Towards a Conceptual System for Managing in the Anthropocene *

Robert Hoffman
2016 unpublished
This note takes as its frame of reference the concept of 'deep thinking' developed by William Byers [Byers 2015]. According to Byers, deep thinking or creative thought can emerge when a problem is framed by two (or more) conceptual systems and it is found that there are areas of incoherency between the conceptual systems. A new conceptual system encompassing elements from the primary conceptual systems may arise from the effort to resolve the incoherencies. Managing in the Anthropocene is a
more » ... lem domain that can be framed by two conceptual systems, one of which may be described as Newtonian, the other as evolutionary. This paper explores elements of a conceptual system for framing the problem of managing in the Anthropocene inspired by the incoherencies between Newtonian and evolutionary framings. This note takes as its frame of reference the concept of 'deep thinking' developed by William Byers [Byers 2015]. According to Byers, deep thinking or creative thought can emerge when a problem is framed by two (or more) conceptual systems and it is found that there are areas of incoherency between the conceptual systems. A new conceptual system encompassing elements from the primary conceptual systems may arise from the effort to resolve the incoherencies. The critical element is the ability to see a problem domain through the lens of different conceptual systems. Byers illustrates the concept of deep thinking using examples from number theory involving the problem domains of counting and measuring. The counting domain gave rise to the conceptual system of positive integers; the measuring domain to the conceptual system of fractions. When these two conceptual systems were brought to bear on the problems of zero, infinity, and negative numbers, more encompassing conceptual systems emerged.
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