Nora Bateson

About the guest: Nora Bateson is the daughter of the influential systems theorist, anthropologist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind. She made the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, about her father. The film has been called “an intellectually challenging and inspiring work of art… with a glimpse of evanescent hope” and combines explanations of his theoretical work with a portrait of their relationship.

In addition to her film work, Nora is the author of Small Arcs of Larger Circles, a book bringing together her writings, poetry, and drawings on the topics of complexity, systems, education, organizations, new economic and financial models, future thinking, and ethics. In it, she also introduced the term “symmathesy.” Though hard to pin down, Nora’s work also incorporates ideas from biology, cognitive science, art, anthropology, psychology, and ecology.