Knowledge Summit Dublin evening gathering with Dave Snowden, Dawn, Alice Jing Shan, and a rainbow at the Guinness Storehouse.

Dave and I had been talking about the observer, reality, and how much depends on position at the dinner.

Suddenly, a rainbow appeared outside the window!

We both decided to capture the moment.

One moment.

Two observers. Two generations.

Two reactions to the same rainbow.

One looking outward to capture nature as he saw it,

One looking outward by looking inward, capturing the moment with humans in it through a selfie.

The rainbow appears outside the window,
and again through another interface.

It reminded me of Bian Zhilin’s 卞之琳 short poem Fragment 《断章》:

你站在桥上看风景，
看风景的人在楼上看你。
明月装饰了你的窗子，
你装饰了别人的梦。

You stand on the bridge looking at the view,
The viewer on the balcony is viewing you.
The bright moon adorns your window,
And you adorn someone else’s dream.

Reality is not observed from nowhere. The observer is already in the relational field.

Reality is not observed from nowhere.
The observer is already inside the relational field.

Dave Snowden, Dawn, and Alice Jing Shan at the Guinness Storehouse during the Knowledge Summit Dublin evening gathering.

Yesterday was the first time Dave Snowden and I met in person. Until then, I had only encountered him through online exchanges. Suddenly, he was 3D. Technically, 4D, because time is the constitutive dimension of system trajectory.

Anyway, there was a moment when my system experienced a wee shock, followed by some recalibration. He was much taller than I had imagined, and I only realised I had said that out loud while we were walking side by side, when he replied that he used to be taller.

Then he said old people shrink. I said nothing while while my neck stretched my neck was stretched, but from my 5’3”, his current 6’1” is still very much operationally tall. Just like my husband, who casually puts things on top of the fridge. Yes, the fridge. Reality is relational.

Later, on the way back to the accommodation, Dawn and I spoke about how the world appears from a small child’s eyes. Height is not just a measurement; it changes access, proportion, distance, threat, comfort, and possibility. A room is not the same room from every body.

This is why I keep returning to relational dynamics under constraint over time. Reality is not experienced from nowhere. It is lived from a position, through an interface, under conditions.

Knowledge Summit Dublin evening gathering with Dave Snowden, Dawn, Alice Jing Shan, and a rainbow at the Guinness Storehouse.

Reflections is a space for personal, lived, and process notes from the field by Alice Jing Shan. These are moments between essays, frameworks, and stories, where the system is still forming.

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I am now what my parents once were to me, in the eyes of my children.

For a long time, I think I was not sure what to do as an individual.

I do not mean in the sense of a job description. I have known since I was a little girl that I wanted to be involved in language, culture, and education.

I mean something more like positioning myself in the grand scheme of things.

My parents’ work was serious enough to convince me that there were grown-ups working very hard to make sure the world did not fall apart. I am married to a scientist who is committed to helping save lives.

I remember my father working at the desk in my room in the evenings when I went to bed. That was where the desk stood in our old flat when I was a little girl. He sat with his back to me, under the dim desk lamp, and somehow the sight of him working made the world feel both safer and larger.

But what about me?

I chose to be a teacher, and then an academic. I attended seminars and conferences. I served as vice president of the Doctoral Association, where almost everyone had a PhD title.

Then what?

Somehow, even when I turned thirty, I still thought the grown-ups would be there.

I was “just” a young woman, and somehow believed there were grown-ups somewhere out there solving the big problems.

Then I became a mother of two small children.

The supposed end of my PhD coincided with the beginning of a global pandemic, followed by a few years of what can only be described as a cascading train wreck of personal designated suffering.

A four-year PhD turned into seven years.

A celebration of new life led to months in hospital and repeated visits to neonatal critical care.

Even having the house ceiling collapse on the day we were moving in became one of the funny highlights of those days, because life has an unbelievable sense of wicked humour.

Sometimes, in the greatness of sorrow, you shed no tears.

In the greatness of misfortune, you burst into laughter.

Now I have two small children.

My joy and pride.

I look at them, sometimes from the most vulnerable part of myself, and feel a deeper chill:

I am one of those grown-ups now.

