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Scenario praxis, critically explored as the theory-informed practice of scenarioing, is proposed as a modality for institutionalising knowing within a systemic governance framework. Framing and institutional considerations associated with a constructivist inquiry-based learning approach that might open capacity for innovation in future scenarioing praxis are outlined to complement and counterbalance positivistoriented evidence-based approaches. Drawing on espoused theoretical and epistemological commitments, background literature, researcher experience, and our framing choices, we describe a heuristic device for use ex post to critically examine accounts of past scenario development, or ex ante to generate scenarios. The heuristic and its process of generation are designed for use in context-sensitive ways suited to the systemic governance of climate change adaptation and similar situations that can be framed as 'wicked' or uncertain.

One of the most significant and enduring ideas associated with the systems initiatives at Hawkesbury has been the inter-connections that were made there between systemic acts of development in the 'concrete world' and the abstract 'epistemic developments' of the actors who participate in them. Each is seen to be constitutive of the other in a profoundly systemic manner, with 'concrete events' being both influenced by and an influence on 'abstract ideas'. The embrace of critical experiential strategies, which themselves are regarded as essentially systemic and reflexive in nature, has been a central feature of the pedagogies, research processes, and engagement strategies that have been designed to better facilitate this inter-connection. As calls for more sustainable and equitable forms of development gather momentum across the globe, and the citizenry become increasingly engaged with issues that are seen to pose significant systemic global risks, the need for collective, communicative experiential strategies as systemic discourse, Somewhat taken aback by such a seemingly reductionistic inquiry at a Systems Conference -for never before had I been asked to either prioritize or personalize my learning -I replied that I would give the matter some thought and get back to him! It would not be an easy task: The whole Hawkesbury experience had, after all, been one long learning journey characterized by a sustained appreciation of the ever-changing braid of ideas and events as our history had unfolded over a quarter of a century -to borrow from the evocative metaphor of Vickers (1983). Furthermore, one of the many extraordinary features of the Hawkesbury systemic initiatives has been their emergent nature through collective endeavours and the continual sharing of new experiences and 3 developing scholarship, and thus it has always been extremely difficult to separate the 'I' from the 'we'. And then finally there was the matter of my own changed circumstancesnot just in institutions and indeed nations as well, but in the whole focus of my attention:At Hawkesbury I had been concerned primarily with the systemic development of one Faculty in the context of its changing role within the systemic development of rural Australia, whereas in my present position I focus essentially on the role of an American Land Grant University in 'international development' within a context of 'sustainability'. Not one to shrink from a challenge however, or to explore a familiar scene from an unfamiliar perspective, I have been giving the question some very considerable thought.What follows here then is a piece in which I try to collect those thoughts into a coherent narrative. It is not the paper that I had originally prepared for Crete -for that was still written within the genre of a third-party historical commentary about Hawkesbury. In contrast, this is a personal narrative that reflects what I think were the most valuable lessons for me from our systems initiatives. The story is essentially the identification and subsequent explor...

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