Confluence: The Book

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Story colored glasses: Confluence: The Book

Thursday, May 20, 2021

It’s done. The new book is ready for you to read. It has an Amazon page with print and Kindle versions, plus a web site (at cfkurtz.com/confluence) with downloadable exercise materials. You should also be able to order the book at your local book store (ISBN: 978-0-9913694-1-6).
Confluence is about the ways in which organized plans (like roads) and self-organized patterns (like traffic) intermingle and interact in our lives, families, communities, and organizations. It’s about complexity, but it’s not just about complexity. It’s about how the structures and procedures we design and the spontaneous patterns that emerge as we interact co-occur, intersect, and press on each other.
The book revolves around the use of seven “thinking spaces,” blank canvases you can use to explore organization and self-organization in situations and from perspectives that matter to you. Each space explores a different aspect of confluence. A group exercise helps you use the spaces to make sense of things together. (You can read some of the book by clicking “Look Inside” on the Amazon page.)

Aside from the first chapter (which introduces the book) and the third chapter (which explains the group exercise), most of the book uses the seven thinking spaces to explore a variety of situations, from ghost towns to factories to folk tales to mirages. I wrote these explorations for two reasons. First, I wrote them to use the spaces in front of you, so you can see how you can use the spaces yourself. And second, I wrote the examples to help you practiceusing the spaces as you read and think about my explorations.