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Meeting of the Waters:
At the Relating Systems Thinking and Design conference

meeting of the waters

Abbie VanMeter and Sergej van Middendorp, together with colleagues George Fedha, Laurence Habib, Dewi Hartkamp, Flavio Mesquita da Silva, and Fred Steier, presented a paper and facilitated a workshop at the 13th Relating Systems Thinking and Design conference in Oslo, Norway. Our paper, to be published in the conference proceedings in 2025, continues the work to make sense of collaborative support networks (Van Middendorp et al., 2021), now in the context of the polycrisis. The term polycrisis was first described by Morin and Kern (1999) as the “complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the planet” (p. 74), and more recently by Lawrence et al. (2024) as “the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects” (p. 2).

The conference theme this year was Rivers of Conversation. We suggested the metaphor of the Meeting of the Waters in Brazil, where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimoes meet and flow together for several miles before forming the Amazon river, as one way to address the question: how do we design for collaborative support networking that affords the co-creation of regenerative, sustainable, and just futures in the face of the polycrisis? And how can we relate across the cases that we are engaged with in each of our (work)lives in a way that affords such collaborative support networking to emerge?

In the World Café that we facilitated in Oslo, together with 30 participants, we shared our metaphors for the polycrisis and how we see ways to engage with this overwhelming phenomenon. We also reflected on how emergent collaborative support networking among ourselves engaged in the World Café could help support connections between diverse initiatives and communities in prevention, mitigation, and adaptation. We know that each individual relationship in such networking needs levels of depth that fit with, and are reflexive of, the regenerative, sustainable, and just outcomes that we are trying to achieve. We are also curious to continue learning how to keep designing for this paradox of scale and depth. Strikingly, the effects of the polycrisis are showing up in the lives of those in our own team and in those who we met at the conference. The actual rivers in our co-author Flavio’s country Brazil are now dry, threatening the livelihoods of the many communities and ecosystems that rely on their water. Fred could only just make it out of the Tampa area, having been caught between two hurricanes. We met many people at the conference with stories of how they are being directly affected in their lives.

The conference itself brought a diverse community with equally diverse perspectives together virtually in and near the physical space of the Architecture and Design School in Oslo. Daily walks and talks to and from the conference location in the beautiful Norwegian city enlivened the experience and built both new and deeper relationships in our team and between each of us and the conference participants. As a team we shared a house, instead of staying at a hotel. This provided us with many conversations in the kitchen and added to the depth and the length of conversations that helped us further develop our learning and ideas. By bringing in our work in CMM as part of these conversations and into the conference, we hope to continue strengthening the relationships in the spirit of trans-disciplinarity.

Now that the conference is over, we will polish our paper for publication and explore the possibility of editing a special issue for the World Futures Journal about Collaborative Support Networking.

Van Middendorp, S., Habib, L., Hartkamp, A. D., Mesquita da Silva, F., & Steier, F. (2021). Collaborative support networks for sustainability leadership. In Leadership in Sustainability: Perspectives on Research, Policy, and Practice(pp. 290–316). Fielding University Press.

Morin, E., & Kern, A. B. (1999). Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium. Hampton Press.

Lawrence, M., Homer-Dixon, T., Janzwood, S., Rockstöm, J., Renn, O., & Donges, J. F. (2024). Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability, 7(e6), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1

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