Handling Complexity in Policy Evaluation: Training and Support Our new CECAN training and support series ‘Handling Complexity in Policy Evaluation’ will provide you with knowledge and practical advice to allow you to deal with complexity in policy analysis and evaluation.

Handling Complexity in Policy Evaluation: Training and Support

How do systems get unstuck? Rex Weyler 23 April 2015

How do systems get unstuck? – Greenpeace International

How do systems get unstuck?

Rex Weyler 23 April 2015 |  0 CommentsShare on WhatsappShare on FacebookShare on TwitterShare via Email

Human enterprise appears stuck, like an addict, in habitual behaviour. We have plenty of data alerting us to global heating, declining species, disappearing forests, and rising toxins in our ecosystems. Yet, after decades of efforts to reverse these trends and some notable achievements — whaling moratorium, ocean dumping ban, renewable energy projects — the key trends appear evermore troubling. [1]

In December 2014, I attended a gathering hosted by the International Bateson Institute (IBI) and Centro Studi Riabilitzione Neurocognitiva Villa Miari, a clinic for paralysis patients in Schio, Italy. We observed therapeutic methods employed at Centro Studi to help us consider links between these methods and a efforts to address the ecological paralysis apparent in our social systems. “How Do Systems Get Unstuck” is a long-term, collaberative research project of the Bateson Institute.

Continues in source:

How do systems get unstuck? – Greenpeace International

Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics By Geeta Dayal Oct 21, 2009

Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics | Rhizome

We are experimenting with different approaches to systems transformation — here are five insights UNDP Innovation May 14·8 min read By Søren Vester Haldrup

We are experimenting with different approaches to systems transformation — here are five insights | by UNDP Innovation | May, 2021 | Medium

interesting

How organisations are changing. The next “next” generation swardley May 24·21 min read Just over a decade ago, I published the table in figure 1 to describe how organisations were shifting from a traditional form to a set of next generation behaviours. Whilst the table was welcome in some quarters, it was generally met with derision and comments of “this is just for startups”. Not that I’m bitter … much … gronda gronda.

How organisations are changing.. The next “next” generation | by swardley | May, 2021 | Medium

Ultrastability … Autopoiesis? Reflective Response to Tom Froese and John Stewart Humberto Maturana Romesín Published 2011 Computer Science Cybern. Hum. Knowing

[PDF] Ultrastability … Autopoiesis? Reflective Response to Tom Froese and John Stewart | Semantic Scholar

Ultrastability … Autopoiesis? Reflective Response to Tom Froese and John Stewart

• Humberto Maturana Romesín
• Published 2011
• Computer Science
• Cybern. Hum. Knowing

It is unfortunate that Tom Froese and John Stewart in their article have treated the thinking of Ross Ashby as a conceptual source for my work and the development of the notion of autopoiesis, because by doing so they have obscured their possibility of seeing what questions I am answering in my work. It is also unfortunate that they have assumed that I follow the path of cybernetics, which certainly is not the case. Cybernetics has been used in the attempt to formalize the circularity of biological processes, but one formalizes what one thinks about the processes that one wants to formalize and not the process that one believes to be formalizing. If one is not aware of this, one confuses the formalism proposed with the process that one intended to formalize, and this is what has happened with the notion of autopoiesis at least in the reflections about it. In this context it is unfortunate that in their scholarly effort the authors of this article, in their attempt to show that I do not satisfy what seems to be their deep feeling that living to occur requires the operation of some organizing principle, have been blind and deaf to what I say in my writings. At the same time I think that it is good that at the end of their article they recognize that Ashby’s notions about ultrastability are not adequate to understand what makes a living system a living discrete autonomous entity. When one speaks of the autonomy of living systems, one is saying that their operation as discrete living entities follows regularities determined by the manner they are made, and not by any external organizing factor. As such, autonomy is a feature of the operation of living systems as they continuously make themselves, and we find them autonomous when we begin to reflect about them. So what I say is that what makes living beings autonomous living discrete entities is their constitution and operation as molecular autopoietic systems. In these circumstances the autonomy of living systems needs not to be explained as such, although it is no doubt interesting to reflect on how the organisms transform as autonomous entities in the course of the ontogenic and phylogenic drift of the different organism-niche unities that they integrate.3 The authors of this article speak as if they thought that the notion of autopoiesis were something that existed out there in the world and about which one can have different opinions, although they do not say what they are talking about when they use

