Evidently a new journal with quite a list of editorial board:
The Journal of Systems Thinking (JoST) (ISSN 2767-3847) is a rolling, online-only, open-access, free-to-publish, double-blind peer-reviewed journal dedicated to basic scientific research, innovation, and public understanding in the areas of Systems Thinking (cognitive complexity), Systems Mapping (visual complexity), Systems Leadership (organizational complexity), and Systems Science (ontological complexity).
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Diversity & Universality in Systems Thinking
The field of systems thinking may be in the midst of a sea change event—a ‘fourth wave’ predicated on the search to identify universal patterns that unify the diversity of frameworks and methods in the field as well as, perhaps, knowledge and disciplines in general. It is critically important that the field of systems thinking resolve what Bateson called a ‘double bind’ between a diversity of methods and the universality of patterns that underlies them. Furthermore, the best candidate theories, grounded in evidence, must be vetted and reviewed. JoST’s Special Issue on Diversity and Unity will frame the debate. Thus, we issue a Call for Papers—an open and invited call for papers responding to the paper:
Cabrera, D., Cabrera, L. and Midgley, G. (2021) The Four Waves of Systems Thinking. In, Routledge Handbook of Systems Thinking, (Eds) Cabrera, D., Cabrera, L. and Midgley, G. Routledge. London, UK.
We are inviting notable experts on the topic as well as providing an open, general call for response papers.
Submissions can be any length up to 8000 words.
Using this form, you must notify us that you intend to submit a paper by May 30, 2021 (this takes less than one minute).
If anyone is interested in looking at these two editions side by side, here is a comparison of ToCs. The book is reorganized rather significantly even though Bogdanov himself downplayed the changes.
All parts (two in the first edition, three in the second) are combined into one ToC.
More and more people and organisations who are addressing complex sustainability challenges are turning to systems change practices. They are looking to get to grips with complexity and to better understand how to use their resources, position and influence to address the challenges. These people are working across civil society, philanthropy, business, international development, government and beyond. Many hope that adopting this emerging practice will give them the answers to the long held questions of – How do I know where to intervene? How do I know that what I am doing is the ‘right’ thing? Am I using my resources for their greatest effect? Once we have set ambitious goals around issues like inequality and climate change, how do I know I am creating impact?. In 1999 Donella Meadows wrote a paper entitled Leverage points: places to intervene in a system to help translate the work of systems dynamics into understanding where a small amount of energy might have a greater effect. Ever since, practitioners have been chasing these elusive leverage points trying to understand how this might be made useful and practical. There is, however, no silver bullet to changing a system. At Forum for the Future and through the School of System Change, we work on a number of different projects such as the Protein Challenge and Boundless Roots Community as well as collaborate on, coach and co-inquire with others such as the Marine CoLAB, Oneless, Lankelly Chase Foundation. In this paper we seek to build on systems change ideas and theories, using Forum for the Future experience of working with these ideas in practice, and offer actionable knowledge (Coghlan 2007) to other change makers who are grappling with these questions. This paper provides four qualities that help us understand the dynamics of a changing system, and how potential in these dynamics might be identified and be translated into strategy and interventions. I explore and illustrate these through cases and examples and raise the question about how change makers might value what we measure when understanding impact in the context of a changing system.
Our newest discussion amongst Ecology of Systems Thinking facebook group facilitators and guests. With Nora Bateson, Dr. Derek Cabrera, Dr. Laura Cabrera, Peter Jones, Dr. Gerald Midgley, and Benjamin Taylor about Universality and Diversity in Systems Thinking.
The Complexity in the Social World series of interviews (and YouTube Playlist) follows on from the seminar we organised in March 2021. The aim of this series is to capture some of the foundational thinkers in conversation around how to apply complexity thinking to the social world, the world of managers, economists, change agents and societies. In this way, some of these foundational thinkers, many starting their work in the 1980s, are represented and their differing perspectives and different foci of application are available in one place.
This open access book have three themes have been central to Leydesdorff’s research: (1) the dynamics of science, technology, and innovation; (2) the scientometric operationalization of these concept; and (3) the elaboration in terms of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations. In this study, I discuss the relations among these themes. Using Luhmann’s social-systems theory for modelling meaning processing and Shannon’s theory for information processing, I show that synergy can add new options to an innovation system as redundancy. The capacity to develop new options is more important for innovation than past performance. Entertaining a model of possible future states makes a knowledge-based system increasingly anticipatory. The trade-off between the incursion of future states on the historical developments can be measured using the Triple-Helix synergy indicator. This is shown, for example, for the Italian national and regional systems of innovation.
