Feeling Fractals
One of the things you notice when you work with human systems is that things keep recurring in the same way at different levels. For example, you notice that a difficult relationship between senior leaders is replicated in the relationship between their organisations. And if it is a governmental organisation, you find a similar relationship between their Departments of State.
This is an interesting property of scale free systems. It is also seen in nature in what are known as fractals. Think of the fronds on a fern or a growing snowflake.
What this means is you can get glimpses of systemic behaviour from quite small interactions. You can feel as you walk in to a new business what that business is going to be like. The way reception is laid out, the way you are greeted by security or reception, the way in which you are cared for while you wait for your appointment. Often you get an intuitive sense of this long before you pick up the visual or relational cues.
When working with a human system, be it a commercial organisation or town hall meeting, if you can tune into these less obvious cues, what you are intuiting, how you are feeling, what your senses are picking up, you gain insight into the nature of the wider system as well as the particular meeting you are in.
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Each individual in the meeting with you comes bringing their network of relationships, how those make them feel, happy or sad, energised or deflated. This is passed on in the interaction between you, in the way you able to connect.
So sometimes, we might be well advised to stop processing so hard with our busy brains and zone in to what else we might be able to discern. There is a lot that we can learn from more subtle interaction.
Hi John. I do agree with your view and I would add that it is not enough to sense without discrimination and reflection. Having a very high level of self awareness, emotional intelligence etc is necessary to “sort out” what is ‘my stuff, ‘their stuff’ ‘our stuff’ in order to make sense of what we see and experience.