Sense-making in Uncertain Times

If it wasn’t already obvious - COVID, the recent bushfire crisis, climate change - are all revealing how our own wellbeing is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of others and the planet.

This session offers innovators and entrepreneurs, trail blazers, change makers, mavericks and all those who care about our wellbeing and the planet, a space to perceive these interconnected and complex challenges in new ways.  

These crises are showing up social divides, racism and privilege; inviting us to look more closely at our ways of relating to each other and how the most vulnerable are cared for.

How can we sharpen our perception of these inextricable links, this systemic interdependence, and the relationships between the many contexts – health, education, economy, family, ecology, culture, identity and many others - that are in flux right now?

What will shape our response to this moment? What awareness, assumptions, beliefs and perceptions will we bring, as we find a way forward together?  

Join us for an exploration to help us to better perceive and make sense of the complex times we are in.

We’ll be exploring what is going on through multiple contexts with a simple but profound process - People Need People Online – a virtual Warm Data session.

We’ll be relating in a new way to what we are noticing, a way that makes a difference. We are no longer striving to see and make change; we are in it. The old normalcy is not something to go back to, because it’s what got us here.

Now is a time to learn together, to tend to the relational soil and cultivate its vitality, creating the conditions for new responses to emerge. Responses that are born and grow from a rich and complex relational space.  

The warm data process familiarizes groups of people with the ways in which the contexts of their lives marinate and overlap into each other and it offers an introduction to the complexity of their own lives, so that they may better see the complexity of others. Through this discovery people begin to see how vital it is to tend to their families, communities and the land, and they are able to respond to emergencies with warmth…

Our well-being and that of our planet is possible only if we permit ourselves to perceive and embrace the rich expressions of who we are as living human communities and to find a way, in relationship. This will require warmth and rigorous attention to relational integrity above the anxiety to control.

Nora Bateson, President, International Bateson Institute, and Mamphela Ramphele in Finding a Way