## My own thinking I am doing what I can to learn 'what do I do when I do what I do'. Partly to understand what's going on inside myself and partly to find leverage points to improve.
## Cognition - Meta-Cognition This was a post on a LinkedIn Systems Thinking group: I’ve been on an interesting thought journey recently, thinking about my own underlying (not conscious) process of ‘how I think’, with particular curiosity to see if I can interface better with that process when I’m problem-solving, using systems thinking tools and techniques. For example, I’ve been playing with SSM’s activity models to extract a subsection of my ‘thinking process machine’* with a given set of boundaries, a set of outcomes to achieve and a time limit (vital for deadlines whilst living with ADHD!). The outputs so far are continuously moving complex weighted maps of concepts and ideas, so I need to work on that! 😂 This has led me to reading the very interesting chapter on Mind and Consciousness in the book The Systems View of Life (Capra & Luisi, 2014), as it was to hand. I’m particularly fired up about cognition, the relational networks and maps there, and the process of reflective consciousness from a systemic viewpoint. What my 'problem' was, that started me on this path of thinking... When I am thinking about something, such as the current assignment due shortly for the Managing Change with Systems Thinking in Practice module, I am often resistant to start due to knowing I'm still working on it, deep down, somewhere. To me, this looks a bit like a Very Still Lake, where under the surface are all sorts of processing things going on and when 'done', the finished 'idea' will bubble up to the surface and present itself. This terrifies me, as it often takes so long and I felt I had no visibility of what stage it was at nor ability to interact with the process, especially once a deadline looms! When explaining this to a friend recently, he casually suggested 'draining the lake' and I was blown away - I had never considered such an approach to the Very Still Lake! While on the train home, I did this visualisation and immediately saw an image of a phenomenally complex 'classification' machine, spinning and whirring at many levels, grouping and re-grouping ideas and concepts. Comparing and relating and building multi-level relational networks between concepts, classifications, meta-classifications on and on...! (It was a very exciting moment!!)