Organizational development consultant, coach and educator based in Victoria, British Columbia. Co-founder, with Jean Singer, of Ecology of Design in Human Systems, and Associate Faculty in the Master of Arts in Leadership program at Royal Roads University. A friend and dialogue partner of Michael Haupt, whose conversation on 25 September 2026 brought lens and self-talk into the corpus’s reading of the ladder of inference.
Contribution
Keller’s work centers on building collaborative, multicultural relationships in organizations. His expertise grew out of a decade living in Nepal and Tibet, and he holds a master’s degree in Intercultural Communications from Antioch University. His consulting emphasizes multicultural dynamics and cross-cultural adjustment, alongside executive and team coaching, for clients across government, non-profits, financial and educational institutions and professional associations.
Ecology of Design in Human Systems describes its purpose as co-creating learning environments in which people develop their innovation and adaptive capacities to meet emerging challenges, while maximizing the fit between their people, resources and sustainable living. Its change model works with four questions: the motivation for change and its impact, how the problem is defined and resolved, whether implementation is feasible, and which methods fit the situation.
Contribution to the corpus
In a Zoom dialogue with Michael Haupt on 25 September 2026, lens and self-talk were named as additions to Argyris’s ladder of inference: the lens as the frame through which participants interpret the world, and self-talk as the narrative through which each person explains the world to themselves, carrying their cognitive biases. Haupt developed both into the three-layer model set out in The Ladder, the Lens and Self-Talk and applied it to governance in the Emergent form, where people from very different perspectives meet without a built-in tie-breaker. The dialogue also prompted the research brief A TIME Profile for Multi-Perspective Governance.
Keller’s intercultural practice bears directly on the lens concept, which treats interpretation as something a person inherits by belonging to a community, a language and a history.
Related pages
- The Ladder, the Lens and Self-Talk
- Lens (glossary)
- Self-talk (glossary)
- Ladder of Inference (glossary)
- A TIME Profile for Multi-Perspective Governance
- Chris Argyris
Sources
- Ecology of Design in Human Systems. “About Michael.” https://www.ecologyofdesigninhumansystems.com/about-us/about-michael/
- Keller, M., and Haupt, M. (2026, September 25). Zoom dialogue on the ladder of inference, lens and self-talk. Unpublished conversation.
Provenance
Written 26 September 2026. Biographical details from the Ecology of Design in Human Systems website. The account of the 25 September 2026 dialogue follows the pages it gave rise to; it does not assign either participant sole authorship of lens or self-talk.