Systems thinking is an integrated way of looking, seeing and thinking about the world in which we live, work and find ourselves. Importantly, the various phenomenon of experience reflect the duality of being subjective constructions of my worldview and at the same time the objective manifestations of a larger system in which I find myself. Bound by the legacy of the world of which I am conscious, systems thinking provides me with a range of tools to guide both my processes of thinking and appreciation , as well as my understanding of the various systems I apprehend.
The thinking aspect of systems thinking preferences the determining role of individual worldview and the importance of mental models as the framework of reference for all enquiry. It accepts that individual perspective enlarges our appreciation of the system in focus, although it is moderated by conscious assumptions and unconscious biases. The process of appreciation is accordingly further bounded by the limits of rationality and the artefactual nature of boundaries placed on enquiry. Central to our understanding are the beauties of dichotomy and paradox, between and through which our appreciation can be transcended and transformed. Central to our thinking in systems processes are the values of curiosity and wonder, and the imperative for dialogue and conversation, through which ”other” can be encountered.
The systems aspect of systems thinking regards the encountered world as a dynamic whole constituted of interconnected parts exhibiting reciprocal influence on each other. This context of complexity creates the preconditions for emergence and unpredictability. However indeterminate, the manifest structure and self organisation of the whole exhibits variety and over time equilibrium, facilitated by feedback and information flow. Between states, path dependence is observable through flux and change that is influenced by attractors and a priori conditions.
Systems thinking is holistic not reductionist. It attempts to balance analysis with synthesis and objectivity with subjectivity. In many ways it is a response to the inadequacy of the Western way of thinking, which, in light of the eclipse of classical physics and the rise of the social sciences, is manifestly inadequate to respond to the significant problems of our time.
Analytical psychology is that discipline established by, and founded upon, the work of Carl Gustav Jung. In his view of the world, human beings find themselves situated between two vast realms of experience; an outer world and an inner world, and depending on mood or disposition, emphasise “taking the one for the absolute truth by denying or sacrificing the other”. This is the fundamental situation and condition of being human. Consequently, we must adapt to each, for each, in opposition to each other, make demands upon us as human beings. Adaptation to the outer world, Jung asserts, requires adaptation to the inner world, and conversely, adaptation to the inner world requires adaptation to the environmental conditions of the outer world.
Standing between the inner and outer worlds, encapsulating the personal equation, is the human psyche. For Jung, the psyche is the fundamental condition of human existence, and an essential part of the mystery of life and being. It has its own structure and form like every other organism. Jung does not contend that only the psyche exists, but that in terms of perception and cognition, humans cannot transcend the psyche. Our experience of world is bounded by the psyche, and for Jung, the psyche contains the mystery of Being, and it is from the psyche that everything human exists and everything human comes to be.
Analytical psychology extends upon the notions of the collective unconscious and its constituent archetypes that pre-form and condition behaviour, thoughts and feelings. Human adaptation for Jung was therefore a dynamic and teleological process directed towards the goal of human individuation. As the primary mechanism of adaptation, the psyche according to analytical psychology in constituted of functions with orientations towards either the internal or external world. This dynamic mix of functions and attitudes gives rise to the theory of psychological type.
Analytical psychology is an effective framework through which to understand life’s many challenges, whether they be personal, organisational or social. John applies his understanding of analytical psychology to promote a deeper understanding and engagement with wilderness experience, as well as establish insight into personal and organisational development.
John’s love of wilderness has conspired with his love of photography to produce a deep resonance with wilderness photography, and a desire to capture both the essence and form of wilderness experience. Given the dynamic and ever changing nature of wilderness, there is a limitlessness to the opportunities presented by wilderness photography.
Originally inspired by the likes of Ansel Adams, Olegas Truchanas, Peter Dombrovskis and Robert Rankin, John loves the work of contemporaries like Chris Bell, Rob Blakers and Grant Dixon as well as the new photography of Ben Messina and Wolfgang Glowacki amongst others. Although John is particularly drawn to Tasmania, the variety and diversity of wilderness throughout Australia provides a wonderful context in which to explore the myriad environments and associated archetypal themes.