pdf https://www.dropbox.com/s/yi9kckdjo4p5xw5/Ultrastability%20%E2%80%A6%20Autopoiesis_%20-%20Dr.%20Tom%20Froese.pdf?dl=0

How Does The World Work: Top-Down or Bottom-Up? Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email

How Does The World Work: Top-Down or Bottom-Up? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

h/t The Kihbernetics Institute on Twitter:

Metamodern View of Science Published 01 August, 2017 by Hanzi Freinacht

Metamodern View of Science – Metamoderna

Every self-respecting (and in this case, self-ironic) philosophy must relate to knowledge. What can we know? How can we know it? What knowledge should count as most fundamental and valuable? What to make of subjective experience, social constructions, religions and spirituality in the face of scientific inquiry?

Posts on Metamodernism:
1# Metamodernism: The Conquest of a Term
2# Metamodern View of Science
3# Metamodern View of Reality
4# Metamodern Spirituality, Existence and Aesthetics
5# Metamodern View of Society
6# Metamodern View of the Human Being

Without further ado, let’s jump to the bullet list of insights. The metamodern view of science is:

• To respect science as an indispensable form of knowing.
• To see that science is always contextual and truth always tenta­tive; that reality always holds deeper truths. All that we think is real will one day melt away as snow in the sun.
• To understand that different sciences and paradigms are simul­tan­eously true; that many of their apparent contradictions are superficial and based on misperceptions or failures of translation or integration.
• To see that there are substantial insights and relevant knowledge in all stages of human and societal development, including tribal life, poly­theism, traditional theology, modern industrialism and postmodern criti­que. In the book The 6 Hidden Patterns of World History, I call this the evolution of “meta-memes”.
• To celebrate and embody non-linearity in all non-mechanical matters, such as society and culture. Non-linearity, in its simpl­est definition, means that the output of a system is not proport­ional to its input.
• To harbor a case sensitive suspicion against mechanical models and linear causation.
• To have “a systems view” of life, to see that things form parts of self-organ­izing bottom-up systems: from sub-atomic units to atomic particles to molecules to cells to organisms.[i]
• To see that things are alive and self-organizing because they are falling apart, that life is always a whirlwind of destruction: the only way to create and maintain an ordered pattern is to create a corresponding disorder. These are the principles of autopoiesis: entropy (that things degrade and fall apart) and “negative en­tropy” (the falling apart is what makes life possible).
• To accept that all humans and other organisms have a connect­ing, over­arching worldview, a great story or grand narrative (a religion, in what is often interpreted as being the literal sense of the word: some­thing that connects all things) and therefore accept the necessity of a grande histoi­re, an overarching story about the world. The meta­modernist has her own unapolog­etically held grand narrative, synth­esizing her available under­stand­ing. But it is held lightly, as one recog­nizes that it is always partly fictional – a proto­synthesis.
• To take ontological questions very seriously, i.e. to let questions about “what is really real” guide us in science and politics. This is called the onto­logical turn.

”…we don’t really have a safe ‘ground of reality’, just a strange space that tunnels in all directions. In this magnificent and frightening hall of mirrors, we must still latch on the best models of reality, and we must still respect the authority of science, which can be questioned only by yet more universal authorities of science.”

Beginning with the first two points, these are obvious to most modern people. Science is defined as that which can be studied with a rigid method and can be empirically verified or falsified by further studies. You can also come up with alternate theories that explain the phenomena more parsimoniously, accurately and in greater harmony with other existing knowledge.

