classic article:

A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence against Anxiety: A Report on a Study of the Nursing Service of a General Hospital Isabel E. P. MenziesFirst Published May 1, 1960 Research Article https://doi.org/10.1177/001872676001300201 Article information 

A Case-Study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence against Anxiety: A Report on a Study of the Nursing Service of a General Hospital – Isabel E. P. Menzies, 1960

Isabel Menzies Lyth

Isabel Menzies Lyth – Melanie Klein Trust

Isabel Menzies Lyth

Isabel Menzies Lyth was born in Fife in 1917, the fourth child of a minister of the Church of Scotland. She took a double first in economics and experimental psychology from St Andrews, where she lectured for some years. Her tutor was Eric Trist, who was to become a leading figure in the field of organisational development. It was through Trist that during the war she was able to spend her vacations from her teaching at St Andrews working with the War Office Selection Board and, later, the Civil Resettlement Headquarters of the British Army. At the end of the war she moved to London and was the only woman in a group of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and social scientists who founded the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, which offered research and consultation to organisations. Among this group were Wilfred Bion, John Bowlby, John Rickman, Jock Sutherland and Elliott Jaques. In this post-war period the influence of Melanie Klein, and then also Donald Winnicott, imbued the atmosphere of the Tavistock Institute.

In addition to her social research, Menzies began psychoanalytic training in London. Bion was her second analyst. It was an analysis which she said she undertook for herself, rather than the analysis required as part of her psychoanalytic training. Bion had a great influence upon her. In 1957 she qualified as a child analyst, and in 1960 became a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Throughout her time at the Tavistock, she would see her patients in the morning and carry out social research in the afternoon (Dartington, 2008).

She had a significant role as a group-relations consultant, particularly at the Tavistock Institute’s international ‘Leicester’ conferences on the dynamics of authority and leadership.

Contribution to understanding organisational life

Menzie’s classic paper on the structure of a hospital nursing service, ‘A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety. A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital’ (1960), has almost iconic status within the field of organisation theory and organisational consultancy. It is required reading for all who were interested in what is now termed the ‘system psychodynamic’ approach to organisations (Gould, J., Stapley, L. and Stein, M., 2001). In the paper Menzies made the original proposition that work in health care and social care organisations entail significant anxieties for staff and that defences against this anxiety are part of organisational life. In the introduction to the paper she describes how a hospital,

“…sought help in developing new methods of carrying out a task in nursing organisation. The research data were, therefore, collected within a socio-therapeutic relationship in which the aim was to facilitate desired social change.”

From, ‘A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety. A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital’ (1960), p.95.

The hospital had been finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile staffing needs and training needs. The senior staff felt that that there was a danger of complete breakdown in the system of allocating student nurses to practical front line work with patients, while also trying to train them effectively.

Menzies states that she took a position of considering the overt problem as the ‘presenting symptom’ and to reserving judgement on the real nature of the difficulties until she had completed the ‘diagnostic’ work. She set up a programme of data-gathering consisting of intensive interviewing, observational studies of operational units, and informal contacts with nurses and other staff. In an interesting footnote she refers to this as a ‘therapeutic study’ and writes of how the work in later stages shifted from diagnosis to therapy. She states that “presentation and interpretation of data, and work done on resistances to their acceptance, facilitate the growth of insight into the nature of the problem”.

She notes that as the research proceeded she “came to attach increasing importance to understanding the nature of the anxiety and the reasons for its intensity” (p97). For Menzies, the anxiety is connected to primitive anxieties aroused in the nurse by contact with seriously ill patients. She uses the description of infantile psychic life as elaborated by Freud, and more particularly by Melanie Klein (1959), as a conceptual framework. Above all, she draws on Klein’s view that the internal phantasy world of the infant “is characterised by a violence and intensity of feeling quite foreign to the emotional life of the normal adult”, seeing infantile-type primitive anxieties aroused for the nurses through intimate contact with patients. She describes how she sees these anxieties mobilised in the nurse around love, hate, aggression and suggests that the main psychological mechanism in use is projection. The nurse projects her own infantile phantasy situation into the workplace, experiencing the work as a deeply painful mixture of objective reality and phantasy.

