BOOK REVIEW: SYSTEMIC MANAGEMENT FOR A COMPLEX WORLD

by Manish Jain, Complexity University and Ecoversities Alliance

There is a famous saying, “No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.” I see this book by Marina Pechlivanis from Brazil as an important kick-start towards individual and collective liberation from the polarising and paralysing mindsets that shackle us today. It is a disruptive and generative guide to unlearning. It is a powerful invitation to expand our sense of self (beyond the ‘selfie’ culture) and to reconnect to the richness and beauty of the world.

Many billions of people have recently had their first, conscious brush with the reality of complex systems with the Covid-19 pandemic. Our notions of security, safety and stability have been shaken in 2020. We have witnessed how one crisis in one part of the world has shaken many systems and triggered many other crises around the world. People are increasingly aware that is a huge amount of uncertainty about what the future holds. Recent social movements such as the Buen Vivir in Latin America, Degrowth Movement in Europe, Black Lives Matter in USA and Gross National Happiness in Bhutan have been asking fundamental questions about what is a good life. The American Dream is no longer the gold standard. There is even more uncertainty about how to model the future much less navigate it. It is a kind of meta-uncertainty with 30–40 different probable scenarios. Despite their grand promises, most world leaders feel paralysed about what to do.

The turning point in my life started when I started to believe that my illiterate village grandmother was more intelligent than my Harvard professors. I learned from her that there is a fundamental difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘being’. One may know some theory or facts but this is very different from embodying and living it. I share this insight because I don’t feel that we can truly understand and live with a world of complexity and inter-connectedness from classrooms, textbooks, frameworks or even google maps. Systems thinking is not just another subject that can be added to the syllabus.

Today, I see that my formal school and university education not only did not prepare me for a world of greater and greater uncertainty, it had conditioned my mind to see and think in linear, analytical, fragmented, reductionist, competitive, scarcity-driven ways. This was a two-dimensional framework of learning that privileged and valued de-contextualised flat world of paper and screens over real three-dimensional multi-sensory experiences of life. I was told over and over again while growing up that whatever would be on the exam was the most important thing to learn if I wanted to succeed; anything outside of that was just a waste of time. So activities like playing with friends, spending time with grandparents, exercising, resting and healing (without medicines), speaking my local language, wandering in the forest, travelling, growing and cooking fresh food, volunteering for social causes, helping in the family business, etc. were all seen as ‘extra-curricular’ activities. I later realised that these activities were the core of where my learning and skills came from and what happened in the classrooms and exams was the extra-curricular part.

Schools around the world have been trying to rectify this by adding courses on social-emotional learning, happiness education, sustainability education, vocational training, gardening, entrepreneurship education and systems thinking. But these by and large remain ‘add-ons’ and the fundamental design and game remains the same, modelled after the factory and the needs of industrial-military civilisation and economic growth at any cost. The global project of modernization and development has essentially been about centralised planning, sorting, labelling, othering, commodifying and extracting. It is about controlling life. Scarcity. Monoculture. Inequality. Violence. Human-dominance. These were sold to us as a Faustian Deal for a chance to pursue the ‘American Dream’ and the march towards Progress. This game has been well-analysed and named by many social and ecological thinkers. The question facing all of us at this juncture is where do we go now? What are the Ariadne’s threads to hold on to when trying to navigate the Minotaur’s Global Economy Labyrinth and systemic breakdowns? How do we avoid reproducing the dynamics of the same old system when trying to deal with the complex challenges that face us? How do we heal the psychological and spiritual wounds?

Disillusioned by top-down strategic planning methods, I resigned from a promising career as an education planner with the UNESCO twenty three years ago and returned to India with these questions. As I apprenticed under my ‘village grandmother’s university’, I started to more clearly understand what role the modern education has played in disconnecting us from our inner conscience and deepest wisdom, from our hands, from our hearts, from non-human living beings, from an inherent paradigm of inter-connectedness and a sense of the sacred; in effect, dumbing us down and reducing us to atomised and afraid individuals and cancerous consumers. Even much of our social action towards complex challenges is being driven by a narrow vision of individual behaviour change with little thought about the larger inter-connected systems that we live in.

Grappling with complex systems and complex challenges will require a great deal of unlearning on our part. Much of my professional and personal work over the past two decades has been trying to understand and support unlearning. My grandmother has been instrumental in my journey. Unlearning means peeling back the layers of certain dominant assumptions, fears, anxieties that drive our actions and behaviours. Just to clarify, unlearning is not the same as forgetting. Engaging more deeply with complexity will call for us to unlearn some of the following:

1. Stop blaming individual leaders (such as Trump or Bolsonaro) as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ and start understanding systems and the tools we use and how they use/shape us.
2. Stop waiting for silver bullets, UN Declarations and wish-lists, technological utopian blueprints and experts to come and save us and start building more robust local experiments, friendships, knowledges and ecosystems.
3. Stop believing we are ‘poor’ and start understanding the real wealth and power that is in our communities.

