Bateson's own methodology was eclectic especially in his anthropological work. What is it that particularly appeals to you about his thinking and why? Bateson can be seen as one source of  "strategy without design" thinking so maybe an improvised and responsive methodology is implied...

Dear Stephen,

Thankyou for replying - I take your point about improvisation and responsiveness and am interested to know something more about what you mean when you say 'strategy without design'? I am drawn to Bateson's work on systems, patterns, connections and mind - and draw on his ideas when I work with people in the organisation I work within.  An attention to ecology and circularity seems important. 

I was hoping someone might already have done the work of organising Bateson's multiple threads of interest and inquiry into a way of working into systems.  I have a growing understanding of some of the component parts - its that quest to integrate and synthesis into a whole (or as much of a whole as can be shaped) that fascinates me - perhaps this is too tight and needs to loosen up a bit?

Regards,

Gareth

Strategy without Design: the silent efficacy of implicit action (2009) Robert Chia and Robin Holt is an exercise in staying loose and letting things happen very much in the spirit of process that animated Bateson whose system thinking was pretty organic. Worth a read.

As Bateson himself pointed out, 'In the nature of the case, the explorer cannot know what he is exploring until it has been explored.' (Bateson, 1972, p.xvi).

Bearing this in mind, I developed a methodology based on logical typing for my PhD, analysing Stanislavsky's actor training as found in his fictional training texts using a Batesonian approach. It was very difficult indeed, took ages and I would definitely do it again. The crucial principle was to allow the results to emerge from the material itself, rather than imposing categories or expectations. It involved scanning the material again and again, at increasing levels of specificity, making tables and diagrams of anything and everything until structural patterns emerged. And they did. My results were unlike anything that has been found before, and revealed the unconscious model of experience underlying Stanislavsky's work as well as his strategy for using them for the purpose of acting.

At each stage I was able to discover the redundancies in any previously emergent category selections, and any mistakes I made along the way turned out - every time - to be category errors. It was frustrating, exciting and very time consuming indeed, but I sustained momentum by being playful and curious. I used colour and layout to bring out consistencies - and inconsistencies, some of which turned out to be the most important aspects of the work. You can read about the process in excruciating details in my PhD which is available on the Goldsmith's website. 

If you are still pursuing this thread, I will share that I am too. I've got a more directed approach than the ones above. I'm wallowing right now among the swells of context/content and logical types as information sets, the hierarchy of information implicit in a bureaucratic hierarchy, the place of that hierarchy in any given organization alongside the other components of a given office's context for determining work, the informational aspects of routines and how flexible they can be under (a) normal conditions when they form fractal patterns and (b) under stress when the organization's context or environment is changing - or a demand such as climate change requires a change in the context of all contexts.

What have you come across since you wrote this inquiry 3 years ago? And are you still pursuing this?

Jim Newcomer, Ph.D.