Alongside anxiety is another crucial theoretical concept, the relationship between emotion and its ‘containment’; that is, the ways in which emotion is experienced or avoided, managed or denied, kept in or passed on, so that its effects are either mitigated or amplified. The capacity to think, on the part of individuals or groups, is related to the capacity for containment of anxiety (Bion, 1959) Going one step further, Menzies then suggests that this to-be-expected anxiety is amplified by the techniques used to contain and modify this anxiety.

The main message of her paper is the elaboration of how these defensive techniques are played out in the organisation of the nursing service. They are:

1. Splitting up the nurse-patient relationship
2. Depersonalisation, categorisation, and denial of the significance of the individual
3. Detachment and denial of feelings
4. The attempt to eliminate decisions by ritual task-performance
5. Reducing the weight of responsibility in decision-making by checks and counter checks
6. Collusive social redistribution of responsibility and irresponsibility
7. Purposeful obscurity in the formal distribution of responsibility
8. The reduction of the impact of responsibility by delegation to superiors
9. Idealisation and underestimation of personal development possibilities
10. Avoidance of change

Her conclusions give a powerful picture of dynamic processes at work within an institutionally defensive system.

Although people rely on social defences to contain their anxiety, they also desire to restore their experience of psychological wholeness and repair the real or imagined damage they have done in devaluing others. This desire for repair helps to limit the level of social irrationality in any group setting and provides a strong basis for moments of group development.

Perhaps the particular emphases of Menzies’ nursing paper militate against its being remembered and taken seriously. The paper illustrates the complex defence system used by the nursing system but does not address adequately what to do about it. This is a point that Menzies continued to feel strongly about. In an interview with Liz Webb and David Lawlor (2009) she asserted that the paper had been misunderstood and had led people to believe that providing support groups for staff was the answer to anxiety-provoking work. She was firmly opposed to this idea. She thought that the issue of anxiety was over-emphasised, in relation to the other side of the process – containment. She felt that the organisation needed to be designed in a way that offered staff effective containment of their anxieties.

Dr David Lawlor, 2016

Key publications

1960 Menzies Lyth, I. ‘A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety. A report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital’, Human Relations. 13(2): 95-121.

References

Bion, W. R. 1959. ‘Attacks on linking’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 40: 308-315, and also in Second Thoughts, London: Heinemann.

Dartington, T. 2008. ‘Isabel Menzies Lyth’ (obituary), The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/feb/20/1

Gould, J., Stapley, L. and Stein, M. (eds.) 2001. The Systems Psychodynamics of Organisations. Karnac: London.

Klein, M. 1959. ‘Our adult world and its roots in infancy’. In The Writings of Melanie Klein Vol 3, Routledge, 1975.

Lawlor, D. and Webb, L. 2009. ‘An interview with Isabel Menzies Lyth, with a conceptual commentary’, Organizational & Social Dynamics. 9(1): 93-137.

Lawlor, D. 2009. ‘Test of time: a case study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety: rereading 50 years on’, Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 14(4): 523-30.

Menzies Lyth, I. 1988. Containing Anxiety in Institutions, Vol. 1. London: Free Association Books.

Menzies Lyth, I. 1989. The Dynamics of the Social Selected Essays, Vol. 2. London: Free Association Books.

Thanks to the Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society who have granted us kind permission to reproduce the photograph above of Isabel Menzies Lyth.

source:

Artemy Kolchinsky on “Semantic Information” & The Physics of Meaning — COMPLEXITY — Overcast

Artemy Kolchinsky on “Semantic Information” & The Physics of Meaning

December 11, 20201:201:00:31

episode notes:

source (on overcast.fm, my recommended player)

Artemy Kolchinsky on “Semantic Information” & The Physics of Meaning — COMPLEXITY — Overcast

source:

The diversity bonus in pooling local knowledge about complex problems | PNAS

The diversity bonus in pooling local knowledge about complex problems

 View ORCID ProfilePayam Aminpour, Steven A. Gray, Alison Singer, Steven B. Scyphers, Antonie J. Jetter, Rebecca Jordan, Robert Murphy Jr, and Jonathan H. GrabowskiPNAS February 2, 2021 118 (5) e2016887118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016887118Add to Cart ($10)