John uses both macro and wide angle landscape photography to capture the moods, feelings and awe of the wilderness, and in doing so, he hopes that people might grow in their appreciation of the value of wilderness and be encouraged to become involved in it’s pleasures and conservation. For John, looking for a photo opportunity creates the preconditions for seeing more than would otherwise be seen. Looking and seeing are thus deeply related, and for John, they represent the nexus where essence and form meet and are ideally expressed in that illusive image…
Wilderness is many things – a place, a condition, a metaphor, and even an idea. Rugged, isolated or untamed. Wild, desolate, or dangerous. It commands our attention and provokes a response. It always has been, and always will be, a parallel theme to the very human notions of habitation, society and civilisation. Against this, the meaning of wilderness, its value and our understanding of it change over time, from person to person, from place to place and from society to society. What is constant however, is that all people at all times need to form a personal conception of what wilderness means to them, a view of its place in relation to being human and perhaps most critically, what to do about the one unassailable fact of wilderness – that as civilisation expands, wilderness contracts.
The primacy of place in human experience is undeniable. We live, breath and move in places, limited by time and space. And yet, the existence of one place, presupposes the existence of other places. Thus the places of civilisation are juxtaposed against the places of wilderness. The two are in many ways the oppositional pairs underlying our general sense of place, or at least, two basic categories of place. Whatever our understanding, wilderness is one of those “other” places – geographic, psychological or spiritual. Wilderness is a place we can avoid, a place we can visit, or a place in which we can dwell. Our idea of wilderness grows out of the interplay that arises between ourselves and our places, informed by our experiences of its opposite, civilisation.
Wilderness thus becomes an integral component of our worldview, and because places are external to us and our constructed meanings are internal, the landscapes of our inner world are inherently connected to the landscapes of our outer world. Consequently, wilderness, either implicitly or explicitly, forms an essential component to our sense of meaning as humans. If as the psychologist Carl Jung said ‘civilisation is the rational, “purposeful” sublimation of free energy, brought about by will and intention’, then in contrast, wilderness is neither rational nor sublimated nor the product of human will or intention. Its contrariness or otherness opposes the ego-centric nature of our human individualism. As the American naturalist John Muir opined aver 100 years ago ‘most people are on the world, not in it – have no conscious sympathy or relation to anything about them’. This echoes another view of Jung’s that ‘man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature’.
Wilderness presents us with a place which is unbounded and within which we can situate ourselves and as jane Hollister Wheelwright says, ‘stretch to our fullest dimensions … superseding presumed limitations of courage, stamina, and strength’. Wilderness provides an experience in which our limited ego, can be confronted with an other that represents a greater, all encompassing and superordinate whole. As opposed to the increasingly fragmented artifacts of civilisation, wilderness presents not only a picture, but an experience of otherness and wholeness that is integrated and unbounded, chaotic and rhythmic, expansive and intricate.
As Theodore Roosevelt said ‘there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm’. Its meaning must be experienced, and its complementary necessity cannot be denied. Wilderness, and more importantly, our relationship to it and its meaning to us individually, is a human necessity. Echoing Jung’s observation that ‘in the course of the millennia, we have succeeded not only in conquering the wild nature all around us, but in subduing our own wildness’, is Thoreau’s now famous remark that ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world’. The philosopher Richard Tarnas reminds us that ‘nature’s reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes into being through the very act of cognition. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind'[. Thus wilderness, and its elemental wildness, is intricately and necessarily bound up with our being and becoming as humans.
John’s love of books has seen him collecting, selling and trading books for more than 30 years, and he now has refined his interests to a number of select subjects categories. His personal interest in wilderness photography has also resulted in a collection of all major Australian (and especially Tasmanian) wilderness photographers.
In addition to this collection, John has also amassed significant collections in a number of other sub-fields including:
The central structural component in Jung’s theory of human adaptation is his understanding and explication of what he developed and described as psychological type. According to Jung, the mechanism for adaptation and orientation is the psyche, which has two distinguishable perceiving functions, namely sensation and intuition, and two judging functions, namely thinking and feeling. Furthermore, each of these functions is oriented according to a basic attitude, namely extraversion or introversion.
Extraversion is an orientation toward the external world, and the flow of energy is from object to subject. In contrast, introversion is an orientation toward the internal world, and the flow of energy is from subject to object. Consequently, in the energetic flow between the subjective idea and the objective thing, “for the introverted attitude the idea is the prime mover; for the extroverted, a product”.
