One of the most obvious ways to use the Viable System Model is a mapping approach. You take the VSM quite literally and map organizational aspects like meetings, roles, tools, or artifacts to the model’s different systems. Even though this method is partially criticized within the VSM community, I still like it since it allows me to visualize all the different things we do or don’t do in organizations. It helps to clarify which functions are actually maintained and reflect if they are functional or dysfunctional.
In the following lecture, I show how the model explains an Agile Software Development Team. To make the story a bit more tangible, I use the scenario of a startup situation. Four friends found a new company…
As soon as you really think about it, boundaries dissolve, connections appear. Everything is nebulous.
…sounds a bit woo-woo? *Of course* systems exist – we interact with them all the time, and we can model and understand them. Not always, not every time, but reliably and with great predictability. Systems engineers got people to the moon. There are deep, underlying laws of our universe. We don’t call these boundaries into being magically by the power of our brainboxes – yet…
We also know that our view can change. Paradigm shifts actually happen. Something we misunderstood resolves into clarity.
So. There’s no definitive system in the world – it depends how you see a situation. But something is ‘real’, something constraints our possibilities in specific ways.
The problem is the question.
We’re inside a loop of understanding. It makes sense to act as…
Sometimes it’s easier to understand what things are for when you know why you would want to use them.
Discover and Understand
Every day when you work and communicate with people you have to work out what they mean what they say. Most of the time you might be lucky enough to get it right or have a relationship with your peers so that you have what I call a ‘second level language’; your relationship is such that you’re intuition second guesses the thinking and you get in the groove… most of the time.
If you’ve not developed a relationship with the people you’re working with and you haven’t had time to learn insights or the situation or problem under discussion is difficult to explain and understand or you’re working against the clock, then you may want to draw upon a broad range of problem solving methodologies…
This paper examines the utility of a novel and relatively unknown approach to handling messy situations. This approach, developed by Raul Espejo, is the VIPLAN Methodology. It is presented as a heuristic and comprises a set of six activities which act as ‘pointers’ to guide thinking and actions. The methodology’s contribution rests upon its explicit focus upon the context within which messy situations are handled. This draws attention to the cybernetics of the situation (Cybernetic Loop), which can be made sense of using the Viable System Model. However, one of the challenges of the methodology is the perception that it is complex and difficult to use. A case-study is used to investigate how the methodology can be operationalised. This reveals a set of nine lessons, which are offered as guidelines to enhance our understanding of how to use the VIPLAN Methodology.
What is the overall idea? When people gather together, a group naturally forms. In many cases, it is desirable to have these natural groups persist in time and have their existence be sustainable over the long term. However, given the highly dynamic nature of interpersonal communications and the variety of life events, developing the right infrastructure for long term group success is far from easy. This essay presents a model and pattern for one such infrastructure. Introduction In any grouping of people, there needs to be some sort of organizational principle, even if it is very informal or implicit, that allows each person, each member, to more effectively coordinate their own individual actions with respect to the intents of the group as a whole. As groups get larger, the need for an explicit internal structure increases. For very large groups this need for formal complexity becomes significant.
Yet, despite the many examples of large governments, institutions, industries, etc, that currently exist, the organizational principles necessary for them to be sustainable are far from obvious. In may cases, it is not even obvious that they are sustainable at all — sometimes even large bodies fail without a single identifiable cause. Attempting to found a new group or institution on the basis of an existing one can often result in transparently, unconsciously, and implicitly inheriting the weaknesses of the existing system. Without an awareness of the principles of group formation, there can be little hope of real group longevity in the face of significant enviromental or situational changes.
However, rather than attempting to deal with the complexity of large scale groups directly, it is considered that sustainable group systems can be identified by 1) resolving a minimal abstract set of organizational concepts (one which would span the total space of all organizational systems) and 2) using those concepts to define the minimum possible structure necessary to create a sustainable group. Once the basic principles of long term group stability have been identified in their simplest ‘ideal’ form, the way is opened for the practical application of these ideals to real groups.
In effect, it is considered that if any group can be made sustainable, that the dynamics of that group can be treated as a ‘cell’ and composed into larger groups which will also be sustainable (using the same techniques as that internal to the prototypical cell group itself). Therefore, the issues associated with group scale can be factored out. This allows the consideration of sustainability to be applied to small groups (with minimum complexity) as if they are representative of all groups. Of primary interest then is what sort of minimal organizational dynamics would enable any small group to be sustainable.
Last week Nora Bateson engaged in a conversation with a few of us on the work of the International Bateson Institute. Nora is the President of the International Bateson Institute.
Her work asks the important question “How we can improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world”.
“Pathology,” said Nora Bateson while explaining the importance of perception in systems, “is the inability of an organism to understand its world.”
“What world?” responded a someone I know when I shared the concept. For him, his world was about himself and his needs. He failed to recognise the others in the different systems he was a part of. He never saw the others that made up his family. He never recognized the others who were his colleagues. He never saw the others in the teachers that he interacted with. He never recognised those who he did business with, they were simply means to an end. He never saw the others that made up his community.
