Central to my thoughts are some thinkers I came across as part of my PhD research. In no particular order, they are the psychoanalysts Erich Fromm and Ignacio Martín-Baró, the sociologists Niklas Luhmann and Barney Glaser, the philosophers Enrique Dussel and René Girard and the theologian/philosopher Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan.

What interests me about all these people is that they explore, in their different ways, how we become more fully human through a willingness to open ourselves up to a genuine encounter with other people and ideas.

I am also grateful to my original PhD supervisor, Ruth Deakin Crick, who introduced me to systems thinking and learning emergence, which provided a launchpad for my exploration, nudging me towards the research method Classical Grounded Theory, which is central to all my work.