Communication without Coding: Cybernetics, Meaning and
Language (How Language, becoming a System, Betrays itself)

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Systems Thinking in project management: A case study in success for the NHS webinar | APM

Systems Thinking in project management: A case study in success for the NHS webinar

Published on29 Jun 20200 comments

Systems Thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns rather than static ‘snapshots’. Systems Thinking is a discipline for seeing the ‘structures’ that underlie complex situations.

This presentation held on Tuesday 30 June 2020 looked at some of the principles and techniques of Systems Thinking and illustrated their practical application to a real project; the launch of a new NHS website.

The talk covered not just Systems Thinking during design, but also linked all project elements and disciplines together during project execution to deliver overall success, despite all the hurdles in its way.

NHS technology projects have a poor track record of success, but this project was delivered on time, on budget and was so effective, it won four awards, including a Queen’s award for innovation.


APM System Thinking SIG. Having joined the University of Manchester as a Visiting Lecturer in 2011, teaching project management to organisations including Rolls Royce, E-ON, AMEC and Sellafield Ltd, he teaches in parallel to his consultancy practice, and has just published a book on project success.He is a Fellow of APM and a Chartered Project Professional, active both as a member of the APM North West Branch committee, liaising with Corporate Partners, and as Secretary of the APM Systems Thinking SIG.This webinar is suitable for professionals with any level of experience.

Andrew has very kindly allowed his presented material to be made available for viewing. The webinar recording is on YouTube and also embedded below for your information.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/BE34Gu_swXQ?controls=0&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.apm.org.uk

 #apmsystemsthinking  #apmwebinar  #apmnorthwest

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Systems Thinking in project management: A case study in success for the NHS webinar | APM

Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference Olúfémi O. Táíwò © Melody Overstreet From The Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 4 (“What is We?”). 

Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference – Olufemi O. Taiwo

Gettig to the other side of POMO complexity – see also:

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APM Systems Thinking SIG chair interview – Certes

APM Systems Thinking SIG chair interview

20TH DECEMBER 2018

Interview with Dr Michael Emes MEng PhD MIET MAPM MINCOSE, APM Systems Thinking Specific Interest Group (SIG) chair.

Why is systems thinking important to you?
Systems thinking helps me get to grips with challenging problems. Having too narrow a focus leads to solutions that aren’t effective in the long term. I’ve learnt this from my project work, from teaching and from research.

How is systems thinking relevant to the project managers of today?
To some extent, systems thinking is part of project management’s DNA. Projects are systems of activities with critical inter-dependencies and ‘hard’ systems thinking can help to optimise projects to minimise use of resources for example. But systems thinking really adds value when you realise that the world of projects is imperfect and uncertain, not deterministic, and has a significant human dimension where ’soft’ systems thinking comes into play. Not only do tasks often take longer to complete than anticipated due to unforeseen events and re-work, but we often start projects without a clear understanding of what the project’s objectives are. Systems thinking gives us the tools to attempt both complicated projects (with many interfaces and distributed supply chains – such as building a new aircraft) and complex projects (where stakeholders don’t agree on the fundamental objectives – such as building a new runway for London or using IT to deliver improved healthcare services). Ultimately, systems thinking helps us to do a better job of managing risk and project scope.

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An Epistemological Foundation for Communication

Klaus KrippendorffFirst published: September 1984

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1984.tb02171.x

pdf: https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1560&context=asc_papers

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NAE Website – Policing as a Complex System

Santa Fe Institute@sfiscience·Jan 15“How might #policing be reengineered to achieve a substantial reduction in the use of deadly force?” Treating US policing as the decentralized #ComplexSystem it is, Brendan O’Flaherty & SFI’s @rajivatbarnard (both at @columbia_econ) write for @theNAEng:

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ARINA | TIP – The Integral Process for Working on Complex Issues

The Integral Process For Working On Complex Issues ^tm  (TIP)

Called “TIP” for short, this is a mature, research-based process for groups of any size, in any settings, to deal with thecomplex issues, questions, and decisions they must grapple with.

Its powerful effectiveness comes from its design, using critical thinking and core processes of healthy change and development. This is how it fosters healthy change and development as people work on issues of any kind. This is why TIP is rated “5” on the Scale of Public Interactions.

Its common steps and templates empower users to address any issue. This means it is replicable for use on a wide variety of issues and transportable to any setting, at any scale.  

This process can transform perspectives, assumptions, cultures, relationships, system change efforts, and therefore how public or organizational business is done. It transforms how issues are understood and addressed.  This isn’t magic. Rather, it results from many years of action research and issue analyses, and mature use of solid theory.

