Imagine Flowing the Universe through Process Listening – to live in harmony with Planet Earth and to consciously and ethically explore our human potential; to be attuned to the warp and weft of the dynamics of change so every thought, action and inaction contributed to the emergence of life affirming, future creating, opportunity increasing relationships – consciously, purposefully, and yet effortlessly, naturally. An experience of such complete consonance with the flow of life is what Teilhard de Chardin would have called an experience of syntony.

Integral responses to the complexity of contemporary global and local challenges – personal, organizational, planetary – require an expanded perspective: a way of recognizing interconnections, of perceiving wholes and parts, of acknowledging processes and structures, of blending apparent opposites. But most importantly, they require collaboration. Individual solutions and breakthrough ideas are necessary but not sufficient. Real opportunity to affect change arises from the systemic synergies that we create together. The Club of Rome coined the term “global problematique” to describe the complex entanglement of the collective challenges we face at any given point in time. It is our task to create “solutionatiques” – systems of shared solutions that arise from the genius of each person. We need to create an ecology of new ways of working, learning, and living that embody social and environmental integrity. In short, we must learn to design systems of syntony.

Like all forms of truly creative and life-affirming processes, this can only be done in relationship – with oneself, others, nature, with past and future generations, and with the deep and sacred dimensions of the cosmos. Accessing this potential requires practice and imagination, even though learning to develop one’s syntony sense is more like learning how to love than it is like following a manual of instructions for how to do anything in particular.

Alexander Laszlo is an Argentina-based polycultural systems scientist, Director of Research at the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research, President of the Board of Directors of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, and the 57th President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, who is known for his work on systems theories and “education ecosystems, and whose research and work has delivered outstanding contributions in the fields of leadership, systemic innovation, and sustainability.