APPLYING THESE IDEAS TO MY OWN LIFE 
Like most people, I have experienced many more inflections in my life than disruptions.  I came up with a list of 14 inflection points and 4 significant disruptions.

Inflection points occurred three times during my secondary schooling and on each occasion there was a circumstance in which a teacher believed in me sufficiently to give me a chance and help create opportunity for me which took me on a new pathway without feeling any sense of loss for the past. Inflection points in my life also determined my pathway to a PhD and to my first professional role and 8 years of living in Saudi Arabia. At a personal level, inflection points occurred when I met the first girl who I decided to marry, and also, after her untimely death at the age of 48, when I met and married my second wife and entered her family. Inflections also occurred as each of my children were born and we grew from a couple into a family since becoming a parent and caring for children has a significant impact on our experiences, identity and behaviours.

"Very few people see inflection points as the opportunities they often are: catalysts for changing their lives; moments when a person can modify the trajectory he or she is on and redirect it in a more desirable direction.  Whether it's a new job, a change in a relationship, or something else, an inflection point is one of those periodic windows of opportunity when a person can pause, reflect, and ask: '... do I want to continue on this path or is now the moment to change direction?"(2)

It's hard to remember what you thought as a child, but now I think I did realise at the time (aged 12) when I was in my first inflection point, that I was at crossroads and that the decision I was making would alter the course of my life. I could see that there were opportunities for me to take although I could only appreciate the true significance of the change I made when I look back years later. As Soren Kierkgaard once said 'Life can only be understood backwards [after it has been] lived forwards'

Turning to the disruptions in my life I have experienced several of my own making. The first occurred when my family and I left Saudi Arabia and I gave up a job I enjoyed, many good friends and a lifestyle we had grown accustomed to come back to a period of great uncertainty. The second, when I was 40, and I fundamentally changed my career. The first 12 months were the hardest of my professional life. I had to give up being the professional geologist I had invested heavily in becoming and there were enormous feelings of loss alongside the stress, uncertainty and at times exhaustion I was experiencing. But the biggest disruption I have so far had to cope with was the loss of my first wife to cancer in 1999. When she died, a significant part of me died with her and I know that I became a different person to the person I was when she was alive. While outwardly it might have looked as if I had coped well with my loss, I mostly kept how I felt to myself. I lost my enthusiasm for life for a while and within a few months I had decided to move on to another role in another organisation - I think, in part, to escape the past.

Looking back now, I can now see how all these inflection points and disruptions were the triggers for new pathways and experiences through life. Many of these points required me to go through a transition that was not enjoyable or comfortable and was sometimes full of anxiety and stress. All of them changed me to varying degrees and in various ways. All required me to learn, develop and change as a person. Many required me to develop myself professionally for new roles and to relinquish an identity and begin to form a new identity. 

THE IDEA OF LOSING YOURSELF
As I was completing this post I came across a post by Maria Popova (3) on Rebecca Solnit's book A Field Guide to Getting Lost (4). Maria tells a story in which a student came into a workshop with  a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” The idea of using disruptions and inflection points in life to discover how to 'go about finding that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you', seemed like a revelation to me.

Solnit writes (4): 'To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away.' As  Popova elaborates,'to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually  what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.' This beautifully expressed way of seeing the process of embarking on a new trajectory through life, seems to offer a deeper insight into the psychological process of life inflections and self-disruptions, by revealing why we are motivated to do it.  By changing the direction of our life. By voluntarily putting ourselves into new situations that will take us on a different path through the landscape that we have access to in our life - we are creating opportunity to lose something of ourselves (the life we used to lead and the person we used to be) while at the same time creating the potential to discover, 'that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you'.  Losing ourselves is the way we challenge ourselves to live a life in which we can discover for ourselves who we are.  'Never to get lost is not to live' (Popova).

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR CREATIVITY 
It seems to me that inflections with all the promise they hold, are also important points for creativity as we have to recreate ourselves and develop entirely new ecologies for learning and flourishing in response to the changing circumstances of our life. On the other hand disruptions are often periods when creativity may die within us as our desire to flourish is overwhelmed by our sense of loss and dislocation, and creativity serves only to help us survive, not flourish.

I conclude that the points of inflection and disruption in our life enable us to discover who we are at each stage and in each part of our life and they exert a profound influence on who we become. They are largely responsible for our uniquely personal learning and development trajectories and our accomplishments in the contexts we have inhabited. They demand and require us to develop our resilience and afford us new opportunities to exercise our creativity in both recreating ourselves and solving the problems and dilemmas of new circumstances in our life.

