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Addressing wicked problems: A complexity based approach to systems change Tickets, Thu 09/04/2020 at 2:00 pm | Eventbrite

OCT 13

Addressing wicked problems: A complexity based approach to systems change

by Wicked Lab FREE

Event Information

Description

FREE WEBINAR

Learn how to address wicked problems by taking a complexity-based approach to systems change.

Presented by Dr Sharon Zivkovic and Emily Humphreys

In this FREE webinar you’ll learn why wicked problems can’t be addressed with just projects and programs.

We will illustrate why a complexity, solution ecosystem and systemic innovation approach is best suited to addressing wicked problems, and demonstrate how communities and governments can work this way.

Join us in this FREE 45 min webinar as we introduce and discuss:

• Different types of problems
• Approaches for addressing different problem types
• Academic interest in taking a complexity approach
• Practitioner interest in taking a complexity approach
• How to take a complexity approach
• Wicked Lab’s approach to addressing wicked problems

We will also be demonstrating Wicked Lab’s online Tool for Systemic Change and announce the dates for our next Complex Systems Leadership Program in June 2020

This online event will be delivered via Zoom.

Before the event please review your system compatibility here

It will be recorded and sent to registered participants after the event.

About Wicked Lab

Wicked Lab is helping communities and governments address wicked problems with award-winning research that embraces complexity to create systemic change.

With education programs and an online tool to map, track and measure systemic impact, Wicked Lab enables communities, nonprofits and governments to address the multi-casual and interconnected nature of wicked problems.

Wicked Lab is an Australian social enterprise co-founded by Dr Sharon Zivkovic and Emily Humphreys

Sharon is the Chief Innovation Officer of Wicked Lab. She has been working with diverse community stakeholders to address community problems for 20 years. In 2001 Sharon received the Enterprising Woman of the Year Award in recognition of her contribution towards creating strong and enterprising communities. In 2012 she received the Best Overall Paper Award at the International Social Innovation Research Conference for a paper that describes the model that underpins Wicked Lab’s approach and in 2016 she received a Fresh Scientist award for her use of complexity science to address complex problems.

Emily is CEO of Wicked Lab. She is an experienced commercialization professional with a masters in Science and Technology Commercialisation and has worked with numerous organisations to translate research into tools for practitioners.

Learn more about Wicked Lab at www.wickedlab.com.au

Date And Time

Tue, 13 October 2020

1:30 AM – 2:30 AM BST

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Addressing wicked problems: A complexity based approach to systems change Tickets, Thu 09/04/2020 at 2:00 pm | Eventbrite

How systems mapping helps drive successful partnerships By Erin Gray & Madeline Tyson & Charlie Bloch August 27, 2020

How systems mapping helps drive successful partnerships | Greenbiz

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Full article: Resources, relationships, and systems thinking should inform the way community health promotion is funded

Article Commentary

Resources, relationships, and systems thinking should inform the way community health promotion is funded

Shane Kavanagh,Alan Shiell ,Penelope Hawe &Kate GarveyReceived 15 May 2020, Accepted 10 Aug 2020, Published online: 27 Aug 2020

• ttps://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2020.1813255

ABSTRACT

Public health agencies tasked with improving the health of communities are poorly supported by many ‘business-as-usual’ funding practices. It is commonplace to call for more funding for health promotion, but additional funding could do more harm than good if, at the same time, we do not critically examine the micro-processes that lead to health enablement – micro-processes that are instigated or amplified by funding. We are currently engaged in a university-and-policy research partnership to identify how funding mechanisms may better serve the practice of community-based health promotion. We propose three primary considerations to inform the way funds are used to enable community-based health promotion. The first is a broader understanding and legitimising of the ‘soft infrastructure’ or resources required to enhance a community’s capacity for change. The second is recognition of social relationships as key to increasing the availability and management of resources within communities. The third consideration understands communities to be complex systems and argues that funding models are needed to support the dynamic evolution of these systems. By neglecting these considerations, current funding practices may inadvertently privilege communities with pre-existing capacity for change, potentially perpetuating inequalities in health. To begin to address these issues, aspects of funding processes (e.g., stability, guidance, evaluation, and feedback requirements) could be designed to better support the flourishing of community practice. Above all, funders must recognise that they are actors in the health system and they, like other actors, should be reflexive and accountable for their actions.

KEYWORDS: Funding models, resources, systems thinking, health promotion, practice

full article in source:

Full article: Resources, relationships, and systems thinking should inform the way community health promotion is funded

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CompTalks

Participants are offered a special discounted rate to become SICC members: 25€ for full four-years membership (rather than 50€).

source (h/t Complexity Explorer)

CompTalks

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Are you ready for what systemic change means? | World Economic Forum

Are you ready for what systemic change means?

