Dragonfly Thinking
Our best chance of understanding complex issues lies in seeing them through “dragonfly eyes,” as political scientist and psychologist Philip Tetlock shows in his work on forecasting. Dragonflies have compound eyes made up of thousands of lenses and they integrate the views from these lenses to give them a range of vision of nearly 360 degrees. They are also some of the most skilled predators in the animal and insect world, catching around 95% of their prey because of their ability to predict where their prey is going. Taking dragonflies as a source of inspiration, Anthea and Miranda Forsyth founded Dragonfly Thinking Pty Ltd to encourage more multi-lens analysis, integrative thinking, futures thinking and foresight techniques in business and governance.
Dragonfly Thinking™ involves synthesizing a multitude of points, counterpoints, and counter-counterpoints so that the integrated whole is more valuable than the sum of its parts. It reflects a signature technique that appears in Anthea’s scholarship across diverse fields from her earlier work analyzing clashing approaches and paradigms in customary international law and the investment treaty system, to her more recent work on unpacking competing narratives about the pushback against economic globalization and using those as a basis to create a Risk, Reward and Resilience framework (RRR) to help enable integrative policymaking with respect to complex problems.
Anthea’s work on Dragonfly Thinking is closely connected with Howard Gardner’s work on Synthesizing and the Synthesizing Mind. Howard and Anthea regularly correspond about the nature of synthesis and its connections with creativity, prediction (e.g., Tetlock’s work on superforecasters) and policymaking (e.g., Geoff Mulgan’s work on the Synthesis Gap in policymaking). For introductory blogs by Anthea on Howard’s website about “A Synthesizing Mechanism?” and “Mixed Martial Arts as Interdisciplinary Street Fighting,” see below.
Anthea is particularly interested in cross-border and cross-disciplinary collaborations – including within and among academia, business, governments and NGOs – to develop creative ways of approaching the complex interconnected problems facing today’s world. She convenes groups of diverse thinkers who meet to share emerging ideas, research and sources, facilitating the collisions and cross-pollination of ideas that lead to new understandings.
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A Synthesizing Mechanism?
Introduction by Howard Gardner
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Mixed Martial Arts as Interdisciplinary Street Fighting?
Introduction by Howard Gardner
Visual and metaphorical thinking
Anthea takes a highly visual and metaphorical approach to her research that links with her broader interest in better integrating analytical and creative thinking into conceptual work. As a visual thinker, Anthea frequently crystallizes her thinking in images before reducing them to words. She also makes extensive use of metaphors to both construct new conceptualizations and communicate them to others.
In keeping with notions of the extended mind, and the way the brain often functions best outside of our office environments and oscillating between connecting with people and quietly reflecting alone, Anthea often draws inspiration for her work from time spent engaging with others and in the natural environment. Canberra and the South Coast provide beautiful natural backgrounds for outdoor inspiration.
Visual thinking
The discussions with Nicolas Lamp that led to Six Faces of Globalization took place during Anthea’s early morning walks in Australia and Nicolas’s late nights in Canada. The idea of putting the six narratives onto a Rubik’s Cube crystallized during a jog in January 2019, shown in the initial sketch here.
In her work with Taylor St John on UNCITRAL, Anthea first sketched the image for bringing the various reforms together within a flexible framework on a napkin in a café in September 2019. It was then rendered digitally by CartoGIS at the ANU and used in Anthea and Taylor’s subsequent blogs and articles.
Metaphorical thinking
Anthea often uses metaphors to develop and convey new conceptualizations. This approach is in keeping with studies about the significant role of metaphorical thinking in creative intellectual processes in science and beyond. In Clash of Paradigms: Actors and Analogies Shaping the Investment Treaty System, for instance, she likened the system to a platypus:
“When the skin of an Australian platypus was first taken to England in the 1700s, scientists thought it was a fake. It looked like someone had sewn a duck’s bill onto a beaver’s body; one scientist even took a pair of scissors to the skin looking for stitches. The animal had fur and was warm-blooded like a mammal, yet laid eggs and had webbed feet like a bird or a reptile. Scientists struggled to categorize this unusual creature. Was it a bird, a mammal, or a reptile? Or was it some strange hybrid of all three? Comprehending the investment treaty system has proven just as problematic…”
In Complex Designers and Emergent Design , Taylor St John and Anthea conceptualize participants in the UNCITRAL ISDS Reform Working Group as complex designers, by which they mean actors who seek to design and redesign institutions within complexity. They explain the role of complex designers through invoking the metaphor of landscape architects:
“The complex designers we see at UNCITRAL face unpredictability and ongoing change, but still aspire to design or redesign institutions that will deliver on their substantive goals over time. In our observation, they function like landscape architects who focus on both episodic design and adaptive management. Like architects, they attempt to design structures that respond to but also shape the users who will inhabit them. Like gardeners, they consider the environment in deciding what to seed and when, being mindful of the need to tend to their plants and calibrate their care giving in light of changing conditions.”
Outdoor inspiration
Anthea’s work on adaptive governance and complexity theory has developed over many early morning jogs around Lake Burley Griffin and walks up Red Hill with her great friend and colleague Miranda Forsyth. Anthea has taken many photos during these morning sessions, of dew-laced spider’s webs, reflections, black swans, and panoramic perspectives, all of which feature (metaphorically) in their work.
What Anthea's reading
Anthea reads avidly across a broad range of subjects, a practice she describes as “cognitive foraging.” From her forays across fields, she makes connections and identifies patterns, sharing passages and links with her collaborators in a process affectionately known as “Anthea spam.”
She is always interested in receiving book recommendations. Suggestions can be sent to anthea.roberts@anu.edu.au or by tweeting @AntheaERoberts. Here’s a sample of what she’s currently reading.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. Neither plant nor animal, they are found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. They can be microscopic, yet also account for the largest organisms ever recorded. These endlessly surprising organisms have no brain but can solve problems and manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into a spectacular and neglected world, and shows that fungi provide a key to understanding both the planet on which we live, and life itself.
The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
Why is the brain divided? The difference between right and left hemispheres has been puzzled over for centuries. Drawing on a vast body of brain research, the renowned psychiatrist, author and thinker Iain McGilchrist reveals that the difference between the two sides is profound – two whole, coherent, but incompatible ways of experiencing the world. The detail-oriented left hemisphere prefers mechanisms to living things and is inclined to self-interest, while the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility, and generosity.
A Synthesizing Mind by Howard Gardner
Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenon – a mind-changer. Widely read by the general public as well as by educators, this influential book laid out Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Reflecting now on his own mind, Gardner concludes that his is a “synthesizing mind” – with the ability to survey experiences and data across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. He contends that the synthesizing mind is particularly valuable at this time and proposes ways to cultivate a possibly unique human capacity.
Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta
What happens when global systems are viewed from an Indigenous perspective? How does it affect the way we see history, money, power and learning? Could it change the world? Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Most of all it's about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.
Other books Anthea loved
• Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic
• The Global City by Saskia Sassen
• Seeing Like a State by James Scott
• The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
• Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow
• The Great Convergence by Richard Baldwin
• Wired to Create by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire
• Originals by Adam Grant
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
• The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett
• Apology and Utopia by Martti Koskenniemi
• Crisis and Renewal by David Hurst
• Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Diversity Bonus by Scott Page
• Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• Images of Organizations by Gareth Morgan
• Range by David Epstein
• The Globalization Paradox by Dani Rodrik
• How China Escaped the Poverty Trap by Yuen Yuen Ang
• The Landscape of History by John Lewis Gaddis
• The Chessboard and the Web by Anne-Marie Slaughter
• Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed
• Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers
• Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott