Now in a session with June Holley, and I can’t believe I haven’t linked to this before?! Network Weaving is a really significant part of the

NetworkWeaver – Weaving System Shifting Networks

NETWORK WEAVING

During the twenty-first century, activity will increasingly take place in self-organizing, system shifting networks. This site offers resources and discussion space for those who want to better understand network approaches to transformation and improve their skills in facilitating this transition.

This is also the site for the Network Weaver Consultants Network, a loosely affiliated group of consultants who provide a wide range of network services for organizations, networks and communities.

Go to the Network Services page to see a list of ten network services and which consultants offer each service.

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NetworkWeaver – Weaving System Shifting Networks

Thanks to Roger James for pointing this out, and its links to scenario planning.

Classic article:

“Memory of the future”: an essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness

D H Ingvar

• PMID: 3905726

Abstract

The classical tripartite concept of time divided into past/present/future components, has been applied to the analysis of the functional cerebral substrate of conscious awareness. Attempts have been made to localize and to separate the neuronal machineries which are responsible for the experience of a past, a present, and a future. One’s experience of a past is obviously related to one’s memories. Memory mechanisms (in the conventional sense) have a well known functional relation to superficial and deep parts of the temporal lobe. Some such mechanisms presumably have a more widespread distribution. The experience of a present or a “Now-situation” is mediated by the sensory input. This input also exerts a role for conscious awareness of an inner Now-situation, independent of current afferent impulses, as shown by numerous observations on sensory deprivation. The main discussion is devoted to the experience of a future. Evidence is summarized that the frontal/prefrontal cortex handles the temporal organization of behaviour and cognition, and that the same structures house the action programs or plans for future behaviour and cognition. As these programs can be retained and recalled, they might be termed “memories of the future”. It is suggested that they form the basis for anticipation and expectation as well as for the short and long-term planning of a goal-directed behavioural and cognitive repertoire. This repertoire for future use is based upon experiences of past events and the awareness of a Now-situation, and it is continuously rehearsed and optimized. Lesions or dysfunctions of the frontal/prefrontal cortex give rise to states characterized by a “loss of future”, with consequent indifference, inactivity, lack of ambition, and inability to foresee the consequences of one’s future behaviour. It is concluded that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for the temporal organization of behaviour and cognition due to its seemingly specific capacity to handle serial information and to extract causal relations from such information. Possibly the serial action programs which are stored in the prefrontal cortex are also used by the brain as templates for extracting meaningful (serial) information from the enormous, mainly non-serial, random, sensory noise to which the brain is constantly exposed. Without a “memory of the future” such an extraction cannot take place.

pdf: https://www.prospectivepsych.org/sites/default/files/pictures/Ingvar_Memory-of-future-1985.pdf

Memory of the future (Fuster, 2014)

https://www.cambridge.org.sci-hub.se/core/books/neuroscience-of-freedom-and-creativity/memory-of-the-future/1BE1B971ACD2E9E42ADD6360BE28B6B2

Memories of the future: new insights into the adaptive value of episodic memory (various, 2013)

Karl K. Szpunar^1,2*, Donna Rose Addis^3,4, Victoria C. McLelland^3,4 and Daniel L. Schacter^1,2

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/11708605/3662022.pdf?sequence=1

Remembering Possible Times: Memory for Details of Past, Future, and Counterfactual Simulations (various, 2020)
Felipe De Brigard, Bryce Gessell, Brenda W. Yang, Gregory Stewart, and Elizabeth J. Marsh

Link to scenario planning:

another link:

https://geraldashley.blog/2018/04/21/memories-of-the-future/

and a piece on market research and links to futures work more broadly:

https://www.greenbook.org/mr/market-research-methodology/memories-of-the-future/

WE HAVE ARGUED at some length in another place that the mechanical equilibrium model and the organismic homeostasis models of society that have underlain most modern sociological theory have outlived their usefulness. A more viable model, one much more faithful to the kind of system that society is more and more recognized to k, is in process of developing out of, or is in keeping with, the modern systems perspective (which we use loosely here to refer to general systems research, cybernetics, information and communication theory, and related fields). Society, or the sociocultural system, is not, then, principally an equilibrium system or a homeostatic system, but what we shalt simply refer to as a complex adaptive system.

continues in source: http://coevolving.com/transfer/2013-ISSS-Buckley/1968_Buckley_SocietyAsAComplexSystem_ocr.pdf?source=post_page—————————

h/t Liam Mahon, and then I found the document hosted on David Ing’s coevolving.com

Sweden Game Arena

Systemic design is for many game designers like water to fish: we swim in it daily, but we have a difficult time articulating exactly what it is. Mike Seller’s talk provides useful, practical definitions of important concepts like systems, emergence, and interactivity, as well as a cohesive framework for creating systems and systemic effects in game and AI design.

A Systemic Approach to Systemic Design – Mike Sellers – YouTube

BOUNDARYLESS CONVERSATIONS PODCAST — SEASON 2 EP #13 Trans-contextual Organizing: Shifting Perceptions — with Nora Bateson Nora Bateson joins us for an earnest conversation where we delve into invisible assumptions, entanglement, and trans-contextual organizing. Together we explore what embracing a complexity standpoint truly means for an organization and for the relationships taking place within it and between that and other organizations.

Trans-contextual Organizing: Shifting Perceptions — with Nora Bateson | by Boundaryless | Mar, 2021 | Stories of Platform Design

BOUNDARYLESS CONVERSATIONS PODCAST — SEASON 2 EP #13

Trans-contextual Organizing: Shifting Perceptions — with Nora Bateson

Nora Bateson joins us for an earnest conversation where we delve into invisible assumptions, entanglement, and trans-contextual organizing. Together we explore what embracing a complexity standpoint truly means for an organization and for the relationships taking place within it and between that and other organizations.

https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/trans-contextual-organizing-shifting-perceptions-with-nora-bateson-5a2f233b9d23

American Society for Cybernetics – ASC

Models are not good or bad, right or wrong, only more or less useful in a given context. — Stafford Beer During this ASC Series event Jude Lombardi facilitated a conversation between two long-term members and past-presidents of the ASC, Allenna Leonard and Larry Richards, about the life and work of Stafford Beer. As many might know, Beer was a prolific producer of many things — in a variety of domains. He was, according to Leonard, a “polymath—a scientist who painted, wrote poetry, taught yoga and cooked a delicious Yorkshire pudding.” Event page and links to papers: https://asc-cybernetics.org/asc-speak…

ASC Speakers Series #4 – Leonard and Richards on Stafford – YouTube

jude lombardi In this video short from the 1993 American Society for Cybernetics conference in Philadelphia PA. Humberto Maturana talks about the history of humanity, desires, wants, freedom and responsibility.

Humberto Maturana and The Tango of Responsibility – YouTube

Announcement from Gerald Midgley, Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull (as posted by Mike on facebook)

MIKE C JACKSON LECTURE

You may know that we have an annual ‘Mike C Jackson Lecture’, thanks to an alumnus donation. Our speaker this year (June 2nd) will be Carlo Rovelli, who is a quantum physicist. His most recent book, Helgoland, starts the job of connecting the fundamentals of systems science with quantum mechanics. He goes back to the work of Bogdanov at the time of the Russian revolution, and explains how Bogdanov proposed a universal theory of organization that can be used to understand the fundamentally relational nature of quantum phenomena. This is very significant for systems science and systems thinking, as it promises to put the ‘science of organizing’ back at the centre stage of mainstream disciplinary science. Finally, let me thank Orsan Senalp. It was through him that this lecture became possible. Indeed, Orsan will be organizing a mini-symposium after the main lecture, not least because Carlo Rovelli is very keen to engage with post-Bogdanov systems scientists and systems thinkers. More information (including dates for both the Lecture and mini-symposium) will follow soon.

