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Cybernetics and Circularity: The Heinz von Foerster Aphorisms
ANTHOLOGY of PRINCIPLES PROPOSITIONS THEOREMS ROADSIGNS DEFINITIONS POSTULATES APHORISMS etc. H.V.F. May 17-21 1995 CYBERNETICS AND CIRCULARITY
Cybernetics and Circularity: The Heinz von Foerster Aphorisms
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Complexity Explained
“I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity” – Stephen Hawking
Complexity science, also called complex systems science, studies how a large collection of components – locally interacting with each other at small scales – can spontaneously self-organize to exhibit non-trivial global structures and behaviors at larger scales, often without external intervention, central authorities or leaders. The properties of the collection may not be understood or predicted from the full knowledge of its constituents alone. Such a collection is called a complex system and it requires new mathematical frameworks and scientific methodologies for its investigation.
Here are a few things you should know about complex systems,
result of a worldwide collaborative effort from leading experts, practitioners and students in the field.
“There’s no love in a carbon atom, No hurricane in a water molecule, No financial collapse in a dollar bill.“
– Peter Dodds
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Complexity Explained
Experience shapes future foraging decisions in a brainless organism
Jules Smith-Ferguson, Terence C Burnham, Madeleine Beekman
Adaptive Behavior
The ability to change one’s behaviour based on past experience has obvious fitness benefits. Drawing from past experience requires some kind of information storage and retrieval. The acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum has previously been shown to use stored information about negative stimuli. Here, we repeatedly exposed the slime mould to three stimuli with differing levels of potential risk: light, salt and lavender. We asked if the slime mould would change its foraging behaviour depending on the level of risk. In our experiment, taking risk yielded better food. We consistently selected individuals that made the same foraging decision (accepting risk or avoiding risk) over multiple trials. Hence, the same individuals were tested over a period of time, but only individuals that continued to make the same decision were allowed to continue. Regardless…
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There is a temporary problem with buying recurring membership that affects a minority of applicants (it depend on which bank you use!). This will be resolved in early March. Our apologies.
Northumberland County Council Public Health Team are seeking expressions of interest from individuals (by 14th March) with extensive experience of systems thinking approaches such as Soft Systems Methodology, Strategic Options Development Analysis, developing attribute maps, systems map and causal maps. Click here for more details.
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SCiO – Systems & Complexity in Organisation
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SCiO UK Virtual Open Meeting – March 2021
Mon 22 March 2021 18:30–20:30 GMT
Virtual Open Meeting: A series of presentations of general interest to Systems and Complexity in Organisation’s members and others. SCiO organises Open Meetings to provide opportunities for practitioners to learn and develop new practice, to build relationships, networks hear about skills, tools, practice and experiences. This virtual session will be held on Zoom, the details of which will be confirmed nearer the time…
· The Variety Calculus – concepts and methodologies to address increasing complexity – Gordon Niven
· Rewilding Public Services: taking a design turn with 7 Starlings CIC – Lesley Rowan
All welcome; FREE; Online event (Zoom); English; Book now
“Later in the bar” – SCiO UK March 2021
Mon 29 March 2021 19:00–21:00 GMT+1
“Later in the bar” is a SCiO UK networking event where we try to recapture some of the features of meeting in the bar after an open meeting. This is an opportunity to mingle freely (online) and set your own agenda. These social networking events are different from the open days (speakers and discussion) and member-only development days (each agenda slot filled set by members for learning discussions). Social networking events combine some initial small group work and provide completely open opportunities to mingle as individuals and groups. The format will vary slightly based on numbers.
All welcome; FREE; Online event (Zoom); English; Book now
SCiO Metaphor Special Virtual Development Event – April 2021
Mon 12 April 2021 19:00–21:00 GMT +1
This Virtual Development Event will be a Metaphor Special. SCiO’s Development Days offer an opportunity to draw upon the collective expertise of SCiO members in a friendly and supportive atmosphere. By taking Development Events online, using the Zoom meeting platform, we aim to make them accessible to more SCiO members Development Events are both for members who are just starting out on a journey to explore Systems Thinking approaches, and for those who have many years of exploration and practice….
