We want the world to be manageable, organisational life to be simple…
…so we can apply ‘best practices’. Or even complicated – so we can simulate, model, and plan. We want this so bad, we’re prepared to break everything that’s living and special about organisations to make it true.
But organisations are truly complex and unpredictable. There are:
Continues in source: https://chosenpath.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/irreducible-complexity-the-force-in-organisational-life/
book:
events
systems in Aboriginal practice
in this monthly speaker series we hear from Aboriginal practitioners,
and the ways in which thinking in systems is a part of their practice.
for our inaugural session Corrina Eccles will offer a Welcome to Country and share about her systems practice. the session will also include an opportunity for questions.
date: September 29th 9:30am – 11:00am melbourne time
source and book:
events
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Funding Place Based systemic change | Renaisi
‘Place-based’ working is an increasingly popular approach to social change but it has defined most of Renaisi’s 22 years. We use it as a lens to view individual and societal issues, because
For all that, lots of funding, policy, research and current practice is still designed and structured to focus on issues (homelessness, offending, public health) or cohorts (unemployed people, refugees, young people). That creates a challenge for those of us who use place to understand and solve problems.
The project group, chaired by Save the Children UK and including charities, agencies and funders came together to think about how funding could help a movement towards place-based change.
The group started with a working definition:
“Place-based systemic change is an approach to social change, rather than an outcome of it, and is defined by focus, time horizon, approach, scale and intentionality.”
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Funding Place Based systemic change | Renaisi
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u.lab: Leading From the Emerging Future | edX
u.lab: Leading From the Emerging Future An introduction to leading profound social, environmental and personal transformation.
u.lab: Leading From the Emerging Future | edX
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Book direct at
Developmental Perspectives and Systems Thinking | Facebook
Hosted by Systems Change Finland
https://laurea.zoom.us/j/65991516626
Have you ever wondered why most systems maps are flat and two-dimensional whereas how we understand “the system” actually depends on the mental models and paradigms that Donella Meadows outlined in her 12 leverage points (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points)?
In this workshop we’ll explore how changing Developmental Perspectives (mental models and paradigms) affect how we view a real-life system.
Mikael Seppälä from Systems Change Finland will speak briefly about how Adult Developmental Psychology/Metamodernism/Integral Theory can inform Developmental Perspective taking.
After that we will do a few group exercises on perspective taking.
The event is online in the timezone EEST UTC+3.
Link: https://laurea.zoom.us/j/65991516626
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Developmental Perspectives and Systems Thinking | Facebook
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Article: Finding simplicity in chaos: Beyond VUCA — People Matters
Read to know why we need a more thoughtful way of making sense of our emerging chaos and uncertainty.
Volatile. Uncertain. Complex. Ambiguous. VUCA. Some leadership pundits recommend that we use this term for anything we don’t understand or cannot control. The problem is that the tumultuous events in our world, and the concomitant domino-effects we are experiencing, have completely outgrown that label. In fact, VUCA as a handy acronym has had its day. When we invoke VUCA to explain how things are changing, we risk missing the depth and breadth of the current reality. We excuse ourselves for inaction and passivity. Paradoxically, the term might even obfuscate and confuse our ability to make sense of what’s going on right now. We need a more thoughtful way of making sense of our emerging chaos and uncertainty. In short, we need to understand our worlds and ourselves as complex adaptive systems.
VUCA is problematic as a framework for a number of reasons.
continues in source:
Article: Finding simplicity in chaos: Beyond VUCA — People Matters
I feel the authors are potentially a bit misguided in their understanding or otherwise of ‘flow’:
In modern western medicine, the body is divided into systems that each have their own distinct function: like the nervous system or cardiovascular system.
That clearly wasn’t what the writers of the Mawangdui were doing. Their descriptions are more focused on how different structures interlink to create a flow through the body. They pay no attention to the specific function of the structures. We think this is because these scientists were making their observations of the human body for the first time, and purely described what they saw.
i.e. perhaps the flow is more important than the specific function of the structure, and they knew this!