Full pdf: http://www.global-arina.org/Documents/TIP%20Introductory%20Booklet%202006-2007.pdf

Case study: https://integral-review.org/more-perspectives-new-politics-new-life-how-a-small-group-used-the-integral-process-for-working-on-complex-issues/

FRIDAY, JANUARY 29, 2021 AT 8 PM UTC – 9 PM UTC

Radical Regeneration: Sacred Activism and Systems Change – A conversation with Andrew Harvey

Free  · Facebook liveMoreAboutDiscussionInterestedInvite

Details

 Systems Change Alliance

Friday, January 29, 2021 at 8 PM UTC – 9 PM UTC

Duration: 1 hr

Public 

Andrew Harvey is a world-renowned author of more than 30 books and the Founder and Director of The Institute for Sacred Activism, an international organization focused on inviting concerned people to take up the challenge of our contemporary global crises by becoming inspired, effective, and practical agents of institutional and systemic change, in order to create peace and sustainability.Sacred Activism is a transforming force of compassion-in-action that is born of a fusion of deep spiritual knowledge, courage, love, and passion, with wise radical action in the world. Harvey believes that the large-scale practice of Sacred Activism can become an essential force for preserving and healing the planet and its inhabitants.Harvey was born in India in 1952 and lived there until he was nine years old. At the age of 21, he became the youngest person to be awarded a scholarship at All Soul’s College, England’s highest academic honor. But he soon became disillusioned with academic life and returned to India where a series of spiritual experiences initiated his spiritual journey. He has studied Buddhism, Sufism and Hinduism extensively and written many books on these subjects as well as translated the poetry of Rumi
and Kabir.Harvey speaks extensively throughout the world and has received many honors for his writings, including the Benjamin Franklin Award and the Mind, Body, Spirit Award.Join the conversation live on Facebook or YouTube or catch it later in our Films archive. 

https://t.co/3xsLejbQJR?amp=1

https://t.co/qiSQmAStzJ?amp=1

David Krakauer

I consider the many ways in which evolved information-flows are restricted and metabolic resources protected and hidden — the thesis of living phenomena as evolutionary cryptosystems. I present the information theory of secrecy systems and discuss mechanisms acquired by evolved lineages that encrypt sensitive heritable information with random keys. I explore the idea that complexity science is a cryptographic discipline as “frozen accidents”, or various forms of regularized randomness, historically encrypt adaptive dynamics.

Submission history

From: David Krakauer [view email] 
[v1] Thu, 7 May 2015 15:27:25 UTC (15 KB)

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[1505.01744v1] Cryptographic Nature

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor#Strange_attractor

Strange Attractor

Strange Attractor – an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

Inspired by a question in the Ecology of Systems Thinking facebook group from Helena Luisa Pms – https://www.facebook.com/groups/ecologyofsystemsthinking/permalink/3670574453021672/

And a response from Marc Rettig (his link at bottom), here are my recommended links for ‘evaluation’:

http://www.bobwilliams.co.nz/systems.html

And there’s a lot here, much of which leads to blogs and/or people with an ongoing consistent interest in evaluation (from ‘complexity’ – CECAN and Human. Learning. Systems., to international ‘development’, to ‘systems change’ – Tamarack Institute, SSIR etc) – I would say it’s worth opening each of these for a quick scan:
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/11/20/human-learning-systems/
https://ssir.org/articles/category/measurement_evaluation
https://www.hpma.org.uk/2021/01/13/webinar-thoughts-on-system-leadership-wednesday-17th-march-at-10am/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/12/27/palladium-how-to-design-better-programmes-in-complex-systems-andrew-koleros-american-journal-of-evaluation-2018/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/11/08/system-thinker-notebook-james-shelley/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/11/05/qualitative-process-evaluation-from-a-complex-systems-perspective-a-systematic-review-and-framework-for-public-health-evaluators-mcgill-et-al-2020-and-another-take-on-systems-and-vs-comple/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/10/14/evaluation-in-a-systems-perspective-of-planning/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/10/09/cecan-webinar-capturing-social-dynamics-for-evaluation-trajectory-based-qualitative-comparative-analysis-11-november-2020-1300-1400-gmt-with-lasse-gerrits-and-sofia-pagliarin/
https://www.tamarackcommunity.ca/library/topic/evaluation
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/09/16/inclusive-systemic-evaluation-for-gender-equality-environments-and-marginalized-voices-ise4gems-a-new-approach-for-the-sdg-era-un-women-headquarters/
https://www.tavinstitute.org/projects/systems-thinking-at-the-tavistock-institute-past-present-and-future/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/08/27/evaluating-system-change-a-planning-guide/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/08/14/we-cant-include-everything-and-everyone-so-what-to-do-on-boundaries-evaluation-uncertainty/
https://evaluationuncertainty.com/2020/07/29/looking-for-input-on-next-steps-what-do-research-and-theory-in-complexity-and-systems-tell-us-about-evaluation-practice-and-evaluation-theory/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/07/19/covid%e2%80%9019-how-a-pandemic-reveals-that-everything-is-connected-to-everything-else-sturmberg-2020-journal-of-evaluation-in-clinical-practice-wiley-online-library/
https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/06/16/developing-a-systems-perspective-for-the-evaluation-of-local-public-health-interventions-theory-methods-and-practice-nihr-school-for-public-health-research/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jep.12065

Notes on Principles-Focused / Developmental Evaluation What is it like to bring rigor to evaluation when working in complexity and uncertainty, with emergent approaches? Marc Rettig Following Oct 24, 2017 · 13 min read This is a place for me to gather and organize notes, which I’m making public in case it helps someone else. These notes (which will keep changing over coming months) are an input to a further process of synthesis.

