How to deal with altitude sickness in systems thinking
We often talk about “altitude sickness” in our work at Regen Melbourne, and for good reason – it’s complex! Sometimes though, the framing of altitude sickness has its limits (in the logical, vertical layering it implies). Here, Nicole Barling-Luke explores a reframing of this feeling, and asks: what if we started thinking about the jolt we receive when we’re overwhelmed with complexity as an invitation for seduction instead?
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Scene: dinner time, Stockholm, 2024.
A group of people are sitting around a square table, all experiencing varying degrees of tiredness, hunger and cognitive fatigue after a whirlwind few days of touring Scandinavia on an Impact Safari. We know a special guest is coming to dinner, but who? Do we really have room for one more conversation about ‘impact’ right now?
The door creaks open, heads go up – is it the waiter with more bread? No, it’s the radiant, smiling face of Pella Thiel. Immediately, for alchemically immeasurable reasons, the whole room starts laughing and drops into a new layer of focus and camaraderie.
As the conversation and hearty meal progresses over the next few hours, I’m mentally clocking “different scales of intervention” in what Pella is sharing about her work. Between the hyper-local ‘planting potatoes’ (literally), the regional work with the creation of an Embassy for the Baltic Ocean and the international work in lobbying to establish ecocide as an international crime.
And yet thinking of this work in ‘layers’ is a disservice to the full bodied integration Pella lives and breathes in her work.
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Altitude sickness
Altitude sickness is the result of gaining height/altitude too rapidly in such a way that doesn’t allow the body enough time to respond to the changes in environment (reduced oxygen and air pressure). The daily context in which we, at Regen Melbourne, use this term has nothing to do with mountains or physical altitude, it’s the conceptual leaps between scale and the ‘closeness’ or ‘distance’ with which you’re looking at any given situation from.
Chances are, if you’re working in any complex environment you might have felt it – the feeling you get when there’s a conversation that moves between systemic challenges and tangible manifestations of said challenges in such a way that leaves you feeling overwhelmed at where to begin.
At Regen Melbourne our conversations are full of this – we actively take a systems approach to all our work after all! For example in Regen Streets, Nina has unearthed that a barrier to reducing car speeds around schools (in order to encourage active transport and safety) is that the training for local traffic management takes five full working days, which makes it challenging for time-poor parents and volunteers. While the rule stems from a place of public safety, it’s a significant inhibitor to operationalising community-led responses and is a prime example of the risk-averse approach embedded across the ‘manage and control’ public service incentives structure, which over prioritises public health risk at the expense of adaptability and responsiveness.
While ‘altitude sickness’ is an invaluable shorthand to explain the paralysis that comes with too much untethered zooming in and zooming out, I’ve recently been considering the limitations of that framing.
When the altitudes frame is helpful:
There’s no doubt that creating artefacts to help us navigate the different ‘scales’ and ‘layers’ of the work we are doing and observing is necessary in order to:
help orient ourselves and our team to design the right type of action;
help share with others what it is we see and have a productive conversation about whether that is also what they see;
stay focused on where we can influence more intractable forces that might enable more types of experimentation;
see the right resolution of patterns.
And in our work we’ve created a series of ‘viewfinders’ or ‘artefacts’ that we use to navigate altitudes – and avoid the sickness:
RM’s impact model: this is the mental model that lives rent free in our head when we talk about what RM does - it’s the most ‘zoomed out’ image we hold of what the organisation is here to do. It helps us see the relationship between four key elements: an alliance of organisations, a bold goal (as described by the City Portrait), an ambitious portfolio of projects that create pathways towards this goal and a Systems Lab designed to shift the enabling conditions that will accelerate our movement towards the goal.
RM’s strategy (as a periodic table): this helps us see the wholeness of the moving parts at play in the organisation.
Project architecture: this is one version of how we see the essential ingredients of what makes up a wildly ambitious project. It is a version of the picture the Lead Convenors hold in their head of their responsibility areas as system orchestrators. In this case it is a view of the Swimmable Birrarung project that makes static the fields of action at play, the collaborators we’re working with, the ‘above the ground’ projects and the governance wrap-around - all in service to the goal of making the Birrarung/Yarra river swimmable from source to sea.
Shared visions: We have a vision that was developed in the foundational research that helps us see what a regenerative Melbourne actually means (rather than simply saying the green space inside the doughnut…). We also have visions for the wildly ambitious projects. And this has multiple altitudes also - for example in Regen Streets there is (1) a vision for a wave of regenerative streets across Greater Melbourne, alongside (2) a multitude of visions created by each individual street by the people that live, work and play there.
The City Portrait: This shows us a Greater Melbourne scale view of how we are progressing towards a safe and just space, a space where we are living in balance between people and planet. Within the digital platform there are multiple altitudes at play, the portrait itself, which is made up of the wedges of the social foundation (eg food, energy, education) and the ecological boundaries (eg biodiversity loss, climate change), and within the wedges there are a variety of indicators that measure different scales of progress.
All these artefacts help us conceptualise the work, provide a provocation to learn about the work, invite collaborators into the work and tether a growing team towards action. And taken all together can be pretty nausea inducing if you’re not having a good day… hence the altitude sickness.
The limitations of an altitude sickness frame:
Altitude sickness - the rapid changing of a (conceptual) environment that leaves you feeling woozy is part and parcel of trying to exert force and transformation in complex, dynamic places… places like cities.
And yet there is a limit to what is implied in altitude sickness – it implies you are gaining altitude in a linear ‘up and down’ way. That there is a controllable way in which you come ‘close to a problem’ and move away to see the ‘systems view’ – but it’s all the systems view! Because in reality, anyone grappling with systems is flinging all over the shop across multiple dimensions that don’t map up or down.
At times it is absolutely necessary to mark your place so that we can all orient ourselves in proximity to other actors and the right ‘size’ of the challenge.
And there are times that too much view finding, too much marking territory on a scale that implies measurable height and is somewhat mechanistic doesn’t serve us.
In these latter times, when orientation needs something else, what can we turn to?
Altitude sickness or altitude seduction?
We can turn to Pella Thiel. A more joyful person I have not met. Over two raucous dinners we travelled between potatoes and the international criminal court and the role of seduction. Being in the presence of someone who embodies the complexity of the world and delights in that posture, is well … seducing.
You might know someone similar? Someone who can gracefully elucidate the relationship between the price of chocolate and our global supply chains. Maybe it’s someone who has a natural inclination to be curious and delighted by messy work, maybe it’s the person you turn to when there’s too many altitudes and scales at play and you know they’ll find a way to help you create a shape that is grabbable so you can act and then find out what the next shape of action should be.
The work ahead won’t stop inducing altitude sickness, and at times when the zooming in and zooming out isn’t serving clarity we can all perhaps pause and think of Pella and ask: what would it look like in this moment to instead be enticed by the complexity?
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