For him, therefore, all that mattered was his own aspirations, purposes, and needs. Not those of anyone else. He had been described by those who interacted with him as being self-centred, even narcissistic. He was an example of the pathology Nora referred to.
You know the kind of person I mean, right? Unfortunately there are too many in the world for whom the world is all about themselves, their aspirations, their purposes, and their needs. For them everyone else is just a means to their aspirations, needs, and ends.
They are systems illiterate. They do not recognize that our world is the result of the systems we are a part of.
They are blind to the fact that systems are a result of purposes for which its participants come together, not the private purposes of a participant. They do not understand that the behaviour of the system is a result of the interactions of its participants, not a result of their wishes.
Nora Bateson calls information about the interrelationships in a system as warm data. It is the basis of understanding our world. Without it we have pathology.
One of the ways in which this pathology expresses itself is through what Nora’s remarkable father, Systems Scientist Gregory Bateson, had described as double bind.
For instance we when we tell children to be free to do as they please, we create a double bind. Asking them to do as they please is inconsistent because if they are free to do as they please, they will not heed to the needs of others. They will not care, nor respect others.
While there are many different explanations for double binds, from a systems perspective, those who learn to drive their actions while ignoring the others in their systems, or those who ignore feedback that tells them about the consequence of their actions, will experience a double bind. Double binds are the result of creating exploitative systems or systems that allow feedback to fail.
When we block perception, ignore its feedback, chose to see only what we like, not what is, or we completely ignore the others and the common purposes that brought us together, we create double binds. The less perceptive we are of the others in our world, the more the double binds we create.
For instance those who get accustomed to drive their motorcycles on pavements while ignoring the others who came together to accept the pavement for our common purpose of walking will experience double bind. They create a situation where they believe they are being punished if they cannot drive on the pavement and they are being punished for driving on the pavement. This is not very different from a terrorist who feels punished for not doing the act of terror, and also for doing the act of terror.
Bateson had also surmised that children who get into double binds would have greater problems as they grow. By the time the child is old enough to have identified the double bind situation, it has already been internalized, and the child is unable to confront it. The child then creates an escape from the conflicting logical demands of the double bind, in the delusional world of a pathological system. Bateson demonstrated that the symptoms and etiology of schizophrenia could be formally described in terms of a double binds.
The COVID pandemic, and the climate crisis are also the result of this double bind. When we see social distancing, use of masks, and lockdowns as an affront on our freedom, as a punishment, we ensure the continuity of the pandemic. We feel we are punished by an unending pandemic.
When we view our restrictions on our consumption as a punishment, we move faster and faster toward a global rise in temperature and extreme weather conditions. We feel punished and helpless in the climate crisis.
Unless we learn to understand and share the warm data of our systems: the participating actors, the common purposes that brought them together, the feedback that drives their actions, the moral code that serves as the basis to evaluate the feedback of the consequences of their action, our systems will have pathology.
Without systems literacy, there is no path to free ourselves from the short-term and be able to address the Short-Now, or the lifetime of the systems we participate in.
Thankfully we have those like Nora Bateson to bring sanity in an increasingly insane world.
~~
#All views expressed in this column are those of the author and/or individuals or institutions that may be quoted and Pune365 does not necessarily subscribe to the same.
Dr. Anupam Saraph grew up in a Pune that was possibly a tenth of its current expanse and every road was lined by 200 year old trees. He’s committed to the cause of de-addicting the short-termers.
Cranfield School of Management5.57K subscribersSUBSCRIBEDSpeaker: Professor Michael C Jackson (University of Hull) This talk discusses the nature of complexity, the development of systems thinking, the emergence of critical systems thinking, and how to conduct interventions on the basis of critical systems practice. The world has become increasingly networked and unpredictable. Leaders of international bodies such as the UN, OECD, UNESCO and WHO, and of major business, public sector, charitable, and professional organizations, have all declared systems thinking an essential leadership skill for managing the complexity of the interrelated economic, social, and environmental issues they face.
Steffen Roth, investigador en el Departamento de Estrategia, de La Rochelle Business School en Francia y en el Departamento de Investigación Social, Universidad de Turku, en Finlandia, ha escrito un documento de investigación según el cual, desde su principio la crisis del coronavirus de 2020 ha sido declarada no sólo como una “guerra médica”.
Explica en éste sentido Roth: “La idea de que los gobiernos y las organizaciones del sector privado deben combatir sistemáticamente la información errónea percibida en caso de una pandemia mundial se había propagado en varias ocasiones mucho antes de la crisis actual de covid19. Una de esas ocasiones fue el Evento 201, “un ejercicio pandémico de alto nivel” coorganizado por la Universidad Johns Hopkins, la Fundación Bill y Melinda Gates y el Foro Económico Mundial (FEM) el 18 de octubre de 2019. El propósito de este ejercicio fue para identificar brechas críticas en la…
HUGGERx is a researched-based, immersive ecosystem of learning and collaboration “tools” or touchpoints designed to support young people – ages 8-88, to lean into complexity, to see it as a guide, rather than an enemy.