1. Edited by Matthew O. Jackson, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved November 4, 2020 (received for review August 14, 2020)

• Article
• Figures & SI
• Info & Metrics
•  PDF

Significance

Groups can collectively achieve an augmented cognitive capability that enables them to effectively tackle complex problems. Importantly, researchers have hypothesized that this group property—frequently known as collective intelligence—may be improved in functionally more diverse groups. This paper illustrates the importance of diversity for representing complex interdependencies in a social-ecological system. In an experiment with local stakeholders of a fishery ecosystem, groups with higher diversity—those with well-mixed members from diverse types of stakeholders—collectively produced more complex models of human–environment interactions which were more closely matched scientific expert opinions. These findings have implications for advancing the use of local knowledge in understanding complex sustainability problems, while also promoting the inclusion of diverse stakeholders for increasing management success.

source:

The diversity bonus in pooling local knowledge about complex problems | PNAS

The Philosophy of Organism | Issue 114 | Philosophy Now

Articles

The Philosophy of Organism

Peter Sjöstedt-H introduces Whitehead’s organic awareness of reality.

The philosophy of organism is the name of the metaphysics of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Born in Kent in 1861, schooled in Dorset, Alfred headed north and taught mathematics and physics in Cambridge, where he befriended his pupil Bertrand Russell, with whom he came to collaborate on a project to develop logically unshakable foundations for mathematics. In 1914, Whitehead became Professor of Applied Mathematics at Imperial College, London. However, his passion for the underlying philosophical problems never left him, and in 1924, at the age of 63, he crossed the Atlantic to take up a position as Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947. His intellectual journey had traversed mathematics, physics, logic, education, the philosophy of science, and matured with his profound metaphysics, a complex systematic philosophy that is most comprehensively unfolded in his 1929 book, Process and Reality.

The philosophy of organism is a form of process philosophy. This type of philosophy seeks to overcome the problems in the traditional metaphysical options of dualism, materialism, and idealism. From the perspective of process philosophy, the error of dualism is to take mind and matter to be fundamentally distinct; the error of materialism is to fall for this first error then omit mind as fundamental; the error of idealism is also to fall for the first error then to omit matter as fundamental. The philosophy of organism seeks to resolve these issues by fusing the concepts of mind and matter, thereby creating an ‘organic realism’ as Whitehead also named his philosophy. To gain an overview of this marvelous, revolutionary, yet most logical philosophy, let’s first look at what Whitehead means by ‘realism’, then at the meaning of its prefix, ‘organic’.

source:

The Social Self of Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy

II-1 | 2010
IndividualsSymposia. “Individuals”

The Social Self of Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy

Olav Bryant Smithhttps://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.935Text | Bibliography | Notes | References | About the author

FULL TEXT

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1Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy has commonly become known as process philosophy. Whitehead himself regarded his philosophy as the philosophy of organism. His organic philosophy is understood through various types of process that occur in the becoming of actual organic entities in relationship with one another. Whitehead’s conception of the self is one that provides an alternative foundation for psychology, helps to make sense of personal identity over time amidst a series of changing experiences, and offers a ground for understanding an ethic based on shared bonds between self and world. The mind-body problem is solved in the philosophy of organism, and a ground for understanding the lived body is provided.

2This paper begins with Whitehead’s deconstruction of the modern analysis of the self, and then discusses in turn Whitehead’s “reformed” ontology and theory of perception, the becoming of a single occasion of experience, the development of societies of occasions of experience, the creation of self-identity over time as a society displaying a selective pattern or “unity of style.” The paper concludes with a discussion of this social self, in the context of evolution, displaying an enjoyment and expression of lasting value through a series of fleeting activities of individual occasions of experience.

⁂

3Whitehead’s philosophy of organism would not have been created were it not for an analysis of the relations between the self and world. In what Whitehead termed his reformed subjectivist doctrine, he begins as Descartes did with the analysis of an act of experience, and then searches for an adequate model of the self and its experience.

