This observation is true of all living organisms and ecological systems, not only people and social situations. We often do not think of the depths of organisms, the processes that sustain them, the relationships that enhance them, the delicacy of their interactive connectedness. The plant and its pollinator, and the ecosystem they sustain and are sustained by, form one whole even as each organism is a whole in its own right. We intervene - often inadvertently - as though organisms were separate and discrete entities, but they are not; their life processes are dynamically interconnected. In our drive to make the world useful to us, we mistake surface edges for true boundaries - where in fact there are myriad mergings taking place - and so, acting on one ‘thing’ or part, we always affect larger wholes. (When we do not intervene with this consciousness of complexity, species start becoming extinct, cows go mad, deserts spread, fish disappear, weather patterns react, water fouls, fowls catch global colds.)

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A conventional response to the dynamism of living process which surrounds and incorporates us is a strange yet not surprising one. Often, we resort to the instrumental thinking which has been so helpful to us in our technical mastery of the inanimate world. We try to simplify. We analyse composite wholes into their component parts, and try to control these parts as separate and distinct entities. We strive to reduce complexity, the better to manage our world. Management is key - the attempt to hold complexity at bay. So we analyse, categorise, divide and package; we regulate input in the belief that we may then predict outcome; we separate cause and effect, and seek linear explanations that may enable us to control effect through regulating cause. We adopt a calculative approach in order best to utilise for our own needs. We reduce to the smallest possible part - so that we may manage. We enter situations with theories and models, with instruments and techniques, with packages and procedures. In reducing the world to our laboratory, we reduce ourselves to technicians. Such a conventional response seeks to control life, not to enhance it.

This is a strange response, because it is, increasingly, so clearly based on false premises. Our world is fragmenting before our very eyes. Reacting; kicking out against our penchant for control, becoming less and less manageable and predictable. Both socially and ecologically. Yet it is not a surprising response because the calculative and reductive stance is what we have come to learn through our mastery of the inanimate world (where we are able to manage, to control, to hold ourselves separate, to ignore accountability). We have not yet developed the thinking that may apprehend living process on its own ground. The depths, the ambiguities, the porousness of living process is beyond us . . . so we search for a certainty that will allow escape from ambiguity. But in this way we reduce our world and ourselves . . . and our futures.

Such reduction eradicates from our vision and understanding perhaps the most important elements of life itself: the intangibles of process, relationship and connection. Life becomes impoverished through our impoverished approach to it. In an ironic reversal, the intractability of the situations we face, the increasing fragmentation and unsustainability of the world we inhabit, is a function of the way we approach it. Our very attempts to reduce in order to manage create the ‘problems’ which then appear to overwhelm us.

On the other hand, complexity tends towards a kind of holistic coherence when we approach it with a different way of seeing, and from a different perspective: if we hold the idea before us that we are not primarily concerned with making the world manageable, but making it more visible; if we develop the ability to see into the depths of things, so that the processes, relationships and connections that form the living skein of social and developmental situations become transparent. So that we gain awareness of a larger reality, rather than reduce complexity to component parts. So that we become able to incorporate ourselves within that reality, rather than hold ourselves falsely apart.

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As practitioners in The Proteus Initiative, our many years of experience in working with social situations have brought us to recognise that mastery of such situations does not rest in the drive to manage them but rather in the drive to render them visible, so that underlying depths, dynamics and relationships become revealed, transparent and understandable. This drive to meaning, to a greater awareness of the initially intangible processes of change, leads in and of itself to a different way of being with respect to particular situations, and this in turn may lead to their - and our - healthy emergence into enhanced futures. As the situations with which we interact become more revealed, so they become more whole - rather than fragmented - and we are changed, and our relationships change. While the situations can never become less complex, they begin, remarkably, to become more coherent, more able to manage themselves, to find their way through chaos, conflict and constraint into reflective development. Connecting with their own inner formative processes, with the inner dynamics which inform their possibilities (and constraints) they become more capable, more robust. They become more of themselves. The key to working with complexity is a new kind of awareness, the ability to grasp living process on its own ground, to understand ourselves as developing and changing processes.

