Cranfield School of Management5.57K subscribersSUBSCRIBEDSpeaker: Professor Michael C Jackson (University of Hull) This talk discusses the nature of complexity, the development of systems thinking, the emergence of critical systems thinking, and how to conduct interventions on the basis of critical systems practice. The world has become increasingly networked and unpredictable. Leaders of international bodies such as the UN, OECD, UNESCO and WHO, and of major business, public sector, charitable, and professional organizations, have all declared systems thinking an essential leadership skill for managing the complexity of the interrelated economic, social, and environmental issues they face.
HUGGERx is a researched-based, immersive ecosystem of learning and collaboration “tools” or touchpoints designed to support young people – ages 8-88, to lean into complexity, to see it as a guide, rather than an enemy.
Ultimately our goal is for youth to develop confidence that they can use their understanding of living systems principles to help solve complex problems and together, innovate their way to healthier futures
At Hugger X, we’re exploring these Immersive Whole-Systems“Touchpoints” to learn about and collaborate around living systems:
Systems change friends! We invite you to a great Open Space online gathering. Here the themes, topics, and discussions that our wider community needs to have will emerge. As will the actions we choose to take.
The ideas, projects, questions and challenges concerned with systems change that you are working on contain the seeds of the discussions that will populate our agenda for the day. We will self-organise around the topics that matter to us.
Together we will grow new and fruitful connections. Ideas will propagate and cross-pollinate across our networks.
System changer, systems thinker, complexity navigator, network weaver, social acupuncturist? Whatever label you respond to, if you are in some way trying to understand and shift systems for the better, this Open Space is for you!
Who is this for?
If you feel any kind of affiliation to the idea of systems change, then this is for you. You may be a complete beginner, an interested academic, or a seasoned practitioner, if you have an interest in systems change, then you are who we are looking for, and we would be delighted to welcome you to the open space.
Open Space uses self-organisation to co-create an agenda for discussion that is of common interest to the assembled participants.
Open Space operates under four principles and one law. The four principles are:
1. Whoever comes are the right people. 2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. 3. When it starts is the right time. 4. When it’s over it’s over.
The Law is known as the Law of Mobility:
If you find yourself in a situation where you are not contributing or learning, move somewhere where you can.
The four principles and the law work to create a powerful event motivated by the passion, and bounded by the responsibility, of the participants.
In the first hour after the welcome and introductions we will open the space for agenda creation. Here you are all invited to propose a session topic. We will ask you to add your session to an editable spreadsheet and then we will give you the ‘microphone’ and invite you to present your session topic in 30 seconds to the wider audience.
Once the agenda has been prepared we will split into various rooms to begin the discussions.
At the end of the day we will all reconvene in the closing circle and share insights from the conversation that has been emerging throughout the day.
Event Host
Facilitators
Tanja Korvenmaa& Esko Reinikainen
Event Partners
Registration
The tickets for this event are ‘pay what you can’ with a minimum contribution of €10 to cover platform and event management costs. Current Systems Change Finland members can attend for free. If you pay €30 or over you will also receive a Systems Change Finland membership for 2021. Any surplus collected above the platform and event management costs will go to support the activities of Systems Change Finland.
Messy Issues, Worldviews and Systemic Competencies
January 2010
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-84996-133-2_6
In book: Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice
Richard Bawden
This is a follow-up to my last week’s post – Notes on Regulation: In today’s post, I am looking at the Arvid Aulin-Ahmavaara’s extended form of the law of requisite variety (using Francis Heylighen’s version). As I have noted previously, Ross Ashby, the great mind and pioneer of Cybernetics came up with the law of requisite variety (LRV). The law can be stated as only variety can absorb variety. Here variety is the number of possible states available for a system. This is equivalent to statistical entropy. For example, a coin can be shown to have a variety of two – Heads and Tails. Thus, if a user wants a way to randomly choose one of two outcomes, the coin can be used. The user can toss the coin to randomly choose one of two options. However, if the user has 6 choices, they cannot use the coin to randomly…
On 4 March 2021, I gave a seminar entitled ‘An Introduction to Systems Thinking for Tackling Wicked Problems’. This was in a series of seminars co-organized by the Linnaeus University Systems Community (Sweden) and the Centre for Systems Studies at the University of Hull (UK). 261 people participated. The feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive, and lots of people wrote asking if a recording would be made available. I have now been sent the recording, and the URL is pasted below. I have to say that nerves got to me in the first couple of minutes, as I wasn’t expecting several hundred participants, but then it gets more fluent after the ‘contents’ slide.Note that the URL below takes you to the Linnaeus University web site, and there is some text about the talk below the video screen. This is not visible at first sight – you have to scroll down. Please do so, as I have suggested a couple of books for you to read if you want to find out more. Here is the abstract for the talk:We are increasingly facing ‘wicked problems’. They are stubborn, challenging and often have to be managed rather than solved. They frequently involve interlinked issues, multiple agencies with different perspectives on both the problem and potential solutions, conflict over desired outcomes or the means to achieve them, power relations making change difficult, and uncertainty about the possible effects of proposed changes. While traditional scientific, policy and management approaches can make a useful contribution, we need something more than these if we want to gain a bigger picture understanding of how to act in the face of wicked problems. Systems thinking can help. In this talk, Gerald Midgley will introduce a framework of systems thinking skills, plus a variety of systems ideas and methods that can help people put these skills into practice. He will illustrate the use of the methods with a number of examples from his own social policy, natural resource management and community development projects in the UK and New Zealand. In this way, he will show how we can begin to get a better handle on wicked problems.
