On Causality

My brake from writing ended up to be longer than intended. As I’m going through quite a transformation in my life, both personally and professionally, it has been difficult to find some time to sit down and write. I also have less time to ruminate and hence fewer topics to write about … But let me stop finding excuses and jump into today’s email. Just so much: I’m not sure I can keep up the weekly rhythm with my emails at the moment.

One topic I have been thinking about recently is causality – actually I have been thinking about it on and off for many years, but it feels like recently I have had a significant insight. And as it is with every insight, it feels so obvious now with hindsight that I am almost embarrassed to say that, while I have been aware of the idea on an intellectual level for a while, I have only really internalised its significance now.

Photos from my glacier trek

I spent the last few days trekking on the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland, from the Jungfraujoch via the Konkordiaplatz to the Fiescher Alp. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience – it was my first glacier trekking experience although I have hiked a lot in the alps before.

So there are no deep musings or intellectual explorations happening this week. I’m just going to share some photos for you to enjoy. Also, I will be off for the next two weeks, exploring Scotland. So probably no emails, unless I’m struck by a particularly share-worthy insight.

The premises we re-enact

I had quite a few responses to my email last week and I want to pick up and respond to one in particular. Chris Corrigan has written a whole blog post in response and suggested to start a conversation. I want to take him up on this. So in order to follow the conversation it makes sense to first read Chris’s post and then come back here to read my response to it. I will also copy my response into his comment section (I don’t have a comment section, Chris, as this is a newsletter, not a blog!)

First I just want to say that I was a little bemused when he identified my reflections as similar to the patterns of people who are new to complexity work. After all, I have been studying systems and complexity for the better part of 20 years now. But giving it some further thought, I indeed know that there is still so much I don’t know. So, I take it and gladly see myself as a beginner.

Taking a stance

We can always question ourselves and ask if we are really sure enough about the validity of what we think. This can be paralysing. I have been there and still often find myself there. But what I also realised is that sometimes I need to pause questioning and take a stance to enable myself to take a step.

Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature of being human we will never reach a place of ‘pure’ unbiased understanding. So we need to strike a balance between self-critical reflection and believing that we found some ground that is solid enough to step on and move forward.

Sensing Change continued

I asked in my last weekly email and on social media how we know that living systems (societies, organisations, ecosystems) are changing on a level that Dana Meadows called ‘paradigm’ (Meadows 1999) and Gregory Bateson called ‘attitude’ (Bateson 1966). I received a quite a few interesting responses.

One thing that is clear is that in order to find some sort of answer to the question, we first need to find the right framing. We need to get some clarity about some terms. For example ‘know’ or ‘change’ or ‘effect’. Also we somehow need to decide what we mean when we say something is becoming ‘better’. The two aspects of ‘knowing’ and ‘change’ are linked through the idea of learning.

Sensing change

Last week I posted the following questions on LinkedIn and Twitter:

How can we know that living systems (societies, organisations, ecosystems) are changing on a level that Dana Meadows called ‘paradigm’ and Gregory Bateson called ‘attitude’? And how can we determine if they change to the ‘better’ or the ‘worse’ (whatever these words may mean)? 

On the outsider

I just spent some time in Georgia, talking with people in two municipalities to initiate a pilot Local Economic Development (LED) process. My colleagues and I have worked the last 16 months with organisations in Georgia to better understand how LED can be improved in the country. One activity that has come out of that deliberation is to run a pilot on municipal level.

So here we are, coming in as the outside ‘experts’, which is unfortunately often how we are perceived. But what is the value of external people like me coming into a system like a city and work with the local people like the local government, business representatives or associations?

On intentionality, continued

I got good feedback on my email last week about intention so I decided to stick with the topic for this week. Of course my friend Bhav is correct when he responded with “No, everything we do is systemic, whether with intention or not!!!” Everything we do has consequences in the system. Even the smallest stone that falls into the water creates ripples. And everything is connected to everything else. I guess when I said that “Everything we do with intention is not systemic,” I meant it in a sense that if we want to achieve a specific systemic change our intention often leads us in the wrong direction, to rather unintended changes.

