A systems-thinking-infused shared learning group:

Join the final session of our group in this form on 5 August 2020, 2-3:30pm UK time – how can we build back better in the days ahead? The learning never stops… from the PSTA https://bit.ly/3fegY8p

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Managing the Commons- Eight Principles to Self-Govern | Serve Learn Sustain | Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA

Managing the Commons- Eight Principles to Self-Govern

Dan MatisoffSLS ESSC FellowAssociate Professor

• Read moreabout Dan Matisoff

How would you define this BIG IDEA?

In 1968, Garrett Hardin postulated that humans were doomed to suboptimal outcomes, due to the tragedy of the commons. Individuals behaving rationally would lead to overconsumption and thus, collectively suboptimal outcomes. He, and many who came after, argued that the solutions to this tragedy were either privatization of a resource, or alternatively government control and top-down regulation.

But decades of research have demonstrated that local communities have demonstrated the capacity to avoid this “tragedy” through the formation of institutions that are collectively designed, monitored, and enforced. In Elinor Ostrom’s seminal book “Governing the Commons” she argues that by forming institutions that follow 8 principles can allow communities to avoid the tragedy of the commons and collectively self govern collective (or “common pool”) resources.

These 8 principles are:

1. Boundaries of users and resource are clear
2. Congruence between benefits and costs
3. Users had procedures for making own rules
4. Regular monitoring of users and resource conditions
5. Graduated sanctions
6. Conflict resolution mechanisms
7. Minimal recognition of rights by government
8. Nested enterprises

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Managing the Commons- Eight Principles to Self-Govern | Serve Learn Sustain | Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA

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Considering uncertainty, awareness and ambiguity as a three-dimensional space – Integration and Implementation Insights

Considering uncertainty, awareness and ambiguity as a three-dimensional space

July 28, 2020

By Fabio Boschetti

The concept of unknown unknowns highlights the importance of introspection in assessing knowledge. It suggests that finding our way in the set of known-knowns, known-unknowns, unknown-knowns and unknown-unknowns, reduces to asking:

1. how uncertain are we? and
2. how aware are we of uncertainty?

When a problem involves a decision-making team, rather than a single individual, we also need to ask:

3. how do context and perception affect what we know?

This third question pertains to ambiguity, understood as the extent to which framing a problem differently (reflecting different assumptions, priorities, values or morals) may lead to different conclusions. The distinction between uncertainty and ambiguity is significant: more information can reduce uncertainty but not ambiguity, since the latter may bias how this information is processed.

None of the above three questions has a black or white answer: in real world problems we are never fully certain or fully uncertain, fully aware or fully unaware; rather answers span a continuum. Uncertainty, awareness and ambiguity thus have the flavour of geometrical dimensions: they define an abstract 3 dimensional space where our state of knowledge can be mapped.

These insights can be turned to practical use by making introspection operational. We can monitor how, not just what, we think in relation to each of the three axes by using simple checklists

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Considering uncertainty, awareness and ambiguity as a three-dimensional space – Integration and Implementation Insights

In today’s post I am looking at “Design” from a cybernetics viewpoint. My inspirations for today’s post are Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Klaus Krippendorff, Paul Pangaro and Ranulph Glanville. The concept I was originally playing around was how the interface of a device conveys the message to the user on how to interact with the device. For example, if you see a button, you are invited to press on it. In a similar vein, if you see a dial, you know to twist the dial up or down. By looking at the ideas of cybernetics, I feel that we can expand upon this further. Ross Ashby, one of the pioneers of Cybernetics defined variety as the number of possible elements(states) of a system. A stoplight, for example, generally has three states (Red, Green and Yellow). Additional states are possible, such as (blinking red, no light, simultaneous combinations of two or…

Cybernetics and Design – Poka Yoke, Two Hypotheses and More: | Systems Community of Inquiry

Imagine that you are on your daily walk in the park. You see a monkey on a park bench, busily typing away. You become curious as to what is happening. You slowly approach him from behind, and try to see what is being typed on the paper. Strange enough, what you see typed on the paper so far is legible prose; complete with grammar and semantics. What could be an explanation for this phenomenon? This example was given by the great anthropologist cybernetician, Gregory Bateson. He used the example to explain “cybernetic explanation”, as he termed it. He said: Causal explanation is usually positive. We say that billiard ball B moved in such and such a direction because billiard ball A hit it at such and such an angle. In contrast to this, cybernetic explanation is always negative… In cybernetic language, the course of events is said to be subject…

The Monkey’s Prose – Cybernetic Explanation: | Systems Community of Inquiry

In today’s post, I am looking at the idea of complexity from a second order Cybernetics standpoint. The phrase “only when you realize you are blind, can you see”, is a paraphrase of a statement from the great Heinz von Foerster. I have talked about von Foerster in many of my posts, and he is one of my heroes in Cybernetics. There is no one universally accepted definition for complexity. Haridimos Tsoukas and Mary Jo Hatch wrote a very insightful paper called “Complex Thinking, Complex Practice”. In the paper, they try to address how to explain complexity. They refer to the works of John Casti and C. H. Waddington to further their ideas: Waddington notes that complexity has something to do with the number of components of a system as well as with the number of ways in which they can be related… Casti defines complexity as being ‘directly proportional…

Complexity – Only When You Realize You Are Blind, Can You See: | Systems Community of Inquiry

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Socio-Technical Systems, Service Systems Science – Coevolving Innovations

Socio-Technical Systems, Service Systems Science

 July 19, 2020  daviding 0 Comments

In order to move forward, the Systems Changes Learning Circle has taken a step backwards to appreciate the scholarly work that has come before us.  This has included the Socio-Psychological Systems, Socio-Technical Systems and Socio-Ecological Systems perspective, from the postwar Tavistock Institute for Human Relations.  The deep dive on “Causal texture, contextualism, contextural” takes us back to 1934-1935 articles by Pepper, Tolman and Brunswik.  These influenced Fred Emery and Eric Trist in their famous 1965 article.

In Trist’s later years (i.e. between 1977-1985, when he was in Toronto at York University, with the Action Learning Group). the younger researcher with whom he was collaborating most was Calvin Pava.  There is a great summary of Pava’s work and life in Austrom and Ordowich (2019).

Through some fortunate coordination, I was able to meet Doug Austrom in Indianapolis in August 2018, having discovered a preprint of the article, just a few days before I was to travel to Iowa.

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Socio-Technical Systems, Service Systems Science – Coevolving Innovations