(If you're reading this on a phone, the above embedded player probably won't show up -- so here's the download link to the episode, and here's the link to my show on Apple Podcasts.)
I introduced myself to Brian Murphy, of Placework Studios, via email shortly after his presentation at this year's New Hampshire Businesses for Social Responsibility virtual conference, "Silver Linings: Resilience and Regeneration." In fact, he might not have even finished presenting by the time I sent my email.
Murphy's talk reached me at the perfect time. For a couple years now I've been talking on my podcast more and more about "systemic thinking" -- a way of understanding the world's (and one's own) problems by considering the actors and factors and cycles involved. I'm a person who was trained to think narratively, where everything has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. This is, I am finding, usually a flawed way of thinking about people and organizations and progress and the way they are intertwined.
I don't know about you, but I was never really persuaded by history class in the early years of school, with the focus on founding fathers and other individual figures. Later, once we got to the progressive movement and the suffragettes and other groups of people making little changes all over, I sat up a little straighter in my chair.
(Similarly, my favorite book in A Song Of Ice and Fire is the fourth book, in which the main characters in Westeros are swallowed up the the larger, decentralized social movements they unknowingly activated.)
Murphy's talk at the conference was about "Regenerative Communities" -- how his firm's architectural projects were aiming beyond sustainability and toward work that gave back more than they'd taken from the environment and the people in and around it. This work toward regeneration was all tied up in his concept of "Systems Thinking" (that phrase is what initially got my attention -- having myself only a passing understanding of architecture from my friend Rob Harbeson, various Netflix shows, and David Byrne songs). In the podcast interview we talk about both concepts, and what a regenerative community looks like in practice, and we connected his idea of "Systems Thinking" with our shared optimism about the future.
I'm a person who is pretty openly troubled by the way many discuss climate change in apocalyptic terms, and I honestly believe that our tendency toward narrative thinking is partly to blame. We see ourselves and our lives as a story, and we fear the end of that story, so we're always looking out for it! Which is understandable. But we don't have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All of us are individually and collectively a part of many connected cycles -- we play a role in processes that continue beyond us. And I don't just mean after we die -- I mean even after we leave a room. We are always impacting each other, and our environments, in ways that reach beyond our experience. When you start to see yourself as a part of a larger, collective cycle, or even a set of systems and cycles, you not only have, surprisingly, a stronger sense of your own impact, but a fiercer belief in our ability to enact change together.
So that's sort of what I wanted this episode to be about.
