patterns of resilience

Some friends are pulling together a gathering of collaboration minded individuals this week, centered around the presence of a number of members of the Enspiral Network (based out of New Zealand).

I am proposing a session there, but would be happy to repeat it again elsewhere, whether as a lecture/conversation at a University or Corporation or simply as a speaker at a conference. Here is an outline:

Title: Patterns that thrive in any ecosystem.

This will dive into some of my own recent aha’s as well as those of others.

It will largely focus on concepts related to:
1) Complex Adaptive Systems

2) What Nature “care’s about.”


3) Nature’s Strategies

4) The tension between
a) the efficiency gains of centralizing activity (what works gets repeated / reproduced)
b) the resilience benefits of diversifying activity (helps when circumstances change)

5) The “necessary” wastefulness of that tension (ex: lots of births, environmental degradation and die-offs are part of the pattern that yields resilience) — I refer to this as BLOOM & BUST.

6) It’s all happening in an exhaust stream of energy

7) Coherence Layers

8) Perspective, Separation and Connection

9) The complex part: managing the radiation of impacts across coherence layers.

10) Solutions to problems that have previously been experienced get selected for.

11) Solutions to problems that have NOT previously been experienced (the unknowns) are defended against using patterns of diversification (mutation, reproduction, exponential population growth)

12) What makes humans special – analogous reasoning, prediction, behavior modification.

13) Applying those lessons to social organizations (companies, communities etc.)

14) Applying those lessons to the design of information systems and of a functional global scale regulatory system.

Matt