11 Mar Relishing the Creativity that Surprises Itself
I just received a review of my book The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world that I am sharing. Phillippe Vendenbroeck really completes (in a Vygotskian sense) my thoughts and written words. And the site he posted it on is really good! You can get a feel for it here in the context in which he speaks of The Overweight Brain:
This is the fourth book in a row by a female author that I’m adding to my Systems Library. Undeniably these feminine perspectives are adding something vital and distinctive to the systems discourse and practice.
Jocelyn Chapman digs into the personal lives of systems thinkers and practitioners and dares to put the ‘love’ word in the title of her book on cybernetics.
Judi Marshall lets a very sensitive and experimental approach to ‘living life as inquiry’ unfold against a background of elusive systemic patterns.
Cognitive scientist Hanne De Jaegher puts forward an enactive perspective on the way we develop knowledge. Our mind does not function as a biological computer. Knowledge emerges from a fluid process of participatory sense-making that not only involves our brains but all of our body-mind in contact with fellow human beings and all the other entities and artifacts that make up our world.
These three positions reflect a humble stance in the face of complexity. They shirk the privileging of rational intellect. Instead they foreground the inevitably bewildering experience of living in a complex world, and an ethos of kindness and empathetic risk-taking that helps us to grow.
The work of Lois Holzman fits seamlessly with this stance. She was trained as a psychologist, and, in collaboration with her mentor and friend Fred Newman, developed an innovative form of social therapy. Holzman continues to operate from her professional base at the East Side Institute in New York, which she co-founded. She has published prolifically, most often in a rather academic mould. In her latest book she offers a potentially wider readership access to her ideas. The language is non-technical and the tone of voice is very personal, inviting the reader into the warp and weft of Holzman’s own lived life.
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