Sources
1) Exploring Disruption and Resilience Lifewide Magazine December 2014           
2) Taking Advantage of Life’s (Few and Far Between) Inflection Points  Howard's Gift: Uncommon Wisdom to Inspire Your Life's Work,  By Eric C. Sinoway http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7041.html
3) Maria Popova (2014) A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves 
4) Rebecca Solnit (2006) A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit on How We Find Ourselves

Illustrations by Kiboko HachiYon

The editorial team is working on the next issue of Lifewide Magazine  which aims to explore the idea of disruption in life and how individuals cope with and overcome significant disruption and change, adapt and grow through their experiences. The human condition is to try to understand situations in order to make good decisions about how to act or not act. Some situations are easy to comprehend: they are familiar and we have dealt with them or something like them before and we are confident that we know what to do. Others are more difficult to understand and some are impossible to understand until we have engaged in them. The amount of stability will vary from one person's life to another. Instability leading to disruption is not something that can be controlled, and there are many things in life that we have little or no control over. But some aspects of our life we can control and we can actively seek stability by avoiding putting ourselves in situations that might lead to disruption. We might hypothesize that people who behave conservatively, who do not take risks or venture into situations of uncertainty, are less likely to encounter self-created disruption. But also perhaps, they are less likely to be able to deal with it when they encounter it. On the other hand, people who go looking for adventure and change, who are willing to take risks, are more likely to encounter self-created disruption in their life. And because they have experienced it before and dealt with it, they are better able to cope with it should it happen again.

This post is concerned with how we might understand stability, change and disruption in our personal life using complexity theory to help us appreciate what is happening and why it is happening. Complexity theory is 'a set of concepts that try to explain complex phenomenon not explainable by traditional cause and effect theories. It integrates ideas derived from chaos theory, cognitive psychology,computer science, evolutionary biology, general systems theory, fuzzy logic,information theory, and other related fields to deal with the natural and artificial systems as they are, and not by simplifying them (breaking them down into their constituent parts). It recognizes that complex behaviour emerges from a few simple rules, and that all complex systems are networks of many interdependent parts which interact according to those rules(1).

Interpreting life disruptions using the Cynefin framework

The Cynefin sense making framework, developed by David Snowden (2&3) is a simple tool to help us explore and appreciate the nature and level of complexity in any situation. It was originally developed to aid understanding of organisational change, but the conceptual tool can also be used to evaluate personal situations. A life is after all made up of many situations of differing levels of complexity all being enacted in real time. Fortunately, for most of us, most of our life is made up of situations that are fairly stable and we can reliably predict what will happen within such a situation and we can behave accordingly. We are not challenged to invent new behaviours or learn new things in order to act appropriately and effectively.

Disruption occurs when events and circumstances cause the patterns, routines and relationships of everyday life to fundamentally change and we are forced to relinquish our existing life, or significantly adapt it, or invent an entirely new life for ourselves and perhaps reinvent ourselves in the process. In such situations we are we are challenged to invent new behaviours and learn new things in order to act appropriately and effectively.

Watch a youTube clip about the Cynefin framework developed by David Snowden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8

There are four domains within the Cynefin framework which we might equate with different types of situation in our life. In the simple domain things have a simple cause and effect – you do X and you are very likely to get Y. The environment - contexts and problems - are familiar and understood. You will probably have had many similar experiences that can be directly related to the situation. You know that ‘what you do’ is likely to have a particular result. And if you do the same thing in a similar situation the same result will happen. This is the situational domain we most commonly experience in our everyday life when life is not so troublesome. In this situation we know what to do, we know how to respond because we have been there many times before.

At the other extreme is the chaotic domain where there is no perceivable relationship between cause and effect. If this situation happens in your life, you feel totally out of control and overwhelmed physically, intellectually and emotionally. We encounter this out of our depth, never experienced before, situation in some life changing experiences. In these situations we sometimes do nothing, either because we do not want to exacerbate the situation or we feel so overwhelmed that we can't imagine anything we do will beneficially affect the situation. Alternatively, we may feel that we have to act, believing that it is better to do something than nothing. In fact it is only by doing something and seeing the results of what we do that we know whether what we did was effective. The feedback we get from our actions enables us to see what we need to do next. It's a trial and error suck and see, who can help me process. It won't get us out of chaos but it may well take us one step in the direction we need to go.

Between these two extremes there are two other types of situation depicted in the Cynefin framework.

