The beauty of complexity
We refer to manifestations rather than results and outcomes as the latter imply a reductionist relation of causality between an “activity” and its “outcome”. Project managerial causation does not apply to the complexity in which the processes we co-facilitate are evolving in and are characterised by, such as: intra and inter community dynamics and ecology, society/education system self-perception, inter-relation and co-suscitation, collective imagination and collective sense-of-self, emerging governance of systems’ self-facilitated and co-suscitated transformational processes, social ecosystems emergence, societal metamorphosis, foregrounding civilisations of ecology and humanity.
Manifestations are not results produced by discrete actions, but lived expressions of eco-systemic movement as it becomes perceptible within a relational flow-field. They are moments where shifts in meaning, relation, imagination, or capacity surface into experience, without being reducible to singular causes or claims of authorship.
We access the manifestations in their story form: the narratives of the witnessed, experienced and of what becomes possible. The stories depict what is and what is growing in becoming. Each story is a part that embodies the properties of the whole. We indicate the stories in their raw form, as witnessed, experienced and expressed by our partners, team members, evaluators and fellow researchers, along with their quotes. These are curated by the Tamkeen Recognition & Appreciation System, external evaluations, research papers, and our partners’ sharing platforms (websites and social media).
Stories are therefore not used as substitutes for analysis, but as onto-epistemic sites in which meaning, transformation, and systemic shifts become perceptible before they are fully nameable. Their value lies not in representativeness or generalisability, but in their capacity to reveal patterns of becoming, tensions, currents and confluences, possibilities and openings across scales. This approach calls for complexity informed and oriented evaluations. It does not evade rigor, but seeks to remain faithful to the nature of the co-facilitated processes, which cannot be reduced without distortion. Accountability, in this context, is understood not as control over results, but as responsibility for the quality, integrity, and humility of the processes, relationships, and conditions we co-create and co-facilitate with our partners, and for our contribution to the system’s evolving capacity to recognize, regenerate and co-generate its own futures in the present.
Manifestations watercolour their revealed landscapes, and landscapes of manifestations reflect our growing shared understanding of what is unfolding and emerging, as well as our focus of attention. Manifestations are not solid, isolated outcomes. They are semi-transparent washes of colour (meaning, effect and affect) that overlay the complex paper-grain of the existing context. Manifestations are fluid and can follow the inherent “capillary action” of the system’s own grain and propensity (its relationships, histories, dynamics, changing contexts). They don’t create the paper (the landscape) but reveal its texture, dips, and ridges by how the pigment pools, flows or blooms. A story of a new collaboration (a manifestation) “colours” the landscape of trust, making its contours visible to itself. Some washes may fade or evolve, while others become lasting traces that permanently alter the colour of the social ecosystem’s humus (a deep cultural shift for example).
The landscapes of manifestations are phenomenological and shaped by our focus of attention. They do not intend to function as proof of impact in a linear or attributional sense, nor as illustrative anecdotes selected to confirm pre-defined intentions. They are offered as situated expressions of emergence within complex social ecologies, where causality is distributed, relational, and historically entangled. Metamorphic transformation cannot be attributed to isolated actions or actors; it emerges through evolving relationships over time, shaped by accumulated histories, meaningful stories, conditions, and interactions that no single intervention can command or predict.
In a Whiteheadian sense, we understand experience as prehended before it is conceptualised. Our work, therefore, is not to impose categories upon experience, but to become collectively aware of the gaze through which experience is being prehended, and to let shared understanding grow from this co-reflexive attentiveness.
The art of Watercolouring
Watercolouring belongs to a semantic field of: fluidity, translucidity, transparency, emergence, light, permeability, subtlety, irreversibility, and co-creation with the medium. Watercolouring is not filling a form with colour but allowing colour to reveal the form that is already becoming.
The hues, tonal value (intensity of lightness), gradual saturation, diffusion and layering of LMEs are the stories, events, moments that reveal the shape of the manifested Istibyan What is self disclosing? and Istimkan What co-emerging conditions are offering rest and sustenance to the emerged?
Istibyan: is the self-revealed, the self-disclosed. Istibyān is not an exposition (bayān). It is clarity achieved through an internal unfolding. It denotes a reflexive process of clarification whereby something becomes manifest through its own intelligibility.
Istimkan: is the self-realised through resting and enduring, sustained conditions. Istimkān is the phenomenon’s capacity to sustain its own disclosure. It stabilises the conditions under which Istibyan can continue unfolding.
