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…
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?
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.
How can we access the potential of a Social System Map if we’re not able to keep it up-to-date?
The Social System Mapping Origin Story I (Christine Capra) fell in love with System Mapping in about 2005 and started making maps at every opportunity. Some time after that, I began to work with intentional change networks and had the opportunity to create some network maps. From this, I began to imagine combining the two…
Social System Mapping is about systemic transformation. It’s about supporting strong networks of change-agents who are justice-informed and complexity-wise.
There’s a path here, meant to discover – not yet another place to run off to and consume, but a way to make the place where we are healthy and whole again, through one another. A path so obscured by our current mainstream cultural norms that most people can at best vaguely accept that it might exist, but very few know its contours.
Notes from our Learning Journeys | Harvests about SenseMaking with Social System Maps from our Community of Practice.
Phil Metzler and Laura Kaestele discuss her perspective on what SenseMaking means to her work and for network weaving.
A success story about Sense Making with the RE-AMP Network’s Social System Map
Part 6 of a 6 part series from an Interview with Aldo de Moor Prior part Reflecting On Our Discussions It’s been over two years since my original interview with Aldo. That one interview was so rich, it generated six blog posts and an abiding friendship. We’ve met online semi-monthly ever since that first great…