Prof Andrew Pickering is an emeritus professor of philosophy and sociology and a Fellow of the Cybernetics Society. In the 50th Annual Conference of the Cybernetics Society he spoke of BRITISH CYBERNETICS AS A NONMODERN PARADIGM. In doing so he gives a history of various accomplishments in alternative robotics, art, psychology, architecture and social affairs and the way these reflect another way of thinking. He argues for the “ontology” of cybernetics and not just the “epistemology” — describing some ways in which the early explorers put it into active practice. He argues it has potential to solve world problems.
The hippocampal-entorhinal system is important for spatial and relational memory tasks. We formally link these domains, provide a mechanistic understanding of the hippocampal role in generalization, and offer unifying principles underlying many entorhinal and hippocampal cell types. We propose medial entorhinal cells form a basis describing structural knowledge, and hippocampal cells link this basis with sensory representations. Adopting these principles, we introduce the Tolman-Eichenbaum machine (TEM). After learning, TEM entorhinal cells display diverse properties resembling apparently bespoke spatial responses, such as grid, band, border, and object-vector cells. TEM hippocampal cells include place and landmark cells that remap between environments. Crucially, TEM also aligns with empirically recorded representations in complex non-spatial tasks. TEM also generates predictions that hippocampal remapping is not random as previously believed; rather, structural knowledge is preserved across environments. We confirm this structural transfer over remapping in simultaneously recorded place and grid cells.
We’re writing this blog post to continue our series on growing the community of Directors committed to collective leadership, co-creation and building cultures that support collaboration.
Leading public services has always been tough — we have to tackle complex societal issues which no single organisation can face alone, especially during these times. As public sector leaders, Directors are at the forefront of this, wrestling with the systemic and interrelated nature of many issues.
We had our fourteenth breakfast call in early November, where we were joined by Alex Thomas from the Institute for Gov, who responded to the question:
How might we lead in the context of government in the 21st century?
Below is a summary of our discussions.
How might we lead in the context of government in the 21st century?
Are the current challenges we face as profound, or different to, past challenges? What are the risks and opportunities?
We have been in crises before. However, being collaborative is hard when you’re sitting in front of screens all day, every day. Our days feel the same — and we haven’t yet figured out to how collaborate in a world of virtual work. COVID-19 response initially saw us overcome bureaucratic barriers, taking more measured risks. Now, there is an increasing sense of people returning to a normative risk-aversion.
Our deeply held ideas are colliding with new ways of leading that are more distributed, relational, and interdependent. But our systems and processes are not set up for this. The challenge of balancing urgency and importance is felt most acutely right now. Without careful, intentional action, our linear, siloed approaches will keep exerting themselves.
We do not have to be a fully fledged systemic thinkers… to work systemically.
We need a different approach and thinking across the Civil Service. We exist as part of many complex systems— interconnectedness is the order of the day. As leaders and public sector professionals we sit alongside other actors, rather than above or at the centre and we need to change the relationships with have with people, communities, markets and more in order to take advantage of diversity of experience in order to solve the biggest problems.
Perhaps we need to take a less transactional, more relational approach, and build genuine connection and relationships?
How are you and the teams you lead feeling, from a personal and leadership perspective? How can we lead ourselves and our teams?
The mix of COVID-19 and business as usual has been a difficult juggling act — a balancing of urgency and importance. The things that directly affect us are sometimes out of our control. It can sometimes feel impossible to join up across the existing siloes, which is frustrating. We see areas getting narrower, more cautious, and not working across government. Despite this, there seems to be an increased appetite to be more adaptive within our teams. We must build across boundaries, draw on local expertise, and work with outside partners when moving forward.
COVID-19 has been catalyst for an enhanced focus on wellbeing, both ourselves and people we work for, not just as another ‘task’ on the to-do list. What we are asking people to do is really, really difficult. We are seeing a 24/7 culture, where people are on call all the time as a result of prolonged working from home, become increasingly normalised. Things are tougher in the world of virtual work; we are in danger in being on the hamster wheel and not getting off it. It is a cause for concern.
The teams we lead are feeling burned out. They haven’t had enough time off, and may have worked long hours over long periods, sustaining the response effort alongside their public sector colleagues.
The levels of underlying anxiety are much higher now. People have worries they carry with them, not just their work, but also their families, communities, sickness, and increasingly visible inequality — amongst many other things.
This, coupled with high levels of vacancies and redeployment of staff, has resulted in people having high workloads. What can we do about this? We must role model taking a more intentional approach to leadership — starting with taking time off ourselves, checking-in with our teams, being open about how we feel, and making space for informal discussions.
Reflection
This space gives us the time and space to think about the things that are on our minds. We must be open, brave, and bold in how we approach leading ourselves and our teams. However, moving to a different approach requires curiosity, courage, and passion — and we all can play a role in this shift.
MOL can be used to enhance the effectiveness of treatments for specific problems and mental disorders, and also to address issues in the delivery of treatment such as lack of engagement, poor motivation, and resistance.
https://www.methodoflevels.com.au/what-is-mol/
What Sort of Therapy is MOL?