4Whitehead believed that modern philosophy’s difficulties stem from a worldview that he referred to as Subjectivist Sensationism. Previous models of the self had been thrown off by the stress laid upon one, or other, of three misconceptions:

The substance-quality doctrine of actuality.
The sensationalist doctrine of perception.
The Kantian doctrine of the objective world as a construct from subjective experience. (Whitehead 1978: 156)

5Due to overconfidence in the power of ordinary language to reveal the inner workings of nature, the Greeks’ ontology of qualities inhering in underlying substances were a direct result of analyzing subject-predicate propositions where the subjects were place-holders for ascribed predicates. Subjects endured in narratives through numerous predicative changes, and thus, substances endured while experiencing only qualitative changes over time. So, on the modern theory, the self’s perception of the environing world, (the self being such an enduring substance), was sensationalist, with only such predicative descriptions being perceivable through the senses. The German idealist movement then began with Kant’s model of the self beginning from such a subjective sensationalist starting point, and expressing an objective world resulting from that experience.

The combined influence of these allied errors has been to reduce philosophy to a negligi- ble influence in the formation of contemporary modes of thought. Hume himself introduces the ominous appeal to ‘practice’ – not in criticism of his premises, but in supplement to his conclusions. Bradley, who repudiates Hume, finds the objective world in which we live, and move, and have our being ‘inconsistent if taken as real.’ Neither side conciliates philosophical conceptions of a real world with the world of daily experience. (Whitehead 1978: 156)

6Whitehead was searching for a model of the self and its experience of the world that was adequate to our experience. Hume’s phenomenal theory, as Hume himself attests, had to be set aside when he got up from his desk in order to get on practically with life. Idealists, and other postmodern approaches that accept Kant’s model of the synthesis of the self’s experience from the subjective to an objective construction, find the external world to be somewhat illusory. Whitehead did not believe we can live on the basis of either model. He believed that our theory should support our practices, or be set aside as inadequate.

full article in source:

The Social Self of Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy

source

Complexity, metaphor, and radical change

Complexity, Metaphor, and Radical Change

Published

05 September 2019

Filed under

PhilosophyComplexityRadical change

• Complexity, Metaphor, and Radical Change
• The Double Challenge of Complexity
• Models and Metaphors
• Paradigms and Power
• Making Shift Happen
• Sense-making and Survival
• Literature
• Acknowledgements

Science and society deal with complexity – but, judging from the current state of our social and natural world, they don’t seem to be very good at it. Why? And how can we change their behaviour in ways that keep the worst – collapse, catastrophe, and extinction – from happening?

The Double Challenge of Complexity

The social and ecological systems that surround us are complex. Beyond the common sense understanding of the term, this means they have the following properties:

1. They consist of large networks of individual components.
2. These components interact without central control, but following comparatively simple rules.
3. From these interactions, complex collective behaviour emerges that can change non-linearly through reinforcing feedback loops.

Such behaviour is hard to explain and often impossible to predict. Nonetheless, dealing with complex systems has always been a vital task for humans and other animals trying to survive in their social and ecological environment. Before the arrival of language, natural selection and the biological adaptation it enabled took care of this challenge: It created what might be called implicit, evolutionary knowledge¹ about coping with complexity, embodied at species level – adapted automatic behaviour, inherited instincts, and innate mechanisms for individual learning.

Language² changed all of that. It allowed intersubjectivity and the cultural – as opposed to biological – transmission of information, enabling collective learning and the accumulation of explicit knowledge. This led to an explosion of social complexity and to a constant acceleration of cultural, technological, and economic development. As an effect, biological, social, and technological adaptation have become decoupled, because they operate on different timescales – technology changes faster than social norms, and both change faster than biological design.³ Thus humans created an environment to which they are in many ways biologically and socially maladapted.

