Beyond Systems Thinking: From Organization to Organizing, the Gerund Mindset
Why
While diving deeper into systems thinking I kept bumping into a nagging void: the charts, loops, and nodes were elegant, yet they somehow left out the felt, lived-in side of change. That gap finally closed when I encountered process-organization ontology and its rich, anti-representational vocabulary—abduction, enactivism, relationality, sense- & meaning-making, narrative, identity, multiplicities, diffraction, dialectic.
These concepts echo what Bergson, Whitehead, and Weick keep telling us: reality is flow, not snapshots. Words, metaphors, and stories are not mirrors but tools we wield in the moment to help new ideas emerge from intra-action (Barad) rather than tidy interaction. Embracing that stance explains why some projects leave me unchanged while others reshape me from the inside out: it all comes down to engagement—being with the situation, not merely talking about it.
In Simple Terms
Think of a system as more than gears in a machine. It is a living conversation—people, ideas, and feelings continuously shaping one another. Traditional diagrams capture the skeleton (structure). Process thinking adds the bloodstream (how information, experience, and meaning actually flow).
The organization dissolves into airy nothing each day and is reconstructed the next through conversations that convert textual traces back into shapes and locations.
It asks:
How are we making sense together—right now, on the ground?
What stories, identities, and emotions travel between the people?
How does deep engagement (sometimes called flow) transform the very people doing the work?
Where do clashing views (dialectic) or overlapping views (multiplicities & diffraction) spark fresh possibilities?
When we swap “aboutness” (standing outside and analyzing) for “withness” (stepping inside and sensing), the system breathes—and so do we.
Theory
A Networked Flow of Concepts
At the heart of all these ideas is essentially a move away from traditional representationalism—the idea that language directly mirrors reality—towards an anti-representationalist approach, where language and meaning are actively shaped through our interactions.
We make sense of our environments through Enactivism, meaning we understand things not merely by observing them but by actively participating in them. Central to this active participation is Abduction, a reasoning process where we encounter surprising situations and creatively explore the best possible explanations. Unlike deduction (where conclusions necessarily follow from known premises) and induction (generalizing from repeated instances), abduction involves dynamic interpretation and continuous adaptation.
This abductive reasoning naturally involves:
Relationality—understanding how events or ideas interconnect and influence each other.
Diffraction—viewing situations from multiple, often contrasting perspectives, allowing hidden insights and new patterns to emerge.
Dialectic—embracing contradictions and tensions between differing viewpoints as opportunities for new understandings.
Multiplicities—recognizing and holding multiple possible interpretations simultaneously, allowing clarity and insights to arise naturally from practice.
Together, these processes generate dynamic, omni-directional sense-making, continually refreshing how we interpret the world around us. The result is Narratives & Identity—stories and roles we continually create and recreate, shaping our ongoing reality.
This shift from static states to continuous action transforms organization (a static noun) into daily organizing (an active verb). I call this continuous, action-oriented way of thinking the Gerund Mindset, a continuous, action-oriented approach that emphasizes processes and ongoing activities rather than fixed or static states. This mindset focuses on verbs—such as "learning," "adapting," and "organizing"—to highlight that systems and organizations are constantly in motion and continually shaped by daily interactions and actions.
What I Think
I generally believe these ideas strongly align with Eastern philosophies, especially Taoism and Zen Buddhism, which emphasize fluidity, continuous becoming, and the interconnectedness of reality. For me, adopting this approach is not merely a professional strategy—it has become a broader approach to life.
Interestingly, our language—particularly English, structured around rigid subject-object distinctions—often limits our thinking. It implies a static world where actions happen to objects rather than a world continuously "verbing." Languages like Chinese and Japanese, which use symbolic rather than phonetic structures, or languages with more fluid grammatical structures like Arabic and Hungarian, raise fascinating questions about how our linguistic frameworks influence cognition and perception.
Moreover, cognitive behavioral psychology highlights how even within linguistic limitations, we can still train ourselves to perceive reality dynamically. However, these explorations will be elaborated upon in future discussions.
