System Blindness, System Sight, and Homo Systemicus

Maybe it's just coincidence.
I've been writing about the costs of system blindness and the possibilities of system sight for over thirty years, and in all that time I have never (well maybe once) been asked to write a paper on the subject for a journal or a book.  But now I'm working on three requests - a journal issue on systems, a collection of articles on organization development, and a book on leadership  - all of which have come within the past several months. Is there a new opening coming?
In all my efforts - books, the Power Lab, the Organization Workshop - I have been pushing against the personal bias in our attempts to understand human interaction. For the most part, when relationships go sour - in the family, the organization, the community - our explanations are personal; the problem lies in the motivations, temperaments, characters, idiosyncrasies, developmental failures of one or more of the parties. And, when our explanations are personal, then our solutions will also be personal: separate, control the other, keep from being controlled by the other, divorce, therapy, and, in the extreme, we murder one another. My work has demonstrated that much of this person-focused effort is wasted, misplaced, and, too often, needlessly destructive.

We humans may see ourselves as the ultimate end of evolution; we are possibilities perfected, with nothing better waiting in the evolutionary the wings.  Neanderthal Man probably felt the same way until we came along.  Unfortunately, the way evolution works, we can't  pick the next best development. It either comes and adapts better than the current model - us - or it disappears as one more evolutionary dead end. I am hoping for the emergence of homo systemicus - a species whose superior adaptability rest on the ability to see, understand, and master the systemic conditions in which they and others exist.

Members of homo systemicus naturally and reflexively understand other people's worlds; they empathize with the difficulties others are experiencing; they don't react defensively or destructively to others' actions; they don't make up self-justifying stories. They understand, and they interact based on that understanding.

There is much more to homo systemicus, but that's enough for now.

Comments

[James Greyson]

Brilliant term, homo systemicus. Was that your invention?