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This ancient Chinese anatomical atlas changes what we know about acupuncture and medical history
September 2, 2020 1.53pm BST
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The accepted history of anatomy says that it was the ancient Greeks who mapped the human body for the first time. Galen, the “Father of Anatomy”, worked on animals, and wrote anatomy textbooks that lasted for the next 1,500 years. Modern anatomy started in the Renaissance with Andreas Vesalius, who challenged what had been handed down from Galen. He worked from human beings, and wrote the seminal “On the Fabric of the Human Body”.
Scientists from ancient China are never mentioned in this history of anatomy. But our new paper shows that the oldest surviving anatomical atlas actually comes from Han Dynasty China, and was written over 2,000 years ago. Our discovery changes both the history of medicine and our understanding of the basis for acupuncture – a key branch of Chinese medicine.
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This ancient Chinese anatomical atlas changes what we know about acupuncture and medical history
Biology and Philosophy volume 21, pages501–521(2006)
Ultimately we will only understand biological agency when we have developed a theory of the organization of biological processes, and science is still a long way from attaining that goal. It may be possible nonetheless to develop a list of necessary conditions for the emergence of minimal biological agency. The authors offer a model of molecular autonomous agents which meets the five minimal physical conditions that are necessary (and, we believe, conjointly sufficient) for applying agential language in biology: autocatalytic reproduction; work cycles; boundaries for reproducing individuals; self-propagating work and constraint construction; and choice and action that have evolved to respond to food or poison. When combined with the arguments from preadaptation and multiple realizability, the existence of these agents is sufficient to establish ontological emergence as against what one might call Weinbergian reductionism. Minimal biological agents are emphatically not conscious agents, and accepting their existence does not commit one to any robust theory of human agency. Nor is there anything mystical, dualistic, or non-empirical about the emergence of agency in the biosphere. Hence the emergence of molecular autonomous agents, and indeed ontological emergence in general, is not a negation of or limitation on careful biological study but simply one of its implications.
source: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/s10539-005-9003-9
Electric-Monking this as I have a clue this is a nice link between the sort of Christopher Alexander, service systems science, and design based on time horizons (David Ing may remind me of some proper references, it is very late here), and Elliot Jacques’ definition of ‘work’. (Not to mention there are some pretty obvious links to cybernetics, sensemaking, Varela and Maturana etc).
Originally triggered by this tweet from Ryan Singer of Basecamp
…and a link to a good video of his with web design examples (registration required for video)
Constraint – Jon Umerez, Matteo Mossio. Constraint. W. Dubitzky, O. Wolkenhauer, K.-H. Cho, H. Yokota.
Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, Springer, pp.490-493, 2013, 978-1-4419-9863-7. 10.1007/978-1-
4419-9863-7. halshs-00792440
Kauffman’s work-constraint cycles. – Google Search
presentation
BEYOND PHYSICS: THE EMERGENCE AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE
STUART KAUFFMAN
THE INSTITUTE FOR SYSTEMS BIOLOGY, SEATTLE
MARCH 29, 2017, CERN
Much as celebrities appear on all the podcasts I have subscribed to when they have something to promote, now the Soviet internet – founded on cybernetics – is appearing all over…
source
The Soviet Internet that never was | TheArticle
by LASZLO SOLYMAR| @LASZLOSOLYMAR
SHARE:
Emmanuel Evzerikhin/TASS
Norbert Wiener’s book Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was published in the US in 1948. He called this new subject “Cybernetics”, resurrecting the Greek word kybernetes meaning governance, steerman, pilot. The term first appeared in an essay by Andre Marie Ampere (the same man after whom the unit of electric current is called) on civil government that he believed did need some control. Wiener was of the same opinion, but his interests were much wider. With today’s terminology we could call his vision the communications, control, computer symbiosis.