Complicated situations are not single events but involve a stream of interconnected situations linked to achieving a goal, like solving a difficult problem or bringing about a change in one's life. An example might be the way someone searches for, finds, applies for and eventually, after a long recruitment process, manages to secure a new job which will bring about a significant change in their material circumstances. Searching for, finding and buying a house might also fall into this category of life challenge. In such situations there are cause-and-effect relationships but sometimes you have to invest effort into working out the relationships by gathering information about the situation and analysing it to see the patterns and look for possible explanations of what is happening. Engaging in these sorts of challenges is the way we become more expert in achieving difficult things, including finding a job and being a parent with teenage children who are trying to find a more independent life.

Complex situations are the most difficult to understand. They are not single events but involve multiple streams of variably connected situations linked to achieving a significant change or, in the context of life disruption, a collection of situations that have coalesced and conspired to make a situation very messy and difficult indeed. In their article Jan Gajeel and Keith Chandler (4) describe life scenarios where a severe illness, leads to depression, leads to loss of job, leads to economic problems and perhaps loss of home, leads to relational problems in the family or the loss of job leads to economic problems, leads to health and social problems like clinical depression and family problems; a divorce leads to loss of family identity, leads to a depression, leads to loss of job. These are complex and very messy situations that may tip people into chaos and without help, few people are able to create a new and better life for themselves. In such situations the cause-and-effect relationships are so intermingled that things only make sense in hindsight and sometimes well after events have taken place. The results of action will be unique to the particular situation and cannot be directly repeated. In these situations relationships are not straightforward and things are unpredictable in detail. People involved may not know the cause of the change that they have been involved in or ascribe the source of change to something that is quite removed from the trigger for change. The way you make progress in understanding what is happening is to sense the patterns of change and respond accordingly. This is exactly where the construction of narratives can help especially if the process is aided by a trusted empathetic facilitator.

Learning for a Complex World

I like the idea of learning for a complex world (5) because it embraces learning and development needs for a lifetime of working with complexity rather than merely studying to pass exams.Traditional academic forms of higher education are founded on stability and certainty and seek to control learning and development within prescribed outcomes-based models of education. They work predominantly with abstract book knowledge and theoretical approaches to problem working. In terms of the Cynefin framework higher education tends to position learning in the simple and complicated domains. Consequently, these forms of education do little to prepare people for the really significant disruptions they will face in their life. Formal education can equip us with knowledge, understanding and ways of thinking that can assist us in particular contexts but it is limited in so far as it cannot offer us the experiences of actually dealing with complex situations as they emerge in the social world that is our life outside the classroom.

The real educational challenge for higher education is to help learners prepare themselves for the disruptions, some forced some chosen, that they will undoubtedly encounter in their lives. In helping learners develop the knowledge, capability, creativity, will and resilience to deal effectively with the full range of life situations we are developing their ability to comprehend and appraise situations of different levels of complexity, and act appropriately and effectively. We do this intuitively throughout our lives because that is what life is about. It stands to reason that a university that adopts a lifewide concept for learning and development (6) extends the opportunity to engage students with the situated and contextualised environments in which such complexity emerges. That is why institutions that seek to encourage learners to draw on their whole life experience for their own development are moving in the direction we need to go if we are to create an education system that will really help people prepare for their uncertain and unknowable futures.

Biographic Note: Norman is the founder and leader of Lifewide Education

Information sources

1http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/complexitytheory.html#ixzz3IvgHzpZ8

2 Snowden, D. (2000) Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place: An Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in Formal and Informal Communities. Conference proceedings of KMAC at the University of Aston, July 2000 and Snowden, D. (2000) Cynefin: A Sense of Time and Space, the Social Ecology of Knowledge Management. In C. Despres and D. Chauvel (eds) Knowledge Horizons: The Present and the Promise of Knowledge Management, Bost on: Butterworth Heinemann.

3 Snowden, D. J. and Boone, M. (2007) A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November: 69–76.

4 Gajeel, J. and Chandler, K. (2014) Helping People to Fix their Broken-Life. Lifewide Magazine Issue 12 December 2014 available on line at:http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/ to be published Dec 15th 2014

5 Jackson, N. J. (2011) Learning for a Complex World: A Lifewide Cocept of Learning, Education and Personal Development Authorhouse

6 Jackson, N.J. (2014) Lifewide Learning and Education in Universities & Colleges: Concepts and Conceptual Aids in N Jackson and J Willis (eds) Lifewide Learning and Education in Universities and Colleges Chapter 1 available at:http://www.learninglives.co.uk/e-book.html