Latest Paper. 🙂

Link to Springer Chapter

Link to Springer Book

 

Welcome the dawn of this new day, ask for for help when you need it, and treat yourself at least as well as you would treat your best friend!

Love and the happiest of New Years, to all friends past and future, known and unknown,

Valerie

The systems you exist within, that comprise you, your life and your goals – do not exist in isolation, for they are highly complicated, multi-layered, many-dimensional slices of a complex world.  Sometimes the standard specialties we have for addressing problems – whether personal, health, family, business, community, organization, environmental, strategic – are  simply and purely,  insufficient.  Most of the problem-solving approaches, and definitely the thinking behind solutions we are given, however, are linear, short-term, and myopic.  Generally these approaches address the symptoms, rather than the sources, of problems, for their scope and innovation are not sufficient to the task of the complex analysis required to correctly parse and reconfigure these systems towards beneficial and even optimal outcomes.

While the standard approach is often ‘all I have is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail’ — complex systems theory and its practical application provide an encompassing yet customizable world view that enables understanding of the most intricate and tangled problems, whether those of your personal health, your business, or other aspects of your individual, community, or organizational network.

For instance,  as we age, multiple health problems just get you a raft of non-communicating specialists, rather than someone to design a highly personalized program to optimize you across all facets of your life and world. Shared community and environmental dilemmas get you a different raft of specialists, many of whom cannot even talk across their jargon. Complicated questions of business structure, aim, strategy, and performance  – all have their specialists, who zoom in to examine your world microscopically and to select the solution that solves the problems they see through a predictably non-systemic lens.

But when do these experts employ the ‘Macroscope’? When do they pull back – and perhaps step back much, much further – in order to grasp the Big Picture of how things are really functioning in *your* system? How can they identify unique and original solutions to the often overwhelming complexity of your systemic problems when the scope of that lens is too shallow, and conditioned by the hyperspecialization of our time?

In general, they don’t – because our society and culture do not train people to read the overarching patterns,  or to seek out, the underlying principles of our systems. Yet our cultures, our economic landscapes, even our own selves, bodies, beliefs and knowledge,  are being rapidly reshaped as the interdependence and connectivity of all things are more deeply revealed to us every day.

My specialty and my task is to help you interpret,  manage, and optimize the complexity that faces you.  I can assist, or lead in order to devise solutions to remedy problematic issues, and to co-create innovative methods and means for you to achieve the greater health, brilliance, and potential that you or your organization needs to thrive.

Consulting? Research? Strategy? Project creation and integration? Communications? Imaginative yet rigorous solutions to even ill-defined problems? I can help.

My training across a multitude of scientific disciplines,  coupled to extensive integration of global and cross-cultural knowledge,  has provided me with some unusual skillsets and perspectives that can help you in many arenas. Never treading the standard path, I was first a journalist and researcher, then a psychologist,  dived more deeply to gain a doctorate in Neurosciences,  and all coupled to direct study and experience in applying complex systems theory to real-world problems.   From modeling brains and biochemical circuits on supercomputers to the development of  integrative approaches to land management, from analyzing  group dynamics, honeybee labor,  and human perceptual behavior, to business strategy and algorithmic design — I have emerged with a multi-scale, creative approach that can help you cut through the messiest of problems or limitations.   A highly interdisciplinary, out of the box(es!) thinker,

In-depth study which has crossed the boundaries of science, business, and culture pushed me to strive for both breadth and depth of research, insight, and innovative thinking.  All of these are needed for solving knotty complex problems – whether those of personal health and achievement, of technology and commerce, of group dynamics and social systems, interactions,  or of larger issues facing humanity.

I am a deep generalist in a specialist world. With this kind of integrative thinking, a whole new realm of solutions and realization of potential can emerge.

My exact specialities are under the links at the top – let me know if you’d like my assistance in solving your problem, understand your system, and in inventing an optimal  new path into the future.