Ultimately our goal is for youth to develop confidence that they can use their understanding of living systems principles to help solve complex problems and together, innovate their way to healthier futures
At Hugger X, we’re exploring these Immersive Whole-Systems“Touchpoints” to learn about and collaborate around living systems:
Systems change friends! We invite you to a great Open Space online gathering. Here the themes, topics, and discussions that our wider community needs to have will emerge. As will the actions we choose to take.
The ideas, projects, questions and challenges concerned with systems change that you are working on contain the seeds of the discussions that will populate our agenda for the day. We will self-organise around the topics that matter to us.
Together we will grow new and fruitful connections. Ideas will propagate and cross-pollinate across our networks.
System changer, systems thinker, complexity navigator, network weaver, social acupuncturist? Whatever label you respond to, if you are in some way trying to understand and shift systems for the better, this Open Space is for you!
Who is this for?
If you feel any kind of affiliation to the idea of systems change, then this is for you. You may be a complete beginner, an interested academic, or a seasoned practitioner, if you have an interest in systems change, then you are who we are looking for, and we would be delighted to welcome you to the open space.
Open Space uses self-organisation to co-create an agenda for discussion that is of common interest to the assembled participants.
Open Space operates under four principles and one law. The four principles are:
1. Whoever comes are the right people. 2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. 3. When it starts is the right time. 4. When it’s over it’s over.
The Law is known as the Law of Mobility:
If you find yourself in a situation where you are not contributing or learning, move somewhere where you can.
The four principles and the law work to create a powerful event motivated by the passion, and bounded by the responsibility, of the participants.
In the first hour after the welcome and introductions we will open the space for agenda creation. Here you are all invited to propose a session topic. We will ask you to add your session to an editable spreadsheet and then we will give you the ‘microphone’ and invite you to present your session topic in 30 seconds to the wider audience.
Once the agenda has been prepared we will split into various rooms to begin the discussions.
At the end of the day we will all reconvene in the closing circle and share insights from the conversation that has been emerging throughout the day.
Event Host
Facilitators
Tanja Korvenmaa& Esko Reinikainen
Event Partners
Registration
The tickets for this event are ‘pay what you can’ with a minimum contribution of €10 to cover platform and event management costs. Current Systems Change Finland members can attend for free. If you pay €30 or over you will also receive a Systems Change Finland membership for 2021. Any surplus collected above the platform and event management costs will go to support the activities of Systems Change Finland.
Messy Issues, Worldviews and Systemic Competencies
January 2010
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-84996-133-2_6
In book: Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice
Richard Bawden
This is a follow-up to my last week’s post – Notes on Regulation: In today’s post, I am looking at the Arvid Aulin-Ahmavaara’s extended form of the law of requisite variety (using Francis Heylighen’s version). As I have noted previously, Ross Ashby, the great mind and pioneer of Cybernetics came up with the law of requisite variety (LRV). The law can be stated as only variety can absorb variety. Here variety is the number of possible states available for a system. This is equivalent to statistical entropy. For example, a coin can be shown to have a variety of two – Heads and Tails. Thus, if a user wants a way to randomly choose one of two outcomes, the coin can be used. The user can toss the coin to randomly choose one of two options. However, if the user has 6 choices, they cannot use the coin to randomly…
On 4 March 2021, I gave a seminar entitled ‘An Introduction to Systems Thinking for Tackling Wicked Problems’. This was in a series of seminars co-organized by the Linnaeus University Systems Community (Sweden) and the Centre for Systems Studies at the University of Hull (UK). 261 people participated. The feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive, and lots of people wrote asking if a recording would be made available. I have now been sent the recording, and the URL is pasted below. I have to say that nerves got to me in the first couple of minutes, as I wasn’t expecting several hundred participants, but then it gets more fluent after the ‘contents’ slide.Note that the URL below takes you to the Linnaeus University web site, and there is some text about the talk below the video screen. This is not visible at first sight – you have to scroll down. Please do so, as I have suggested a couple of books for you to read if you want to find out more. Here is the abstract for the talk:We are increasingly facing ‘wicked problems’. They are stubborn, challenging and often have to be managed rather than solved. They frequently involve interlinked issues, multiple agencies with different perspectives on both the problem and potential solutions, conflict over desired outcomes or the means to achieve them, power relations making change difficult, and uncertainty about the possible effects of proposed changes. While traditional scientific, policy and management approaches can make a useful contribution, we need something more than these if we want to gain a bigger picture understanding of how to act in the face of wicked problems. Systems thinking can help. In this talk, Gerald Midgley will introduce a framework of systems thinking skills, plus a variety of systems ideas and methods that can help people put these skills into practice. He will illustrate the use of the methods with a number of examples from his own social policy, natural resource management and community development projects in the UK and New Zealand. In this way, he will show how we can begin to get a better handle on wicked problems.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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