This mainstream view of science of course means that whatever we think we know is always only a partial story about a greater mystery. This holds true even in the most emblematic and powerful of the sciences: physics. For instance, Newton’s laws of gravity have been shown to be better explained by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Today some physicists, like Lee Smolin, are proposing that we live in a universe where even natural laws are emergent – i.e. just long lasting “habits” of the universe, rather than “laws” inscribed prior to its existence. In a similar vein, Erik Verlinde has argued that gravity doesn’t exist, that it may be an illusion.

Even the most basic and concrete of our convictions – and the ones that best predict the behaviors of nature – are part of deeper mysteries. And science is the process of building upon what we know, which ultimately always tears down the previously known. It is a dance of consciousness, always delving into a deeper mystery. We don’t live in a universe where “science” tells us “the truth”. We live in a universe where the truth always lies beyond us as we plunge into its mystery.

This insight necessitates a holistic view of the world. We cannot easily subscribe to the reductionist view that physics grounds chemistry, which grounds biology, which grounds psychology, which grounds the social sciences. There is of course a logic to this progression, but it is only a partial truth.

There are genuinely different facets of reality: where, for instance, our subjective experience must always be part of the equation, and this consciousness is always within a social context – in the case of humans, a social context that is imbued with meaningful symbols and their interrelations. So because even the study of “physics” cannot exist as anything outside of socially mediated consciousness, its exploration of the world cannot give us all the answers. The subjective realm, and the social realm, hence merit their own, separate forms of inquiry: humanities, perspective taking, interpretation, contemplation – even meditation.

If you can’t point to a “physics” that would exist prior to anyone’s conscious understanding of it, you can no longer believe that physics alone exhausts the knowledge of nature and reality. It is simply a set of mental models of interrelations between different parts of the experienced world. This is not to say, of course, that physics is reducible to opinions and subjective experience. Rather: all physical reality exists within our socially mediated consciousness, just as that same consciousness only exists within the framework of physical reality. The different fundamental aspects of reality swallow one another. This paradox is what most observers have missed: that one aspect of reality is entirely swallowed by another aspect of reality, which is in turn swallowed by the very thing it swallows. Very few people seem to understand this.

So we don’t really have a safe “ground of reality”, just a strange space that tunnels in all directions. In this magnificent and frightening hall of mirrors, we must still latch on the best models of reality, and we must still respect the authority of science, which can be questioned only by yet more universal authorities of science.

”Our work, as metamodern philosophers and scientists, is to rewrite the very fabric of what is real, as our participatory perspectives express higher truths, as they mirror more profound insights about physics and complexity – and land us in a vast landscape of reflections, gazing deeper into the abyss.”

A NEW ONTOLOGICAL TURN

The other points on the list present some such models that are fundamental to the metamodern view of knowledge, that give us something to latch on to.

The metamemes are master patterns in our view of the reality. Societies – and their sciences – evolve by changes of bits of knowledge and cultural patterns, which Richard Dawkins famously named memes. But there are also master patterns that organize the overall patterns of these memes: there are “metamemes”. Modernism, or modern life, is one such metameme, showing up in the arts, philosophy, science, legal structures, politics and the social organization of everyday life. Postmodernism is another one that has showed up in late modern societies. And metamodernism is still being born.

So even if science reigns supreme, it is always created in social, economic, cultural and philosophical settings that determine what scientific questions are asked, what methods are used, what problems are seen as worthwhile, which questions are kosher and which ones are taboo.

From within the field of science we see the growth of increasingly non-linear perspectives and models. You have the growing study of complex, self-organizing systems that follow the logics of chaos mathematics – and it is gaining strength across the sciences. When you study systems of this kind, the “input” is generally not proportional to the “output” of the system. This is in itself, of course, a silly and rather trivial observation: of course there are lots of things that cannot be described with linear, mechanical models. But the repeated exposure to systems thinking also changes one’s general sense of reality: we leave behind a view of reality as “a machine”, and begin to see it as a large set of very different interacting systems. From molecules, to cells, to organisms to ecosystems and societies, you can study their autopoiesis, their propensity to self-assemble. And paradoxically, this is only made possible by the fact that everything in the world is entropic, that everything is always decaying.

