By Lowell F. Christy, Jr, Ph.D.

Please read this article before reading my commentary.

The Forum is in the social transformation business. I found these 15 guidelines documenting the characteristics of complex social systems as the "truck drivers guide" (simple, thank you, Robert) when entering the foreign domain of living systems. 

#2 (emergence - interactions and consciousness of individual actors is different than the logic of the resulting system) & #7 (path dependence making all change history dependent) are particularly relevant to our mission of UNLEASHING  processes to can change our dysfunction political/social/cultural cul de sac we find out selves in. 

All political and cultural systems ARE SYSTEMS as these insights provide the lens through which the change maker has at least a possibility of positive change.

This is confirmation of the key distinction used by the Founding Thinkers and the unique supply change of ideas and ideals that directed the architecture of our frame of government. This distinction is between individual linear consciousness (small m - mind) and the Mind (capital M) of the system. 

The FORUM is unique in our unique constellation of those capable of working towards the practicality of designing complex interventions between the mind and Mind. This difference is radical, requiring different tools and ways of behaving in what the Founders saw as almost sacred.

A system differs from normal consciousness which is 1) Cybernetic (closed loop of an identity preserved over time ergo a circuit) & 2) System which means cross linkages, interrelationships, interdependencies otherwise known as entanglements. 

The core insight here and in the conclusions of our two years of laboring to identify how to stabilize and revitalize the American Experiment is that democracy is partially based on the openness of information, assembly & interactions of individuals and individual consciousness.

This freedom can become toxic if the power players freeze the world to their advantage without any constraints requiring the meta thinking of the contextual environment within which the de Tocqueville Art of Assembly takes place. Here lies the Art of Governing where context and content cross. The art is the tension between the context and content, part and whole enabled by designers of change who focus on guiding the interactions through policies and modeling such that the social/institutional forms decided upon creates an environment where society can evolve. 

This evolution requires understanding the difference between artificial human designed systems and the mother of all learning Nature and natural processes. We humans, like beavers, change our environment. The question is working with the limitations of human consciousness and how the world we create must ultimately align with living systems. Otherwise we design our environments wherein we decay and civilizations collapse.

This guided jostling allows for emergence of new intelligence and innovations linked to ever changing Physical Nature and other complex adaptive living systems 

At the FORUM we are dealing with the governance of parts and wholes that result in a thriving healthy state for the greatest diversity capable of generating the ideas, programs and institutions for The People. Simple yet Complex.

Just an idea,
Lowell Christy