Michael asked in his reply if intention necessarily needs to be linked to a purpose. Or whether it is more a way of choosing between different options for action without necessarily having a specific outcome in mind. This made me curious about the origins of the word intention. On etymonline.com I found this:

On intentionality

I recently said: Everything we do with intention is not systemic. I can’t really remember in what context I said it but I remember that I was surprised myself when hearing me say that. So here a bit of an exploration of this statement.

If we do something intentionally, we do it on purpose, consciously. I think. We do it because we expect a certain reaction. We turn the light switch so the light turns on. Or we add sugar to a cake so it gets sweet. These are banal examples of course, as they are fairly obvious. Yet we generally use the same way of thinking for more complex problems. We buy electric cars to reduce our carbon footprints. We do it with one particular causal connection in mind, but often ignore all the other causal connections that are also attached to that decision.

Two Haikus

Something short this week. I spent most of the week in my second five-day retreat with Philip Shepherd for the ‘the embodied present process‘ facilitator training I’m doing this year. Here are two haikus I wrote during the week, inspired by some of the sharings in the group.

Wander in wonder

A wondering in kinship

The trees as brothers

Ruminations on imagination

Just a few ruminations on imagination this week. It has come up a couple of times recently and I haven’t really made up my mind on it.

A friend of mine has sent me a piece called ‘Imagination is not creativity’, which I quite enjoyed, from a Substack account called “Applied Complexity Science” (not sure who is behind it, actually). The author contends that “not only is imagination not sufficient for creativity, it can indeed hamper it.” This is the main argument:

Finding closure with purpose

I was given this little book by Simon Sinek called Together is Better (Sinek 2016) and asked to choose a quote from the book. It’s a little story book that tells the story of three kids that meet because they get chased out of a playground by a nasty kid. At the same time, it’s intended to be a fable for leaders.

I struggled to choose a quote. They are all interesting and some jumped at me and I said, “yeah, nice!” But all of them left that sensation that not all has been said, that there was more to it, that if we take it like that, as a statement of truth, we are missing something. That reminded me of something Gregory Bateson, one of the intellectual giants on whose shoulders I find myself standing rather often, wrote:

Why systems work feels counter-intuitive

Some people told me that my last email I sent last week did end up in their Junk mail folder or did not arrive at all. I’m struggling with some technical issues, which is why this email comes from a different email address than the usual mj@systemic-insight.net. If you have not seen last week’s email, you can read it here (it’s worth it!): On knowing and understanding. You can access all previous emails in my archive.

On to this week’s reflections.

On knowing and understanding

I have read a very interesting article recently on a concept called Tamkeen that is practised in Marokko. The article is called Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis and was written by Karima Kadaoui (Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development) and Louis Klein (European School of Governance – EUSG).

In the article, they describe Tamkeen as follows:

What if …?

I am spending this week with Philip Shepherd at a deep dive into his Embodied Present Process. I am enjoying the embodiment work that I started a year or so ago (I wrote about it earlier here and here). At the start of the event last night all participants introduced themselves and when it was my turn I shared that through my work on embodiment but also on Warm Data and by exploring other related fields I feel like waking up to a whole new part of the world I simply wasn’t aware of before.

Later I reflected why this new awakening is happening now. I think it is largely because I adopted a new stance vis-a-vis new kinds of knowledge. Earlier, coming from a natural science background, things needed to be based on established science, ideally verified through some sort of peer-reviewed publications, etc. Everything else essentially did not exist, was pushed into the realm of the esoteric or worse, humbug. My new stance towards new (to me) fields of knowledge and experience (like embodiment or even things like astrology) is different. It is based on the questions, “What if it were true and just not provable / not yet proven in a traditionally accepted way?” and “What would I miss out on if I was just to dismiss this?” Based on these questions I’m more likely to plunge into new things like the embodiment work. And this does not mean that these bodies of knowledge (no pun intended) are in any way flaky. People like Philip Shepherd have spent their lives making experiences and systematically documenting them, exchanging with others and further develop the field. Just dismissing all this work as ‘unscientific’, as I would have done just a few years ago, would be such a waste, no? What would happen if we acted as if it were true? What is the risk? I’m doing that more and more and allowing myself to experience new things like a rather counter-cultural journey to explore my body’s wisdom and this giving me a lot of new positive experiences.

