“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”

(Michael Shermer)

Bob’s gun shop shouted out at me as I walked on a Sunday morning; its striking geometries demanding attention.

Even on such a cold, blue-skied day, I shouldn’t hang around in this part of town, they said, but I’m drawn to confusion and juxtaposition as though both were magnetic.

My tendency to walk towards curiosity can get me into trouble but, regardless, I stopped to talk to a couple of skinny, tanned, heavily tattooed guys fixing a truck motor by the side of the road. They enjoyed my accent and, laughing at me, said again, that I should be careful wandering in this part of town. We joked for a while and I left them, carrying on their work in T-shirts as I pulled the zip of my padded jacket to my neck and wandered a little more.

The complete gun shop evidently flags a border where action, place, identity and presence are reinterpreted. The liminal space where patterns change.

We have a primal, hard-wired capacity to perceive pattern. Even if, these days, the disorientation of rapid change leaves us struggling to understand their overt meaning.

But we still feel it in our bones.

The shift in complex social signals as I crossed into the ‘wrong side’ of town was evident; and, when I walk through an organisation, a similarly nuanced, complex signals reveal the ‘culture’ that I feel even beyond the funky design of buildings or liberally scattered bean bags.

The quality of our enduring relationships exists in micro signals.

So, as we continue our search towards a new normal, I know that we are already experiencing it. It rests, implicate, enfolded, in all that we are already doing.

Our challenge is to look keenly, listen carefully, for an emergent world. Our work is to sense into the hidden connections and fragile patterns, and engage gently in liminal spaces as we frame a future together which reflects our best intention and purpose. All too soon, delicate conversations harden and structures, both social and physical, find their form. By which time, our care or negligence becomes visible as the potential for transformation fades.

I’m still fascinated by the bold clarity and demand of the gun shop patterns.

And I know that the patterns that demand our attention now are much less clear.

Notes:

In ‘The Hidden Connections,’ Fritjof Capra makes the case for two different kinds of leadership; the ability to hold a clear vision and serve as a standard for others embody or, another kind, which facilitates the emergence of novelty, creating conditions rather than giving directions; using the power of authority to empower others and, as people connect to each other, amplify the helpful feedback.

Rather than looking for analytic solutions that depend on the silo’d thinking of division, Gregory Bateson famously asked, "What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?” His integrative, whole, connected view of life is subtle and complex, often difficult to grasp, but ‘Steps to an Ecology of Mind’ is a comprehensive ‘starter’ that probes his thinking.

David Bohm tells us that the best way to explore the implicate order might be through art and dialogue, both of which point towards “new modes of perception, through the senses, and new forms of imagination.” Some time with his ‘On Creativity’ will be well spent.

Pattern