In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) is the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can “converge” on strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will not likely be a strong scientific consensus.
The principle is based on the unity of knowledge; measuring the same result by several different methods should lead to the same answer. For example, it should not matter whether one measures the distance between the Giza pyramid complex by laser rangefinding, by satellite imaging, or with a meter stick – in all three cases, the answer should be approximately the same. For the same reason, different dating methods in geochronology should concur, a result in chemistry should not contradict a result in geology, etc.
The word consilience was originally coined as the phrase “consilience of inductions” by William Whewell (consilience refers to a “jumping together” of knowledge).[1][2] The word comes from Latincom- “together” and -siliens “jumping” (as in resilience).[3]
Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary tells us:hys-ter-e-sis:n [NL, fr. Gk hysteresis shortcoming, fr. hysterein to be late, fall short, fr. hysteros later]
a retardation of the effect when the forces acting upon a body are changed (as if from viscosity or internal friction); esp: a lagging in the values of resulting magnetization in a magnetic material (as iron) due to a changing magnetizing force. –hys-ter-et-icadjThere seems to be no etymological link between hysteresis and either hysterical (fr. L hystericus of the womb) or history (fr. Gk, inquiry, history, fr. histor, istor knowing, learned). This is too bad, as there are scientific connections to both words. (There is no link, scientific or etymological, to histolysis, the breakdown of bodily tissues, or to blood.)
Hysteresis represent the history dependence of physical systems. If you push on something, it will yield: when you release, does it spring back completely? If it doesn’t, it is exhibiting hysteresis, in some broad sense. The term is most commonly applied, as Webster implies, to magnetic materials: as the external field with the signal from the microphone is turned off, the little magnetic domains in the tape don’t return to their original configuration (by design, otherwise your record of the music would disappear!) Hysteresis happens in lots of other systems: if you place a large force on your fork while cutting a tough piece of meat, it doesn’t always return to its original shape: the shape of the fork depends on its history.
Toward a generic alerting real time database A commercial white paper on escalating alerts. Under Development and for discussion…. Suggestions please! About
Dynamic capability is “the firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments” (David J. Teece, Gary Pisano, and Amy Shuen).
Dynamic capabilities can be distinguished from operational capabilities, which pertain to the current operations of an organization. Dynamic capabilities, by contrast, refer to “the capacity of an organization to purposefully create, extend, or modify its resource base” (Helfat et al., 2007). The basic assumption of the dynamic capabilities framework is that core competencies should be used to modify short-term competitive positions that can be used to build longer-term competitive advantage.
Watch Dr. Teece and others describe dynamic capabilities and strategy:
Three dynamic capabilities are necessary in order to meet new challenges. Organizations and their employees need the capability to learn quickly and to build strategic assets. New strategic assets such as capability, technology, and customer feedback have to be integrated within the company. Existing strategic assets have to be transformed or reconfigured.
Teece’s concept of dynamic capabilities essentially says that what matters for business is corporate agility: the capacity to (1) sense and shape opportunities and threats, (2) seize opportunities, and (3) maintain competitiveness through enhancing, combining, protecting, and, when necessary, reconfiguring the business enterprise’s intangible and tangible assets.
Learning
Learning requires common codes of communication and coordinated search procedures. The organizational knowledge generated resides in new patterns of activity, in “routines,” or a new logic of organization. Routines are patterns of interactions that represent successful solutions to particular problems. These patterns of interaction are resident in group behavior, and certain sub-routines may be resident in individual behavior. Collaborations and partnerships can be a source for new organizational learning, which helps firms to recognize dysfunctional routines and prevent strategic blind spots. Similar to learning, building strategic assets is another dynamic capability. For example, alliance and acquisition routines can enable firms to bring new strategic assets into the firm from external sources.
New assets
The effective and efficient internal coordination or integration of strategic assets may also determine a firm’s performance. According to Garvin (1988), quality performance is driven by special organizational routines for gathering and processing information, linking customer experiences with engineering design choices, and coordinating factories and component suppliers. Increasingly, competitive advantage also requires the integration of external activities and technologies: for example, in the form of alliances and the virtual corporation. Zahra and Nielsen (2002) show that internal and external human resources and technological resources are related to technology commercialization.
Transformation of existing assets
Fast-changing markets require the ability to reconfigure the firm’s asset structure and accomplish the necessary internal and external transformation (Amit and Schoemaker, 1993). Change is costly, and so firms must develop processes to find high-payoff changes at low costs. The capability to change depends on the ability to scan the environment, evaluate markets, and quickly accomplish reconfiguration and transformation ahead of the competition. This can be supported by decentralization, local autonomy, and strategic alliances.
Co-specialization
Over time, a firm’s assets may become co-specialized, meaning that they are uniquely valuable in combination. An example is where the physical assets (e.g., plants), human resources (e.g., researchers), and intellectual property (e.g., patents and tacit knowledge) of a company provide a synergistic combination of complementary assets. Such co-specialized assets are therefore more valuable in combination than in isolation. The combination gives a firm a more sustainable competitive advantage (Teece, 2009; Douma and Schreuder, 2013).
Asset orchestration
If capabilities are dependent on co-specialized assets, it makes the coordination task of management particularly difficult. Managerial decisions should take the optimal configuration of assets into account. Asset orchestration refers to the managerial search, selection, and configuration of resources and capabilities. The term intends to convey that, in an optimal configuration of assets, the whole is more valuable than the sum of the parts.
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