How might understanding tempo help systemic action in government-community interactions?

Many organisations suffer from reinforcing loops of images, ideas and habits of ever-compressed time horizons which can undermine value-generating activities such as other-regarding care work, cyclical work, and collective imagineering of alternatives.  Systems thinking and futures thinking both lend themselves to critical examination of linear and short-term organisational assumptions that constrain evolution of governing ideas and practices to be fit for new social and environmental purposes and realities.  Changing timeframes and directional orientations of time affect what actions are taken, by when and by whom towards sustainable futures. We also need to understand how our concepts of time and their relationships with collective action intersect with complex social and environmental policy at and across spatial and institutional levels.  This session will open exploration of how change is happening in government-community interactions around climate change, to look for ways to open up collective assumptions about what change work matters, and how and why it matters.    Making use of key concepts in understanding social dynamics and temporalities in systems work (from Barbara Adam, Chris Groves, Kerri Facer and Helen Pallet), this ‘working in the open’ session will make a case for systems practice that helps organisations to attend to multiple assumptions and lived experiences of timeframes, time-directions, and time-valuations for new collaborations in climate action. This will be useful for practitioners and praxis people working across complex issues in multiple stakeholder locations and through organisational boundaries.