Episode 28: Nora Bateson - Interconnectedness, warm data, and the vitality of things

Nora Bateson is a world-renown sensemaker. You might wonder what that is exactly, and it’s probably because she essentially shaped the profession through her singular thinking.

She has for many years been rethinking how we conceive of the complex world that we live within and teaching us how to navigate it. Nora seamlessly blends the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems.

Nora artfully brings her sensemaking to the world - she is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator. Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. In 2016 she published her wonderful book on the study of systems and complexity, Small Arcs of Larger Circles.

Nora is the President of the International Bateson Institute in Sweden. And she designed and founded the brilliant and endlessly fascinating ‘Warm Data Labs’ - a new structure for enabling societal responses to complex challenges.

Her message is acutely important to now, in this year (2020) of rupture and upheaval that has exposed so many cracks in our society. It is a distinct pleasure to bring you this conversation with the remarkable Nora Bateson at a time when it feels so necessary.