MOL is a flexible and powerfully effective and efficient transdiagnostic cognitive therapy. MOL engages each person’s internal resources to promote their own recovery in an enduring and generative way. The starting point for MOL is the subjective experience of the individual and, by assisting people to expand their awareness and increase the interconnectedness of their internal worlds, they are able to make different sense of their difficulties and forge new and more contented lives. By providing treatment from the individual’s perspective. As a transdiagnostic therapeutic approach MOL is well suited to complex cases as well as addressing some of the more difficult problems in therapy such as noncompliance, lack of engagement, and poor motivation.
Using MOL
MOL has been used in the UK and Australia in primary care, secondary care, and private practice with good results. MOL focusses on the distress underlying symptom presentations rather than the symptoms themselves so, instead of helping people overcome symptoms, MOL helps people understand and resolve psychological distress.
The Theory Behind MOL
MOL is based on an understanding that the neurocircuitry of the brain is organised according to control system architecture. This architecture is described in a theory called Perceptual Control Theory (PCT). PCT suggests that these hierarchically arranged negative feedback loops ensure that the world is experienced as the individual intends it to be. Control is fundamental to satisfactory and contented day-to-day living. People experience psychological distress when their neural control systems work in opposition to each other. One control system might try to create a sense of safety, for example, while another is striving for excitement and risk. Or one control system might seek social approval at the same time that another is pushing for autonomy and independence.
MOL Therapists
MOL therapists recognise that they can’t ever really “walk a mile” in another person’s shoes so they don’t even try. Instead, they spend all of their time helping the other person examine in detail the shoes they are wearing, and finding out about the miles the person would like to walk in them. How do they fit? Do they have the right shoes for the job? Where do they plan to walk? What might be up ahead? MOL therapists understand that, fundamentally, people get themselves better when they are psychologically distressed and they work hard at being therapeutically useful by facilitating the “getting better process”.
This paper provides a basic introduction to using method of levels (MOL) therapy with people experiencing psychosis. As MOL is a direct application of perceptual control theory (PCT), a brief overview of the three main theoretical principles of this theory—control, conflict, and reorganization will be outlined in relation to understanding psychosis. In particular, how these principles form the basis of problem conceptualisation and determine what an MOL therapist is required to do during therapy will be illustrated. A practical description of MOL will be given, using case examples and short excerpts of therapeutic interactions. Some direct contrasts will also be made with cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis (CBTp) and psychodynamic approaches (PA) in order to help illustrate the theory and practice of MOL.
Scientists are working across disciplines to render complex reality to scientific understanding.
It has been the great triumph of the sciences to find consistent means of studying phenomena hidden by both space and time, overcoming the limits of cognition and material culture. To hide in space means that phenomena lie beyond the scope of our everyday senses because they are either too small or too distant to be detected without amplification. Things can be hidden in time by being too fast for us to perceive or too slow for a single lifetime to encompass.
The scientific method is the portmanteau of instruments, formalisms, and experimental practices that succeed in discovering basic mechanisms despite the limitations of individual intelligence.
There are, however, on this planet, phenomena that are hidden in plain sight. These are the phenomena that we study as complex systems: the convoluted exhibitions of the adaptive world — from cells to societies. Examples of these complex systems include cities, economies, civilizations, the nervous system, the Internet, and ecosystems.
Paradoxically, the complex world is one that we can, in many senses, perceive and measure directly. Unlike distant stars or nearby minerals that require a significant increase in optical capability to arrive at insights into their elementary properties, behavior — both individual and collective — seems to present itself in ways that can be investigated rather modestly through observation or experiment.
But the way in which complex phenomena are hidden, beyond masking by space and time, is through nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence — a deck of attributes that have proved ill-suited to our intuitive and augmented abilities to grasp and to comprehend.
Over the course of thirty-five years, the Santa Fe Institute has been looking into this proximal, near-invisible reality, working in highly diverse, nondisciplinary teams to invent new concepts to render up complex reality to science; searching for order in the complexity of evolving worlds.
THE Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) has launched a Centre for Systems Leadership to train youths, professionals and organisational leaders to lead more successfully through systems thinking.
The centre, to be located in the existing SIM Management House in Namly Avenue, will run an 18-day programme for working professionals, spread over six months. It will also offer bespoke programmes, tailored for leadership teams in organisations and enterprises.
This is in addition to the 30-hour programmes it will run for youth leaders and final-year undergraduates from February. The centre is also planning its first systems leadership conference that same month.
Learning programmes will be run on-site. However, the centre is also working with collaborators to roll out online options from the first quarter of next year, said Seah Chin Siong, SIM’s president and chief executive.
Josephine Teo, Minister for Manpower and Second Minister for Home Affairs, officiated at the centre’s launch event on Thursday evening.
She said: “The more complex our problems, the more leaders need the skills and discipline of systems thinking.” She added that the new centre can help to build capacity in Singapore to emerge stronger from the Covid-19 pandemic, and to develop resilience against future disruptions.
Systems thinking and leadership gained prominence in the 90s as a way of approaching issues and problem statements holistically, as part of interconnected systems and not disparate parts. Dr Peter Senge, an American systems scientist, is credited for popularising the concept as a management strategy.
