Sue Borchardt - Stumbling on Complexity
Stumbling on Complexity: Reflections of a (slow) Learner and Creative
Description:
In this session, Sue Borchardt will share a couple of her animated short videos, a few of her favorite articulations of complexity concepts, and take us on a tour of some of the complexity informed theories, models, frameworks, insights, and tools that have taken up residence in her repertoire. If there’s time and interest, we could map a bit of our collective landscape of complexity ideas & insights in real-time.
Sue's Bio:
Sue Borchardt stumbled on complexity after her staunch belief in an entirely ordered and sensible world disintegrated amidst incontrovertible evidence that most of it was a delusion. After making friends with nuance and paradox she stumbled on complexity, specifically the scientific descriptions of complex adaptive systems she found in neuroscience, biology, philosophy, and evolutionary theory. Decades on, the concepts offered by complexity sciences – concepts like circular causality, emergence, and dynamic stability -- still seem to offer a better fit with “reality” than those that got her through those first few decades (albeit with much unnecessary suffering!).
Curiosity eventually led her back to grad school at which point she got an upgrade from dilettante to generalist by earning a Masters degree from Harvard, studying learning & development in individuals & groups. She stayed on at the Learning Innovations Lab (LILA) at Harvard for seven-ish years, first as a research assistant and later making animated short videos to capture the insights and puzzles emerging from LILA’s community of learning professionals. Her time at LILA was like being a kid in a candy store, with visiting faculty sharing a rich array of theories, research findings, models, and frameworks (including cynefin).
Currently, Sue is a research artist who thinks a lot about how to foster/invent more humane and reflective practices in business, community, non-profits, and government. Her work weaves ideas, story-telling, art, and first-person experience into animated videos and visual artifacts that put sensemaking/sense-making into service. In addition to a Masters in Human Development and Psychology, she holds a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. In between her academic stints she spent 15 years as a software engineer, developing rapid prototypes for the US Navy and the Human Genome Project. Before it all, she was (and continues to be) an artist.
You can find many of her videos on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/researchartist
Description:
In this session, Sue Borchardt will share a couple of her animated short videos, a few of her favorite articulations of complexity concepts, and take us on a tour of some of the complexity informed theories, models, frameworks, insights, and tools that have taken up residence in her repertoire. If there’s time and interest, we could map a bit of our collective landscape of complexity ideas & insights in real-time.
Sue's Bio:
Sue Borchardt stumbled on complexity after her staunch belief in an entirely ordered and sensible world disintegrated amidst incontrovertible evidence that most of it was a delusion. After making friends with nuance and paradox she stumbled on complexity, specifically the scientific descriptions of complex adaptive systems she found in neuroscience, biology, philosophy, and evolutionary theory. Decades on, the concepts offered by complexity sciences – concepts like circular causality, emergence, and dynamic stability -- still seem to offer a better fit with “reality” than those that got her through those first few decades (albeit with much unnecessary suffering!).
Curiosity eventually led her back to grad school at which point she got an upgrade from dilettante to generalist by earning a Masters degree from Harvard, studying learning & development in individuals & groups. She stayed on at the Learning Innovations Lab (LILA) at Harvard for seven-ish years, first as a research assistant and later making animated short videos to capture the insights and puzzles emerging from LILA’s community of learning professionals. Her time at LILA was like being a kid in a candy store, with visiting faculty sharing a rich array of theories, research findings, models, and frameworks (including cynefin).
Currently, Sue is a research artist who thinks a lot about how to foster/invent more humane and reflective practices in business, community, non-profits, and government. Her work weaves ideas, story-telling, art, and first-person experience into animated videos and visual artifacts that put sensemaking/sense-making into service. In addition to a Masters in Human Development and Psychology, she holds a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. In between her academic stints she spent 15 years as a software engineer, developing rapid prototypes for the US Navy and the Human Genome Project. Before it all, she was (and continues to be) an artist.
You can find many of her videos on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/researchartist
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