:
“I’ve read so many books about dealing with complexity. Most of them tell us that we can go on doing things the way we’ve always done them as long as we carry around some totemic words like “fractal” and “strange attractor” and “emergent.” Liminal Thinking is different. It may be the first book I’ve read that challenges its readers to live more effectively in a world that seems (but isn’t) newly complex (and complicated).”
Read the whole review.