When perceiving, The sensing function enables us to focus on what is real and actual, trust experience, take in via the five senses, apply experience and attend to the factual and concrete. Contrastingly, the intuition function focuses on possibilities, trusts imagination, is future oriented, see patterns and attends to the abstract and theoretical. When judging, the thinking function seeks order, uses cause and effect logic as well as employs impersonal decision making to analyse and critique. The feeling function seeks harmony and uses value-based logic to effect inter-personal decision making, it seeks to sympathise and focuses on appreciation.
Jung asserted that “it is not the purpose of a psychological typology to classify human beings into categories – this in itself would be pretty pointless. It’s purpose is rather to provide a critical psychology which will make a methodical investigation and presentation of the empirical material possible. First and foremost, it is a critical tool for the research worker, who needs definite points of view and guidelines if he is to reduce the chaotic profusion of individual experiences to any kind of order. . . . Secondly, a typology is a great help in understanding the wide variations that occur among individuals, and it also furnishes a clue to the fundamental differences in the psychological theories now current. Last but not least, it is an essential means for determining the personal equation”.
Jung’s theory of psychological types was been operationalised by Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs, who developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), with the stated purpose “to make the theory of psychological types described by C. G. Jung understandable and useful in people‘s lives”. Whilst acknowledging that a psychometric instrument can never circumscribe the diversity of human behaviour, the MBTI does attempt to identify individual‘s psychological preferences. It is the most widely used personality instrument for normal, non-psychiatric populations in the world. It is a forced-choice self-report inventory, and generates strength of preference scores for each of four dichotomies.
John has applied psychological type in a number of ways including:
The question and meaning of technology for human beings has received diverse attention from many perspectives, both philosophical and practical. The two dominant perspectives on technological thinking are determinism and constructivism. When viewed deterministically, technology exhibits an internal force and logic of its own. A deterministic approach to thinking about technology considers the influences, both positive and negative, that technology exerts on society. Contrastingly, technology is also viewed as socially constructed and contingent upon human agency and socio-cultural factors. This approach reacts to and rejects technological determinism.
Importantly, the main approaches to technology also assume that it is either value free and neutral, or humanly controlled. The value-free and neutral approach, with extrinsic moral or ethical dimensions, separates means and ends. Alternatively, the humanly controlled approach, with intrinsic moral and ethical dimensions, correlates means and ends.
By way of definitnion, technology can be understood in a fourfold manner as object, knowledge, activity and volition. This enables us to encompass otherwise competing approaches, as well as position the various forms of technology, within the context of a technological system. Additionally, because neither technology nor the agent of technology (the individual) exist in isolation, they constitute technological systems which, can be also understood in a fourfold hierarchical manner as comprising, individuals, organisations, sectors and nations.
Importantly, my approach to technological systems posits that individuals deploy technology as knowledge (maxims, rules, theories), purposefully as volition (active and receptive) to the tasks of technology as activity (invention, innovation and adoption), to create technology as objects (utilities, tools, machines).
At the intersection of the competing approaches to technology, the primary agents of technology, and basic units of analysis within technological systems, are individual human beings. Historically both positivists and constructivists have long resisted “lifting the lid” of the psychological or so-called cognitive “black box” of the individual. The continual tension between these two approaches, and the incomplete picture afforded by such analysis, strongly suggests that an additional line of enquiry is required to add to our understanding of the phenomenon of technology and its relationship to human beings. Similarly, the determining roles of individual human beings in activities of invention, innovation and technological diffusion, would also suggest the need for an additional approach.
Along the intellectual lines proffered by Jung, and in an attempt to redress the splitting tendency of modernism, I assert that the play of opposites associated with technology ‘culminates in a release, out of which comes the “third”. In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored‘. Consequently, the psychological approach to the relationship between human beings and technological systems developed as an outcome to my PhD research, contributes to such a synthesis. As Jung says, ‘we are not liberated by leaving something behind but only by fulfilling our task as mixta composita {mixed entities}, i.e., human beings between the opposites‘.
A psycho-constructivist understanding of technology can assist our understanding of the relationship between human beings and technology, as a way of being in the world. Practically, a psycho- constructivist understanding of technology, as a way of doing in the world, can enhance the daily engagement with technology as well as the process of innovation. Therefore, it can also contribute toward a transpersonal understanding of the life-world that unites the natural and the artefactual and helps us find our place as human beings in the world, and especially within technological systems.