The book, in due course, reached the Soviet Union, where it fell into the hands of philosophers. They were not amused. They could recognise an assault on the fundamentals of Socialism when they saw one. The titles of some of their articles clearly demonstrated their disapproval: “Cybernetics, an American Pseudo-Science”, “Cybernetics, a Science of Obscurantists,” “The Science of Modern Slaveholders”. An extract from the Concise Dictionary of Philosophy, as late as 1954, retains this scepticism: “Cybernetics clearly reflects one of the basic features of the bourgeois worldview — its inhumanity, striving to transform workers into an extension of the machine, into a tool of production, and an instrument of war.”ADVERTISINGAds by Teads
It was never easy to rebut Soviet theories based on ideology. Trofim Lysenko managed to ruin Soviet genetics and agriculture by his theory of the inheritability of acquired characteristics, supported strongly by Stalin. Lysenko flourished for nearly three decades and was discredited only after Stalin’s death. Fortunately for Soviet science the philosophers’ stronghold on cybernetics was weakened by scientists and engineers eager to get involved with that “Obscurantist” science.
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The Soviet Internet that never was | TheArticle
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THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE | Edge.org
A Talk with Stuart A. Kauffman [11.9.03]
An autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.
Introduction
Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist who studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Thirty- five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms “order for free.” Kauffman is not easy. His models are rigorous, mathematical, and, to many of his colleagues, somewhat difficult to understand. A key to his worldview is the notion that convergent rather than divergent flow plays the deciding role in the evolution of life. He believes that the complex systems best able to adapt are those poised on the border between chaos and disorder.
Kauffman asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a “new” biology, somewhat similar to that proposed by Brian Goodwin, in which natural selection is married to structuralism.
Lately, Kauffman says that he has been “hamstrung by the fact that I don’t see how you can see ahead of time what the variables will be. You begin science by stating the configuration space. You know the variables, you know the laws, you know the forces, and the whole question is, how does the thing work in that space? If you can’t see ahead of time what the variables are, the microscopic variables for example for the biosphere, how do you get started on the job of an integrated theory? I don’t know how to do that. I understand what the paleontologists do, but they’re dealing with the past. How do we get started on something where we could talk about the future of a biosphere?”
“There is a chance that there are general laws. I’ve thought about four of them. One of them says that autonomous agents have to live the most complex game that they can. The second has to do with the construction of ecosystems. The third has to do with Per Bak’s self-organized criticality in ecosystems. And the fourth concerns the idea of the adjacent possible. It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so they increase the diversity of what can happen next. It may be that biospheres, as a secular trend, maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible. If they did it too fast, they would destroy their own internal organization, so there may be internal gating mechanisms. This is why I call this an average secular trend, since they explore the adjacent possible as fast as they can get away with it. There’s a lot of neat science to be done to unpack that, and I’m thinking about it.”
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THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE | Edge.org
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Home (news) | WOSC 2020
Videos:
source:
Home (news) | WOSC 2020
All videos and livestreaming via https://www.wosc2020.org/videos
Key contributors to WOSC 2021 Congress kindly agreed to record in advance of the event a 10/15 minutes (video or ppt) presentations focused on their WOSC 2020 themes.
The content of the WOSC 2020 Online event will consist of the published videos and the on-line round-table programme.
Roundtable participants will have the opportunity to hear in advance the views of other participants. For their contributions to the roundtables they may prepare ppt presentations for talks of no more than 10 minutes. Discussions will be moderated as will be questions of registered people to the event (these questions will be filtered by the moderator before reaching the roundtable).
Technology: We will use the Zoom platform and the sessions will have technical moderators.
Programme: The two days online event will start the 16th and finish the 17th of September. Each of the first two days will last for four hours to allow spreading time zones in the programme. After the on-line event a three hours meeting of members of the WOSC 2020/2021 Strategic, Organisational and Programme committees will take place.
View less…
8:00 Colombia, 9:00 East USA, 14:00 UK, 15:00 EU, 16:00 Moscow, 23:00 Melbourne
Igor Perko, Raul Espejo and Vladimir Lepskiy. Introduction to the organizational aspects of the online event and the preparations for WOSC 2021 (up to 15 minutes);
Questions from participants will be accepted and will be answered at the end or later during the on-line event.