Keywords
Triple-Helix synergyA calculus of redundancyhorizons of meaninganticipatory systemsoperationalisation and measurementneo-evolutionarysocial-systems theoryentropy statisticsopen access
Authors and affiliations
Loet Leydesdorff
1
1.Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)University of AmsterdamAmsterdamThe Netherlands
About the authors
Loet Leydesdorff (Ph.D. Sociology, M.A. Philosophy, and M.Sc. Biochemistry) is Professor emeritus at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) of the University of Amsterdam. He is Associate Faculty at the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex, Visiting Professor of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) in Beijing, Guest Professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, and Visiting Fellow at the School of Management, Birkbeck, University of London. He has published extensively in systems theory, social network analysis, scientometrics, and the sociology of innovation (see at http://www.leydesdorff.net/list.htm or http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en). With Henry Etzkowitz, he initiated a series of workshops, conferences, and special issues about the Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. He received the Derek de Solla Price Award for Scientometrics and Informetrics in 2003 and held “The City of Lausanne” Honor Chair at the School of Economics, Université de Lausanne, in 2005. In 2007, he was Vice-President of the 8th International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems (CASYS’07, Liège). Since 2014, the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI/Clarivate) lists him as a highly-cited author.
In this Synergetick Landscapes unit guest lecture, Silvia Barbero will talk about how Systemic Design can provide tools to face complex scenarios maintaining a holistic perspective and promoting an active cooperation among the involved stakeholder. The methodology is supported by case studies in order to understand the tools and the potentialities of this approach. The main field of application is the agro-food, the policy making and the territorial enhancement.
Silvia Barbero PhD (f) is Associate Professor at POLITECNICO DI TORINO (Department of Architecture and Design). She is responsible for the stage&job design curriculum. Her research mainly focuses on Systemic Design applied to territorial development. She is the scientific coordinator of RETRACE project (Interreg Europe I call) on the development of local and regional policies to move towards a circular economy, and other H2020 projects, like proGIreg. She has been coordinator also regional project (PACK, POR-FESR 2007-2013), and team leader of…
Dr Dione Hills asks how can a better understanding of complexity have an impact on the way we think?
People are waking up to the realisation that a better understanding of complexity – and of how complex adaptive systems behave – can have quite profound implications for the way they think about, plan, manage and evaluate their activities. New books, journal articles, training, webinars and guidance, setting out what ‘complexity informed’ practice might look like, come out each month. The first months of 2020 will be particularly significant, with the publication of a revised ‘Magenta Book’ (cross-government guidance on policy evaluation) with a special annex on complex policy evaluation, a new ‘Complex Evaluation Framework’ to inform evaluation practice at Defra and revised guidance from the Medical Research Council on developing and evaluating complex interventions in the health field. A special issue of the ‘Evaluation’ journal in the spring will feature thinking and case studies examples emerging from work at CECAN (Centre for Evaluation Complexity Across the Nexus).
But what does all this mean for you and your work? This lunchtime talk by Dr Dione Hills (Principal Researcher/ Consultant, TIHR) provides an opportunity to hear about some of these developments, and reflect on how this might change how you think about, plan, manage or evaluate your own activities – or perhaps confirm that you had it right all along, but the world hadn’t yet come to appreciate this.
In this article, I argue against views of the development of abstract thinking that employ the notion of decontextualization. Starting from an assumption that conceives of context as constitutive of meaning, it becomes clear that the notion of “decontextualization” is a poor concept that provides little explanation for the developmental process toward meaningful abstract thinking. I propose a conceptualization of the notion of context from an activity point of view and contend that the conscious process of (re)contextualizing—that is, the continuous process of embedding contexts in contexts—can lead to an explanation of the development of meaningful abstract thinking. The process of continuous progressive recontextualizing is described in the article on the basis of how young children expand their play activity toward embedded, more abstract activities.