This requires a fluidity of thinking, an acuteness of observation, an accountability for intervention, a transparency of self, a drive towards understanding what lies beneath, what enables emergence and connectedness. An appreciation of, and intimate engagement with, the continuously reforming relationships which flow within and between living organisms.

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To develop such capacity, The Proteus Initiative has schooled itself in the methods, practices and insights of JW von Goethe. Goethe initiated a way of understanding, observing and revealing living process which was both radical and revelatory. Goethe’s approach, which goes by various names - qualitative, holistic, organic, phenomenological - represents a different stance towards the world from that of the calculative or instrumental mindset. Rather than focusing on divided and individual things which bear no intrinsic relationship to each other or to ourselves, it develops faculties and perspectives which are able to see connections, relationships, dynamics, living processes within their own specific and particular contexts. Development of these insights and practice in these methods release faculties and the kind of consciousness which is able to render living process transparent. The dynamics inherent in all living processes thus become more accessible to us; we begin to read and make meaning of the text which lies before us. Developed faculties of attentive observation and schooled imagination become key. For the living world is a text which we can begin to read; we can become literate in a realm which was previously closed to us. As we become more literate – and more whole - we enable divided situations to become more whole, more coherent, less fragmented, less arbitrary, less ‘windswept’, more ‘in tune’ with their contexts, their potential, their creative energies.

There are two essential questions which underlie the Goethean approach, and the essentially interactive nature of that approach. The first helps us to approach phenomena (situations) on their own ground. Not by asking questions like how a particular problem can be solved, or better ways of getting a situation to work for us, but rather to ask the fundamental question: “If the situation were to speak, what would it say?” In other words, in a gesture of deepest respect, to make the situation discernible (and especially, tangible to itself). The second, with respect now not to the situation out there but to the practitioner’s own engagement with it, is to ask (following Craig Holdrege’s - of the Nature Institute - formulation): “How can I make myself into a better, more transparent instrument of knowing?” This not only to pay attention to one’s own capacity, but also to recognise that we are implicate in any situation we work with. We change the world through changing ourselves.

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It is these two questions, taken together, which characterise Goethean practice as a conversation. In any conversation the process itself is integral to its outcome; there can be no pre-formulation - real conversations are open-ended, dependent as much on the dynamics between participants as on the inner dynamics of each participant (which themselves will be in a continuous state of change). As a conversation develops between a social situation and one who intervenes into it, each is transformed through the consciousness of the other.

Approaching social intervention, or any of the helping professions, or ecological considerations, as a conversation between practitioner and situation, demands highly developed faculties of observation, understanding and intervention on the part of the practitioner, and levels of maturity - even wisdom - which can tolerate ambiguity whilst maintaining the rigour of focused intention. As situations are worked with in this way, they themselves will integrate such capacities. These capacities are the promise of a Goethean approach to social phenomena, both for practitioner and situation. They can be learned through their exercise and practice.

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It is with such mutual learning that The Proteus Initiative is concerned. As practitioners working with complex situations, our aim is not to resolve the situation, but rather to learn our way around such situations almost as one learns to negotiate one’s way around a strange city. To become familiar with the manner of their processes, the dynamics of their relationships, their paths of metamorphosis and change. So that we may begin to anticipate, to hold in consciousness, to respond intuitively to shifts and movements and stuck places, to encourage awareness, to derive and build meaning, to foreground the underlying wholeness out of which situations emerge so that fragmentation into unsustainable parts is diminished; to enhance rather than reduce. To read social situations, and in so doing to enable these situations to unfold their inner potential.

The unsustainable and inherent contradictions of our time demand a new leap in consciousness. This may be the promise contained in the unnerving realities we face.