Members only; FREE to members; Online event (Zoom); English; Book now
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SCiO Belgium – digitale meeting editie april 2021
Wed 28 April 2021 18:00–20:30 CET+1
Virtuele meeting (Zoom) waar we telkens inzoomen op één topic gebracht door een inspirerende spreker, waarna we een mind-openende én verdiepende dialoog houden. 19:00 Welkom & introductie 19:20 Netwerk moment SCiO-stijl 19:30 ‘Reorganiseren voor groei tijdens Covid’ – Wim Focquet – DPD – HR Directeur (Nl) 20:30 Verdiepende dialoog 21:15 Conclusies & dankwoord. Het Belgische netwerk is een Nederlandstalig netwerk. SCiO is een breed netwerk van professionals in organisatie ontwikkeling, organisatie design, en de systemische bege….
Members only; FREE; Online event (Zoom); Dutch; Book now
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SCiO DACH (Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz)
VSM Praxis – Anwendung des VSM im Rahmen der RoBau-Methode
Fri 19 March 2021 18:00–19:30 CET
VSM-Anwendungsbericht durch Carola Roll im Rahmen der bei JELBA GmbH & Co. KG entwickelten RoBau-Methode. Inhalt des Berichts sind Vorstellung der Rahmenbedingungen und Zielsetzung, Beschreibung der Vorgehensweise und Aufzeigen der Entwicklungsschritte bis zum aktuellen Status sowie Ausblick auf zukünftige Arbeitspakete. Im Anschluss allgemeine Diskussion der präsentierten Inhalte….
Members only + Guests; KOSTENLOS; Online event (Zoom); German; Book now
SCiO DACH: One System – One Hour: System 3*
Fri 16 April 2021 17:00–18:00 CET+1
Moderiertes Diskussionsforum über die Eigenschaften und Aufgaben des Systems 3* im VSM. Basis der Diskussion sins die Bücher “Viabilitiy of Organizations Vol. 1-3” von Wolfgang Lassl.
Members only + Guests; KOSTENLOS; Online event (Zoom); German; Book now
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SCiO Espana – Principios y leyes de los sistemas – Marzo 2021
Tue 30 March 2021 19:00–21:00 GMT+1
Principios y leyes de los sistemas Es esta sesión vamos a conversar sobre los principios fundamentales de los sistemas y cómo éstos nos permiten anticipar, no predecir, el posible resultado de nuestras decisiones. Exploraremos también los diferentes paradigmas en los que se fundamentan las organizaciones y cómo estos influyen en su eficacia
All welcome; FREE; Online event (Zoom); Spanish; Book now
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SCiO-NL March 2021 meeting – Text strategy – a holistic approach to practical communication
Tue 9 March 2021 18:00–20:00 CET
This month SCIO-NL will be hosting a presentation on Text Strategy, a very practical and useful approach to communication. The presenter is Marian van Stoppelenburg, who has developed this holistic strategy for developing great texts. The presentation will be in English, so international members are more than welcome.
Members only + Guests; FREE; Online event (Teams); English; Book now
source: www.systemspractice.org/events
via John Pourdenahd
BBC World Service – Global Business, Russell Ackoff
To mark his recent death Peter Day revisits an interview he did 2 years ago with Russell Ackoff Professor Emeritus of the Wharton School in Operations Research and Systems Theory. His f-Laws expose the common flaws in both the practice of leadership and in the established beliefs that surround it.
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BBC World Service – Global Business, Russell Ackoff
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Thought Leadership for Systems Transformation
INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP
Developing Evolutionary Leaders for Systems Transformation
Q&A Sessions for Prospective Participants:
on Clubhouse: Wednesday, February 24 at 9:30 am Pacific Time
https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/MwY3oWzY
on Zoom: Wednesday, March 3 at 9:30 am Pacific Time
request Zoom link at info@evoleadinstitute.com
OVERVIEW
Whether you are working on place-based systemic change, prototyping new paradigm organizations, taking action to reshape global narratives, or engaging in some other aspect of systems transformation, you are contributing to a conscious social evolution that encompasses many interconnected contexts that evolve over time. For this experimental program, we invited thought leaders across some of these contexts so that participants could broaden their awareness of various approaches, tools, and practices they can use to advance and evolve their work.
Initially, we planned to offer this format as an optional addition to the Articulating Your Evolutionary Work (AYEW) program hosted by the Evolutionary Leadership Community but eventually decided that it would be equally valuable for change-makers with different levels of experience. As a result, anyone can register just for this part though we still expect that a significant number of participants will come from the AYEW program.
We live in a time of content abundance: it is possible to access valuable information in virtually any field through books, articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other easily accessible sources. With the democratization of content production and distribution, inviting guest teachers to simply repeat the same message that can be found on the Internet feels like a waste of opportunity. In this experiment, we want to maximize the value of the precious real-time conversation with thought leaders by doing quality pre-work to get the dialogue grounded in the groups’ specific context from the start.