This situation poses a double challenge: On the one hand, our capacity to understand the complexity we created is severely limited – we cannot fully and explicitly describe, explain and predict the behaviour of complex systems, and our instincts and intuitions as well as our norms and values produce inappropriate and counterproductive reactions to the systems we have created or changed. On the other hand, the rapidly accumulating negative effects of these changes and our reactions, from social fragmentation and political polarisation to runaway climate change and ecological breakdown, require a more radical change in behaviour to avoid societal collapse and civilisational catastrophe than the slow and evolutionary change of social norms and biological design is able to produce.

full aticle in source:

Complexity, metaphor, and radical change

source:

Frontiers | Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances | Human Neuroscience

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY ARTICLE

Front. Hum. Neurosci., 12 August 2014 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00599

Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances

Jelle Bruineberg^1,2,3 and Erik Rietveld^1,2,4*

• ¹Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• ²Department of Philosophy, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• ³Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
• ⁴Department of Psychiatry, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

In this paper, we set out to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for the new field of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. This framework should be able to integrate insights from several relevant disciplines: theory on embodied cognition, ecological psychology, phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and neurodynamics. We suggest that the main task of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience is to investigate the phenomenon of skilled intentionality from the perspective of the self-organization of the brain-body-environment system, while doing justice to the phenomenology of skilled action. In previous work, we have characterized skilled intentionality as the organism’s tendency toward an optimal grip on multiple relevant affordances simultaneously. Affordances are possibilities for action provided by the environment. In the first part of this paper, we introduce the notion of skilled intentionality and the phenomenon of responsiveness to a field of relevant affordances. Second, we use Friston’s work on neurodynamics, but embed a very minimal version of his Free Energy Principle in the ecological niche of the animal. Thus amended, this principle is helpful for understanding the embeddedness of neurodynamics within the dynamics of the system “brain-body-landscape of affordances.” Next, we show how we can use this adjusted principle to understand the neurodynamics of selective openness to the environment: interacting action-readiness patterns at multiple timescales contribute to the organism’s selective openness to relevant affordances. In the final part of the paper, we emphasize the important role of metastable dynamics in both the brain and the brain-body-environment system for adequate affordance-responsiveness. We exemplify our integrative approach by presenting research on the impact of Deep Brain Stimulation on affordance responsiveness of OCD patients.

continues with full paper in source:

Frontiers | Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances | Human Neuroscience

source:

Systems and Constraints – Discourse

Systems and Constraints

Martin Gurri talks with Alicia Juarrero about her theories of stability and change in the context of government institutionsMartin Gurri August 18, 2020Image credit: The Course of Empire: Destruction, Thomas Cole, American (1801–1848)/Wikimedia Commons

• This interview is a companion to an article about Alicia Juarrero’s ideas that is also published on Discourse.

Alicia Juarrero is the founder and president of Vector Analytica, Inc., a software development firm in Washington, DC. Her books include Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (1999) and the forthcoming Complexity and Constraint: How Context Changes Everything; many of her papers can be found at her website, www.aliciajuarrero.org. Juarrero has taught philosophy at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland and has been a visiting scholar at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Durham University in the United Kingdom. She received her BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

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Systems and Constraints – Discourse

source:

https://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/inqre2a1.htm

While there have been a variety of applications of Churchman’s work to organizational development and organizational effectiveness, the InQ is the only instrument that actually measures our relative preference for each of these major inquiring systems. It also provides an interpretation of the behavioral implications of the resulting profile. And, while it has been applied to broaden and deepen individual competencies in problem solving and decision making, in team building, improving communication, conflict resolution, in matching persons to projects, and in integrating new hires; it has yet to be developed specifically to expedite the process of change needed for mastering the five disciplines of the learning organization, for the purpose of knowledge creation and sharing.

Before embarking upon this, a summary of each of the inquiring systems and their accompanying strategies will be provided, so that the reader will have the necessary background when reading the explanations of how these inquiring modes can apply to the learning organization, or so that they can refer back to them if necessary. Briefly, they are:

• The Synthesist (Hegel) sees likenesses in things that appear unalike, seeks conflict and synthesis, is interested in change, gets at underlying assumptions, sees the essence of problems, is speculative – asks what if and why not, and regards data to be meaningless without interpretation.
• The Idealist (Kant) welcomes a broad range of views, seeks ideal solutions, is interested in values, is receptive, and places equal value on data and theory.
• The Pragmatist (Singer) proceeds on the basis of an eclectic view, uses a tactical, incremental approach; and, being innovative and adaptive, is best in complex situations.
• The Analyst (Leibniz) seeks the “one best way,” operates with models and formulas, is interested in “scientific solutions,” is prescriptive, and prefers data over theory and method.
• The Realist (Locke) relies on “facts” and expert opinion, seeks solutions that meet current needs, is serious about getting concrete results, acts with efficiency and incisive correction, prefers data over theory. (Adapted from “The Art of Thinking” Harrison and Bramson, 1982).