Network concepts are omnipresent in contemporary diagnoses (network society), management practices (network governance), social science methods (network analysis) and theories (network theory). Instigating a critical analysis of network concepts, this article explores the sources and relevance of networks in Foucault’s social theory. I argue that via Foucault we can trace network concepts back to cybernetics, a research programme that initiated a shift from ‘being’ to ‘doing’ and developed a new theory of regulation based on connectivity and codes, communication and circulation. This insight contributes to two debates: Firstly, it highlights a neglected influence on Foucault’s theory that travelled from cybernetics via structuralism and Canguilhem into his concept of power. Secondly, it suggests that network society and governance are neither a product of neoliberalism nor of technological artefacts, such as the Internet. They rather resulted from a distinct tradition of cybernetically inspired theories and practices.
In this paper we criticize the “Ashbyan interpretation” (Froese & Stewart, 2010) of autopoietic theory by showing that Ashby’s framework and the autopoietic one are based on distinct, often incompatible, assumptions and that they aim at addressing different issues. We also suggest that in order to better understand autopoiesis and its implications, a different and wider set of theoretical contributions, developed previously or at the time autopoiesis was formulated, needs to be taken into consideration: among the others, the works of Rosen, Weiss and Piaget. By analyzing the concepts of organization and closure, the idea of components, and the role of materiality in the theory proposed by Maturana and Varela, we advocate the view that autopoiesis necessarily entails selfproduction and intrinsic instability and can be realized only in domains characterized by the same transformative and processual properties exhibited by the molecular domain. From this theoretical standpoint it can be demonstrated that autopoietic theory neither commits to a sharp dualism between organization and structure nor to a reflexive view of downward causation, thus avoiding the respective strong criticisms.
ALL ISSUES
PUBLISHED APRIL 2021
Service Design and Systems Thinking
There is a transition underway in service design that is challenging traditional ways of working. As the scope of service design projects continues to expand, service designers are increasingly confronted by the immense complexity of overlapping service systems. The articles in this issue offer powerful provocations and hopeful, practical examples on how to integrate systems thinking into service design.
Gallagher, J. M. (1977). Piaget’s Concept of Equilibration: Biological, Logical, and Cybernetic Roots. Topics in Cognitive Development, 21–32. doi:10.1007/978-1-4613-4175-8_3
url to share this paper:
sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4613-4175-8_3
Gallagher, J. M. (1977). Piaget’s Concept of Equilibration: Biological, Logical, and Cybernetic Roots. Topics in Cognitive Development, 21–32. doi:10.1007/978-1-4613-4175-8_3 url to share this paper: sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4613-4175-8_3
Critical Complexity – Paul #Cilliers
Collected Essays Edited by Rika Preiser #amreading
(NB: most of this book’s content was written before Cilliers death in 2011 so please keep this context in mind in light of some of his views esp around the topics of AI, neural nets, etc)
Collected Essays Edited by Rika Preiser #amreading
(NB: most of this book’s content was written before Cilliers death in 2011 so please keep this context in mind in light of some of his views esp around the topics of AI, neural nets, etc) pic.twitter.com/O37g3OUMZd
‘What is going on here?’ This is the question at the heart of Kay and King’s Radical Uncertainty – a question the authors suggest we should all be asking much more often.
In this large and wide-ranging book, John Kay (economist and founding Dean of Oxford University’s Said Business school) and Mervyn King (economist and former Governor of the Bank of England) set out to distinguish between risk and uncertainty. They argue that this distinction once understood by economists on all sides of the political spectrum – they refer in particular to the writings of Keynes and Frank Knight, the father of the Chicago School – has been forgotten to the danger and detriment of good decision making.
‘the world is inherently uncertain and to pretend otherwise is to create risk, not to minimise it.’
Risk is likened by the authors to a puzzle. It can be solved by existing information ordered in the right way. Uncertainty is like a mystery – we are missing information and in particular we are beyond the limits of statistical reasoning. The authors argue that most of the big world decisions we currently face – whether in business, epidemiology or politics – are radically uncertain. We are operating in conditions of mystery where our knowledge is imperfect and variables are constantly changing. Climate, economic and social systems are not linear. They are subject not just to multiple variables and action, but also to what people think. Our failure to understand this context – radical uncertainty – and in particular our attempts to model our way through using data and statistics are at the root of poor decision making and much of our current woe.
