Conversation between Bobby Fishkin of CrowdDoing & Open Innovation Brazil
How Service Learning and Skilled Volunteering can Bridge Skill Gaps & Social Innovation Gaps to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals A working paper by Bobby Fishkin & CrowdDoing, July 19 th 2019
Systems thinking is the ability to see the whole before the parts, and it’s fundamental to the Disruptive Design Method.
We believe 110% that thinking in systems is the tool to help make a positive impact on the world around you.
The world is full of big messy complex social, political, and environmental problems. which are all part of bigger systems at play. In order to help disrupt the underlying issues, we need to first understood what is going on.
From climate change to the rise in racism, homelessness, child exploitation, global politics and ocean plastic waste, these problems are all part of complex interconnected systems.
By taking a systems approach, it enables you to develop a more dynamic and intimate understanding of the elements and agents at play within the problem area, so you can identify opportunities for intervention.
This is our simple 6-step flow to making change from a systems standpoint
This is what has led to the exploitative economy. In order to get to a circular economy, we need systems thinking.
”Problems are just unaddressed opportunities waiting for a creative minds to tackle them”. ~ Leyla Acaroglu
By taking a systems approach, we can each undo the linear and rigid mindsets that helped create the problems to begin with.
Thankfully, humans naturally have a curious and intuitive understanding of complex, dynamic, and interconnected systems. So, it’s really not that hard to rewire our thinking systems from linear to expanded, from 1-dimensional to 3-dimensional thinking.
UnSchool Workshop participants engage in a systems mapping exercise during one of their sessions
Our Systems Thinking course is one of our most popular classes for a reason: systems thinking is a superpower that anyone can access to make change.
If you’ve already taken our Systems Thinking course, or have expertise in this area, then take a look at our advanced Systems Interventions course to learn to see critical relationships, understand feedback loops, and conduct consequence analyses. You will also establish causal relationships and gain radical insights into systems dynamics.
More importantly, the book shows, in the true spirit of science, that all assumptions,explicit or otherwise, must be made accountable in engineering. The turning point in the book is where Tsien goes beyond the model-based theory of servomechanisms and argues for the necessity of a new design principle for a general type of system where the properties and characteristics of the controlled system are largely unknown.
Shared by Stuart Umpleby on the CYBCOM mailing list
The European Union for Systemics (EUS) seems to have replaced the European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna, the meetings of the Dutch Systems Group in Amsterdam, and the few Heinz von Foerster Society meetings in Vienna. A series of meetings in Maribor, Slovenia, just south of Austria, are continuing. These conferences all used English. The EUS meetings use French as much or more than English and welcome other languages, e.g., Spanish and Italian.Stuart On Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 10:00 AM Damien Claeys <damien.claeys@uclouvain.be> wrote:
Hello to all,
Here is the latest news from the European Union for Systemics (EUS):
1. After a decade, Andrée Piecq has completed her mandate as general secretary in May 2021 and has accepted the mandate of honorary secretary-general. We thank her sincerely for her deep commitment in the development of the EUS and in the diffusion of the concepts of the systemic approach. Our learned society owes her a large tribute.
The website of the EUS has been moved to an independent server of the UCLouvain and the domain name extension .eu has been replaced by an extension .org:
In today’s post, I am looking at the idea of ‘category mistake’ by the eminent British philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle was an ardent opponent of Rene Descartes’ view of mind-body dualism. Ryle also came up with the phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ to mock the idea of dualism. Cartesian dualism is the idea that mind and body are two separate entities. Descartes was perhaps influenced by his religious beliefs. Our bodies are physical entities that will wither away when we die. But our minds, Descartes concluded are immaterial and can “live on” after we die. Descartes noted:
There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.
was born before computers, made his first computer graphic in 1964, cofounded Pixar, was the first director of computer graphics at Lucasfilm, and the first graphics fellow at Microsoft. He is the author of A Biography of the Pixel(2021).3,200 words
Diversity focuses on human characteristics that make people either different from or the same as each other. This article introduces the concepts of vertical and horizontal diversity. Vertical diversity evaluates difference as superior or inferior. Horizontal diversity treats difference as variation. Organizational paradigms of assimilation and separation are based on vertical diversity and treat diversity as a problem to be solved. Assimilation solves it by submergence of difference and separation by isolating difference. Often organizations in the United States take a benevolent assimilation approach to diversity. However, research shows that assimilation does not engage diversity in ways that promote learning, creativity, and organizational effectiveness. This article argues for a relational re-conceptualization of diversity as horizontal. The discussion integrates diversity paradigms with diversity perspectives, levels of self-representation, and uncertainty and certainty orientations to create an explanatory framework for the dynamics of diversity.
Halogen, Demos Helsinki and Future fit Leadership Academy are proud to present a step-by-step approach to systemic transformation and ecosystem innovation. Together, we have developed a Playbook for Systemic Innovation – Mindsets and Methods for Transformation.
Across private and public sectors, fundamental industries such as food production, energy, transportation, communication and materials, all face a series of serious challenges. The sustainability gap is vast, as a result of what we call transformative failure.
The solution is transformations that are not only economically viable, but also covers ecological and social needs. This calls for systemic change; we must go from one paradigm to another.
We appreciate that business as usual is hard enough as it is, and introducing new business models, new competences and new forms of collaboration can seem almost impossible. But it is possible.
Through an R&D project, funded by Innovation Norway, we have gathered our knowledge and systemised our competence in a new offering, a step-by-step approach to ecosystem innovation. The framework has been developed through real-life projects with fish farming company Aquaressurs and trade organisation Abelia. The process and results will be presented at the launch.
The playbook covers aspects such as regenerative mindsets, systemic mapping, systemic leadership, orchestration of ecosystems, design driven innovation and portfolio management, accompanied by real-life examples and business cases.
Join our digital launch Thursday September 16th @ 9:00 CET to learn more about our Systemic Playbook and how to start transformative change in your organisation
Why this social change agent wants you to ‘fail better’
by Kara Baskin
Aug 17, 2021
Why It Matters
Kara Penn learns from “smart mistakes” as she works bringing community development, management, and systems thinking to bear on social issues.Share
“Improved failure” might sound like an oxymoron. Not for Kara Penn, who explains how bold managers can exploit, design, and use failure as an asset in “Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner,” which she co-wrote with MIT Sloan senior lecturerAnjali Sastry.Work smart with our Thinking Forward newsletterInsights from MIT experts, delivered every Tuesday morning.Email Address
As founder and principal consultant at Denver-based Mission Spark, Penn harnesses ideas from community development, management, and systems thinking to improve the social sector — a nod to her previous positions as a counselor at a juvenile detention facility, business advisor to low-income Southeast Asian artists, and nonprofit consultant.
We talked with Penn, MBA ’07, about the power of collaboration, the role of reflection in generating ideas, and why we all need to be systems-thinkers.
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Systems Community of Inquiry 
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