The Synthesist and Idealist inquiry modes are substantive, value oriented ways of thinking and knowing, while the Analyst and Realist are functional and fact oriented. While about half of all people prefer to think in one main way, 35% prefer two or more styles in combination. Most people in North America prefer the Idealist style (+37%), followed by the Analyst (35%), the Realist (24%), the Pragmatist (18%), and the Synthesist (11%). Thirteen percent have a level profile where four or five of the styles are preferred fairly equally (Harrison and Bramson, 1982).

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https://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/inqre2a1.htm#s3

Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Systems Approach by C. West Churchman
Review by: David W. Miller
Source: Management Science, Vol. 16, No. 4, Application Series (Dec., 1969), pp. B288-B291
Published by: INFORMS
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2628806

https://www.jstor.org.sci-hub.se/stable/2628806?seq=1

Systems Approaches to Managing Change brings together five systems approaches
to managing complex issues, each having a proven track record of over 25 years.
The five approaches are:
1. System Dynamics (SD) developed originally in the late 1950s by Jay Forrester
2. Viable Systems Model (VSM) developed originally in the late 1960s by
Stafford Beer
3. Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA: with cognitive mapping)
developed originally in the 1970s by Colin Eden
4. Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) developed originally in the 1970s by Peter
Checkland
5. Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) developed originally in the late 1970s by
Werner Ulrich
The accounts of the approaches that follow draw heavily on the extensive experience
of the contributing authors. They are more than experienced practitioners, they bring
the added quality of academic rigour to the reflection on practice that characterises
their work. Drawing on the extensive experience of these contributing authors, some
of whom are primary originators, this volume is an accessible exposition of the
fundamentals of five compatible but different approaches and in addition is an opportunity to update guidance on the use of each approach.

Click to access Introducing-systems-approaches_ch1.pdf

Systems ApproachWorkbook
Systems Thinking and Complexity in Substance Use Systems
NOVEMBER 2012
Who should read this brief?
• Leaders and decision makers in the substance abuse and mental health services
field, such as regional directors and program managers
• Anyone interested in learning more about working in a complex system
Why are systems thinking and complexity important to a Systems Approach?
• This brief is part of the Systems Approach Workbook, which is intended to
assist those using the Systems Approach report as a guiding framework for
improving the accessibility, quality and range of services and supports for
substance use in Canada.
• The workbook supports a change management approach to system
development, which should be informed by the level of complexity of the
system in which change is taking place.
• Services and supports for substance use in Canada are located within broader,
interconnected health and social systems.
• This brief will help you assess the level of complexity in your system, and
better understand its impact on change, project implementation and leadership.

Click to access nts-systems-approach-system-thinking-complexity-2012-en.pdf

source

How to Apply System Thinking to Your Business – business.com

How You Can Apply System Thinking to Your Business

Chris PorteousCo-founder and CEO at Framestrbusiness.com MemberJan 11, 2021

What is system thinking, and how can it be applied to a wide range of businesses and industries without impacting their efficacy?

System thinking seems like a new buzzword in the world of business, but it’s actually complex. Companies can be considered from an abstract perspective. Each of its departments, inputs, outputs and processes can be compared, in analog, to systems. If you attempt to do this, we realize that the generalization can offer us deep insights.

System thinking is, at its core, a method of conceptualization. It’s not how we, as humans, typically see things. If we are involved in using it to aid our understanding of business processes, we must first grasp what it is and how it can be applied. This article delves into what system thinking is and how it can be used to benefit a wide range of businesses and industries.

How do you define system thinking?

Depending on whom you pose this question to, the answers will be distinctly different. Biologists view system thinking as to how colonies of organisms arrange themselves to perform tasks that are most beneficial to their ecological niche. Southern New Hampshire University defines system thinking as a way of exploring factors and events holistically that may lead to an outcome. From a business perspective, this seems vaguer than it has to be, but it can be briefly applied.

