Intertwingularity is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.
Nelson wrote in Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Nelson 1974, p. DM45): “EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no “subjects” at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.”[1]
He added the following comment in the revised edition (Nelson 1987, p. DM31): “Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t.”[2]
Once a month Deep Dive sessions for greater sense making of Social System Mapping
About this Event
Details for this session:
Using Liberating Structures to help with Map Sense-Making – We’ll share some ideas about how Liberating Structures can be used to help inform Social System Map Sense-Making
A monthly session for:
Meeting other Social System Mappers
Learning more about a specific Social System Mapping topic
Sharing your experience and learning with other Social System Mappers
The main session will be an hour – with an OPTIONAL additional 1/2 hour at the end for those who want to participate in small group ‘give and get help’ breakouts.
Who should attend?
These sessions are designed for people who are:
Already have a basic understanding of what Social System Mapping is.
Have made some maps, are in some maps or are seriously considering starting a map.
Somewhere in the process and full of questions (be they visioning, technical or sense-making).
Wanting to connect with other Social System Mappers.
I know, I know – *nothing* could be more attractive than ‘creating a humanist blockchain future, episode 51: Meta Existential Risk’ but the opening to this is very good (h/t) Mikael Seppala via Systems Innovation
Systems maps do a great job at capturing relationships. Often, as we’re learning how to translate those relationships into systems maps we’re told to keep related elements near each other and minimize overlapping connections.
But are proximity and orderliness really that useful? What might a systems map look like if we threw those principles out the window?
As Adam Groves and Sam Rye have shown us in their work on systems change, it’s possible to use positioning to pack a lot more information into a systems map A) without making the map overwhelming to your audience, and B) without a whole lot more work on the mapmaker’s side.
Sam calls it the systems leverage canvas. A canvas that allows you to use positioning to capture two additional dimensions to every element on the map.
Rather than arbitrarily placing elements on a map, each element is placed according to two values: leverage and severity.
“Arkwright’s Cotton Mill by Moonlight” — painted by Joseph Wright. Technological innovation has given us 250 years of development — but will not solve the most pressing and tangible problems of the 21st century.
This is the second of a series of three articles exploring innovation in complex adaptive systems. Part I is a critique of roadmaps as a linear, deterministic model for innovation. Part III articulates the contours of a systemic investment logic.
We need to build an alternative future. What are the possibilities? The Experiment board is a place for MIND//SHIFT to share some of the bold and big experiments emerging from across our collaborative community.
A photoshopped images of a large stack of tortoises on each others’ backs
We want the world to be manageable, organisational life to be simple…
…so we can apply ‘best practices’. Or even complicated – so we can simulate, model, and plan. We want this so bad, we’re prepared to break everything that’s living and special about organisations to make it true.
But organisations are truly complex and unpredictable. There are:
Continues in source: https://chosenpath.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/irreducible-complexity-the-force-in-organisational-life/
in this monthly speaker series we hear from Aboriginal practitioners,
and the ways in which thinking in systems is a part of their practice.
for our inaugural session Corrina Eccles will offer a Welcome to Country and share about her systems practice. the session will also include an opportunity for questions.
date: September 29th 9:30am – 11:00am melbourne time
The Funding Place Based Systemic Change project chaired by Save the Children UK brought charities and funders together to explore how to best manage funds to support long-term, place-based systemic change (PBSC).
‘Place-based’ working is an increasingly popular approach to social change but it has defined most of Renaisi’s 22 years. We use it as a lens to view individual and societal issues, because
it can resonate with everybody who lives or works there, which helps build a clear and understandable vision for the long term
encourages consideration of people who are not in the room
breaks down service silos and bureaucracies by posing different questions
brings focus on sustaining relationships that engender long term resilience, support and, possibly, systems change.
For all that, lots of funding, policy, research and current practice is still designed and structured to focus on issues (homelessness, offending, public health) or cohorts (unemployed people, refugees, young people). That creates a challenge for those of us who use place to understand and solve problems.
Funding Place-Based Systemic Change project
The project group, chaired by Save the Children UK and including charities, agencies and funders came together to think about how funding could help a movement towards place-based change.
The group started with a working definition:
“Place-based systemic change is an approach to social change, rather than an outcome of it, and is defined by focus, time horizon, approach, scale and intentionality.”
Have you ever wondered why most systems maps are flat and two-dimensional whereas how we understand “the system” actually depends on the mental models and paradigms that Donella Meadows outlined in her 12 leverage points (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points)?
In this workshop we’ll explore how changing Developmental Perspectives (mental models and paradigms) affect how we view a real-life system.