Not because I feel ready, or because I suddenly know what to do.

But because there is no Plan B.

That is it.

Life has no Plan B.

Only Plan A, drift from Plan A, and still only Plan A.

The children are here.

The future is no longer abstract.

I am 35 years old. Still just a young woman in many ways.

But then I think:

if not me, and if not many people like me, then perhaps nothing changes in any real sense.

We all have skin in the game.

I am what my parents were to me, in the eyes of my children now.

Maybe it is time to see that we are not merely observers of the system.

We are already inside it.

I remember a friend once told me during my first pregnancy:

“Children teach us more than we teach them.”

I still think that is one of the wisest things I have ever heard in my life.

I vaguely remember thinking it was deep.

At the time, I was mostly checking whether the food had raw cheese or raw fish in it, because I was eating for two. I remember always walking on the zebra crossing, because safety first.

I understand it differently now.

Children do not only teach us love, patience, exhaustion, tenderness, fear, and joy.

They change where we stand.

They make the future less theoretical.

They make the world personal.

And once that happens, it becomes harder to pretend that knowing is enough.

Reflections is a space for personal, lived, and process notes from the field by Alice Jing Shan. These are moments between essays, frameworks, and stories, where the system is still forming.

If you’d like to follow the work as it unfolds, subscribe below. New writing arrives quietly in your inbox.

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Yesterday I had a surreal moment.

I discovered that Dave Snowden is still very much alive.

Not in the historical sense, but in the very practical sense of posting on LinkedIn, appearing in YouTube interviews, and continuing conversations about systems thinking.

Then I realised that Michael C. Jackson is very much alive, too.

Two names I had previously placed somewhere in the landscape of intellectual history.

And suddenly they were simply…people.

Still thinking.

Still building.

Still exploring.

For a brief second my brain produced a very human reaction:

“Wait… How am I supposed to address them?”

It felt a bit like bumping into Newton and Einstein at a café.

“Hi, Isaac.”

“How is it going, Albert?”

The mind knows they are just people.

The body is not entirely convinced.

⸻

One of the first things I saw was an exchange between Snowden and Jackson.

Snowden had asked a language model to predict how Jackson might respond to his anthro-complexity series — a small intellectual role-play between theory, machine prediction, and a real scholar’s reply.

For a moment it was like witnessing two long-time thinkers converse through Snowden’s small experiment in simulated dialogue.

Elegant. Witty. Slightly mischievous.

To me, it also revealed something else.

Once language models begin to participate in the thinking process, even as playful interlocutors, the boundary between thinker, tool, and system becomes less clear.

Perhaps this is what systems thinking looks like in 2026.

It’s a privilege to have a front row seat, along with my own thought experiment, the Player AJ Problem. 🏀🤔💡

Different formats, players, and containers, perhaps.

Same underlying question:

How do systems reveal themselves through human experience?

⸻

I also read Snowden’s The Pattern Which Connects, centred on narrative and sense-making. Brilliant. He’s exploring meaning systems and the conditions under which meaning forms.

I found that exciting.

His way of collecting sense-making narratives reminded me of something great minds had been doing in a completely different form.

Through stories.

Isaac Asimov wrote Foundation and the Robot series.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

Different containers. Same patterns.

Perhaps that’s why I started writing:

Ally the Sheep.

Frozen Intimacy.

I just didn’t know it at the time.

⸻

Then something else became visible.

Jackson was discussing an upcoming systems thinking conference meant to reconnect academics and practitioners. I see it as an attempt to build the feedback loop between theory and practice.

Reading the comments beneath the post felt like looking at a small ecosystem.

Consultants talking about interventions.

Practitioners describing field experience.

Researchers discussing methodology.

Reflecting on my experience since returning to LinkedIn in January, after consolidating my frameworks and models, I suddenly realised something quietly reassuring.

Many people across many domains and places are already thinking deeply about complex systems.

Not necessarily under that label though, but through daily encounters with ambiguity, failure modes, and organisational drift.

Complex systems thinking is not confined to one institute or discipline.

