Calendar

20 May: Jessie Henshaw
The Hidden Worlds of Context Blindness.
 

 
Calendar link

Link: https://www.isss.org/members-mini-symposiums/
 
On Saturday 20 May Jessie Henshaw will attempt to expose how useful it is to have ways to discover one's blind spots, and because that is central to the world's predicament. 
The basic science behind her approach is that systems that develop by growth are animated from the inside and build an inside world with outside connections. That seems to be the universal model of natural systems; they have lives and build homes with connections. So from anyone's view, both the contexts inside other homes and the contexts of their connections are initially detached from one's view and experience. We sometimes notice coming across them or having regular practices for respecting personal space while learning what they're about. So part of any workshop time would be sharing our ways of noticing the hidden contexts in one's near and distant territories.
Jessie's methodological approach and practice expands on simple examples, noting situations where universal patterns (like the common S curve or changes of state) or where relationships form and respond in unique ways - It's part of a 50 year study  of how nature works by itself, tragically misrepresented as following numerical relationships with no scale or limits, when growth is an organizational process with definite scale and limits, and early warnings of what to do for which there are myriad familiar examples of things starting with growing their power than change to living by collaboration, the two halves of the S curve.   
The main way in which Jessie proposes to explore similarities, differences, and possible complementarities between your practice and others, is by asking people how their practice would respond to the questions her's raises
 

 
 
Jessie is an environmental and human systems scientist who has been doing advanced research on emergent organization in nature for over 30 years. Her innovative work produced a practical new general scientific method for studying uncontrolled systems and led to numerous important findings.
One of those is the remarkable finding that the standard sustainability metrics used around the world are very unscientifically defined. They generally count the impacts we can trace and quite ignore the ones we can’t. It’s as if, culturally, we were all thinking “out of sight, out of mind”, as if that would work in nature! We can joke, but it also implies major changes in what we do, that the community is largely in denial of..
Her subjects include all kinds of lively complex systems such as, organisms, ecologies, cultures, communities, languages, technologies, weather, etc. Such systems generally originate with an initial seed of local organization and a process of accumulative development, forming a cell of organization by growth in an open environment. Jessie’s methods are based on using physics principles as diagnostic tools. She does not use physics to represent environmental systems with equations, but for investigating them, considered as self-defined objects of the environment. The method relies on data for displaying authentic images and behaviors of nature with "fidelity", not for making equations. The technique allows one to historically reconstruct the flow of innovation within a system’s own internal development, and then to anticipate the succession of other developments that are likely, or certain, in its future.
 
 
Time Slot on a Saturday in May:
San Francisco:    7 AM on a Saturday
New York:          10  AM on a Saturday
London, UK:        3 PM on a Saturday
Central Europe:   4  PM on a Saturday
South Africa:       4  PM on  a Saturday
Sydney:              Midnight on Saturday/Sunday