The 2025n1 Banathy Conversation is scheduled to convene at the Center for Corporate Rehabilitation near Fairfield, Iowa, beginning on Sunday, April 13, 2025, and ending on (Good) Friday, April 18.
Participants in the Conversation can plan for the event with more detailed descriptions under:
Booking (including Lodging, Registering, Routing)
Equipping (including Apple-Platform, Google-Platform, Alternative-Platforms)
Engaging (including Connecting, Agreeing, Gathering, Exploring, Reflecting, Recollecting)
The Conversation centers on Gathering, Exploring and Reflecting, in-person, over six days. Activities preceding and following the residential event are conducted on Google Workspace.
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. [William Gibson]
We simultaneously live in multiple systems. Each system has its own nature. As each system evolves, its constituents may perceive the paces of changes and priorities for action differently. Sometimes attention is mostly drawn within. Looking without at other times, smaller-faster pacings may raise alerts, or slower-larger levels may be taken as too rigid.
A system normally deals with anticipated events, so that customary adaptations are a matter of course. Living systems may naturally transform, e.g. as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. As time progresses a system may reach its limits. Social systems exercising consciousness may have the capacity to evolve into a different scale, e.g. a town expanding into a city, or winding down into a village. Organizations with less foresight may find themselves in an unexpected rapid decline – a collapse.
Different people deal with systems changes at different scales, scopes and speeds. At a global level, the impact of climate change on human habitation has been a significant concern brought by scientists into the spotlight. In complexity, the relations between causes and effects may not be readily traceable. Extreme weather conditions (e.g. storms, floods, droughts) that impact farming can ripple through supply chains into food webs. Families choosing to migrate away from homes they have known many generations is a symptom, not a defect.
Some in more fortunate locales have institutional resources that can buffer intense shifts. Work systems, family systems, educational systems, healthcare systems and others weave together in a meshwork. Privileges enjoyed by some may be inaccessible to others.
How do we make choices for ourselves, and for others? Which systems can we affect, and how would we bring about the changes?
The opportunity to explore possibilities for systems changes can be unpacked in a five-day Banathy Conversation event. Small groups of deep thinkers, experts, and scholars collaborate in defining questions worth pursuing, and considering new frontiers. Leading up to the in-person event, preliminary discussions are conducted online. Following the event, participants report on their experiences in proceedings.
CSRP Institute invites individuals and groups to apply as participants for the first Banathy Conversation of 2025. We will convene at the Center for Corporate Rehabilitation near Fairfield, Iowa. This immersive experience begins on Sunday. April 13, 2025 at 5:00 pm, and runs through Friday, April 19 at noon. The 2025 Annual General Meeting of CSRP Institute will be held on Friday, 2:00 pm to 4 pm.
The fee for attending is nominally 100CHF (about $125USD). Located on a farm in the rural heartland, participants may be asked to contribute funds and/or effort towards shared meals. Families are welcomed, and some childcare can be arranged.
The facility has 5 bedrooms available, with a few options for attendees into couch-surfing. Meeting areas could accommodate up to three parallel conversation groups. We expect fewer than 20 participants, in total. Offsite accommodations in town may be an option for visitors arriving with cars.
The venue is located at a 75 minute drive south of Cedar Rapids Municipal Airport, or 2 hours west of Quad Cities International Airport in Moline. We may help in coordinating rides for air travellers.
Pre-conference collaboration and post-conference proceedings will be coordinated on lab.csrp.institute. Participants will be granted Google Workspace accounts for access to shared drives, online meetings, and chat.
Plans are underway for a larger Banathy Conversation 2025 second event in southeast Asia. Current timing under investigation is no earlier than the beginning of September, and no later than the first week of October.
The 2024 Banathy Conversation was held in Lugano, Switzerland from September 29 to October 4.
Interested parties can contact Susu Nousala, Gary Metcalf, or David Ing, for more details.
Hawk, D. L. (2019). Too Early, Too Late, Now What? AuthorHouse. https://www.authorhouse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/799308-too-early-too-late-now-what
Homer-Dixon, T. (2020). Commanding hope: The power we have to renew a world in peril. Knopf Canada. https://commandinghope.com/
Lawrence, M., Homer-Dixon, T., Janzwood, S., Rockstrom, J., Renn, O., & Donges, J. F. (2023). Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 4483556). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4483556
Rosen, J. (2022). Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory Systems Theory: The Science of Life and Mind. Mathematics, 10(22), Article 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/math10224172
Systems inquiries inviting international participants for a residential learning experience had have a long history in Austria.
Under the auspices of Bela H. Banathy, meetings starting in 1982 were led by the International Systems Institute in partnership with the International Federation for Systems Research started.
The International Federation for Systems Research continued biannual events from 2000 to 2014.
Official Proceedings of the IFSR Conversations are available as open access from 2000 to 2014.
The 2016 Conversation was published as a Book on Demand. Chapter 3 is available as an open access accepted manuscript.
The Banathy Conversation, as implemented by CSRP Institute, derives from the original intents of early convenings.
"Bela Banathy defined a conversation as being:
a collectively guided disciplined inquiry,
an exploration of issues of social/societal significance,
engaged by scholarly[1] practitioners in self-organized teams,
who select a theme for their conversation,
which is initiated in the course of a preparation phase that leads to an intensive learning phase." [Dyer (2016), p. 5]
[1] "Conversation methods as described here are no longer restricted to those involving “scholarly practitioners”. The techniques described are equally applicable to any context where the aim is to draw on the creative capacity of everyone involved. Hence it can be applied to a business context where there is genuine openness to contribution from all."
CSRP Institute draws on the techniques and experiences of Banathy Conversations, extending pre-residential and post-residential activities with Internet communications technologies.
Dyer, Gordon. 2016. “Guidebook for Designing and Sustaining Effective Conversation.” International Federation for Systems Research. http://archive-ifsr.org/publications/conversations/, cached at drive.lab.csrp.institute.