Peripeteia
Aristotle described peripeteia, as a sudden reversal in circumstances, that swiftly turns a routine sequence of events into a story. It begins with some breach in the expected state of things. The story concerns efforts to cope or come to terms with the breach and its consequences, leading to an outcome, some sort of resolution.
Why?
“The human intellect is capable of organising society to solve the great problems of our world, such as malnutrition, poverty and war, and yet humanity allows these problems to persist. This is a moral outrage.”
eripeteia tells the emerging story of the 21st century, where we as society are confronted with a breach in our expectations, unintended consequences of our past thinking and actions, which led to gradual erosion of our collective resilience, causing systemic issues such as climate change, protracted conflicts, entrenched horizontal and vertical poverty, inequality or mass migration. The persistence of these consequences tells a story of an ongoing struggle of our human community to engage with uncertainty and complexity, to negotiate interdependence and multiple perspectives, leading to coping strategies and resolutions, which remain fragmented, isolated, and largely un-sustainable. We live in, and create our peripeteia, where our best efforts to change the story, seems to unfold in way, where we become trapped in vicious cycles of stories of breach in expectation, coping strategies and resolutions.
lthough it is true that there are no quick fixes or solutions to systemic issues, we see a significant opportunity to enlarge and nurture our collective capacity to co-cerate a story of a more resilient society. To rebuild our resilience, we require the capacity for systemic inquiry in our thinking and action, which must not reside in a few, but in all of us. Whether as individuals, groups, or organisations, we are united through a conviction that progressive critical systems thinking and action, will reinvigorate our collective resilience, with lasting improvement in the well-being of our society and relationship with our planet.
How we engage engage
Every context is unique. We are all embedded in a unique institutional dynamic, a social fabric which constrains or enables us to engage in purposeful action to bring about systemic change. Our collective social learning cycle nurtures equally novel institutional configurations and social innovation. This co-creates the capacity for systems thinking and action, not residing with the individual, but distributed and sustained over time through emerging norms and relational structures.
“As global citizens, the capacity for systemic inquiry in our thinking and action, must not reside in a few, but in all of us.”
Our Sphere of Work
We see our work as fundamental to ALL Sustainable Development Goals, which require new, more systemic thinking and action to achieve the goals together.
Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship
The UN Sustainable Development Goal no.4 places great emphasis on education, with the UNESCO advocating for education which facilitates the enactment of Global Citizenship. The United Nations Systems Leadership Framework and the OECD, calls for Systems Thinking in Action and for co-creation through inter-organisational relationships.
We at Peripeteia share this vision, with a conviction that Global Citizenship must be enacted upon by all of us, with a much needed distributed capacity for systemic inquiry and applied systems thinking as the foundation to realize the Sustainable Development Goals.
Our Partners
Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.
