ASC: Dancing with Ambiguity – Bunnell (2015) | Systems Community of Inquiry

P. Bunnell
Published in Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2015
Art

For us humans ambiguity is, I think, a necessary concomitant to complexity. Since we are living systems living systemically, in a complex systemic network of relations, complexity is a given. Thus ambiguity is also a given, though at times we would like to dispose of it or ignore it. In this paper I will approach the topic of ambiguity via some common metaphors, a parable, and through my understanding of biology, language, culture, cybernetics and systems. I began working with simulation models in the late 1960s, using punch cards and one-day batch processing at the University of California Berkeley campus computer center. As the complexity of our computing systems grew, I like many of my colleagues, became enchanted with this new possibility of dealing with complexity. Simulation models enabled us to consider many interrelated variables and to expand our time horizon through projection of the consequences of multiple causal dynamics, that is, we could build systems. Of course, that is exactly what we did, we built systems that represented our understanding, even though we may have thought of them as mirrors of the systems we were distinguishing as such. Like others, I eventually became disenchanted with what I came to regard as a selected concatenation of linear and quasi-linear causal relations. As I continued to discuss systems and eventually teach systems courses, I became acquainted with the work of Donella Meadows; and found myself deeply respectful of her insights and clarity. In particular I liked her paper “Dancing with Systems”2 where she claims “We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!” (Meadows, 2008, p. 170).3 I like the notion of dancing with as it implies both an ongoing coordination with another, or a group, and a coherence with something