This pre-work consists of self-study and peer learning. Before one of our guest teachers spends time with the group, we will ask the participants to review related publicly available materials and dive deeper into the content that would add the most value in the context of their own work. Then we will facilitate a 2-hour virtual World Café gathering to discuss individual reflections, enrich these reflections through generative dialogue, look for patterns, and articulate feedback and questions that the group wants to share with the teacher beforehand.
The teacher will review the collective narrative from the World Café conversations to prepare for a 1-hour call with the group. That call will start with the teacher sharing their response to the collective narrative which will be followed by Q&A (questions and answers). So with each guest teacher, participants would be going through these 3 stages:
We will pay our guest teachers for their time according to their requests. The number of guest teachers we are able to confirm will depend on the total amount of financial contributions made by the participants. When registration closes on March 19, we will confirm guest teachers starting with the most popular ones and going down the list for as long as we have funds to confirm more teachers.
To use the potential of this selection process to the fullest, we invite you to have a look at the available guest teachers before you register. You can see a brief description of each teacher’s background below. If you click on the “Learn more” button, you will see a list of highlighted materials that you can explore.
When you fill out the registration form, please select as many guest teachers as you can realistically engage with.
Please note that your preferences will contribute to the final line up but other participants will have an equal say in shaping this collective experience which means that it is possible that only some or even none of the teachers you select might be confirmed at the end. Therefore it is important that you don’t rely on this program to make a specific connection: if what you want is to learn from a certain individual, we encourage you to check out their own offers instead or to use publicly available materials. By submitting your preferences in the registration form, you are trusting the “collective intelligence” to determine key choices that will enable the most productive peer learning experience for this group of people at this moment in time.
With this, we are very excited to present some of our most inspiring teachers and colleagues who agreed to participate in this learning experiment:
FINANCIAL MODEL
At the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership, we keep experimenting with creative ways of using the institution of money in a way that allows for nourishment and agency as opposed to extraction and exploitation. It is important for us to make our programs affordable while paying our teachers well.
For this experimental program, we asked potential guest teachers to let us know how much they would like to be paid for reviewing a collective narrative and spending 1 hour online with the group. We asked teachers to make sure that they request compensation that they feel 100% comfortable about. We know that contexts are very different and so are the factors that each teacher needs to consider, so we completely trust the teachers to set their own fees considering the scope of the commitment, the design and purpose of the program, and their own personal and professional contexts.
For participants, registration is based on the Pay What You Wish pricing model. This means that you can pay whatever you feel is right. We want you to feel 100% comfortable with what you pay considering your expected level of engagement (whether you plan to only attend sessions with a couple of teachers or you want to interact with as many teachers as possible), the impact of your financial contribution on the number of confirmed teachers, your financial situation, your excitement about the program, and any other factors that make a difference for you. Registration fees are non-refundable but completely flexible. For technical reasons, the registration form includes a number of pre-set options but you can always contact us if you prefer to name a different amount.
In addition to the work done by our guest teachers, we will also be facilitating and documenting World Café gatherings. Given the time it takes to produce a high-quality collective narrative, it will require a full day of work by one of our core team members to prepare for, facilitate, and follow-up on each World Café. In the future, we plan to include this time in the budget, but with this pilot run of the program, we decided to use 100% of registration fees to pay our amazing guest teachers (this includes any applicable taxes and transaction fees). Here is how this works:
book at source:
Thought Leadership for Systems Transformation
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How to use Roam Research: a tool for metacognition – Ness Labs
Anne-Laure Le Cunff • Reading time: 13 minutes
Last updated: January 5, 2021
I’ve never been a huge fan of knowledge management tools. Too rigid, too complex, not adapted to the intricacies of the human mind. I never managed to get on the Evernote or Notion bandwagon. It always felt like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Instead, I have been using a combination of sheets, docs and notes all cobbled together to link my research process together. It’s clunky, but it does the job. That was until I discovered Roam, which brands itself as “a note taking tool for networked thought.” Let’s have a look at how to use Roam Research to achieve your goals.
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How to use Roam Research: a tool for metacognition – Ness Labs
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Thinking in maps: from the Lascaux caves to knowledge graphs
Anne-Laure Le Cunff • Reading time: 18 minutes
What do hieroglyphs, flowcharts, road signs, and knowledge graphs have in common? They’re all thinking maps. Humans have been thinking in maps since the very first symbolic communication systems.
While thinking in maps may first bring to mind the idea of cartography, a map does not need to be geographic—it can be any symbolic depiction of the relationship between elements of some physical or mental space, such as themes, objects, or areas.
