Mnemonics of Achieving Strategic Lift-off and Sustainable Flight

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 11 May 2026

Anthony Judge - TRANSCEND Media Service

Imaginative Misrepresentation of Viable Systemic Connectivity by Magic Carpets and Dragonification

Introduction

11 May 2026 – There are many extensively articulated strategies in response to the crises of governance — and to the polycrisis of the times. Their complexity and abstraction typically renders them unmemorable, thereby inhibiting their uptake and appropriate implementation. To an unfortunate degree, the pattern that connects is a challenge to individual and collective memory.

Curiously what tends to be memorable can be readily deprecated as a misrepresentation of the subtlety called for by the challenges of governance. There is therefore a strange dilemma between the recognition of appropriate complexity (in a manner incomprehensible to those most implicated in the implementation of appropriate strategy) and the presentation of comprehensible explanations which are inherently inappropriate. Such misrepresentation has been most notably described as misplaced concreteness by Alfred North Whitehead (Science and the Modern World, 1967).

Faced with that dilemma, there is a case for having recourse to forms of imaginative simplification which deliberately endeavour to maintain a degree of connectivity to the complexity which cannot be effectively rendered collectively memorable. Ensuring that a strategy “flies” can then be explored from that perspective. The approach taken here is through recognition that viable aerodynamics involves the skillful juxtaposition of “parts” to ensure “lift-off” and sustainable flight thereafter. The parts can take the form of triangles, squares, and other pieces — the familiar polygons of geometry — joined together as in a jigsaw puzzle. The simplest airplane can be designed in this way — as children are able to do. Rather than flight, a variety of “animals” can be configured in this way — although typically their movement is not enabled. Origami is especially suggestive in this respect.

That suggestion clearly does not engage with the complexity of the diagrammatics by which a complex viable system is modelled and designed. With respect to governance, this is exemplified by the World3 model which has been the basis for The Limits to Growth (1972) and its later developments. That model is typically represented on a flat paper layout — a systems diagram — posing a challenge to comprehension and memorability even when its complexity is reduced (and thereby mistakenly further distorted) even though its elements refer to functions described by equations for computer manipulation (themselves even more obscure). There is thus a fundamental disconnect between the comprehension by many and the requisite systemic articulation of a strategy. Ironically the matter can be presented otherwise through depictions on “maps” of the metabolic pathways fundamental to life — where their “comprehension” is effectively known to most — primarily, if not solely — through their embodiment.

The challenge is now also evident globally in the articulation by the UN of its set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the systemic connectivity they imply — effectively requiring a corresponding connectivity between the agencies implicated in their implementation. The challenges in this respect are evident in the increasing appreciation of the significant failure of those strategic goals. Ironically this has recently been addressed by recourse to flight-related language through a call to “turbocharge” the SDGs, as discussed separately (Turbocharging SDGs by Activating Global Cycles in a 64-fold 3D Array, 2024). That challenge is all the greater in that it has been formally acknowledged that the readership of UN reports is very limited (Michelle Nichols, UN report finds United Nations reports are not widely read, Reuters, 2 August 2025; Nobody reads UN reports – UN report, The Telegraph New Zealand, 3 August 2025; A UN report on UN reports’ declining readership: surprising truth behind the world’s most ignored document, Economic Times, 3 August 2025).

The exploration in what follows focuses on the possibility of using polyhedra as a means of mapping the systemic elements of any integrative strategy — global or otherwise — in order to render its coherence and viability comprehensible and memorable. One argument in support of this approach is the assertion of Buckminster Fuller that All systems are polyhedra. All polyhedra are systems (Synergetics 2: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, 1979, II, 400.56; Recognition of polyhedra as systems and systems as polyhedra, 2024).

In their relevance to strategic “lift-off” and “sustainable flight”, the argument notes the unexpected inspiration of kites in the influential philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Susan G. Sterrett, Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: a story of models of wings and models of the world, 2005). “Kite” is also a technical term in the geometry of polyhedra. The disconnect between formal articulation by the few (for the few) and popular appeal for the many (for which strategies are purportedly designed) is addressed here by considering how abstract polyhedral geometry can be transformed through phases into memorably imaginative forms.

The question of concern is then how systems diagrams can be transformed into “magic carpets”, for example, as previously suggested (Magic Carpets as Psychoactive System Diagrams, 2010). More provocatively, can they even be transformed into “dragons” — to respond to the widespread imaginative appeal of dragons. Does every strategy call for its “dragonification” — in order to engage with popular imagination? The suggestion is that it is such transformative representation provides the vital psychosocial connectivity which — ironically — is systematically ignored by academic experts and think tanks in advising governments. Dismissed as they are as “figments of fevered imagination”, it is especially ironical that they may embody a form of attractivity that is precisely what conventional strategic articulations especially lack — as is well demonstrated by their popular appeal..

As previously, this exercise makes very extensive use of AI in exploring such possibilities and their visualization. Initially the focus was on the feasibility of configuring polyhedra as “winged strategic vehicles” inspired by the biomimetics of flight and the insights offered by helicopter development (Biomimicry: a fresh approach to aircraft innovation,Airbus; (Engendering a Psychopter through Biomimicry and Technomimicry, 2011). This phase concluded with recognition of the problematic adaptation of most polyhedra to the bilateral symmetry potentially required for such flight — especially given the challenge of “one-wing governance” (typically characteristic of political systems trending towards fascism). The approach was then generalized to focus on the configuration of polyhedral body-plans to any forms of animal locomotion.

The extensive technical detail explored in the exchange with AI — potentially of little interest to most — suggested that the outcome of the exchange could best be presented initially as a concluding context for what then follows (as “footnotes”). That conclusion took the form of the “dragonfication” of an experimental reconfiguration of a polyhedral systemic mapping of the Earth Summit issues of 1992, recently presented anew (Implications of earlier polyhedral mapping of issues of Earth Summit, 2026). Consideration was then given to the prior challenge of using AI to reconfigure any conventional systems diagram in polyhedral form. This was applied to both a version of the World3 systems diagram of “world dynamics” and to an early experimental adaptation of it to “psychodynamics” as a missing dimension of strategic reflection (World Dynamics and Psychodynamics, 1971). That had been understood as a step towards making abstract “world system” dynamic limitations meaningful to the individual.

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