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As observing beings, we learn what we learn by interacting
with our environment: the spaces, objects, processes and others-who-are-also-observing
all around us. Construing these interactions as "conversations",
whether with our friends or our pet fish, is highly useful in
both metaphorical and formal ways.

Metaphorically speaking, we "converse" with everything
in our environment. We "offer our views" as we act,
re-act and think. The environment "speaks to us" in
the sense that we interpret it. We respond to what we hear and
see and feel, in an exchange that has the structure of a dialogue
in language.

More formally, the term "conversation" was used
by Gordon Pask and others in the body of work called Conversation
Theory, which formalizes concepts such as agreement, understanding,
and consciousness. Each of these concepts (as well as the concept
"concept") exists in relation to conversation.

For us to understand each other, there are minimum requirements.
We may both utter the word "cup" or "happiness"
or "cybernetics", but, what is required for each of
us to know we agree on the meaning? A conversation, surely. You
explicate how a cup is used, and what it is for. I hear your
views, re-compute your perspectives, and come as close as I can
get to your meaning of "cup." But is your meaning (or,
to say it more carefully, my view of your meaning) consistent
with my own, pre-existing view? Are there conflicts? And that
is only the half of it. After I exteriorize _my_ view of why
a cup is what it is and how it is used, does your view of my
view of a cup resonate (and not conflict) with your original
view? In summary, if we resonate together in our views of "cup",
then (as named by Conversation Theory) we have "agreement
over an understanding" - in both metaphorical and formal
terms.

This perspective is consonant with Maturana's concept of language
as "consensual coordination of consensual coordination of
actions." It is in language, and via conversation, that
we live together. In that living, and through agreement, we share
perspectives and merge into fractal communities of relations,
friends, clubs, schools of thought and entire cultures. Insofar
as we share our similarities and (for a moment) ignore our differences,
we merge with other participants in conversation and lose our
individuality in exchange for "becoming one with others",
at least in the cognitive domain.

This shared awareness, or consciousness, is an outcome of
conversation. It is a state that persists beyond the individual.
According to Pask, consciousness is conserved in the same strict
scientific sense that matter and energy are conserved in the
transformations of physics. And, much as Heisenberg uncertainty
informs us about the physical realm, Conversation Theory speaks
of how certain we can be of what we know about each other.

The world of finance is a multidimensional system. In most dimensions, it works like the bread market, i.e. with negative feedback mechanisms. But in two important dimensions it does not. Market forces do not stabilise:



• The general price level under present monetary arrangements, nor
• The overall level of leverage in the financial system.
• The price level must be stabilised by monetary policy.
• Leverage needs to be constrained by regulation.

The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world

by C. F. Kurtz and D. J. Snowden