31 Aug 2020

Milos Maricic

Founder, Altruist League

The World Economic Forum

• Systemic-level action can either facilitate or hinder change.

• The realities of systemic change often alienate philanthropists and investors.

• A new funding structure has to come into being to support systemic change.

Systemic change is on everyone’s lips in 2020. The pandemic is laying bare the flaws of our politicians, institutions and healthcare systems. Pushed to the background, progress on climate action remains woefully slow. Wealth inequality continues to rise. Gender parity appears unlikely to happen for a hundred years. Black people keep dying in police custody.

Browse the blog of your favourite organization, private or public, and there’s probably an article there urging that something should be done about these systemic problems; these texts are often heavy on outrage and light on logistics.

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Are you ready for what systemic change means? | World Economic Forum

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POSIWID

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You are here: Home / Design Concepts / Systems Thinking / POSIWID

POSIWID

“The purpose of a system is what it does”, or POSIWID for short, is a dictum coined by Stafford Beer, a leading Systems Thinker in the field of cybernetics; and the creator of management cybernetics – the application of cybernetic principles to the management of large organisations.

To use Beer’s own words, from a talk he gave at the University of Valladolid, in 2002:

It stands for a bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than familiar attributions of good intentions, prejudices about expectations, moral judgements, or sheer ignorance of circumstances

POSIWID is an important Systems Thinking concept and has several implications when thinking about, and/or working on complex systems, be they political, social or business related.  Firstly, it is a question to reflect upon when analysing a given situation – to go deeper and investigate what is really going on.  Richard Veryard puts it well in his blog “Exploring the Purpose of Things” when he suggests:

Ignore the official purpose of the system, ignore what the designers and custodians of a system say, and concentrate on its actual behaviour.  Conversely, if there is some unexplained pattern of behaviour, look for a system whose purpose this pattern reveals.

In the field of politics, this stance can be very profound, particularly in the age of fake news and disinformation.  It seems, increasingly, that nothing is as it appears.  Also in the corporate world, where at the time of writing, serious questions are being asked of Facebook; and the gap between what it says and what it does – an interesting example of  “unexplained patterns of behaviour”.

But it is equally relevant to the design of services and service operations, not least in the more ‘political’ areas of law enforcement, education and health.  Always focus on actual behaviour, not on intentions.  When ‘side effects’, or ‘unintended consequences’, reveal that the behaviour of the system is poorly understood, it is necessary to go deeper, to gain a better understanding of the system you are working on.

Secondly, it requires designers to take care when defining the purpose of a service, or service operation.  As designers, this is typically one of the first things we want to do.  But, what we are actually defining is the ‘intended purpose’; and this may be very different from the actual purpose of the service or service operation under investigation, which may be multiple and contingent upon certain events, or conditions. The system’s actual purpose comes from its emergent properties and this is best determined by observing its behaviour.  This is why the ‘discovery’ phase of a project is so critical, to first understand the situation under investigation, e.g. the actual, rather than the perceived nature of demand.

Further Reading….

There is not a lot of published material that explores POSIWID and its implications, but I can recommend Dan Lockton paper,  “POSIWID and determinism in design for behaviour change” (2012).  And I’ve already included a link to Richard Veryard’s blog, but you should definitely catch his short critique on some common errors when applying POSIWID.

First Published: 13/04/2018

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POSIWID

hat tip to Systems innovation for this link to World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics videos (see also http://wosc.co/)

1.2 Critical Systems Thinking Michael Jackson – YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGb3q0R00dU35Fem8WPI8fg

1.2 Critical Systems Thinking Michael Jackson

31 Aug 2020

WOSCORG

This session welcomes papers which discuss and critique the philosophical and methodological foundations of different systems approaches. Relevant papers will examine the manner in which the theoretical underpinnings of a systems approach (or approaches) impact – for better or worse – on its ability to address issues arising from the complexity of our highly interconnected world. Contributions that suggest how systems methodologies, and their theoretical assumptions, can be modified to make them more successful in practice will be welcome. As will contributions that debate how different systems approaches can be used in combination to manage complexity.