It appears wherever and whenever reality refuses to behave linearly.

Seeing the post about the conference was like staring at Santa Fe on a world map in my living room, only to realise there is a Santa Fe network next door.

Interesting.

⸻

For a moment I wondered where I stood in that landscape.

Then a calmer recognition arrived.

I had not arrived late.

I had simply arrived from another direction.

My starting point was a relational way of perceiving the world, shaped by Chinese intellectual traditions and lived experience.

Discovering systems thinking and complexity science later felt like finding a modern language for intuitions that had been forming for a long time.

My own path has been somewhat cross-domain: practitioner experience, academic training, education research, years of teaching and management, intercultural interpretation, and life itself — including the ordeals that shape perspective, and the privilege of raising two children.

Moving across these domains and cultures meant encountering the same systemic questions from multiple vantage points at once.

Over time this gradually converged into what I now think of as a relational dynamics lens — a way of noticing how relationships shape the stability and collapse of systems across different scales over time.

In that sense, I sometimes feel I arrived in the systems conversation from a slightly different lineage.

But perhaps at the right time and in the right place.

⸻

There is an old Zen description of understanding:

看山是山，

看山不是山，

看山还是山。

Before studying the Way, mountains are mountains.

While studying, mountains are no longer mountains.

After understanding, mountains are mountains again.

Yesterday felt a little like returning to the mountain.

The terrain did not change.

My relationship to it did.

⸻

There was also a small moment of humour in all this.

A few weeks ago I realised that my husband Norbert shares a name with Norbert Wiener.

For a second my brain did the same small jump.

He had no idea either.

The world sometimes leaves these tiny jokes scattered along the path.

Little synchronicities that remind you not to take the intellectual landscape too seriously.

Around that time, my own structural work had begun to stabilise.

The ECC stability model and LAN failure model for system trajectory analysis.

Excellence = ∫ Capacity(t) · Coherence(t) dt

The Five Systems.

The Five Conditions.

The 5×5 Stability Matrix.

I often say: Work on the OS. The rest are APPs.

Stress tests keep the feedback loop alive.

ZPD needs to be protected for development to happen.

The generative level can feel a little lonely.

But not so much anymore.

I can now see other climbers on the mountain.

And I have a feeling that we are all getting closer.

⸻

So this is just a small timestamp.

Not a declaration.

Not a theory.

Just the quiet recognition that a historical window may have opened for a moment.

And through it, I could see that many others are already walking the same terrain.

From different directions.

At different altitudes.

Excellence is capacity held in coherence under constraints over time.

Being able to experience and witness the climb is a privilege.

The conversation continues.

The journey is beautiful.

Reflections is a space for personal, lived, and process notes from the field by Alice Jing Shan. These are moments between essays, frameworks, and stories, where the system is still forming.

If you’d like to follow the work as it unfolds, subscribe below. New writing arrives quietly in your inbox.

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I am 35.

A small timestamp for an idea that has guided my thinking about complex systems, through the lens of Ontology of Relational Dynamics:

Excellence = ∫ Capacity(t) · Coherence(t) dt

Excellence is capacity held in coherence under constraints over time.⏳

Reflections is a space for personal, lived, and process notes from the field by Alice Jing Shan. These are moments between essays, frameworks, and stories, where the system is still forming.

If you’d like to follow the work as it unfolds, subscribe below. New writing arrives quietly in your inbox.

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Sometimes I forget that I’m not standing here alone.

Not because I’m surrounded by people. But because the work itself is quiet.

It does not announce itself as a method. It does not sell itself as a framework.

It just keeps showing up, again and again, in places where systems begin to lose their way.

If I had to describe what it feels like, it’s something like this:

I’m in a very large universe, folding paper planes, throwing them into the dark, not knowing who will see them, or when.

Sometimes a plane circles back. Sometimes it lands somewhere I did not expect. Sometimes it disappears completely.

And then, strangely, one day a stranger quotes a line I wrote in a comment.

Then another. Then a connection request. Then a DM.

A different domain. A different country. A different role. Same failure pattern.

That is how I know the planes are landing.

