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Mike van de Wijnckel’s Expression of Interest

This will be my first time participating in an ASC conference (or any ASC event for that matter). My close friend and colleague Jan Kuiper made the suggestion to go to Bolton together to participate. As fellow cyberneticians, our relation is based on “living second order cybernetics” so the style of this conference is attractive for us. Shortly after Jan made his suggestion, Ranulph Glanville invited me to meet him and Michael Hohl in Gent (BE). We had a nice evening with good conversations about our work. These two interactions have made me “feel at home” to participate in this conference. In my work as consultant, organizer and facilitator I want/can/do work in a congruent way with conversational principles that I learn from second order cybernetics. I have quite some experience with designing and delivering work forms that make conversations work better for individuals, teams and larger groups (in business, non-profit and education). Based on those experiences, I want to construct an agenda of relevant topics with the other participants for further exploration. In my daily work I sense new potentials to further integrate second order cybernetics, for which I do not always find requisite time, space and conversation to articulate them in a workable fashion. I hope this conference gives me an opportunity to generate new questions and insights to go and realize these potentials. In the last years I have studied the works of Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana and in particular Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory and Interactions of Actors Theory. I find these concepts rich and useful to support me to reflect on my work as a practitioner. I want to contribute by fulfilling the purpose of this conference in making it circular and conversational, which is very aesthetic for me and have in-formed me to embody second order cybernetics as a person.

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