Walking in the Garden

On the first page of Jorge Borges' _The Garden of Forking Paths_, Ten Pages that Changed the World, he upends the Myth of Singularity.

For, on that first page, we recognize that there is not a single journey through the story, but multiple, simultaneous journeys through it.

On that page, three Meaning Makers, are introduced.

There is the narrator whose voice is heard only in the first paragraph, a historian who is trying to piece together a military history. There is the primary character, a spy whose confessional creates the primary story arc that seeks to understand his story from the context of an ancestral history. But then, almost hidden from view, is a footnote from an editor, a silent omnipresent traveler who is seeking to assert acceptable truth from their perspective.

Later we discover in the story another meaning maker, the sinologist whose name seals his fate. Finally, we step back from this tale and realize that we too have been a traveler in this journey through the garden, as we reflect on the meaning of what we have just experienced.

In all, five meaning makers. But all who are making meaning from very distinct contexts.

These thoughts are being pondered as we reflect on the mental maps by which each participant in a complex system comes to understand it, an insight explored in the Stella Report.

Perhaps it might be helpful not to think of these mental maps - each schema that can be considered a Meaning Matrix - as existing in parallel planes. Perhaps we would be better served to think of them as Disruptive Orthogonal Planes that have the potential to be explored with Curiosity.

That disruption, perhaps, holds the key to developing a learning culture that allows for the engineering of more resilient systems.

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