SIM’s Mr Seah told The Business Times: “The pandemic has shown people across the world the stark reality of how life can become when existing systems and structures, which we take for granted, no longer function properly.
“In a post Covid world, leaders and organisations will have to strive to better understand the complexities and inter-connectedness underlying the systemic structures which we have built over the years.”
He added that systems thinking has helped organisations and companies overcome disruptions brought about by market shifts, new technologies and low-cost startups. He cited Barnes & Noble as an example of a company that used systems thinking to reinvent their business model; others, like Kodak, failed to comprehend how changes in the industry’s ecosystem would eventually undermine their own innovation efforts
In this Global Strike for Our Future initiative , the organizers (Fridays For Future and Earth Strike from Lucca) propose a reflection on the link between the Coronavirus crisis and the ecological crisis. The point is essential: as fact discuss or to t the beginning of the pandemic of This Magazine, the spread of the virus and its many ramifications are essentially part of a deep crisis in the relationship between us and the nature of which we are a part. Many contribut e stud i have since been published and we can take a cue from these, other jobs, and the most recent events to reflect on the kind of bonds that we are often tempted not to try to understand and recognize.
Exploring the complexity of conflict and organising in the time of Covid-19
The Symposium booking site is now open and is available here . You can see the agenda for the day here.
The following is a post by member of DMan faculty Professor Karen Norman which speaks into the theme of the conference:
Exploring the complexity of conflict in organising in the time of Covid: washing our hands of a problem?
Infection prevention and control (IPC) in hospitals is essential at the best of times, but especially so in a time of Covid. From my previous experience as a Board Director responsible for Infection Control in hospitals, I understand the challenges facing staff in maintaining high IPC standards. In 2003, I was involved in a national initiative to reduce the incidence of hospital acquired Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Auereus, (MRSA) bacteraemias, because 9% of hospital inpatients had infections acquired whilst in hospital,
We use mathematical and statistical methods to probe how a sprawling, dynamic, complex narrative of massive scale achieved broad accessibility and acclaim without surrendering to the need for reductionist simplifications. Subtle narrational tricks such as how natural social networks are mirrored and how significant events are scheduled are unveiled. The narrative network matches evolved cognitive abilities to enable complex messages be conveyed in accessible ways while story time and discourse time are carefully distinguished in ways matching theories of narratology. This marriage of science and humanities opens avenues to comparative literary studies. It provides quantitative support, for example, for the widespread view that deaths appear to be randomly distributed throughout the narrative even though, in fact, they are not.
In 1999, Frederic Vester published a report to the Club of Rome named “The Art of Interconnected Thinking”. The main focus of the book is about understanding complex systems, and how a number of interconnected models, what he called the Sensitivity Model, can help us do so. The Sensitivity Model is an IT-based approach, today in the ownership of Malik Management. While other IT-based approaches try to connect some 200+ variables into a database, Vester is frugal in comparison, with 10-20 variables. The advantage of his approach over the more mathematical siblings is the acceptance and use of fuzziness. We simply cannot expect to be able to get a total picture of our system with sharply differentiated concepts and mathematical variables, so stop trying to do it anyway. The consequence is: we better accept that whatever model we use, it will be incomplete and partially wrong. It would be foolish to attempt something that is 100% correct. Therefore, a more realistic ambition is to create a model which is relevant to the pragmatical perspective of the beholder, and is sufficiently apt to produce this relevance.
AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPLEX SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND ITS APPLICATIONS
Cite as:
Alexander F. Siegenfeld and Yaneer Bar-Yam, An introduction to complex systems science and its applications, Complexity 2020 (July 27, 2020).
AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPLEX SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND ITS APPLICATIONS Cite as: Alexander F. Siegenfeld and Yaneer Bar-Yam, An introduction to complex systems science and its applications, Complexity 2020 (July 27, 2020).
Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic—across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutionary perspective can help us understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic. Here, a diverse group of scientists, with expertise from evolutionary medicine to cultural evolution, provide insights about the pandemic and its aftermath. At the most granular level, we consider how viruses might affect social behavior, and how quarantine, ironically, could make us susceptible to other maladies, due to a lack of microbial exposure. At the psychological level, we describe the ways in which the pandemic can affect mating behavior, cooperation (or the lack thereof), and gender norms, and how we can use disgust to better activate native “behavioral immunity” to combat disease spread. At the cultural level, we describe shifting cultural norms and how we might harness them to better combat disease and the negative social consequences of the pandemic. These insights can be used to craft solutions to problems produced by the pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a scientific agenda to capture and understand what has become, in effect, a worldwide social experiment.
For those interested, a history of readings for my @sfiscience Summer School lectures are available at the link below. I have yet to update for 2020, but will very soon.
In the meantime, plenty of notes, book recommendations, and Summer School drama.https://t.co/l2k7lYxwm7
Our 2019 lectures went from the biological priors of the visual system to meta-cultural knowledge production. A few sources that will enable you to follow up, or go more deeply, into the ideas in play:
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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