On being right

What does it mean to be right? And what right does it give us over others if we think we are right? Is there a right? I have just been mulling over these questions for a bit. I grew up and was socialised in a system that values objectivity and scientific explanations of things. Indeed, I studied environmental sciences at one of the top natural science universities on the planet. So when science established something as ‘true’ I generally tend to believe that it is true.

In his book ‘The Matter with Things‘ (McGilchrist 2021), Iain McGilchrist asks: What is truth? Being McGilchrist, he thereby differentiates truth as seen by the left hemisphere and by the right hemisphere of the brain:

Can we play?

I realised that I am not a very playful person. Particularly, I find it hard to be playful in seemingly serious situations, like in workshops I am facilitating or meetings I am participating in. I can play within the rules but I am not very good in playing with the rules. I was seeing a personal trainer yesterday to help me with some workouts I was trying to get into that I found in a book. He basically said: you don’t need a book, just play with your body and you will feel what works – don’t limit yourself to prescribed workouts. I’m struggling with that as it would require me to imagine what I could try. I don’t feel very creative in that. Also, I often have this feeling that it might be awkward and I might fail. But then, what does failing mean if not an opportunity to learn? And what is the risk, really? What is the worst that could happen? I could embarrass myself in front of a group of people in a workshop. So what? We might just laugh and shrug it off.

Play and playfulness are very important in complex living systems.

Thinking about purpose

During a discussion with some Warm Data folks today I was exploring the idea of purpose as a constraint versus purpose as an attractor – something people in an organisation can attune to.

Purposes as constraints are often very well defined with lots of words. You find words like ‘through’ in there and often it describes who will ‘benefit’ from actions guided by the purpose. When people in an organisation with such a purpose work out possible activities you often hear the argument: “no, we cannot do that, because it is not part of our purpose.”

Can we just go on?

Last week I was in a meeting with a high-ranking official of the Georgian government. We talked about local economic development (LED). The meeting was productive, even though there was quite a bit of scepticism from the official’s side about our approach to LED, which is different to how LED has been understood in Georgia so far. As we are getting towards the end of the meeting, the official suddenly stopped and said something along the lines of, “and we talk here about these things while not far away children are dying.” This statement was followed by a rather long silence as it came quite out of the blue. Nobody was sure how to respond and yet we all knew she was right.

Georgia was scarred by a similar conflict with Russia in 2008 that luckily ended more quickly. As a reaction to skirmishes in the Russian backed separatist region of South Ossetia between local separatist forces and the Georgian army, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Georgia on 8 August 2008, capturing not only two separatist regions but also occupying non-disputed territory, including four cities. On 12 August, a ceasefire agreement between Georgia and Russia was negotiated by the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Where is the change?

Where is the change? I have stumbled over this question when I was thinking about monitoring and evaluation recently. How to evaluate the effect of an organisation or an action? Where to look? It is actually not so trivial. Traditionally one would just decide what change one wants to see and then build a causal chain from your actions to that change, applying an ‘if … then’ logic. Unfortunately, complex living systems do not follow this type of logic.

I cannot find the exact quote but Nora Bateson sometimes quotes her grandfather William Bateson who apparently said something like: in a living system, when one thing changes, everything else changes too. This makes intuitive sense if you believe that in these systems everything is connected with everything.

On learning

I have been thinking about learning quite a bit recently, partly because it is a constant presence in my own thinking and being, partly because I have been exploring Gregory Bateson’s different types of learning recently with friends in the Warm Data Community. Yesterday, I was in a webinar where three projects were presented and how they assess systemic change. For me this was an interesting case study on learning.

Of the three projects that presented, two were very similar. Their aim was to help farmers to sell their produce into higher value markets. In order to be able to do that, the farmers needed to get better inputs like seed, fertilisers and pesticides and they needed to be connected into global value chains for the higher value produce. So the projects analysed the situation and they found the bottlenecks, which they then tried to tackle by working with various actors in the market and for example putting in place new business models or working on regulations. The projects had a lot to learn as there very many problems showing up once they started to engage with the situation – so they had to keep an open mind, keep on top of what is happening, and keep adapting.

On being present

Being present in the moment is a topic that has been on my mind recently. In a way, it is connected to the question of how I can be happy in my life amidst all the difficulties and challenges we are facing as individuals, in our relationships, as families, as societies and as the human species as a whole.