Unlearning takes lots of courage and persistence; a willingness to break the foundations which one’s identity stands on. It is not easy but it is essential.

Another important mindshift we have been exploring in our work in India is the jugaad mind. Jugaad is an Indian phrase used to describe the kind of ingenuity that enables Indians to manage the large and small challenges of everyday life. The essence of Jugaad is playful improvisation from whatever materials you have at hand. More than the low-cost innovations it generates, it is an attitude or state of creative flow. Jugaad involves an active seeing of invisible connections and infinite possibilities. The challenge is to tap into it and channel it. I first came across the spirit and practice of jugaad from my grandmother. Rather than throw things out, she would take left-over pulses, vegetables, even rice and mix in into flour to create wonderful savoury paranthas (breads). Paradoxically, these would actually taste even better than the original dishes. There was never any set formula or recipe for making these; she would just work with whatever there was. She was fully present to whatever form was wanting to emerge.

The idea of jugaad has many cousins around the world: in France it is called bricolage; in the US, it is called macgyvering; and in Brazil, it is called gambiarra. It can be found in the cracks and amongst constraints where modern factory schooling and civilization has not colonised the spirit of resource-FULL-ness and innovation. It can be found on the margins and edges of society in places like slums and favelas, indigenous villages, wild forests. In permaculture design, the edge effect is an ecological concept that describes how there is a greater diversity of life in the region where the edges two adjacent ecosystems overlap, such as land/water, or forest/grassland. At the edge of two overlapping ecosystems, you can find species from both of these ecosystems, as well as unique species that aren’t found in either ecosystem but are specially adapted to the conditions of the transition zone between the two edges.

Accessing and cultivating the jugaad mind in a complex world involves re-building a different set of muscles. Gandhi referred to awakening the 4 H’s of head, heart, hands and home. I would add the 4 I’s: invitation, intuition, imagination and iteration.

Invitation means bringing in perspectives that are very different from our own (and might be totally opposite to what we think) and building a relational field of trust for coming together and co-evolve. It calls for us to learn how to shape-shift and speak multiple languages across different textured contexts and tools. Invitation invites a spirit of deep hospitality and care. It is grounded in the gift culture.

Intuition means tuning into our collective consciousness and deepest wisdom. It calls for us to suspend our conditioned reasoning, hyper-rational inner critic and fears and anxieties about the past and future when making decisions. Intuition invites a spirit of deep listening (from divergent human as well as more-than-human sources) and sensing into what energies are present.

Imagination means opening up new possibilities for creative action. It calls for us to let go of our prescribed pet solutions and conditioned ready-made answers. Making sense of systems characterised by complexity is incredibly difficult, probably impossible, to do alone. There is too much going on, too quickly, with too much contradicting information, for any one person or group to grasp. Competition-based models tend to restrict our collective imagination to what feels ‘realistic’ at any given point in time. Imagination invites a spirit of play-full collaboration and co-dreaming.

Iteration means that we continually practice prototyping, adaptation and try different things out over and over in response to emerging critical information and novel events. Trying to get it all ’perfect’ in advance is the enemy of iteration. What is needed is an ability to launch something, fail, redesign, relaunch, fail a little better, redesign and so on in repeated practice. Iteration helps to build a field of warm data. We see mistakes and failures as essential to building deeper understanding; they are not something to hide like in school. Iteration invites the spirit of humility, playfulness and co-experimentation.

I would posit that a deep root of the crises facing us is that we spent too much time in the 19th and 20th centuries constructing many academic maps but forgot about the real 3-D terrains. Systems, policies, plans and solutions were created without any regard for peoples, places, cultures. But the map is not the same as the terrain. So I personally invite you to take all maps, frameworks and utopian master plans (including my own) with humble skepticism. The terrain is alive, emergent, intelligent and difficult to navigate — and will always be so.

Traversing the terrain means not only learning to live with paradox, messiness, conflict, it implies being able to joyously invite more chaos and confusion into our lives. Confusion can be a tremendous gift. It can help us see possibilities from different angles or, even better, blur and soften what we are used to seeing in a kind of soft-focus in order to allow other invisible things to come into greater focus and clarity. It can take us into a liminal spaces where we can stand and face our shadows without hiding behind rom-com happy endings, organisational myopia and even institutional hope. It can dissolve certain boundaries, institutional certainties, rigid labels and expand our sense of self. Harmony is not an end state — it is a verb, a continual dance between chaos and order.

I feel that our understanding of how to work with complexity systems and challenges around the world is still at a very nascent stage. The discourse and the practice is still evolving, with much of it being driven from the USA and in the English language. There is a strong need for communities of the global South to look into our ancient wisdom traditions as well as (counter)-cultural practices on the margins to help build a more robust field of complexity education. At the core is a need for more playfulness, heart and fearlessness. Maybe perennial tricksters such as our grandmothers, Saci Perere, Anansi and Krishna can give us some deep insights into accessing this spirit.

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