1.2 Critical Systems Thinking Michael Jackson 12 views•31 Aug 2020 1 0 SHARE SAVE WOSCORG 53 subscribers SUBSCRIBED This session welcomes papers which discuss and critique the philosophical and methodological foundations of different systems approaches. Relevant papers will examine the manner in which the theoretical underpinnings of a systems approach (or approaches) impact – for better or worse – on its ability to address issues arising from the complexity of our highly interconnected world. Contributions that suggest how systems methodologies, and their theoretical assumptions, can be modified to make them more successful in practice will be welcome. As will contributions that debate how different systems approaches can be used in combination to manage complexity. Papers that reflect on what ‘improvement’ means, from a systems perspective, are encouraged. Finally, papers that demonstrate the case they make by using examples of practical application will be much appreciated. SHOW LESS

1.2 Critical Systems Thinking Michael Jackson – YouTube

Tolman: Context in Systems Changes and Neuroscience (Episodic Memory)

Tolman: Context in Systems Changes and Neuroscience (Episodic Memory) – Systems Thinking – Open Learning Commons

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ASC 2020 Global Conversation – American Society for Cybernetics

ASC 2020 Global Conversation

September 12-13 2020, online

To Register (Free for ASC Members): Registration Page

This event is held in coordination with the British Cybernetics Society’s virtual event “Cybernetics and the 21st Century: Stories of Practice.”
The ASC invites you to participate in the “ASC 2020 Global Conversation,” September 12-13. This event will consist of a series of live online conversations running across two days and various time zones. Online conversations will be organized as moderated panel discussions, where panelists interact with each other and the audience. Panelists will provide brief pre-recorded presentations, which will be available for advance viewing by all registrants.

Call for Presentations / Panels
To participate in a panel discussion, please submit a video recording up to ten minutes in length and a brief description of it. Lengthier recordings can be accepted but should be cut into several segments of 10 minutes each. Group submissions are accepted and encouraged (to form 1 hour themed panels) subject to availability of time slots. Panelists will be grouped for a one-hour time slot consisting of a moderated conversation for 30 minutes, followed by a brief breakout session for viewers to develop questions for the panelists to respond to. The remaining time of the one hour time slot will be dedicated to discussion driven by the audience. For proposals of themed panels, please contact the organizers.

Submit pre-recorded presentations to: ASC2020.GlobalConversation@gmail.com

Inquiries (ASC): asc2020.globalconversation@gmail.com
Inquiries (Cybernetics Society): paulogcosta@gmail.com

Submission deadline for pre-recorded presentations (EXTENDED): August 31

This virtual event will be held in coordination with the British Cybernetics Society’s event “Cybernetics and the 21st Century: Stories of Practice.” Schedules for both events are coordinated such that participants will be able to take part in both events. Participants are kindly requested to register with BOTH the ASC and CYBSOC. For more details and registration at CYBSOC, see here. 

Registration Details

Registration deadline: September 11. After registration, access codes for all conversations will be sent to you.

Registration: Registration is required for all participants including those who do not participate in a panel discussion.

Cost: The event is free to all current ASC Members and all current CYBSOC members.

To Register: Follow the Link to the Registration Page. There is no fee to register, but non members of the ASC will be requested to join or to make a self-determined contribution. 

Joining/Renewing: To join or renew follow the link  ASC2020 Membership to ASC’s 2020 Membership Page hosted by Cvent. (Memberships are good for one year.) Alternatively, follow the link on  ASC’s webpage:  http://asc-cybernetics.org/join

Non-Member Contributions: Non-members wishing to participate are requested to make a Self-Determined Donation to the ASC via PayPal. . Follow the yellow ‘Donate’ Button at the bottom right on our website. http://asc-cybernetics.org.  (Before or after the event — your choice.)

Event Schedule

Saturday 12th September 2020

UK 11am to 1pm // New York 6am to 8am – CYBSOC
UK 1pm to 3pm // New York 8am to 10am – ASC
UK 3pm to 5pm // New York 10am to 12noon – CYBSOC
UK 5pm to 7pm // New York 12 noon to 2pm – ASC
UK 7pm to 8pm / New York 2pm to 3pm – ASC Keynote: Anthony Hodgson

Sunday 13th September 2020

UK 11am to 1pm // New York 6am to 8am – CYBSOC
UK 1pm to 3pm // New York 8am to 10am – ASC
UK 3pm to 5pm // New York 10am to 12noon – CYBSOC
UK 5pm to 7pm // New York 12 noon to 2pm – ASC

ASC2020 Global Conversation Keynote

Speaker: Anthony Hodgson

Anticipation in a World of Radical Uncertainty – Lessons From 2nd Order Cybernetics