Mikael Seppälä from Systems Change Finland will speak briefly about how Adult Developmental Psychology/Metamodernism/Integral Theory can inform Developmental Perspective taking.
After that we will do a few group exercises on perspective taking.
Read to know why we need a more thoughtful way of making sense of our emerging chaos and uncertainty.
Volatile. Uncertain. Complex. Ambiguous. VUCA. Some leadership pundits recommend that we use this term for anything we don’t understand or cannot control. The problem is that the tumultuous events in our world, and the concomitant domino-effects we are experiencing, have completely outgrown that label. In fact, VUCA as a handy acronym has had its day. When we invoke VUCA to explain how things are changing, we risk missing the depth and breadth of the current reality. We excuse ourselves for inaction and passivity. Paradoxically, the term might even obfuscate and confuse our ability to make sense of what’s going on right now. We need a more thoughtful way of making sense of our emerging chaos and uncertainty. In short, we need to understand our worlds and ourselves as complex adaptive systems.
Why not VUCA?
VUCA is problematic as a framework for a number of reasons.
I feel the authors are potentially a bit misguided in their understanding or otherwise of ‘flow’:
In modern western medicine, the body is divided into systems that each have their own distinct function: like the nervous system or cardiovascular system. That clearly wasn’t what the writers of the Mawangdui were doing. Their descriptions are more focused on how different structures interlink to create a flow through the body. They pay no attention to the specific function of the structures. We think this is because these scientists were making their observations of the human body for the first time, and purely described what they saw.
i.e. perhaps the flow is more important than the specific function of the structure, and they knew this!
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners
The accepted history of anatomy says that it was the ancient Greeks who mapped the human body for the first time. Galen, the “Father of Anatomy”, worked on animals, and wrote anatomy textbooks that lasted for the next 1,500 years. Modern anatomy started in the Renaissance with Andreas Vesalius, who challenged what had been handed down from Galen. He worked from human beings, and wrote the seminal “On the Fabric of the Human Body”.
Scientists from ancient China are never mentioned in this history of anatomy. But our new paper shows that the oldest surviving anatomical atlas actually comes from Han Dynasty China, and was written over 2,000 years ago. Our discovery changes both the history of medicine and our understanding of the basis for acupuncture – a key branch of Chinese medicine.
Ultimately we will only understand biological agency when we have developed a theory of the organization of biological processes, and science is still a long way from attaining that goal. It may be possible nonetheless to develop a list of necessary conditions for the emergence of minimal biological agency. The authors offer a model of molecular autonomous agents which meets the five minimal physical conditions that are necessary (and, we believe, conjointly sufficient) for applying agential language in biology: autocatalytic reproduction; work cycles; boundaries for reproducing individuals; self-propagating work and constraint construction; and choice and action that have evolved to respond to food or poison. When combined with the arguments from preadaptation and multiple realizability, the existence of these agents is sufficient to establish ontological emergence as against what one might call Weinbergian reductionism. Minimal biological agents are emphatically not conscious agents, and accepting their existence does not commit one to any robust theory of human agency. Nor is there anything mystical, dualistic, or non-empirical about the emergence of agency in the biosphere. Hence the emergence of molecular autonomous agents, and indeed ontological emergence in general, is not a negation of or limitation on careful biological study but simply one of its implications.
Electric-Monking this as I have a clue this is a nice link between the sort of Christopher Alexander, service systems science, and design based on time horizons (David Ing may remind me of some proper references, it is very late here), and Elliot Jacques’ definition of ‘work’. (Not to mention there are some pretty obvious links to cybernetics, sensemaking, Varela and Maturana etc).
Originally triggered by this tweet from Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Shaping > Filling is a different way of thinking than Design > Build.
Why? You design and build at every stage. (See Kauffman’s work-constraint cycles. A cannon does work on the cannonball but it also takes work to make the cannon.)https://t.co/xziYahShNj
…and a link to a good video of his with web design examples (registration required for video)
The good people at By Design in Bratislava published a talk I gave in 2018 about Stuart Kauffman's work-constraint cycles. (The pictured part starts at 12:04).https://t.co/otQj4cdBNPpic.twitter.com/IPK2PLScU3
Constraint – Jon Umerez, Matteo Mossio. Constraint. W. Dubitzky, O. Wolkenhauer, K.-H. Cho, H. Yokota. Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, Springer, pp.490-493, 2013, 978-1-4419-9863-7. 10.1007/978-1- 4419-9863-7. halshs-00792440
Systems Community of Inquiry 
You must be logged in to post a comment.