8:15 Colombia 9:15 East USA, 14:15 UK, 15:15 EU, 16:15 Moscow, 23:15 Melbourne
Moderator: Raul Espejo (UK) (plus technical moderator and interpreter for Q/A)
Michael C. Jackson (UK), Vladimir Lepskiy (Russia), Michael Lissack (USA), Dmitry Novikov (Russia), Stuart Umpleby (USA), Clas-Otto Wene (Sweden)
Participants will have up to 10 minutes to introduce their contributions, optionally supported by ppt, which will be followed by discussions among them.
Open discussion: online questions (about five questions and 3 minutes per Q/A); online external participants will be asked to send questions in advance and moderators will put them forward to table participants.
Online coffee break (15 minutes).
10:30 Colombia, 11:30 East USA, 16:30 UK, 17:30 EU, 18:30 Moscow, 01:30 Melbourne;
Moderator: Allenna Leonard (USA), Tatiana Medvedeva (Russia) (plus a technical moderator and an interpreter for Q/A)
Ray Ison (Australia), Bernard Scott (UK), Georgiy Malinetskiy (Russia), Boris Slavin (Russia), German Bula (Colombia), Shann Turnbull (Australia)
Participants will have up to 10 minutes to introduce their contributions, optionally supported by ppt, which will be followed by discussions among them.
Open discussion: online questions (about five questions and 3 minutes per Q/A); online external participants will be asked to send questions in advance and moderators will put them forward to table participants.
13:00 Colombia, 14:00 East USA, 19:00 UK, 20:00 EU, 21:00 Moscow 04:00 Melbourne
8:00 Colombia, 9:00 USA, 14:00 UK, 15:00 EU, 16:00 Moscow,23:00 Melbourne
(15 minutes of introduction, open discussion and answers to questions)
8:15 Colombia 9:15 East USA, 14:15 UK, 15:15 EU, 16:15 Moscow,23:15 Melbourne
Moderator: Igor Perko (Slovenia), (plus technical moderator and an interpreter for Q/As)
Christoph Stuckelberger (Switzerland), Alexander Ageev (Russia), Francesco Caputo (Italy), Alexander Raikov (Russia), Mikhail Goubko (Russia), Andrei Khrennikov (Swedish), Teodora Ivanusa (Slovenia):
Participants will have up to 10 minutes to introduce their contributions, optionally supported by ppt, which will be followed by discussions among them.
Open discussion: online questions (about five questions and 3 minutes per Q/A); online external participants will be asked to send questions in advance and moderators will put them forward to table participants.
Online coffee break (15 minutes).
10:30 Colombia, 11:30 USA, 16:30 UK, 17:30 EU, 18:30 Moscow, 01:30 Melbourne
Moderator: Sergio Barile (Italy)/ Marialuisa Saviano (Italy), (plus technical moderator and an interpreter for Q/As)
Alfonso Reyes (Colombia), Jose Perez Rios (Spain), Aleksander Kovriga (Russia), Tom Scholte (Canada), Clive Holtham (UK) Alexander Koblyakov (Russia), George Kleiner (Russia), Igor Gundarov (Russia)
13:00 Colombia, 14:00 USA, 19:00 UK, 20:00 EU, 21:00 Moscow, 04:00 Melbourne
To advance the communication between the peers, WOSC Congress section coordinators kindly agreed to highlight in their contributions possible topics to develop in WOSC 2021 in the form short -15 minute videos or alternately presentations.
As these will be published throughout September on WOSC2020, YouTube, and Facebook, please be free to watch, comment and share them with your peers.
Theme 1
Theme 2
Theme 3
Theme 4
In Lesbian Ethics, Vol 4 No 1, Spring 1990
source (see content warnig below)
Interindependence: A New Concept in Relationships – Feminist Reprise
[Content warning for description of child abuse and rape in the link, which is behind a ‘click to expand’ content warning in the text]
The concept of interindependence is simple. If I wish to stay independent, others with whom I closely relate must also be independent. Since we are interlinked in the world it becomes our interindependence–one womyn’s independence maintained by the independence of another–that allows each to maintain our individuality and uniqueness.
