Date and time: Friday 14th October & 21st October 2022, 10.00am – 1.00pm AEDT (registration from 9.45am)
Venue: Via Zoom. Details will be emailed to registrants just prior to the workshop start time
Facilitator: Professor Raymond Ison
Register online by: 12 October 2022. Spaces limited to 25 participants.
Fees (GST inclusive): Members $260, Organisational member staff $375, Non-members $425, Student member $125*, Student non-member $210* * Students must send proof of their full-time student status to
Searching for a Good RegulatorDoes a system have its own purpose, irrespective of what anyone says its purpose is? This a Stafford Beer thing, coined as a description of the parts department of Jaguar, which Stafford claimed was there to keep his car off the road. The Purpose of a System is What it Does: POSIWID.This stance gives most people cognitive indigestion. People have purposes, systems are supposed to do peoples’ bidding. Except we know that is not what happens.
I am writing this post after a short break. My topic for the post is “reality”. I have always been fascinated with the idea of ontology in philosophy. It is loosely described as the study of existence or reality and it comes under metaphysics in philosophy. I have written about it many times before and it seems that there are always more and more nuances regarding it. I have come to see myself as a cybernetician, so today’s post is about reality for a cybernetician.
Another philosophical term that is thrown around a lot is epistemology, or the study of knowledge. I see ontology intertwined with epistemology. As a cybernetician, I see the existence of circularity between the two. Ontology, the study of reality, has a circular relationship with epistemology, the study of knowledge. Why is this the case? As a cybernetician, I am of the view that reality is…
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2022): Creative Writing by and for Systemic Practitioners
Systemic practitioners have much to say about the intricate activities of their working relationships. Every breath or intonation is a decision, infused with ethical, cultural, aesthetic and practical considerations. These papers show different forms of storytelling to engage readers in learning about the lives and practice of others and in reflexivity about their own practice.
I like eg ‘Eppur si muove’ https://bit.ly/3BLbBw7 and
‘the evening star IS the morning star’ https://bit.ly/3qGh2Gc
In this LinkedIn post, I also commented ‘Obviously I should have used ‘flocking’ and ‘that obesity map’ too :-)’
John Siegrist said ‘Does the butterfly effect count? I believe Lorentz used to talk about chaos in weather forecasting? And of course there’s the Tulip Bulb Mania.’
Steve Whitla pointed out ‘
The Watt centrifugal governor – exemplifies how in a well-designed system going out of control is also the means of bringing itself back into control. I’ve used this quite a bit since I saw Stafford Beer draw one on a whiteboard to make the point … thermostats are a commoner example but they’re static – watching little globes spinning wildly round and round is more visceral. He added – watch from 35:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg‘
” We cannot ask if a #model corresponds to #reality because we have no independent test of what reality is. All we can ask is whether the #predictions of the model are confirmed by #observation ” — Stephen Hawking
As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn.
We have recently had a discussion (here and here) of Karl Weick, a prominent scholar of business management who plagiarized a story and then went on to draw different lessons from the pilfered anecdote in several different publications published over many years.
Setting aside an issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that, by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation.
Too late for the session, but to preserve the links and record
2022-09-19
September 19 (the second Monday of the month) is the 103rd meeting for Systems Thinking Ontario. The registration is at https://global-elephants.eventbrite.ca .
Global Elephants in the Room: A reflexive prospective following 50 years of the Global Problematique
For September’s Systems Thinking Ontario, OCADU’s professor Peter Jones will share a preview of his talk for RSD11 on a world system perspective of the Club of Rome’s Global Problematique.
It has been 50 years since the original Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome. Since then, many of the original controversies triggered by the dire scenarios produced by the Meadows research team have been accepted as current outcomes of their prediction, anchoring its position as prescient in climate and economic policies. The Limits to Growth project was based on the original Club of Rome prospectus know as the Global Problematique, a problem framing produced by Hasan Özbekhan, a first-generation social system thinker who advocated requisite variety and stakeholder engagement to resolve the problematique.
After 50 years the technocratic approaches of systems thinking still pervade methodology and design. The globalism inherent in the Problematique also remains; with rapidly developing new economies in the Global South, these assumptions ought to also be reconsidered. Why must the Problematique be situated as “global?” Even as Özbekhan’s stakeholder-centred vision may be achievable today, but now we must ask, who are the real stakeholders for these problems? Jones critiques the original view of “the global” as originating from the Club of Rome expert-centred framing and contrast the Western policy mindset with systemic design’s stakeholder-centred systems view. Jones will discuss the mappings from these studies and show an alternative non-Western frame with significant difference in priorities, if the Global South is centred instead of the West.
Venue:
The link for a Zoom conference will be sent upon preregistration.
Özbekhan, H., Jantsch, E., & Christakis, A. N. (1970). The predicament of mankind: A quest for structured responses to growing world-wide complexities and uncertainties. Proposal to the Club of Rome. [Part 1 excerpt]
Christakis, A. N. & Diedrich J. (2022). Co-constructing Retrospective and Retroductive Global Problematiques Virtually with the Logosofia platform, in the context of the Climate Crisis: A report on the Gedanken Experiment. [manuscript]
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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