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One of the great joys of being an academic is that you get to play in the world of ideas and words. It is like being invited to get into your favourite sandpit every day and fool around and see what happens. One of the problems with this, however, is that sometimes people ask you to explain the curious sandcastle you built or that odd looking shape in the corner. As those of you who have a psychological interest might know, the psychoanalytically minded in the profession make a lot of what we do in sand pits and the things we create. They are a very symbolically minded lot. We mention this because what follows is very much a child of our bias, world view, experience and, perhaps, deep unconscious. Chris is an educator, researcher and consultant known for his work in education and culture through his book,‘More than G’day’. Stewart is, variously, an academic, consultant, trainer, psychologist, and psychotherapist.

Both of us had been interested for a while in complex adaptive systems and had played a lot with the systems thinking of Bertanafly (1950), Ackoff and Emery (1972), Fred Emery (1971–1986), and Emery and Trist (1965), for example. For the most part they conceptualised the differential nature of environments and how systems and environment could influence each other. Bertanafly, in particular, challenged the notion that systems are always seeking equilibrium and do in fact adapt to external change. Complexity Theory