Bio: Sergej van Middendorp, Ph.D. helps generate healthy systems with action-research-based practice in improvisation, design, and communication. In doing this, he wonders how we can keep creating wholeness in an increasingly fragmenting world. In search of answers, he focuses on the systems that we make and use to live and work together in communities. In this, he examines the ways in which the metaphors that designers use in their conversations become embodied in the systems that they are creating. By making designers aware of their use of metaphor, and of their ability to generate new futures by improvising with metaphors, they can better cope with the complex and dynamic nature of the challenges presented in design today in a broadly ecological sense. In The Netherlands, Sergej facilitates a collaborative support network of caregivers and IT providers in their development of an Integral Digital Health System. This system affords Dutch Healthcare a transformation from a focus on illness to a focus on health. Using community based development as an approach, the network describes open standards and makes open-source software so that their systems can connect securely and share information while increasing their user's self-sovereignty over their identities, their relationships and their data. Sergej tries to share what he learns in his research and practice by acting into and connecting diverse communities that share a vision on contributing to global justice and harmony through convivial technology. Sergej is an Institute for Social Innovation Fellow with Fielding Graduate University from where he also earned a Ph.D. and an M.A in Human and Organizational Systems. He has an M.B.A. in General Management from Henley Business School and a B.B.A. in Hotel Management from the Hotelschool Maastricht. Sergej serves on the boards of the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution and the Nuts foundation. He lives in The Netherlands with his wife Thekla and their two dogs. Here they enjoy ongoing learning and co-evolution with their two adult children.
Improvising Personal and Social Evolution with the Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD) and the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)
The theory of positive disintegration (TPD) helps us understand factors influencing individual development and how to support personal evolution towards a personality ideal rooted in authenticity. The Coordinated Management of Meaning Theory (CMM) helps us understand how our social worlds are constructed in communication and how to support social evolution through the making of better social worlds. TPD and CMM are both rooted in decades of research and theory development and both have attracted committed communities of scholar-practitioners. We want to use our presentation to explore similarities and differences between the two in order to see how both the theories and the communities can strengthen each other. We are playing with the idea to use the metaphor of (organizational) improvisation to create relations between the theories and communities as one way to generate personal and social evolution.