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Composing a Life: Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson on Our False Mythos of Achievement and the Messy, Nonlinear Reality of How We Become Who We Are – Brain Pickings

Composing a Life: Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson on Our False Mythos of Achievement and the Messy, Nonlinear Reality of How We Become Who We Are

“The knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way, may be a better model for our times than the knight who is questing for the Grail.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” proclaimed a 1924 guide to the art of living while, across the Atlantic, Bertrand Russell was contemplating what the good life really means. And yet as the twentieth century wore on and consumption eclipsed creativity, our ideals of and ideas about what constitutes a good life grew increasingly fogged by the cult of having, to which we submitted the art of being as a sacrificial offering.

In the mid-1970s, the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm turned to the problem of setting ourselves free from the chains of our culture. Fromm was a seer of a different order — so much so that legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead would turn to him for advice on the most challenging aspects of living — and insisted that “the full humanization of man requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation.” But it took more than a decade for this sobering spark to kindle the light of awareness in the hearth of culture.

Few people have been more instrumental in this awakening to the authentic life than anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (b. December 8, 1939), Mead’s daughter. Her 1989 treatise Composing a Life (public library) endures as an immensely insightful inquiry into our culturally conditioned mythologies of achievement and success, and what it takes to transcend them in order to live an authentic, meaningful life — a life that is invariably far messier and more strewn with contradiction than our misleading cultural mythos of self-actualization allows.

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Composing a Life: Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson on Our False Mythos of Achievement and the Messy, Nonlinear Reality of How We Become Who We Are – Brain Pickings

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Naturalising narrated – Cognitive Edge

Naturalising narrated

Dave Snowden March 28, 2021 MANAGING COMPLEX SYSTEMS, REFLECTIONS

In recent times I’ve been engaged in a series of interesting exchanges with Dr Mike Jackson OBE, hereinafter referred to as Mike.  I have a visiting chair at Hull University where he is Emeritus Professor and as well as a fair number of mutual friends including Yasmin Merali and Gerald Midgley.   I have been provisionally scheduled to give the Mike Jackson memorial lecture in 2023, Peter Senge gets the slot in 2020 I gather, so there will be some interesting contrasts to be made.  This year will see Carlo Rovelli is leading a symposium on the work of Alexandr Bogdanov whose work in systems has been much neglected so I am looking forward to that.

I should also make clear at this point my gratitude to, and respect for, the work that Mike has put into understanding not only Cynefin but the wider fields of complexity and systems.  It makes an exchange both interesting and rewarding and allows for a non-homogenising understanding of the wider field.  We share concerns about the rejection of all Systems Thinking by Stacy, and the, at times arrogance of the agent-based modellers of what I call Computational Complexity.

Now the exchanges, while interesting, have led to a certain amount of bafflement on my part as a large part of my responses have been along the lines of but that isn’t what I am saying and that isn’t what Cynefin is about and variations on that theme.  When this happens it is usually a result of the way one or other party is framing the problem and/or the way the idea is being communicated.  Two recent events resulted in a breakthrough for me at least, the light dawned and while I don’t yet hold said light in the palm of my hand I think I am getting there.

contiues in source:

Naturalising narrated – Cognitive Edge

source and comments and more:

Lagrangian and Eulerian Decision-Making

Lagrangian and Eulerian Decision-Making

June 24, 2013 By Tempo

This metaphor is not for everybody, but if it works for you, it will probably be very useful.

Writing Tempo has sparked a lot of  fascinating conversations for me. People either seem to immediately get the decision-making model, or find it completely counter-intuitive and bizarre. Some tell me, “this is exactly how I think, thank you for describing the process clearly.” Others tell me, “nobody could possibly think this way, this is ridiculous.”

In reflecting upon the bimodal responses, it struck me that they were coming from two very different kinds of people. The ones who find the model natural are (predictably) somewhat like me: they do most of their thinking inside their heads with models. The ones who find it unnatural seem to do most of their thinking outside their heads by “watching machines work” as it were. What Myers-Briggs types refer to as the Ti vs. Te distinction (ask your friendly neighborhood Jungian to explain this to you). In terms of concepts in the book, this is the difference between narrative thinkers and situated thinkers.

