I’m excited about the field called “complex systems” because it reflects of best of science’s inherent humility: everything affects everything, and we oughtn’t pretend that we know what we’re doing. I think of that as a responsible perspective, and I think it protects science from being abused (or being an abuser) in the sociopolitical sphere. So imagine my surprise to discover that the “everything affects everything” rhetoric of complex systems, ecology, and cybernetics was leveraged by tobacco companies in the 1990s to take attention away from second-hand smoke in office health investigations. Second-hand smoke wasn’t causing sickness, the hard-to-pin-down “sick building syndrome” was. For your reading pleasure, I’ve pulled a lot of text from “Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty,” by Michelle Murphy. I’ve focused on Chapter 6, “Building ecologies, tobacco, and the politics of multiplicity.” Thanks to Isaac.
continues in source: POLITICAL USE OF THE RHETORIC OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS
Cognition did not appear out of nowhere in ‘higher’ animals but goes back millions, perhaps billions, of years
Pamela Lyon is an interdisciplinary visiting research fellow at the Southgate Institute for Health, Society and Equity, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University in Adelaide. She is currently writing a book based on the ideas in this essay.
In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin draws a picture of the long sweep of evolution, from the beginning of life, playing out along two fundamental axes: physical and mental. Body and mind. All living beings, not just some, evolve by natural selection in both ‘corporeal and mental endowments’, he writes. When psychology has accepted this view of nature, Darwin predicts, the science of mind ‘will be based on a new foundation’, the necessarily gradual evolutionary development ‘of each mental power and capacity’.
Interesting synchronicity – the ISSS (www.isss.org) is engaged in an email discussion about ‘holism’ and ‘a general theory of systems’, in searching for something I just came across a grumbly Facebook Messenger discussion about ‘universalism’, and here’s Gene Bellinger (with an intriguing titbit about von Bertalanffy’s title?) on a similar thing… must be something in the air!
My first introduction to “Archetypes” was via Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization.” I may be a bit slow as I read Senge’s book once a year from 1990 through 1994, and I finally thought I understood it. While I thought I understood the essential nature of the necessity of integrating the five disciplines Archetypes really fascinated me. Their recurring nature was captivating from the extent of their apparent meaningfulness.
Then I recalled reading, in “Uncommon Sense: The Life and Thought of Ludwig von Bertalanffy,” by Mark Davidson, that in the 1930s Bertalanffy proposed that there were fundamental underlying structures that operated across all branches of science. When I first read this I considered it was a ludicrous proposal. Yet, after pondering it for some time, I realized that the branches of science are a fabrication of man, not nature. As such, why shouldn’t there be one set of structures that operated across all branches of science?
As I understand it, based on this proposal Bertalanffy conceived of an approach to teaching about these structures in something termed “General Systems Teaching.” The difficulty was that Bertalanffy’s paper was written in German and the translator made a mistake translating the title to, “General Systems Theory.” And as such there came to be a field of study that was never quite meant to be, which I thought quite curious.
Both the Senge and Bertalanffy perspectives sort of faded into the background as I pursued other interests in the realm of what I used to refer to as “systems.” Then after reading Michael C. Jackson’s “Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers,” and realizing I simply wasn’t smart enough to understand dozens of models and methods to any level real utility, there was a real Aha! moment.
The Aha! moment was the realization that all the models and methods are just about relationships and their implications. With that realization, the next thoughts were of Senge and Bertalanffy, and what might be the basis for understanding everything else? Please watch the following video to get a sense of where I landed.
Humanistic Principles and Social Systems Design | Douglas Austrom + Carolyn Ordowich (ST-ON 2021-05-10)
October 20, 2021 daviding
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Douglas Austrom and Carolyn Ordowich shared some reflections developed jointly with Bert Painter (Vancouver, BC) on some draft humanistic principles, the three Tavistock perspectives, and a meta-methodology with Systems Thinking Ontario.
Beyond Fundamentals: Learning About Social Accountability Monitoring Capacities and Action in Southern Africa Florencia Guerzovich, Yeukai Mukorombindo and Elsie Eyakuze August 2017
20-OCT-2021
What drove the invention of military technologies?
New research conducted through the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and applied to a rich historical dataset shed light on the evolution of weapons, armour and fortifications in human history.
Peer-Reviewed Publication
COMPLEXITY SCIENCE HUB VIENNA
How Bali could teach the world to manage its limited resources
With a method taken from physics, scientists determine which factors contribute to the equilibrium in Balinese rice cultivation.
Peer-Reviewed Publication
COMPLEXITY SCIENCE HUB VIENNA
Shorts applying dynamical systems theory to organizational behavior and dialogue. Made for Evergreen’s ChangeMaker Lab: an agile, knowledge creating company in a college learning environment.
In today’s post I am pondering the question – as a regulator, should you be going towards or away from a target? Are the two things the same? I will use Erik Hollnagel’s ideas here. Hollnagel is a Professor Emeritus at Linköping University who has a lot of work in Safety Management. Hollnagel challenges the main theme of safety management as getting to zero accidents. He notes:
The goal of safety management is obviously to improve safety. But for this to be attainable it must be expressed in operational terms, i.e., there must be a set of criteria that can be used to determine when the goal has been reached… the purpose of an SMS is to bring about a significant reduction – or even the absence – of risk, which means that the goal is to avoid or get away from something. An increase in safety will therefore correspond…
Relating Wiener’s cybernetics aspects and a situation awareness model implementation for information security risk management
Kushal Anjaria , Arun Mishra
Kybernetes
ISSN: 0368-492X
Article publication date: 27 November 2017
Issue publication date: 2 January 2018
Situation awareness theory is a primary mean to take decisions and actions in a dynamically changing environment. Nowadays, to implement situation awareness, theories and models in organizational scenarios have become an important research challenge. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the situation awareness theory and cybernetics. Further, the aim is to use this relationship to check the feasibility of situation awareness-based information security risk management (ISRM) implementation in the organizational scenario.
On Resilience …
Problems are extracted from messes by analysis
prof serious
2 hr ago
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“Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are extracted from messes by analysis.” (Russell Ackoff)
We have, over the last two years, confronted our lack of societal resilience. The last few weeks, with challenges in food and energy supply, have again brought this to the fore. There has been ample comment on each of these issues and I will not, you should be pleased to hear, add to it. Rather, I would like to stand back and suggest we need a different approach to thinking about resilience. I apologise that this is, necessarily, a somewhat technical discussion (prof serious, after all).
Free Webinar Introduction to System Dynamics Modeling October 20, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm NY Time (time converter)In this seminar, you will be able to build your own System Dynamics model! This will be a small, quantitative model of the classic apartment vacancy/build cycle. Read the problem statement.You will take your first steps with Studio and learn how to use it for quantitative modeling. We will focus on the System Dynamics model construction process and how we think about quality in System Dynamics’ models. In this seminar you will be engaged in hands-on modeling and interaction.In this webinar, you will: • Build a small, quantitative System Dynamics model • Use Studio by Powersim Software for very basic quantitative modeling • Become familiar with the System Dynamics modeling process • Learn how System Dynamics can be used for policy developmentSign UpMeet our Instructor Len Malczynski is a System Dynamics practitioner, micro-economist, and software engineer. He has built models for several industries. He was a member of the Office of the Chief Economist at Sandia National Laboratories and currently teaches at the University of New Mexico.Sponsored by This seminar is sponsored by Powersim Software, the developers of Studio Simulation Software. Due to their generous sponsorship, this seminar will be open to the public and free of charge.
Meet our Instructor
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