Businesses are involved in exploring behaviors. Whatever outcome you want from this behavior (a click, for a user to buy, etc.) comprises the outcomes. To fully access this outcome, we must first understand what the user goes through that leads them to that conclusion. These are the factors and events that lead to the click or closing of the sale. In this perspective, a business can figure out how to achieve a goal, given the inputs that make it up. However, these inputs are variable, and there’s no telling what they will be. The interaction of these factors and events is what gives rise to the system that we’re exploring. So, how does a company apply system thinking to its business?

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How to Apply System Thinking to Your Business – business.com

Cybernetics Society: CybSights Events

Enterprise fractals & hierarchical branching—CybSights: President’s Series

Wed,Feb10,2021,5:00PMRegister

Description

Hosted by our President, Dr. John Beckford FCybS, the CybSights President’s Series is a new programme that will bring interesting people together to explore the relevance and contribution of cybernetics to addressing important challenges.

Each event will consist of contributions by two different speakers. Each will be followed by individual Q&A. These are then brought together by the President in a lively and engaging plenary discussion. Each will seek areas of convergence and divergence between the ideas explored.

Events will be held via Zoom on the 2nd Wednesday of each month from 1700 to 1900.

Meetings are open to members of the Cybernetics Society and also the general public. Non-members are invited to join or give a donation. Booking is required.

The Cybernetics Society has been hosting conversations and lectures since the late 1960s.

#PS5 : February 10 2021: Fractal and branching designs & their relevance to business, society, and ecology

This event continues the exploration of the relevance of cybernetics to the contemporary world with contributions both theoretically practical and practically theoretical. The purpose of this series is not just to provide answers but to test whether the right questions are being asked.

FIRST SPEAKER: Patrick Hoverstadt

Cybernetics in Systems: A practitioner’s perspective

Patrick Hoverstadt will talk about how much easier it has become to use systemic cybernetic approaches with clients over the last 25 years. He’ll talk about some of the tricks and pitfalls of communicating and working with clients who don’t have a background in systems, where to use systems and cybernetics and why it matters now more than ever to make these approaches more accessible. The talk will cover some of the classical stances practitioners take, and the effects our positioning choices have.

Patrick Hoverstadt

Patrick Hoverstadt has been a consultant using systems and cybernetics for 26 years working with around 100 client organisations on over 250 systems projects. Clients range from micro businesses to multi-nationals and projects at whole sector and national levels. He is the chair of SCiO the professional body for systems practitioners and has developed a number of systemic approaches including a systemic/cybernetic approach to strategy development and execution.

Followed by brief Q & A

SECOND SPEAKER: David Dewhurst, FCybS, Vice-President of the Cybernetics Society

Strategies for being a tree and related branching systems (0th order cybernetics?) as more conservative!

David tackles some important questions on the notion of hierarchy, teasing us with these challenges:

• If each reader first ponders why trees are tree shaped for perhaps a day before reading further, we will generate more insights.
• How far will the simplest fractal + randomness get you?
• Why are branching structures ubiquitous – family trees, information processing and so on?
• As trees do not occupy the whole universe what are their downsides?

A concrete outcome of this discussion might be a greater respect and contempt for hierarchies.

David Dewhurst, FCybS

David has worked as a jobbing gardener and advocates his neoliberal gardening system in order to save the planet, and time. His (nuanced) support for Hayek when writing about Occupy’s economic policies in the FT was described by George Osborne as ‘surreal’. His 29 other occupations include teaching from University to Nursery, Headship, Ofsted Inspector, Management Consultant, Cleaner @ Tesco, Management Traineeship, Trainee Clinical Psychologist ten years on the Governing Body of Brunel University and doorstep salesman. In the film ’24 Davids’ released on line last year he comes in at number 13 (56 to 64 minutes) where he is characterised even less accurately than in this summary. He hopes to remain Vice President of the Cybernetics Society until 2022.

Plenary Discussion

The aim of this session, moderated by John Beckford, is to draw out the complementary and competing ideas emerging from the two sessions.

book at source:

Cybernetics Society: CybSights Events