This time, in this particular window of history, the algorithm has become my teaching assistant.

Not because it understands what I mean. But because it keeps placing my paper planes into other people’s paths.

It turns the internet into a classroom I did not ask for. It also turns me into a teacher I cannot fully stop being.

And for the first time in a very long time, I remember what it felt like to be in front of a room again, trying to teach something that matters.

Something I always wanted to do, was trained to do, and kept trying to do, even when the conditions weren’t there.

Somehow, right here, right now, it makes perfect sense.

What I’m actually doing

I am not trying to predict the future.

I am not building a new ideology.

I am not here to win a debate.

Underneath the writing, there is also a quieter philosophical commitment: what I am working from is what I call a Relational Dynamics™ ontology, which views reality as relational dynamics under constraint over time. In this ontology, systems take shape, stabilise, drift, and evolve through those dynamics.

So, in way, I am doing something much less dramatic, and much more difficult:

I am tracing system trajectories: how they emerge, stabilise, drift, destabilise, and collapse.

Across organisations, education, healthcare, policy, technology, families, teams,

I keep seeing the same moment arrive:

The system does not collapse suddenly.

It stays operational. It stays productive. It even becomes better at describing itself.

And yet something essential begins to drift.

Judgment migrates. Responsibility dissolves.

People start compensating for structure with their nervous systems.

The work I do is noticing that moment early enough to name it.

Not as blame. Not as moral drama.

As a structural diagnosis.

Because once you can name the failure mode precisely, you can stop punishing individuals for what the system is generating.

The invisible infrastructure problem

I’ve spent long stretches doing this work alone.

It can feel solitary. But it is not loneliness.

More like standing watch. It’s a strange kind of duty.

You can be building something that will later be obvious, but while you are building it, it looks like you are doing nothing.

It can feel like being a night-shift traffic officer at an empty intersection.

No applause. No audience.

Just a commitment to keep the system from collapsing in places people do not notice until it is too late.

This is what invisible infrastructure feels like:

you only become legible after something fails.

And I know there are people smarter than me, faster than me, more specialised than me. That was never the point.

The difference is that I tend to stand where the boundary is, and where the lectern needs to be.

Not because I cannot move faster, but because some spaces are worth protecting.

Some waiting is necessary.

A practical note

I realised I could treat the algorithm the way I’ve treated many students.

Not as something that must understand me immediately, but as something that responds to clarity, repetition, and structure.

It doesn’t fully know what it’s doing. It follows signals.

So I stopped expecting it to get it, and started teaching it what to carry.

I leave it room to grow. I trust the structure. And in return, it keeps putting my paper planes in front of the right eyes.

I did not invent this role

Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling like a visitor to the history of ideas.

I realised I was already in the relay.

Not carrying a flag for any single culture, and not taking a camp as identity.

I’m an accumulation of crossings. That is what makes my angle possible.

I did not start from zero.

I stand in a long, quiet lineage of people across civilisations, who noticed structure, held boundaries, and preserved space for meaning.

They were not always in the centre of power.

But they were never absent.

Some used philosophy. Some used law. Some used stories. Some used language. Some used silent practices passed through generations.

Different containers. Same function.

They helped a civilisation stay standing.

I am not trying to become them.

But in this era, with systems accelerating and capacities thinning, I find myself holding that baton for a moment.

Not as a hero. As a duty.

To translate what already exists. To re-align what has drifted. To reconnect what became illegible.

So that the world can keep breathing.

A timestamp

This is what I want to record, once, clearly:

When I feel tired, it is not because the path is wrong.

It is because the path is long.

I am not alone. I am on watch.

Somewhere else, in other places, other languages, other roles, others are also holding their part of the line.

Quietly.

Without camps. Without spectacle. Without needing to be understood immediately.

The work continues.

The system is still running.

Archive note:

I don’t know who you are. But if you’re here, take your time.

Reflections is a space for personal, lived, and process notes from the field by Alice Jing Shan. These are moments between essays, frameworks, and stories, where the system is still forming.

If you’d like to follow the work as it unfolds, subscribe below. New writing arrives quietly in your inbox.

Subscribe now