Article 8: The CDE Model
The CDE Model helps us discern the deeper patterns in our systems. Although we can’t control outcomes, we can shape conditions so life-giving patterns are more likely to emerge.
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Article 7: Pattern Spotting
This is the seventh article in my 8-week series exploring foundational systems thinking concepts, written for the 2025 RE-AMP Systems Thinking Academy. Whether you’re following along with the series or diving deep into systems practice, this article explores Pattern Spotting — a practice for noticing and sensing emerging patterns in Complex Adaptive Systems. Learn more…
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Article 6: Attending to Our Attention
This is the sixth article in my 8-week series exploring foundational systems thinking concepts, written for the 2025 RE-AMP Systems Thinking Academy. Whether you’re following along with the series or diving deep into systems practice, this article explores Adaptive Action — a simple but profound rhythm for engaging with complexity. Learn more about the Academy…
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Article 4: The Stacey Matrix — Understanding Contexts for Creating Generative Conditions
How do you know whether a situation calls for planning or emergence? The Stacey Matrix offers a pattern-sensing guide for understanding different types of complexity. By mapping agreement and certainty levels, you can choose approaches that fit the conditions—from simple solutions to navigating chaos.
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Article 3: Complex Adaptive Systems: Patterns & Paradigms Naturally Shifting
Why do systems revert to old patterns even after successful change efforts? The answer lies in understanding human systems as Complex Adaptive Systems, where agents interact to create self-reinforcing patterns. Durable transformation requires reshaping deeper patterns of relationship, perception, and meaning—not just controlling surface behaviors.
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Article 2: Systems Thinking and Paradigms: From Personal Shifts to Unleashing Systemic Shifts
Why does change feel so elusive, even when there’s abundant good will? The answer lies in shared paradigms—the invisible architectures of meaning that govern what we notice, ignore, and believe is possible. Discover why paradigm shifts are the most potent point of intervention for lasting systemic transformation
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Article 1. Systems Thinking Starts in our Minds (Yes, Really!)
Why do we get stuck even when our hearts are in the right place? Systems thinking starts with understanding how our mental habits unconsciously reinforce the very patterns we want to change.
DetailsAmplifying Sameness & Damping Difference
Amplifying Sameness & Damping Difference Something that triggers me quite a lot is when people unconsciously (and sometimes intentionally) amplify sameness. It’s one of those harmless-seeming but insidious, nearly invisible, unconsciously destructive dynamics that’s way too prevalent in certain flavors of change-making cultures. What do I mean by ‘Amplifying Sameness’? For example: One person says…
DetailsExploring Methods of Generatively Iterating Our Social System Map
How do we share and invite people into this mapping potential without coercion, w/o wasting people’s time on annoying word-smithing debates, and w/o simply reinforcing a status-quo definition of reality that we may want to be moving away from? In a way that invites curiosity, where the process itself generates more insight into the community and the broader systems the community is interested in changing. In a way that inspires people to care more about one another, to want to work together on challenges large and small, and to care about keeping the map evolving and up to date?
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The Iteration Challenge and the Ethics of Mapping
Every map is an ontological assertion, staking a representational claim to some aspect of reality. Every map necessarily centers some things and excludes many things. This centering and exclusion shapes perception and constrains narratives.
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