As you might have guessed, I’m a very reflective person. I reflect a lot on what is going on, and on how I fit into and contribute to these larger going-ons. Also, I am a person who is quite keen on, both, ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘doing things right’. So my inner reflections are almost exclusively dominated by questions on how I should act or, conversely, why the way I behave is not the right way – as it never is. If driven to the extreme, the way I live life almost as a whole – grace to the circumstances I was born into – can be seen as wrong. To say it in a harsh way: my way of life is built on the suffering of others, historically. The question is how much I can change about this and how far this prevents me from living my own life in a fulfilling way.

Being part of a wider evolution

I am acutely aware that I have not yet written this week. I’m going through an intense time at work, which is really interesting and challenging. As always, the challenge is trying to integrate where I am at personally into work that has to happen within a system which does things in a way I might not necessarily agree with – in my case the system of international development.

Instead of a weekly email I would like to share a conversation that I was reading this morning. The conversation tackles the question, “How can we transform mindsets to address climate change?” It is between Laureline Simone, Founder of One Resilient Earth and Thomas Bruhn of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Study. I met Thomas last summer when I spent time in Potsdam and I have also written quite a bit about his book in some of my weekly emails.

Rewilding for new vitality

Who am I these days?

Wandering in thought all day

Traps. And Warm Data.

So, I fell into a trap of my own making. Last week I wrote that top-down prescriptive approaches to decolonisation are replicating the same kind of thinking that caused them – you know, the ones where they tell you what to do. And then I told you what to do instead. It’s so obvious, and yet somebody had to point this out to me. Reminds me that I constantly need to check the patterns I am perpetuating through my own behaviour. They are often hard to spot as they are so built-in. So normal. Just ‘the way we do things.’

If I want to see changes in the world, I look at how I myself am part of the patterns and relationships that shape the current situation and what I could do to shift my position (not ‘change the system’). By paying attention to my own patterns of acting, I shift my perception so I can pick up these traps earlier and possibly act in different ways. I shift my ‘normal’.

Decolonising our thinking

Last week I wrote about the need to change the way we think. Here’s an example.

This morning I had a discussion about ‘decolonising the curriculum’ in a UK university. There is now a process going on to decolonise the university’s curriculum. The way it is done is that a few people in the faculty’s administration are tasked with working out guidelines on how to change and deliver the curriculum in a better (read: decolonised) way. The guidelines include instructions for the professors and lecturers on what they can say and cannot say and what things they should change in the way they deliver their classes (an example: when they teach Newtonian physics they should check if there are other, non Western, scholars aside Newton that could be talked about – or in general, whether there are ‘other ways of knowing’). Now I think that decolonising the Western Universities’ curricula is necessary and important - so these efforts are laudable. Yet the way this is done in this particular case is for me a very good example of how the same type of thinking is used to solve a problem that has lead to the problem in the first place – and will lead to more similar problems down the line.

We are not radical enough

Over the last two weeks, visiting Switzerland, I had quite a few conversations with my two siblings about life, the universe and everything. Among other things, we talked – no surprise – about the problems we are facing as a global society like climate change, the problems caused by industrial agriculture and mass animal production, or the question of compulsory vaccinations for COVID-19. My siblings are quite a bit younger than me, they are in their 20ies, and I enjoyed hearing their perspectives.

We talked about the need to be more annoyed and take to the streets or find other ways of being active, pushing things, changing things. There is a lot of frustration that even though we see the catastrophe coming – indeed, we are already in it – not enough is being done. There is no time to waste, we need to do something now. There is frustration with the discussion on the political level but also with our parents who have grown up in a different time and are struggling to adjust to the new realities (although our own parents are already living a comparatively sustainable life compared to others).

Looking back, looking forward

Happy New Year to all of you! My year 2021 ended with a bang, I had a positive COVID-19 test on 31 December (my birthday)! So I’m now spending the first 9 days of 2022 in isolation, having lots of time to think, read and – presumably – write. And having lots of long and good conversations with my sister who is isolating with me (she generously shared the virus with me). Luckily, my symptoms have been very mild, allowing me to still have a clear mind and enough energy to do all the things I want to.

First of all, I’m deeply grateful that you have subscribed to my weekly email and I am super-excited about each and every response I am getting from my readers. And of course feel free to forward the emails to whomever you think could benefit from them.

