Centering Sentience: Restoring the Role of Felt Experience in Systems Thinking

Modern groups, organizations, and societies are saturated with sentient experience: anxiety, desire, dread, shame, hope, rage, and grief, to name a few. Yet much of this experience remains under-recognized, disowned, or prematurely converted into argument, conclusion, and action. A foundational premise for this paper is that modern societies lack adequate structures for metabolizing emotional experience in systems, which necessarily leads to coping via defensive maneuvers — denials, over-simplifications, polarizations — which result in failures of collective thinking.

This paper introduces Centering Sentience as an emerging systems-psychodynamic, arts-inflected, and collaborative approach to restoring experience — in its embodied, emotional, and relational fullness — to the heart of systems inquiry. Its core proposition is that failures of collective thinking are often failures of emotional metabolization. The author recognizes the ambition inherent in this kind of project, which in some ways seeks to redress the imbalance of Western rationalism and instrumentalism.

Drawing on a range of inter-related frameworks — Bion’s “container/contained relationship” and his theory of thinking, Intersubjective Systems Theory, systems psychodynamics, socioanalysis, adaptive leadership, social dreaming, “paradoxes of group life,” and vertical development — Centering Sentience asks: What becomes possible when groups get better at: 1) seeing the systemic context of their experience; and 2) feeling and metabolizing their lived experience sufficiently to “think” together?

The paper will present the conceptual architecture of Centering Sentience and invite dialogue among colleagues on prototyping promising methods. Methods currently under consideration include: microanalysis of lived moments across a stakeholder eco-system; foregrounding the sentient system against the task system across the domains of person, role, group, organization, context, and Source; layered maps that also distinguish confidence levels (high confidence; working hypothesis, and not-known); multi-perspectival inquiry organized around the principles of “True, but partial” and “How are they right?” (Shapiro); and arts-based formats using music, film, visual mapping, story, movement, and image as sentient portals into difficult collective experience.

These methods aim to help participants slow down emotionally charged events, notice embodied, relational, and emotional data, locate experience in a systems context, hold multiple points of view, and transform neuro-social activation into shared thinking and wiser action. The aim of these methods is a rigorous practice of making experience-in-context visible, discussable, and “think”-able.

The paper will invite ISPSO and NIODA colleagues into dialogue about how this developing work might extend traditions of group relations, social dreaming, socioanalytic inquiry, and organizational consultation. It will also ask what additional methods, safeguards, collaborations, and research designs are needed to make Centering Sentience useful in leadership, team, and organization development, education, and societal learning.