Narrative thinkers tend to process by following a flow of causation, by keeping an evolving model of it going in their heads. Situationist thinkers focus on the logic of the events flowing through a particular static block of space and time: the one they happen to inhabit at the moment. It’s like following a case as it winds its way through the police investigation, different courts, judges and jurys, versus sitting in a courtroom all day and watching slices of different cases each evolve through a chapter locally.

Both are useful patterns of decision-making, and most people use some blend of the two, but with a strong bias. The two modes correspond to two distinct ways of modeling flow in fluid mechanics. In the Lagrangian approach, you follow the course of a little “parcel” of fluid as it moves. In the Eulerian approach, you watch the flow through the boundaries of a specific static “cell.” Boat perspective versus buoy perspective.

In my experience, Lagrangian decision-makers are much better at probing the internal consistency of decision-making processes, and are better able to detect errors in models when reality deviates from expectations. They are also better at long-term thinking when long-term thinking is possible at all.

Eulerian decision-makers are much better at empiricist thinking, detecting “coincidence is not correlation” and “correlation is not causation” errors. They are also much better at short-term thinking because they are more likely to notice situational coincidences and juxtapositions, because they are paying attention to an entire situation, and less subject to model or narrative bias. They are more used to dealing with juxtapositions of unexpected things.

But the general equality seems to break down a bit when it comes to action. Eulerian types are generally far more decisive and action-oriented, and get things done more effectively.  Their learned understanding of specific real situations is much richer than the modeled understanding of Lagrangians, who are just “passing through” along with the stories they are tracking. Eulerians are less derailed by chaos, while Lagrangian types tend to freeze into inaction when chaos increases too much. Greater capacity for armchair analysis is the consolation prize for us Lagrangian types. Only very rarely in history are “flow conditions” such that Lagrangians have an action advantage.

The fluid-flow analogy suggests a reason why this might happen. When flow gets turbulent, the fluid mixes a lot. To properly follow a “parcel”, you have to let it expand as flow lines diverge and churn. This means there is more fluid in your parcel than you started with, more “noise.” Eventually you are trying to analyze world hunger — the entire body of fluid.

But the Eulerian static parcel stays the same size. It just bleeds causal structure and gets more entropic. The action gets a lot more random and choppy, but still tractable in size. It is also easier to shrink what you’re paying attention to when things get complex — it’s called focusing — than it is to reduce the ambition of a model you’re tracking (generally called pruning).

So if there is a bias in Tempo, it is that I have written it for people who are fundamentally weaker at decisive action. Becoming aware of the nuances of this distinction has actually improved my situational decision-making skills, and I now get less anxious when I am in situations that are full of arbitrary juxtapositions of unrelated causal flows that are interfering with each other.

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Lagrangian and Eulerian Decision-Making

The wisdom of coding

source:

Simple Made Easy

Simple Made Easy

Summary

Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity’s virtues over easiness’, showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.

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Simple Made Easy

AN OVERVIEW OF INTERACTIVE PLANNING

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CP: Interactive Planning

Source: Flood, R. L., & Jackson, M. C. (1991). Creative problem solving: Total systems intervention. Chichester, UK: Wiley. [Chapter 7]

If you read the newspapers and are still satisfied with the state of the world, put this book down; it is not for you. My objective is not to convert those who are satisfied — even though I believe they need conversion — but to give those who are dissatisfied, cause for hope and something to do about it. [R. L. Ackoff, in Preface to Redesigning the Future]

INTRODUCTION

Russell Ackoff’s work has had a major impact upon all of the various branches of the management sciences about which he has had his say: operational research, corporate planning, applied social science, social systems science, management information systems — to mention only the most obvious. One explanation for the depth and breadth of Ackoff’s influence lies primarily in the power of his vision for the management sciences. The job of the management scientist is not to build the mathematical models that purport to predict the future and, therefore, help key decision-makers prepare their enterprises for the inevitable. Rather, it is to assist all of the participants of an organisation to design a desirable future for themselves and to invent ways of bringing it about.

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CP: Interactive Planning

If you have a systems thinking method or practice topic that you can cover in 45-50 mins, and are willing to take a few questions, please get in touch – tony.korycki@sytemspractice.org