Being in service to the present

Last week I ended my email with linking our inclination of deducing individual strands of causality to our perceived need to abstract things from context, from reality, to put them on a map, which is easier to navigate than reality.

Alfred Korzybski introduced the idea that the map is not the territory. In other words, the description of the thing is not the thing itself, the name is not the thing named. The model is not reality. The abstraction is not the abstracted. Gregory Bateson took this a step further when he, building on Korzybski, asserted that the effect is not the cause.

Causality, Map and Territory

Dave Snowden likes to characterise complex adaptive systems as having a disposition to behave in a certain way, rather than being an aggregate of individual and reducible cause and effect relationships. In her 1999 book Dynamics in Action, Alicia Juarrero describes the behaviour of complex systems as multiple interdependent layers of constraints contextually shaping the agents’ behaviour. The constraints are thereby themselves contextually emerging from the dynamic of the relationships between the agents in the system, modifying the system’s prior probabilities in real time.

Gregory Bateson, building on work by Ross Ashby, draws a similar picture of dynamics in complex systems when he talks about a living system being a set of interlinked variables. Bateson thereby stresses the need for flexibility in the variables of living systems in order to preserve adaptability of the whole system to new circumstances. For example, our body needs the flexibility to regulate breathing frequency and heart rate to adapt to strenuous activity or lower oxygen environments and ensure that carbon dioxide is transported out of the body at sufficient rates, and at the same time oxygen transported to the cells. Hence, the faster-changing variables of breathing frequency and heart rate make sure that other deeper variables like the level of carbon dioxide in the blood or, indeed, our ability to be alive, can remain at acceptable levels of stability. So the higher level functioning of the body is not causing the faster variables like breathing to change but it constrains their variability. Rather than being controlled a linear causal relationships between these variables, complex systems’ behaviours are guided by the interdependence between all variables and their flexibility – or lack thereof in the case of pathology.

On Writing

I missed writing my weekly email last week. There was no right moment. As a consequence, I was reflecting why I am writing, why I decided to move from the occasional blog post to a weekly email. For me, writing helps me to formulate my thoughts and find more clarity about a question or a topic or, more even, about the connection between different ideas and how I can integrate them. So I’m writing mainly for myself. Weekly emails feel like a good cadence. Generally, I feel I’m not putting aside enough time for reflection and integration. At least the hour or so I use to write and reflect on these lines is therefore an important time in my week.

Yet, I did not force myself to write last week because I feel that if it becomes forced, it will loose it’s character of a place / time I’m looking genuinely forward to. I don’t want it to become a dreaded place where I have to write. Writing these emails is fun, I feel I’m getting a lot out of it.

The Role of Art

On Friday I visited the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I really enjoyed the exhibition. There were three images I enjoyed in particular. All three were about blossoming trees in the spring. The image above is called ‘Almond Blossom’. The painting was a gift for his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo, who had just had a baby son, Vincent Willem. The other three paintings are part of one series (The White Orchard, The Pink Peach Tree and The Pink Orchard).

I was touched by the beauty of van Gogh’s paintings and drawings - and by the ones of the other artists they exhibit alongside – as well as by the stories that accompanies them. One question that has come up for me is: what role can art have in our systems work? I have come up with two possible answers so far, but I’m sure there are more.

Plucking the Chords

How can we think about action in complex, dynamic human systems? I wrote about the problem with attempting to fix problems before.

I have started thinking of complex human systems as a vast, multi-dimensional network or spider’s web. While there are shortest connections between two nodes in this web, when you pluck the net at one, the vibrations don’t only travel through that shortest connection but also via other routes and pass other nodes.

Locus of purpose

I want to explore my discomfort with purpose a bit more. I have written about it in my last week’s email but also before (for example, here or here). I have received quite a few comments reacting to that email last week, making me think that this is important. The idea is quite alive for me and I still try to feel my way into it.

One of the people reacting to my email asked the following: “I’d be interested to hear more about how you feel strategic direction, and purpose, are different.” Seems like a simple question that is easy to answer and I felt a bit annoyed that it did not feel that simple for me. What I ended up replying with is this: “For me a purpose is anchored somewhere in an idealised future while a sense of direction is anchored in the here and now.” Now that might not be true for everybody. And both could be called ‘purpose’.

