Summary
Living Systems is the name the facilitation team Navigate gives to the ways a group handles its recurring business: how it makes decisions, deals with conflict, shares resources and looks after its people. Navigate, who support groups and social movements, start from a plain definition of a system as “simply behaviour that keeps happening”, whether chosen or inherited, spoken or unspoken. Their aim is ways of working together that don’t reproduce the oppressive dynamics of wider society.
They name seven systems: decision making, conflict engagement, resource flow, information flow, care and support, connection and community, and feedback. These are agreements, but “three-dimensional and dynamic”, more than policies or procedures.
Rationale
Part 1 asks us to stay alive to the dispositions “we are enacting in our approaches, tools, relationships and practice”. Navigate’s systems say where to look: who decides, where resources flow, what happens in conflict.