From Complexity to Simplicity: Using the language of patterns found in nature to understand systems and build better futures.
The challenge of our age is to navigate our way through a world of multiple interdependent systems and facilitate a transition to a sustainable and truly thriving planetary civilisation.
The key to this challenge is our capacity to deal with complexity. We have created an increasingly large, fast paced and complex world, but our ability to coordinate ourselves effectively withing this complexity, at all levels-from the local to the global-has not kept pace.
PatternDynamics™ is a simple tool that can be learned by anyone to overcome the challenges posed by complex systems–at any scale. Here’s how it works:
- The key to complexity is systems thinking;
- The key to systems thinking is Patterns; and,
- The key to using Patterns is to form them into a language.
What is Pattern Dynamics?
PatternDynamics™ is a language of visual Patterns–a ‘Sustainability Pattern Language’–that will help you understand, communicate and design solutions at the systems level. By learning PatternDynamics™ you will gain a powerful new capacity as a ‘systems thinker’–a skill that is often thought to be unteachable.
With this skill you will learn to create Cultures of Sustainability and to facilitate Deep Sustainability Design: sustainability strategies that help resolve complex challenges at any level of organisation, from the community to the planetary, and in any domain, from business to governance to institutional.
What will I experience in the workshop?
This two day PD Workshop led by Tim Winton will be a dynamic participatory group process based on a simple series of movements that anyone can do. Each movement exemplifies one of the PD Patterns. The workshop combines them into a coordinated group process, allowing participants to embody, discuss and experiment with the organising principles that sustain complex dynamic systems.
The workshop will be delivered in two parts:
- Day One will focus on learning and understanding the PD Patterns
- Day Two will focus on how to apply PatternDynamics™ to organisations – in this instance we’ll be using Collaboratory Melbourne as a case study
What will I leave with?
The workshop gives participants introductory competencies in systems thinking, complex problem solving and the principles of sustainability. It also serves as the first step in learning PatternDynamics™ as a sustainability education and organisational development tool.
More on PatternDynamics™
PatternDynamics™ is a social enterprise, based on an Integral Sustainability Pattern Language. It is dedicated to providing a real and practical tool for creating the consciousness required to form a planetary civilisation and a truly sustainable, thriving global society. See www.patterndynamics.com.au for more details.
PD is a way of learning the principles of sustainability through the patterns of nature in order to communicate about ‘whole systems’ and to facilitate the sustainability of complex organisations at all scales.
We think of PD as a language of human evolution.
Join us for Pattern Dynamics with Tim Winton, Saturday 10 & Sunday 11 November, 9:00 am – 5:30 pm in Melbourne
About Collaboratory Melbourne
Collaboratory Melbourne is a community run social enterprise focused on building the capability of people and organisations in Melbourne to address local social and environmental issues. We run monthly Meetups, offer skillshares and workshops, and facilitate concept development and ideation sessions. You can learn more about Collaboratory Melbourne here, and join us at our next Meetup here.
Tim Winton is founder and director of PatternDynamics™. Tim’s background is in the sustainability sector. Over the last 20 years he has worked in sustainability in various capacities: as a hands-on contractor within the reforestation industry, organic farmer, not-for-profit founder, company director, educator, designer and consultant.
He developed PatternDynamics™ as a method of understanding natural systems and for leveraging those understandings in managing complexity. Translating natural patterns into sustainability tools is his life’s work and overriding passion.
Tim is the trustee of Permaforest Trust, a not for profit sustainability education centre and the principle at Permaforest Pty Ltd, a sustainability design and consulting company. Tim is an independent Integral scholar-practitioner who has published articles in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, as part of the proceedings of Integral Academic Conferences and Practitioner Seminars and as a contributor to the edited volume, Integral Theory in Action: Applied, Theoretical, and Critical Perspectives on the AQAL Model (in press).
He speaks and writes regularly on sustainability topics. Tim holds a BA in English Literature, a Diploma of Permaculture Design and a Certificate 4 in Workplace Training and Assessment. Tim posts on sustainability, systems thinking and organisational complexity at his blog www.thepatternguy.com
