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The wild - often dismissed as savage and chaotic by "civilized" thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression - the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings - is the real world, to which we belong.
Gary Snyder1
Cluster: Fundamental Living Systems Patterns
Type: Essential Practice Pattern
Purpose
The Human Systems Pattern maps the complexity of human systems, connects it with our relationship with technology and embeds that complexity within ecosystem limits and planetary boundaries.
Pattern Description
Human systems are fundamentally complex and adaptive, responding to signals from the human, technological and natural environments to create an ever-changing emergent state of culture. All action, whether personal, social, economic or technological create cultures around the action, and those cultures then shape the on-going adaptation of actions as well as the development of new ways of doing things.
Thus the Human Systems Pattern maps the forces at play in human systems, and how they manifest in our domains of practice (such as business, industry, technology) and how they influence our approach to our daily pursuit of livelihood and lifeways in every context of action and agency.
The interacting drivers, contexts and feedback pathways influencing our actions are what creates the continuing emergent impact on our natural systems, including our overshoot of ecosystem limits and planetary boundaries, and demands that we transform our systems towards nature positive pathways of protection, preservation, restoration and regeneration.
Elemental Patterns
Drivers of Change: The world is in continuous state of change, with forces both near and far, with signals both strong and weak, impacting human systems at all scales and domains. In experiencing such forces, human systems adapt to those changes in some way, whether by circumstance or by design, while searching for stability, yet with the possibility of new opportunities for positive change. Such drivers can be a combination of environmental, social, political, economic, technological or capability factors; so understanding and mapping them is crucial for designing a change process if known; if not known, then futures methods may be needed to understand what might emerge in the adjacent future.
Practice Domains: Transformation is not implemented by any one thing or practice: in addition to normal operational tasks there are what I call “practice domains”: these are abstract system patterns that interact across all organizational procedures and processes: ecological; cultural; social; knowledge; technological; livelihoods; and institutional. All these domains are nested within the ecological domain. This Pattern is critical for practitioners because of the implications they have for the approach to practice and the tools and methods being applied. Each domain requires careful thought about how to activate transformation and demands that the sustainability practitioner has an appropriate capability for the domains of practice.
Practice Context: Any field of human endeavour is a field of sustainability practice: economics, governance, engineering, health, science, design, business, education and so on across the Practice Domains.
Sustainability practice often concerns how decisions are made, their contexts, the methods applied, and what emerges from action. Some sustainability practice is situated within narrow boundaries, and generally simple, linear approaches are appropriate: the practice gaps are generally minimal, and can be readily dealt with by a normal professional mind-set.
When practice contexts become complex, such as in working with people, communities, organizations and institutions, when the rules are less certain, or do not exist, or where the practice space is highly contested, the sustainability practice gaps become more evident, and the need for different practice approaches becomes more important. What’s most important, however, is the understanding that all areas of human action happen within ecological systems, and their impacts and multiple-order consequences directly or indirectly impact ecological system health.
Socio-Ecological Interaction: With more pressure from humans , on natural systems than ever before, the scars on the environment indicate the state of our socio-ecological system interactions. All our efforts towards change over the last fifty years have been overtaken by increasing population, economic growth and material demands, with ecological systems under stress and most Planetary Boundaries exceeded. Our social and ecological connections are increasingly disengaged, even though socio-ecological integration is more urgent than ever. Thus inclusion of this Element in the Human Systems Pattern consciously connects to the ethos of the Natural Systems Pattern in this Patterns Cluster.
Socio-Technical Interaction: The key to understanding transformation in human systems is that collectives of interacting people with explicit /implicit and formal/informal rules are actual living systems – this is not an “ecology” metaphor: human systems are alive! Further, we must deeply understand that technology and human culture are intimately linked in dynamic patterns of mutual influence - they are complex and adaptive. This means that as you interact with others (amplified or dampened through mediation with technology) in pursuit of personal and social goals, the system changes in real time as you work with it and often in unpredictable ways.
The ability to restorr and regenerate will be intimately related to technology, even if good holistic and sustainable technical solutions need time to develop and be accepted. Wise technology choice and application in the context of an understanding of living systems is critical for our future survival.
Systems of Learning: This Pattern grounds the concept of systems of learning providing the primary feedback pathway in human systems. An informal approach to learning, on a foundation of developed capacity, applied in meaningful ways, in socially situated real-world actions, at critical intervention points, and with a high level of motivation, is an essential part of the process needed to create a culture of sustainability over deep time. The capacity to reflect while in the process of taking action is critical to establishing a sustained ethos and culture of care.
Emergent Culture: A sustainability culture should emerge through sustainability practice over time through drivers of change towards interaction of the other Elements in this Practice Pattern: systems of learning; systems of socio-technical interaction; systems of socio-nature interaction and human systems feedback.
Culture emerges through engaged participants empowered to make their own meaning of sustainability practice and culture in the parts of the network, organization, institution, community, group or team where they have agency. Engagement should accommodate diverse ways of being and acting, which is particularly important as our development of sustainability culture is an on-going endeavour.
Example Applications
Aligned Practices
Coherent Tools
Knowledge Base
References
Useful Links
Atlas Navigation
Go to the Elemental Patterns within the Human Systems Pattern (under construction):
Drivers of Change - Practice Domains - Practice Context - Socio-Ecological Interaction - Socio-Technical Interaction - Systems of Learning - Emergent Culture
Go to the Natural Systems Pattern within the Fundamental Living Systems Pattern Cluster
Go to the Sustainable Systems Pattern within the Fundamental Living Systems Pattern Cluster
Version
Version 1.1 - 8 May 2025
Snyder, G. (1990). The Practice of the Wild. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.