The concept is implicitly recognized in modern physics by the principle that we are not observers of the physical world but participants therein. Even the action of observing influences the outcome of the world as observed. This independence that I speak of is not to be confused, though it often is, with selfishness, aggression or the inability to deal with others. It is none of these. The independence I speak of is a personal awareness of one’s own power, one’s own ability to navigate the rivers of life. It is the ability of an 8-year-old to walk out into the dark night, alone, and have the strength to know that she will survive. It is the ability to avoid the quicksand of helplessness. We must have the ability to say, this is who I am without reference to anyone else and without reflection in someone else’s eyes. While we are a composite of our experiences, we are more than that. We are the essence of ourselves and of how we use those experiences, prior relationships, family, to become ourselves. Yes, I exist in relation to other people, but I must know myself alone.
In our common understanding of the meaning of independence, we think of not becoming dependent on someone else. But we must also think of not letting someone else become dependent on us. An example is the facilitation of our daughters’ growth. They are dependent on us as babies and the entire process of their growing up is to become independent. As good mothers we feel a constant tension between pushing them toward less dependence, yet holding them back out of fear.
Likewise mothers grow if their adult daughters do not allow them to become dependent either economically or emotionally. We are all familiar with the elder parents who now fear to venture from their houses without the helping/restricting hand of their grown daughter. Even flowers sheltered from the wind and rain do not grow. At the first storm they die.
The essence of all laws of nature is self-consistency, i.e., each thing obeys its own internal pattern (independence as I define it) and interdependence, i.e., each property determines all the rest. Thus, if each lesbian’s behaviors define mine, each lesbian must remain independent for me to do so–interindependence is born.
In Lesbian Ethics, Vol 4 No 1, Spring 1990
I saw a woman sleeping. In her sleep, she dreamt life stood before her and held in each hand a gift: in the one hand love, in the other freedom–and she said to the woman, “Choose.”
And the woman waited long: and she said, “Freedom.”
And life said, “Thou hast well chosen, if thou hadst said ‘love’ 1 would have given thee that thou didst ask for; and I would have gone from thee, and returned to thee no more. Now, the day will come when I shall return. On that day I shall bear both gifts in one hand.”
I heard the woman laugh in her sleep.
~ Olive Schreiner, 1901
More in source (see content warning above)
Interindependence: A New Concept in Relationships – Feminist Reprise
Amir Goldental and Ido Kanter
Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical
This study investigates the dynamics of traffic containing human-driven vehicles along with a fraction of self-organized artificial intelligence (AI) autonomous vehicles (AVs) on multilane freeways. We propose guidelines for the development of AI agents, such that a small fraction of AVs forms local constellations that significantly accelerate the entire traffic flow while reducing fuel consumption and increasing safety. Specifically, we report a 40% enhancement in traffic flow efficiency and up to 27% reduction in fuel consumption even when only 5% of vehicles are autonomous. This scenario does not require changes to current infrastructure or communication between vehicles; it only requires proper regulations. The results indicate that more efficient, safer, faster, and greener traffic flow can be realized in the near future.
Source: iopscience.iop.org
source:
Exchange Cybernetics: towards a Science of Agility & Adaptation
SEP 02, 2020
by Adam Timlett
reviewed by Ben Linders
I believe that agility can become part of a scientific theory of adaptation, and I have been building simulations to explore some of these ideas. However, in order for agility to become a science, it must be shown to complement and add to the existing science of economic decision-making. In order to add something new to existing microeconomics and decision-making science, a science of agility would offer a different way of looking at familiar problems. It could be the case that the science of successful decision-making is not only predicted by assuming people are rational and having aligned incentives such as bonuses with the desired outcome as classical economics dictates. The more recent idea of behavioural economists that “nudging” people with inherent cognitive biases to make better decisions may also not be the full story. I believe that indeed there is a scientific “gap” in the market for predicting successful adaptation by individuals and organisations. So, it is my contention that successful decision-making is predicted by having the capacity for adaptation and using it wisely. I believe that this capacity for adaptation is nothing more than the ability to move resources around in order to take opportunities as they emerge. To be able to adapt in this way well is to behave with “agility,” as the name implies. There is, however, some conceptual development needed to make good on the promise of this idea. So, let’s consider the ingredients of an agile theory of adaptation.
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Exchange Cybernetics: towards a Science of Agility & Adaptation
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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