All this means that you begin to understand how often our general propensity to think in linear terms deceives us, how our intellectual intuitions betray us. We come to expect the unexpected. We begin to understand that matters are always more counter-intuitive than we would think. We begin to focus less on perceived truths and realities, and more on open-ended processes. For instance, writing this blog entry, which uses a number of flattened and truncated theories and concepts, I still see that these half-theories feed into the process of growing a metamodern understanding of the world. An advancement of a larger intuition, if you like. This intuition can in turn lead us to new, more robust science. And across the sciences, such robust theories are appearing – from the diverse work of The Santa Fe Institute for studies of complexity, to the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, to the veritable explosion of Barabasi’s network science, which recently has made its entry into neuroscience and medicine. And you have all the people working on “deep learning”, i.e. making machines learn to facilitate the emergence of artificial intelligence. And then you have the field of complexity economics, and corresponding developments in sociology. The list goes on. It’s a veritable revolution in science, intimately tied to what might loosely be termed a metamodern sense of science. In the humanities you have people like the “enactivists” who work with similar concepts. And of course, there are all the views of complex interactions in meteorology and ecology.

But to view science through the lens of chaos, complexity, interaction, entropy, autopoeisis and emergence is not to have a “stable” view of it. Sure, so there is a “pattern that connects”, described in an increasingly wide variety of authors such as Fritjof Capra, Gregory Bateson, Maturana and Varela, Yuval Harari, Robert Wright, Søren Brier, Manuel DeLanda and so forth. But the metamodern view isn’t that this is “the correct” view or intuition about reality.

It is a proto-synthesis. It is a synthesis of the knowledge and perspectives that can be garnered at this point in history – and perhaps not the only one or the best one – and it is destined to be revised and eventually replaced, just as all former intuitions of science.

But the metamodern mind isn’t contented by a relativist view of science. It still believes that there are greater patterns and mysteries to unravel, and that some truths and intuitions are more useful, and in that sense “higher” than others. So it grasps this proto-synthesis and holds it with self-conscious naivety. Because, after all, we need direction. We need something to believe in.

And we must all bow before the dazzling elegance of science.

And as some authors, notably Karen Barad and the posthumanists, and perhaps the “speculative realists”, have argued, we cannot be contented with a view only of knowledge, only of science. Our view of science is always intertwined with our general sense of reality, of what is “really real”, with ontology.

So the metamodern philosophy tries to figure out what is really real. It thus holds that the hall of mirrors, in which fundamental aspects of reality such as consciousness and physical reality, is a higher reality. It keeps asking questions about the nature of this reality, and understands that philosophy is not being expelled to the margins by empirical science.

Nay, philosophy is reasserting itself at the very core of all scientific endeavors. The same is true of spirituality, as all philosophical endeavors must, at their core, relate to reality itself. This wordless relationship is, after all is said and done, still spiritual.

This is the ontological turn. We are taking a turn in which we base our science upon a deepening philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality. Our work, as metamodern philosophers and scientists, is to rewrite the very fabric of what is real, as our participatory perspectives express higher truths, as they mirror more profound insights about physics and complexity – and land us in a vast landscape of reflections, gazing deeper into the abyss.

And when you gaze into the abyss, it also gazes into you.