These once orthodox economists ruthlessly take apart economic models which they describe as ‘parables’, ‘believing them to represent reality has led macroeconomics astray’. In particular they critique a ‘relatively recent’ over reliance on probability models, when probabilities can in reality seldom be known. Withering critiques are made of ‘futile’ strategy away days, most of behavioural economics, a large swathe of number-based policy making processes, ‘the number is not the policy’ and risk registers, ‘long lists, received in silence and signed off’. They take a swipe at journalists who ‘don’t send the car’ (for the interview) if a nuanced argument to a complex problem is suggested, Treasury mandarins who try to add more complexity to their failing models (as opposed to standing back and asking ‘what is going on here’) and CEOs such as the Goldman Sachs’ executives whose models categorise events as ‘inordinately improbable’ even as they unfold around them.
A reliance on data driven modelling leads large organisations in particular to make decisions ‘on the basis of what is easiest to justify rather than what is the right thing to do’. Whilst Kay and King do not specifically refer to British social institutions this critique sadly brought to mind many large third and public sector organisations whose management and focus on risk has visibly been all too often at the expense of doing the right thing and addressing the causes of our vulnerability. I think in particular of children’s care (where in the case of complex families troubles the context is always one of uncertainty) and care for the elderly.
‘when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right’
The authors argue that we need to turn to story-telling, what they call the ‘Narrative Paradigm’. Story telling helps us to marshal the information we do have and to make sense of a complex and confusing world that continues to change. Too often dismissed by the statisticians as anecdote or ‘bias’ Kay and King argue that in fact stories are a powerful way to work out ‘what is going on here’. The story making process is collaborative – stories are shared, they are a sort of team work – and good decisions are made in a social context, with others who bring diverse experience.
‘the prospect of new experiences – can be a source of joy, rather than despair
Many if not most people I work with experience radical uncertainty in the day to day – something policy makers have only recently become aware of and I have written about here. The traditional response – once this precarity is finally recognised – is to try and make further static adjustments to inflexible systems – add a bit to this benefit, a marginal adjustment to this service – rather than to think differently about flux and uncertainty and what is really needed.
‘uncertainty as delight’
I was drawn therefore to the authors’ discussion of uncertainty as delight: ‘the prospect of new experiences – a source of joy rather than despair’. The authors understand that it is not just nations that need an overarching narrative, communities and individuals need it too. They point as an example to the ‘secure reference narrative’ in Denmark – no fear of crippling medical bills, or dramatic losses of income if a job is lost – enables people to embrace risk, to try new things. Uncertainty becomes like the feeling we have when we discover something new on holiday.
As someone who has spent years trying to convince officials in the Treasury and elsewhere to ask different questions, to listen to stories and to work in new ways, I found this book compelling. I have written in Radical Help – borrowing on the work of Eddie Obeng – of how change requires methods that understand we are working in the fog (the mystery); of the need to constantly adjust our idea of what the problem is (‘what is going on here’) and how a widely shared story – such as the Wigan Deal or Barrow’s New Constellation – is the necessary starting point for any systemic change. I have long argued for the power of stories – for baggy, winding stories – where the differences between us are encompassed not smoothed out – as the starting point for good policy and I believe an embrace of this book would be a critical starting point for any real commitment to a generative economics of place.
There was however one thing about this book that irritated me beyond measure – not a single woman economist is referenced in the stories or the copious index. ‘Not many economists are women’, they note at one point reminding me of an interview with a mandarin I once read in the FT where, as a justification for the absence of women in key appointments, he explained that ‘not many of the chaps we know are women’. This gender bias limits arguments that could have been made and in particular many of the practical applications that the authors could have suggested.
Seven years ago, in the Chessboard and the Web, Anne-Marie Slaughter set out how many of the approaches Kay and King advocate could become new policy tools but no reference is made (although curiously the authors do cite a powerful Princeton commencement address). Carlota Perez’s work on historical narrative and its importance in understanding finance, industry and institutional development and decision making is not mentioned. Kate Raworth’s redrawing of many of the models the authors critique is passed over in silence. The work of Diane Elson and the Women’s Budget Group in the UK and Heather Boushey in the US would deepen the connections between household narratives and policy making, but is not mentioned. The work of Mariana Mazzucato would enable the authors to link their arguments to questions emerging from the current pandemic. I could go on.
But, when two establishment economists such as Kay and King recommend ditching the statistical models in favour of narrative, when they emphasise the role of our humanity in good decision making, it’s definitely a moment. Something is going on here.Leadership, Welfare StateHilary Cottam April 14, 2021
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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