Hi,
Hope you are doing well! You might have noticed that I took a little break. It has been an intense first half of the year, and I needed to calm my nervous system. Which I did by reading Irene Vallejo’s brilliant book Papyrus at a beach at the Baltic Sea. If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you do. It’s a love declaration to books and stuffed with reflections on today’s world through the lens of the past. Many of the things we do nowadays seem extremely important to short-term thinking, but long-term thinking can put that into perspective. That’s what Roman Krznaric calls temporal intelligence. It inspired me to start a new course at www.flexiblevisualsystems.info which I will release in the upcoming weeks.
The last few months have been intense because founding an online school is harder than I anticipated. It requires so much time from Franziska and me, and to be honest, the profit margin is low. But teaching, or in this case directing, is not about profit margins. It is about weaving useful knowledge back into society instead of keeping it to yourself. There is nothing that makes me happier than getting a message from someone saying that FVS has been helpful to them. At the School of Systems, we have lots of brilliant new teachers, offering very exciting workshops and courses. They all bring their own perspective to the FVS world. The diagram shows you the current curriculum. Each workshop and course has its place and helps the other workshops and courses to educate you to become a holistic system designer.
In the next weeks and months, I will introduce you to the new teachers. If you are a long-time follower of this newsletter or even a patron, the very first teacher we start the second half of the year with will sound familiar to you, as I interviewed her already a couple of years ago: the inspiring Lena Weber. Let her words sink in; there is a lot of wisdom in them: https://flexiblevisualsystems.info/resources/interviewlena2/
Wish you a wonderful week, and let me know how your summer goes in the comments.
Best,
Martin