Notes on Principles-Focused / Developmental Evaluation | by Marc Rettig | Rettig’s Notes | Medium

So many interesting ideas here, I’ve posted the whole blog entry – but I urge you to subscribe at the link below!

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Improvisation Blog: Ashby on Reconstructability

What do education, cybernetics, music, technology and philosophy have in common?

• Improvisation Blog

Friday, 22 January 2021

Ashby on Reconstructability

The following quotes are taken from the introduction by George Klir to Roger Conant’s “Mechanisms and Intelligence: Ashby’s writings on Cybernetics”, which can be downloaded here: http://www.rossashby.info/Ashby-Mechanisms_of_intelligence.pdf

The balance between the reduction of complexity to a model and nature itself was a key point for Ashby. Datafying things “throws away information”, as he puts it, but on the one hand, this is essential for science, whilst on the other hand, good science cannot lose sight of the ways in which a model might be used to reconstruct the complexity from which it is derived. 

In most data analytic work today, there is much reduction. And then it stops – and assumes that the reduction can be used to shape the reality – that is the mode of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, etc. But reconstruction is essential, otherwise, how are we to know that it is these variables and not those that we should be attending to?

This also means that a “system” is not a thing-in-the-world, but rather an idea. As Ashby puts it, it is a “set of variables”:

“At this point we must be clear about how a ‘system’ is to be defined. Our first impulse is to point at the pendulum and to say ‘the system is that thing there.’ This method, however, has a fundamental disadvan­tage: every material object contains no less than an infinity of vari­ables and therefore of possible systems. The real pendulum, for in­stance has not only length and position; it has also mass, temperature, electric conductivity, crystalline structure, chemical impurities, some radio-activity, velocity, reflecting power, tensile strength, a surface of moisture, bacterial contamination, an optical absorption, elas­ticity, shape, specific gravity, and so on and on. Any suggestion that we should study ‘all’ the facts is unrealistic, and actually the attempt is never made. What is necessary is that we should pick out and study the facts that are relevant to some main interest that is already given. …The system now means, not a thing, but a list of variables.”

And then here is the problem of reconstructability: 

“systems models which have recently been developed in many different areas are almost invariably constructed from subsystems. While the subsystems, each associated with a subset of the set of variables of the overall system, are often well validated models of the phenomena involved, the question of the ability to reconstruct the overall system from the given subsystems is almost never raised. It seems that there has been a tendency among many systems modellers to take the reconstructability for granted. It is clear that without an analysis by which the reconstruction ability of systems model is determined, the model is likely to be fundamentally incorrect and might be vastly misleading.”

But I think this is the remarkable thing: the whole enterprise is not about “complexity”, but “simplicity”. Reflecting that the variety of the scientists will always be overwhelmed by the variety of nature, he suggests that the whole point of science is to find effective approaches to simplification:

“…system theory (is) the attempt to develop scientific principles to aid us in our struggles with dynamic systems with highly interacting parts, possibly exceeding 10^100 who faces problems and processes that go vastly beyond this size. What is he to do? At this point, it seems to me, he must make up his mind whether to accept this limit or not. If he does not, let him attack it and attempt to find a way of defeating it. If he does accept it, let him accept it wholeheartedly and con­sistently. My own opinion is that this limit is much less likely to yield than, say, the law of conservation of energy. The energy law is essentially empirical, and may vanish overnight, as the law of conserva­tion of mass did, but the restriction that prevents a man with resources of 10^100 from carrying out a process that genuinely calls for more than this quantity rests on our basic ways of thinking about cause and ef­fect, and is entirely independent of the particular material on which it shows itself. If this view is right, systems theory must become based on methods of simplification, and will be founded, essentially, on the science of simplification. …The systems theorist of the future, I suggest, must be an expert in how to simplify.”

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Improvisation Blog: Ashby on Reconstructability

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Ben Sweeting: Architectural roots of ecological crisis – Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance

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JANUARY 22, 2021 BY SYSTEMICAPPROACHTOARCHITECTURALPERFORMANCE Ben Sweeting: Architectural roots of ecological crisis

Ben Sweeting: Architectural roots of ecological crisis – Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance

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Welcome to the 2021 SCT Conference

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Systems-Centered Training  Annual Conference March 13-19, 2021  In a Different World: Dealing with Differences Differently SCTRI is presenting this online conference through its Training and Resource Center

Welcome to the 2021 SCT Conference