From Systems Thinking to Collective Discernment: Ethics, Attention, and Becoming More Fully Human and Alive

Part 2: Why Collective Discernment is Critical to Effective Systems Working

Because No-One Sees Clearly Alone

Because reality is multi-perspectival no single person can see much of what matters, particularly when power, fear, incentives, and professional identities influence what is said, what is heard, and what can be acknowledged. Even the wisest can become distorted inside a culture that rewards certainty, punishes doubt, and treats moral concern as a personal weakness.

This is one of the limitations of “systems thinking” as it is often practised: it can operate without ever naming what really matters, or flattening it into ‘data’. A systems map can represent a prison, a hospital, a council, or a corporation with equal power. It can show flows, feedback loops, incentives, bottle necks. But it cannot, by itself, show what is good, what is harmful, what is courageous and what is complicit.

This is perhaps THE defining weakness of our technocratic age: we can model and manage almost anything except for what matters most: meaning, dignity, conscience, and care.

Collective discernment returns a moral and relational reality to the centre of our systems work. It asks:

• What are we making normal?

• What are we pretending not to see?

• Who is carrying the cost of our decisions?

• What kind of people are we becoming by doing this work in this way?

• What do we owe one another here?

Collective discernment is not about “shared sense-making” as an organisational method. It is shared accountability for what is being legitimised.

And that is what so much of our public life lacks. We have become fluent in a kind of procedural rationality, whether it is strategy, compliance, metrics, targets, risk registers, impact frameworks, while becoming clumsy and inarticulate around the moral and human questions that sit with them. The modern organisation excels at producing alibis:

• “This is the policy.”

• “This is what the evidence says.”

• “This is what finance requires.”

• “This is the national direction.”

• “This is how the system works.”

• “This is what the boss told me to do.”

A great deal of today’s leadership is performed within a moral vacuum, where responsibility is passed upwards, sideways, or downwards. The system itself offers a moral shield. I was just following orders. Or the rationale. Or I have ‘immunity”.

Collective discernment can interrupt this pattern, not with moralism or purity, but through fidelity: returning again and again to the lived reality in the room, the consequences in the community, and the truths people often know but are seldom able to name.

This is why dialogue traditions matter. Bohmian dialogue, for instance, is not about debate or quick consensus, but about the emergence of deeper collective meaning, including the surfacing of assumptions, distortions, and hidden commitments. In a ‘systems world’ that is full of abstraction and noise, collective discernment is the practice of learning to hear what we are collectively avoiding. Listening for a deeper truth behind all the clever knowing.

When you look at the political atmosphere of the UK and US and many other states, it becomes hard to deny how urgently this capacity is needed. The rise of the right is not only a policy story, or about economics, identity, migration, or social media. It is as much a story about a failed moral attention.

It is a story about what happens when people become separated from shared reality, when the public realm becomes a theatre of outrage and performance, and when a “truth” becomes blind allegiance to a cause. It is a story about the corrosion of the capacity to discern: to tell what is real from what has been engineered. To tell what is principled from what is performative. And, what is protective from what is cruel.

If we cannot practise discernment collectively, we become easy to manipulate, not only by demagogues, but by the logics of fear, scapegoating, and control. And if we cannot name that as a moral failure, not just a cognitive failure, then systems work will continue to produce technically sophisticated strategies that often rest on spiritually undermined foundations.

Collective discernment is not an optional extra or a bolt-on. It is a condition for our sustainability and sanity.

In the third and final post in this short series I will explore what this means for leadership development and practice: formation, inquiry, uncertainty, holding, fidelity, and accountability, with reference to how this might just help us with the dire state of contemporary politics.