Rethinking agency—The 2022 agenda for the systems community

Abstract

Five clusters of concern arising from IFSR‐facilitated conversations with its organisational members are used to invite the broader systems community to rethink agency. It is argued that by addressing the cluster elements, potential will be co‐created for the systems community as a whole to help citizens venture beyond failing responses to the global problematique and the Anthropocene‐creating thinking in which we humans are trapped. The five clusters are as follows: Exploring the in‐between: Growing a shared understanding is going beyond a competition of ideas or a clash of concepts. It is a joint exploration of the unknown in‐between. Including the excluded: Systems research happens in open research ecosystems, not in disciplinary silos. It is transdisciplinary and constitutes a global discourse. Living questions: Questions shape paradigms. Transcending paradigms starts from allowing the questions to have their own life, to grow and to dissolve, to improve and to transform. Going beyond systems literacy: Learning to speak systems is one thing, proficiency in systems thinking, systems doing and systems being another. There is a difference between knowing and understanding that we may address as systems wisdom. Rethinking agency: Agency goes from ego to eco, from me to we. Yet, it is not an either–or; it is ego and eco, me and we. To understand agency, we need to understand the ‘and’.

An Indigenous Relational Approach to Systemic Thinking and Being: Focus on Participatory Onto-Epistemology

“…In my Conclusion I re(iterate) the importance of appreciating as part of the literature on the history of systems thinking (and its future agenda) the onto-epistemology of Indigenous systemic thinkers who forward a specific relational approach which urges decolonial alternatives to the "house modernity built". I also indicate that some of the terminology used by Klein et al (2021Klein et al ( , 2023 in their proposed agenda setting for the "systems community" can be revisited in terms of concerns raised from the Global South. (As conceptualized by Santos 2015, this does not refer to geographical positioning on the globe, but to onto-epistemological struggles against modern-colonial-type dominance.…”

Growing a community of conversation and understanding: The 2023 agenda for the systems community

“…The IFSR‐facilitated conversations of its organisational members transitioned during 2021–2022 from an agenda for the systems community framed as ‘rethinking agency’ (see Klein et al, 2021) to one of ‘growing a community of conversation and understanding’. The foundations of our efforts are the acts of being in conversation , pioneered within the IFSR through the influence of Bela Banathy, who from 1988 to 98 served the IFSR in a number of executive committee roles, including as a president (Dyer et al, 2015).…”

Navigating the polycrisis—governing for transformation: The 2024 agenda for the systems community

“…This pursuit has shaped and defined the IFSR Conversations tradition, in which the IFSR and its members have recently been concentrating on reevaluating the concept of agency (Klein et al, 2021) and growing a community of conversation and understanding (Klein et al, 2022) meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene (Ison, 2010; Ison & Straw, 2020) and of the entanglement that some choose to term ‘the polycrisis’ (This Is Why ‘polycrisis’ Is a Useful Way of Looking at the World Right Now, 2023).…”