SCiO UK Face-to-Face Open Meeting – 18 March 2024, London UK

SCiO UK Face-to-Face Open Meeting – March 2024

Are you a practicing systems thinker?

Would you like to meet up, network and learn at the same time?

The first 2024 face-to-face SCiO Open Day is happening very soon in London,

18th March,

9:30am-5:00pm

at the Conway Hall, London, WC1R 4RL

               so why not come along!

Book now

About this Event

SCiO organises Open Meetings to provide opportunities for practitioners to learn and develop new practice, to build relationships, networks hear about skills, tools, practice and experiences. This all-day session will be held in central London at the Conway Hall.

09:30 – Introduction to Systemic Intervention (pre-event) – Simon MacCormac

10:00 – Welcome, SCiO notices and community exercise

10:45 – What’s Stopping Us Stopping Climate Change? – Ed Straw

11:45 – Break

12:15 – Viability of Alternative Food Systems – Lesley Rowan & Tony Korycki

13:15- Lunch Break

14:30 – How to transform organisations by Managing Tensions not People – Russ Lewis

15:30 – Break

16:00 – Modelling Business Ecosystems – Patrick Hoverstadt

17:00 – Later in the Bar social

Details

What’s Stopping Us Stopping Climate Change? – a Systems Thinking answer

The operations of the world are dominated by two artificial human creations: corporations and states. Corporations mostly operate according to the precepts of the global monetary system and neoliberal economics, where money is all and the environment an externality. States attempt regulation for the latter, but are neutered by the system of preferential lobbying.
Despite wetter and hotter warnings, these systems continue on a classic reinforcing loop. COPs are copouts with the artefacts of targets, pledges and PR, alongside the hope actions of EVs, renewables and recycling.
These systems have to be reinvented but within the context of the absolute of the biosphere. It is the ultimate boundary condition. This talk will propose the second order systems of governing changes to break out of the loop

.  Ed Straw

How to Transform Organisations by Managing Tensions, not People

Russ presents the findings from his doctoral research into managers as agents of change across large organisations. Essentially, the five behaviours that update the role of the manager from guardian of a resource (project, team, or department) to transformer of the system. How would their bosses measure that, you may ask. The answer is ‘ambidexterity’ – being good at both exploring new knowledge andrunning the business as usual (BAU). Historically separated (think R&D vs Production), these activities are more likely to coexist today since output is digital or knowledge-based and changes very quickly. By focusing on the tensions in their context, managers are achieving the seemingly impossible – adaptable efficiency and efficient adaptability.

Russ Lewis

The Viability of ‘Alternative’ Systems

Forming alternatives to established economic, technological or political systems, whatever their composition of organisations or institutions, can be difficult, and such alternatives can be susceptible or vulnerable to the ‘establishment’. This presentation explores how we can use the Viable System Model as a diagnostic, from data gathered about a number of outsider organisations through dialogue, insider research, or remote research, to evaluate the survivability of an alternative ‘system of interest’ in its direct or wider environment.

  Lesley Rowan                     Tony Korycki

Modelling Business Ecosystems

Patrick Hoverstadt will talk about modelling business ecosystems. There is a lot of talk about Business Ecosystems, but much of the theory and practice is actually just a reworking and renaming of old supply chain models. We’ll argue that business ecosystems are very like biological ecosystems with the full range of predators, prey, food chains, parasitic behaviour, keystone actors etc. The talk will cover some techniques we have used for modelling eco-systems, some of the uses these model have and walk through some cases from past projects.

  Patrick Hoverstadt
SCiO UK Face-to-Face Open Meeting – March 2024 | SCiO