Early Interest in Paradigms and Systems Thinking

My interest in paradigms and worldviews awoke at Dartmouth College under the

Donella Meadows

tutelage of late Professor Donella (Dana) Meadows, co-author of Limits to Growth, one of the world’s greatest systems thinkers, founder of Cobb Hill Co-Housing, and the Sustainability Institute. In systems thinking and systems dynamics, practitioners place great emphasis on mental models, our assumptions that give shape to the systems we envision and create. A very similar term is paradigm. Dana talked much about paradigms especially in her very popular article “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.”

After college I worked at RARE Center for Tropical Conservation and quickly became the in-house champion for drafting concept models which is systems-lite method for representing how systems operate. This methodology is a central tool for Foundations of Success, an NGO that aims to bring scientific standards and measurement to conservation practice. Also during this time, I read Daniel Quinn’s award-winning Ishmael (and the other 3 books in the series) which opened my mind to the notion that our paradigms today can trace back millennia. This evolutionary perspective broke my mental model that paradigms were somewhat arbitrary belief systems rather than parts of grand evolving belief systems. I also read Mark Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars: Worldviews for a New Age which for me linked all of societal phenomena and ideas into the Modernism-Post-Modernism frame, value systems currently at war.

Toward the end of my time at RARE, I contacted John Sterman (Dartmouth 1973) student of Dana’s, now at MIT, and a world leader in systems dynamics. He generously gave me his textbook on systems dynamics, Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. While I don’t do computer modeling I read the entire tome, taught myself to use causal loop diagramming (a notation for describing systems that is much more realistic than concept modeling), and began applying systems concepts well beyond simply paradigms. I must also recognize the personal support I received from systems dynamics expert, a two-year-removed classmate at Dartmouth, whose master’s in modeling is from MIT, Sustainability Institute and Climate Program coordinator, Drew Jones.

I became very interested in the connection between systems thinking and learning and soon read Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (Senge is the guru of organizational learning and also from MIT) and then attended two Pegasus Communications (the principal publisher of systems thinking materials) conferences in San Francisco and Boston, as a volunteer conference assistant.

I later published an essay in The Systems Thinker and two articles in Reflections, the journal of the Society for Organizational Learning, which earned me membership.

I began a couple of projects to put my systems thinking to work. First I wanted to write a novel to illustrate change in our paradigms necessary to move toward sustainability. I was going to write this in the context of a project that I began called the Worldview Change Project. Neither of these projects took off but they did create a strong basis for projects to come.

Public Use Planning Program

Cover for PUP manual when at Rare

Also while at RARE, I founded the Public Use Planning Program which at first was a response to a protected area planning landscape strewn with unimplemented plans. It was clear to me and my then boss, Brett Jenks (now president of Rare), that the normal way of planning created barriers to implementation. We didn’t know what they were, but it was clear they were out there. So the program was born with the mandate to identify those barriers and build a methodology to help circumvent them. For first five years of the program, I didn't know much about the role of worldviews in causing grand non-implementation. Then I left RARE in 2003 and three years later revived the PUP Program under the new ownership of UNESCO’s World Heritage Center.

Worldviews and Integral Theory
For quite a while I thought worldview was basically just a synonym for paradigm. But sometime around 2003 I got into meditation and superficial spirituality, eventually attending a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat outside of Washington, DC. Then while attending the World Future Society conference in DC, I met Craig Hamilton then managing editor of What Is Enlightenment? magazine (now EnlightenNext) and soon subscribed. Through that medium I discovered philosopher Ken Wilber and Integral Theory. And in 2008 I read Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution: How the Integral Worldview Is Transforming Politics, Culture and Spirituality by Steve McIntosh, another integral philosopher.

Integral Theory describes how human culture has been evolving for the past 200,000 years through various stages of consciousness. These stages include the more well known modernist and post-modernist stages which are followed by the integral stage. For a quick overview of these stages and how they apply to professional paradigms, I will post my article on this topic in Legacy magazine as soon as it is published the May/June 2010 issue.

In 2006 I had already begun a project that would gain traction. I began to research and plan a book on the new paradigm in park planning along with colleague and emeritus professor Dr. Stephen McCool of the University of Montana. We were convinced that the paradigm had to change and relied heavily on Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Donald Schön’s classic The Reflective Practitioner but still weren’t entirely sure the best way to describe the change in paradigms until Integral Theory introduced us to the grand sweep of evolving consciousness. Then we realized how the planning that generates so many barriers today in all professional circles, not just protected areas, emerged from Modernism, is evolving through Post-Modernism but must continue toward Integralism if it can ever hope to produce real results. This trayectory leads planning away from bureaucratic assumptions and habits toward organizational learning, systems thinking, and integral spirituality.

We hope to finish the first full draft of THE FUTURE HAS OTHER PLANS by mid-2010. (See the book query).

In fact, I’m now trying to re-orient all of the Public Use Planning towards a more evolutionary, holistic perspective. One other author who has been critical in this on-going transition is Peter Block whose books Community: Structure of Belonging and his bestselling Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (second edition) have been crucial in defining the qualities that promote implementation among community members. Interestingly enough Block was a student of Chris Argyris who was a colleague of Schön at MIT. Dana Meadows too got her PhD in biophysics at MIT under the founder of systems dynamics, Jay Forrester.

Querencia Experimental Center for Carbon Neutral Communities
On another front, I am working with my wife, Marisol, and Jorge Rojas to establish an NGO called the Q Center whose mission is to experiment, innovate, and diffuse techniques in hardware and software for communities, rich and poor, urban and rural, intentional and non-intentional, on how to transition toward carbon neutrality. The principal feature of Querencia will be an ecovillage where real people actually carry out the experiments. The community would also be the centerpiece, supported by a quality interpretation center, for demonstrating these sustainability techniques.

The project emphasizes helping people to evolve their level of consciousness in pursuit of sustainability. It focuses in a much more practical way the ideas of systems and paradigms. In 2009 I began writing much more about intentional communities and implicitly their worldview and systems thinking implications.

One of my goals is to continue the integration (at least in my own mind) of spirituality and sustainability as applied in natural resource conservation and intentional communities. If wisdom is ultimately about integrating knowledge, I am convinced all the topics I have studied will eventually merge into just one vision of reality, much like physicists' trying to unify the five forces into the Grand Unified Theory (which of course must also be part of my singular vision). I hope I only live longer enough to experience this vision and not simply look back from a reincarnated life at the idea I could never fully develop.