Where do we go from here?

How do we know when a situation is getting better or worse? How can we define how a situation would look like that we would consider to be better? These are important questions if we consider the question of what to do next after having spend some time thinking about a situation and maybe doing some sort of research on what is going on.

What is going on?

What are we not seeing? This is a difficult question to answer. How should we know what we are not seeing? Yet there is always something we are not seeing. The slice of reality we see is always narrowed by both our physical senses’ ability to perceive, the models we use to make sense of what we perceive, and the logic we use (consciously or unconsciously) to decide what is real and what is not. And this is a feedback loop, what cannot be is also not perceived.

What is real?

In systems change literature, one often reads that boundaries in systems are only conceptual. These boundaries exist only in our heads, they are only ideas, they are not .

Pause and reflect

Perception is generally defined as . Perception, hence, happens through information that is transmitted from the senses like touch, sight or hearing, to the brain. Yet there is a translation that needs to happen between the information that comes through the nerves that connects the sense organs to the brain and what our conscious mind then registers: Our conscious mind perceives in the form of images. This is not only true for sight, but for all conscious perception. Yet it is not images that flows through the nerves, as much as it is not images that are stored on a chip in a digital camera.

To act or not to act … ?

It is pretty clear that if we find something that is going wrong, a problem, we act to rectify it. As the old adage say: “Love it, change it, or leave it.” It seems almost a natural reaction to rectify problems. To do that, we analyse what the problem is, design a solution for it, and implement that solution. If the soup is not salty enough, we put more salt in. If my timing belt is broken I need to replace it. If there are not enough skilled workers, we train more. If a person is suffering from obesity, we put them on a programme to lose weight. If energy or housing prices are too high, we put a cap on them. And so on. All quite straight forward solutions to these problems.

On Resilience

I have joined this month’s on the topic . Yesterday we talked about planning and resilience. Some questions that were asked and discussed by the participants were: Can we plan for resilience? Can we build resilience? Can we measure resilience? Is resilience a capacity of an individual? Is resilience something you can build and then ‘have’?

On being confused

Nitzan Hermon wrote in :

(Source)

Entanglement and Agency

(Source)

Seeking refuge in the known

What is Home in a Changing World?

I spent some time with in Sweden a couple of weeks back to learn more about Warm Data and Warm Data Labs. We did a few rounds of and the question that was asked for one round was “What is Home in a changing world?” I found the discussions that grew out of this question extremely interesting and deep and they revealed the complexity of the topic of home. While I cannot really repeat these discussions here, home has popped up again for me a couple of times since.

Source

On Trust

Reimagining Place for a better world

Last week I spent the week at what I usually call ‘my favourite place on Earth’ (see image above). It is an absolute privilege to be able to go to that gem in the Swiss Alps and spend time there every year. The views onto the surrounding mountains are stunning and there is a great hike I do every year to a mountain top at 2,622 meters above sea level (about 8,600 feet). The place itself is on about 1,800 m (ca. 5,900 feet) and accessible via a small, quite steep gravel road that is restricted to cars that have a permission to use it, which you only get if you have a good reason to drive up there (like owning a cabin or renting one).

I’m taking a break

I have been travelling this last week and will be on holidays next week so I’m taking a break from my newsletter for two weeks. Here a little poem for you in the meantime.

(Drawing of Sedna, the goddess of the sea. From the exhibition , Nordic Museum Stockholm. My own photo.)

(Sailing to different shores - my own picture)

Learning together different things

I have been thinking a lot about learning lately and this is my second newsletter on it in a row. One thing I’m exploring is what new forms of learning we can offer that complement the traditional authoritative and input-heavy training courses. It seems to me that for people working on systemic challenges and on transforming systems, getting recipes does not seem useful – if there are such recipes at all.

(Male Common Redstart - my own picture)

Learning is uncomfortable

When are we learning? Learning happens when there is a discrepancy between our perception of a phenomenon and what we would have expected – and when we consequently change the structures of beliefs so we would adjust our expectations accordingly. This also works when we read something and it rubs against the way we have understood things to work. We can then try to apply that new insight and see whether it leads to an improved experience – i.e. more coherence between our new expectations and how we perceive the world.