In the December 2007 edition of Philosophy of Mind, Professor Elisabeth Camp, whose research has focused on forms of thoughts that do not fit standard models, wrote: “Thinking in maps is substantively different from thinking in sentences.”
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Thinking in maps: from the Lascaux caves to knowledge graphs
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Span. Dig Deep. Solve complex problems. | Symbolic Systems Program
Symbolic Systems ProgramSchool of Humanities & SciencesSearch
How does human cognition work?
How do people interact with machines?
How human-like can a machine be?
SymSys will help you answer these questions and more. Students take an array of courses in computer science, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and statistics while also pursuing an area of concentration. Created in 1986 by faculty members at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, the program has become one of the top five undergraduate majors at Stanford.
SymSys breaks down traditional academic boundaries to train your mind and expand your thinking. But don’t mistake it for “light” or “less than”, this is one rigorous, intensive, rock-your-mind kind of education.
The program is designed to help students see connections, consider diverse perspectives, and explore new frontiers of knowledge across varying disciplines. Not only are there courses in different fields but there are overlaps in course content that complement each other.
Each student chooses an area of concentration, allowing you to dig deeper and focus on what interests you most. Concentrations can include: cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, learning, computer music, neuroscience, and decision making and rationality.
SymSys brings together multiple disciplines and methodologies to help you see complex problems from multiple angles and perspectives. We believe this is essential for 21st century learning, not to mention better problem solving.
What can you do with a SymSys major? Practically anything. Invent. Research. Teach. Lead. With hands-on technical training and a deep understanding of how people think and communicate, your SymSys degree will help you stand out. Our alumni are academics, business pioneers, journalists, lawyers, and more.
You’re not alone. Learn why
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Span. Dig Deep. Solve complex problems. | Symbolic Systems Program
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About – The Kihbernetics Institute
I became interest in Cybernetics in the mid 70’s when our Automation class teacher introduced us to A.Y. Lerner’s book “Fundamentals of Cybernetics”. What fascinated me most in this book was the description of “Analogous systems” in chapter 3.4 and the realization that very different structural patterns (mechanical, hydraulic, electrical) have similar behaviour and can be described with identical mathematical patterns:
I’m still enjoying skimming through this easy to read book and finding out how, even after half a century, most of it still holds true, some things have changed with technology advancements, and many of the questions still remain unanswered.
However, there was one thing in this book (and Cybernetics as a whole) I was never comfortable with: the distinction between the Control and Controlled (sub)systems.
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About – The Kihbernetics Institute
Reprinted with corrections from The Bell System Technical Journal,
Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948.
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
By C. E. SHANNON
pdf – https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0404/bd58e5f1edbd288cd69fcbc224485af415bf.pdf
What is Submerging? Nora Bateson Feb 18·20 min read Nora Bateson, Jan 2021
What is Submerging?. Nora Bateson, Jan 2021 | by Nora Bateson | Feb, 2021 | Medium
Discontinuous Improvement: Five Catapulting Ideas
Over a number of years I have worked on the development of at least five catapulting ideas. They are the product of an approach to organizational problems that I first formulated in 1974 under the name “idealized redesign of the corporation.” Rather than merely solving problems, this approach dissolves them. To solve a problem is to change the effects of one or more undesirable causes; to dissolve a problem is to eliminate the causes and thus also eliminate the effects. Implementation of these catapulting ideas requires radical transformation of corporations, not mild reform. They are: interactive planning, the internal market economy, the circular organization, the multidimensional organization, and decision support (learning) systems.
pdf – https://www.adlittle.com/sites/default/files/prism/1993_q4_26-32.pdf
Interactive planning is a concept developed by Russell L. Ackoff, an American theorist, early proponent of the field of operations research and recognized as the pioneer in systems thinking. Interactive planning forwards the idea that in order to arrive at a desirable future, one has to create a desirable present and create ways and means to resemble it. One of its unique features is that development should be ideal-oriented.[1] Interactive planning is unlike other types of planning such as reactive planning, inactive planning, and preactive planning.
Interactive planning – Wikipedia
wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network
introductory presentation: https://cs.brynmawr.edu/Courses/cs380/spring2013/section02/slides/06_SmallWorldNetworks.pdf
Analyzing Kleinberg’s (and other) Small-world Model – Martel and Nguyen (2005) – https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse522/05au/martel-smallworld.pdf
Models of the Small World: A Review – Newman (2000) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0001118.pdf
(NB see also ‘small world experiment/phenomenon’): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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