Dates:
Module 1 10-12 December 2018
10 Dec 7pm-9:30pm
11 Dec 10am-1pm & 2pm-5pm
12 Dec 10am-1pm & 2pm-5pm
Module 2 8-10 February 2019
8 Feb 7pm-9:30pm
9 Feb 10am-1pm & 2pm-5pm
10 Feb 10am-1pm & 2pm-5pm
Venue:
October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL View Map
Price:
SEK(Swedish Kroner) 14,000 includes refreshments but not lunches
Booking:
To book please email your invoicing address to info@thebeyondpartnership.co.uk. You will receive an invoice from Nora Bateson payable by international bank transfer.
Places are limited to 25.
Any questions? Please contact Paul King paul@thebeyondpartnership.co.uk
“Nora has the ability to hold the attention of groups with her deep-rooted insights into the way our natural world works. Her seminars are enlightening, highly enjoyable and challenging, and having attended, you may well come away reflecting on your own personal worldview.”
Nora’s work asks the question “How can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?” An international lecturer, researcher and writer, Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity. She is President and founder of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden.
For the past couple of hundred years, we have been enticed into seeing the world through mechanistic metaphors which include the delusions of individuality and control, and the Cartesian view that the world can be divided into parts. The Warm Data Lab, which Nora Bateson has introduced to the world, is a grounded approach that enables us to experience how everything, including our institutions, concepts, thoughts and interactions, is interdependent and interrelated. The Warm Data exists in the space in between concepts and people. It enables groups to work with their complex challenges by perceiving the multiple perspectives that inevitably exist.”
Eric Lynn -CultureQ’s
This training offers certification by Nora Bateson and the International Bateson Institute to host Warm Data Labs with groups internationally.
The Warm Data Lab process is an inviting and seemingly simple way to bring a group of people into dialogue around complex issues. Anyone, of any age or profession can participate in a Warm Data Lab. From school children to executives, families and companies. The Warm Data lab is an open forum of learning, discussion and discovery. It is not based on prior knowledge, or skill, but will increase both in an atmosphere of mutual learning.
Hosting a Warm Data Lab is another story. The host of a Warm Data Lab must have a strong base in the many theoretical foundations that underpin the process. An effective Warm Data Lab experience requires a prepared and organised host. In contrast to the appearance of the simple openness of the Warm Data Lab, the rigour in which the group is held is critical.
A good Warm Data Lab is an artful balance of both holding open the group’s horizon of learning, and generating conditions for a rigorous and multi faceted discovery to take place. The magic of the process is in the participants’ own connection and learning, which cannot be forced or funnelled into any particular “knowing”, but must instead be invited to make new associations, linkages and perceptions – as individuals in mutual learning.
Once you have completed the course of training you will be certified by the International Bateson Institute to host groups who are interested in using Warm Data to facilitate their work on complex issues. You will not however be certified to train others in becoming Warm Data lab hosts.
Most people who are interested in the training and certification session will have likely already been participants in a Warm Data Lab and discovered for themselves how the process facilitates their working practice. For those who have not personally been a part of a Warm Data group, here is a brief description:
Developed by Nora Bateson over the last 6 years the Warm Data Lab process is an exercise for use with groups who are interested in strengthening and further practicing their collective ability to perceive, discuss and research complex issues. By shifting perspectives, the Warm Data Lab process increases ability to respond to difficult or “wicked” issues. Because so many of the challenges that we face now are complex, we need approaches to meeting that complexity. Although there is a desire to reframe these complex issues in simple terms that might lend themselves to easy solutions, this usually leads to the dangers of unintended consequences of reductionism and further problems.
Thinking in complexity requires the ability to perceive across multiple perspectives and contexts. This is not a muscle that has been trained into us in school or in the work world. It is a skill acutely needed in this era to meet our personal, professional and collective need to respond to crisis, and to improve our lives.
The Warm Data lab is a living kaleidoscope of conversation in which information and formulation of cross contextual knowing is generated. The conversational process is designed to seamlessly engage multiple theoretical principals in a practical format. The process relies on using two concepts: Transcontextual Interaction, and Symmathesy.
Transcontextual interaction is the recognition that complex systems do not exist in single contexts but rather are formed between multiple contexts that overlap in living communication.
Symmathesy: The ways in which systemic interdependency form is through contextual interaction and mutual learning. Symmathesy is the concept of mutual learning that encourages us to concentrate on how these contextual interactions inform one another, and generate learning.
More than 100 Warm Data Labs have been held internationally covering many contexts;
1. A sound understanding of the structure, timing and form of the Warm Data Lab Process. This includes trouble shooting guidelines of “whatnot to do.”
2. Practice setting up, hosting and holding the group through the process.
a. Prep: How to set up the questions and contexts
b. Process : How to support the group during the Lab
c. What next? After the session, how to hold the discussion ofpractical application.
d. Follow up. We have a growing group now of Warm Data Lab practitioners that meet to discuss and explore further learning in this emerging field.
3. A firm grasp of the theory involved. There are several theories at work within this process. Some of them are listed in category form below. All of the theory below threads through the concept and usage of abductive process within Warm Data Labs.
1. Patterns that connect (Bateson)
2. Bertrand Russell’s Logical Levels
3. Difference that makes a difference (Bateson)
4. Multiple description (Bateson)
5. Mutual learning and calibration (Symmathesy)
6. Iterative multi-modal learning (Symmathesy)
7. Autopoeisis (Varella and Maturana)
8. Mind (G. Bateson)
9. Systems and Complexity Theory (Multiple theorists)
10. Ecology of communication (Bateson & others)
11. Double Bind (Bateson)
12. Conscious Purpose (Bateson)
13. Epistemological frames
14. Change in complex systems (Meadows)
15. Interdependency
“Biology, culture, and society are dependent at all levels upon the vitality of interaction they produce both internally and externally. A body, a family, a forest or a city can each be described as a buzzing hive of communication between and within its living, interacting ‘parts.’ Together the organs of your body allow you to make sense of the world around you. A jungle can be understood best as a conversation among its flora and fauna, including the insects, the fungi of decay, and contact with humanity. Interaction is what creates and vitalizes the integrity of the living world. Over time, the ongoing survival of the organisms in their environments requires that there be learning, and learning to learn, together. Gregory Bateson said, “The evolution is in the context.” So why don’t we have a word for those bodies, families, forests and other buzzing hives of communication—and for the mutual learning that takes place within those living contexts?”
– From Symmathesy, a word in progress Nora Bateson 2016
