These notes are based off a talk called “Systems Thinking” done by Peter Senge.
25 years since the 5th Discipline of Systems Thinking
Peter Senge has been at MIT for a long time.
Peter’s mentor said “Having been at the forefront of technology, that this is not the frontier at all - it is more like a production process. The real frontier is understanding our human systems, not technology.
We live in a machine age - technology is the machine.
What’s a living system versus a non living system. Today in botony there are two terms, autopoisis (self creating) versus elopoisis (created by another).
A living system is self created, a machine is created by another.
Humberto Maturana - well know biologist from chili.
We are in a time where reflection is all the important things are happening.
Santiago Theory of Cognition is a famous theory.
Difference between the cognition of a device and the cognition of living systems.
Human beings do not perceive their reality. We do not simply passively take in sensory data and record it.
We do not perceive the world we see, we see the world we perceive.
A women sees a different experience than a man, a sales person sees a different world than an engineer. etc.
The characteristics of a camera is different, it records what is going on.
The more we understand the differences between a living system and machine.
Assignment, write down verbatim what we have seen for the last five minutes… it would be impossible.
There are literally different realities in the room right now, each person creates a reality.
This has profound impacts on the world of relationships.
How many of you have ever been in a conflictual situation was when someone pointed out something you said that was part of the problem, and your response is I didn’t actually say that.
If we get into a complicated situation where there is some real conflict,
The world of human systems is a world of conflict.
When one human being tells another human being what is real what they are doing is making a demand for obedience. We are ascerting that I have a priveldged view of reality, I see what’s real, you see something dillusional.
When we start appreciating the human relationships as a perception it has real implications of how we work around us.
I don’t see what’s going on, What are you seeing what’s going on,
Not a single one of us sees reality