OR63 Online: Creating a better future  14 – 16 September 2021  Connecting OR professionals from across the world to share, discuss and network GET STARTED, SUBMIT TODAY Deadline for submissions: 11 June 2021

OR63 – The OR Society – The OR Society

OR63 Online: Creating a better future 

14 – 16 September 2021 

Connecting OR professionals from across the world to share, discuss and network

GET STARTED, SUBMIT TODAY

Deadline for submissions: 11 June 2021

Gerald Midgely says:

SYSTEMS THINKING STREAM AT THE OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY ONLINE CONFERENCE (OR63), SEPTEMBER 14-16, 2021Many Operational Research (OR) and Systems practitioners share a common interest in systemic intervention to address highly complex organizational, social and environmental problems.The Systems Thinking stream at the OR63 conference, which I am co-organizing, provides a fantastic opportunity to bring people from both the OR and Systems communities together to learn from one another, so both can be enriched. We welcome the widest possible diversity of practitioners and academics, whichever tradition of systems thinking or systemic OR you come from.Each year since 2018, the Systems Thinking stream has been the largest in the sixty-three-year history of the OR Society! We are now mainstream in OR, and this is reflected in the 2021 choice of plenary speakers, with Ariella Helfgott presenting about ‘Systems Thinking for System Change’. Now the conference has moved online, so people don’t have to travel to participate, let’s make the stream even bigger and better – please join in, share your experiences of systems thinking with us, and learn from the wide variety of other systems practitioners who will be participating.If you want to give a talk, THE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS IS 11 JUNE 2021, so very soon. Please don’t miss it! Also, don’t forget to select “Systems Thinking” as your choice of stream. In addition to speaking slots, there are opportunities to run experiential workshops, which can be an hour long. If you want to run a workshop, please choose the “Impact” stream, and make it clear in your abstract that you want it to be a joint session with the Systems Thinking stream.All the information you need to know about deadlines, price of admission, contact information for the organizers, etc., is in the link below.

Decent list of some core systems concepts

Using Complexity Science Concepts When Designing System Interventions and Evaluations By: Beverly Parsons  

InSites

source:

First Course in Critical Systems Thinking & The Management of Complexity – Sept ’21

First Course in Critical Systems Thinking & The Management of Complexity – Sept ’21

Updated: Apr 30

Having recently announced the newly created courses in “Critical Systems Thinking for the Management of Complexity,” we can now announce the start date of the first program, and news that places can now be reserved.

STARTING TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 7TH

The program will begin on Tuesday 7th September. Each of the 12 sessions will then be offered bi-weekly with a short-break for the December holidays. So, the exact dates will be: 7th & 14th September, 5th & 19th October, 2nd, 16th, 30th November, 14th December, 4th & 18th January and 1st & 15th February. The sessions will run from 3.30-5pm UK time.

Each session in the program will be delivered live online via Zoom and will last 90 minutes.

Further program details, the agenda and who should attend can all be found in the brochure.

INCLUDED IN THE PRICE

The price of the program includes:

• Access to all the live sessions
• Private access to video recordings of the program
• A copy of Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity
• All course materials
• First Year Annual Membership of the Critical Systems Institute

PLUS A FREE PRACTIONER’S GUIDE

Participants of programs starting in 2021 will get a free copy of the forthcoming book “Critical Systems Thinking; A Practitioner’s Guide”, also by Michael C Jackson. Participants will also credited in the book as they are likely to contribute insights.

THE PRICE

The all inclusive price is £1,200 as a single payment. or as 4 x £320 monthly payments.

RESERVATIONS

A limit of 20 participants means you are advised to reserve a place now. Payment can be made easily online using most major credit or debit cards:

• RESERVE with a SINGLE PAYMENT
• RESERVE with Payment BY INSTALMENTS

ENQUIRIES

All enquiries should be emailed to contact@enlightenedenterprise.ac

source:

First Course in Critical Systems Thinking & The Management of Complexity – Sept ’21

Sorting Things Out

Classification and Its Consequences

By Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star

Sorting Things Out Classification and Its Consequences By Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star

Sorting Things Out | The MIT Press

Summary

A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions.

What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include “fainted in a bath,” “frighted,” and “itch”); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of information infrastructures.

In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis.

The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city’s story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

pdfs of excerpts etc

Click to access Bowker-and-Star-2000-Sorting-Things-Out.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232915504_Review_of_Sorting_Things_Out_Classification_and_Its_Consequences_by_Geoffrey_C_Bowker_and_Susan_Leigh_Star/link/55218a110cf2f9c130528363/download