Speaker Bio:
Anthony Hodgson, Ph.D, F.R.S.A., Member IFF
Anthony Hodgson is a founding trustee of H3Uni – towards a university of the third horizon. This as an initiative born out of the recognition by a small group of foresight and strategy practitioners that most higher education does not address the huge shift in the skills of collaboration and resilient thinking that are needed to successfully navigate a turbulent world challenged by major issues not previously experienced on a global scale.
Anthony Hodgson has over forty years of experience of providing consulting and facilitation services in foresight and strategy to major corporations and in the public sector in the UK. It is in this role that Anthony Hodgson developed new methods of participative repatterning of shared thinking in groups As an experienced practitioner of systems thinking and scenario futures methods and as a founder member of the International Futures Forum think tank working especially on transformative innovation and new methods of cooperation to match the needs of the Anthropocene.
Anthony Hodgson’s doctorate is in systems science from the University of Hull. As a Research Fellow with the University of Dundee Anthony Hodgson is currently doing original work on integrating foresight methods with systems thinking and modelling through second-order cybernetics, phenomenology of time perception and futures methods. As well as published papers Anthony Hodgson has published a book on some of this work titled Systems Thinking for Turbulent Times: A Search for new perspectives (Routledge, 2020). Contact: anthony.hodgson[at]h3uni.org

ASC 2020 Global Conversation September 12-13 2020, online To Register (Free for ASC Members): Registration Page

ASC 2020 Global Conversation – American Society for Cybernetics

Message from Paul Pangaro via Ben Sweeting on the CYBCOM mailing list

Part of:

The New Macy Meetings: Cybernetics and Designing for Action

Evolving Draft — Last edit 2020-07-12  4:00pm EDT — Paul Pangaro ppangaro@cmu.edu Share this document via the link https://tinyurl.com/newmacy
See also an emerging Manifesto, a more concise view.

link: https://pangaro.com/designconversation/2020/08/pandemics-cybernetics-newmacymeetings-1-sept-13-noon-edt/

Message from Paul Pangaro:
Dear Colleague
I’m writing to invite you to the launch of #NewMacyMeetings in September 2020. This will be a modest first session, one of a series of experiments before a more formal, large-scale effort in 2021. 
Our first session is called Why Can’t Cybernetics Tame Pandemics?
This first session will be held from Noon to 1pm EDT via Zoom on Sunday September 13, part of the 2-day Global Conversation Conference, a joint effort of the American Society for Cybernetics and the British Cybernetics Society.
Registration is required and a donation is completely optional.
Please go to this ASC page for more information and for the link to register. You will receive a Zoom video invitation thereafter.
I hope you will join and contribute your views and critique in an evolving project.
As some of you will know, the original Macy Meetings were held in the 1940s and 50s and they comprised seminal trans-disciplinary conversations that began the wide-spread influence of cybernetics across all the major disciplines of the second-half of the last century.
The world is different now, overtaken by pandemics of biology and technology, racism and inequality, environment and justice. #NewMacyMeetings asks the question, Can cybernetics help tame today’s pandemics?
In addition to a trans-disciplinary conversation, in order to be effective — that is, leading to effective action — our #NewMacyMeetings must also be trans-global (diverse and inclusive) as well as trans-generational (engaging all ages).
There is more detail of the overall direction of #NewMacyMeetings at this link.Please feel free to share this email or to forward the blog post here.
Please let me know if you have questions or comments.
Thank you.
-Paul

ASC 2020 Global Conversation September 12-13 2020, online To Register (Free for ASC Members): Registration Page This event is held in coordination with the British Cybernetics Society’s virtual event “Cybernetics and the 21st Century: Stories of Practice.” The ASC invites you to participate in the “ASC 2020 Global Conversation,” September 12-13. This event will consist of a series of live online conversations running across two days and various time zones. Online conversations will be organized as moderated panel discussions, where panelists interact with each other and the audience. Panelists will provide

ASC 2020 Global Conversation – American Society for Cybernetics

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Systems thinking at the Tavistock Institute – past, present and future – The Tavistock Institute

Systems thinking at the Tavistock Institute – past, present and future

Presented by Dione Hills, Richard Allen and David Drabble.

Systems Thinking has been an important feature in the Tavistock Institute’s research and consultancy work from the beginning in 1947. Central to our action research work with major industries in the 1950-70’s, it formed the core of theory and practice related to ‘sociotechnical systems’ work. This tradition continued within our evaluation activities from the 1980’s onward, and features in several of our current projects. These have received added impetus from the growing interest in complexity theory and its application to evaluation practice, encouraged by our involvement in activities such as the Centre for Complexity in Evaluation across the Nexus (CECAN) and the writing of an annex to the revised Magenta book (Cross-Government Evaluation Group) published on 27 March this year.

This talk on Systems Thinking offered the opportunity to consider what we have learnt from the past, how we are currently applying this – and where systems thinking will be taking us next.

Recording of the talk
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837607735&color=%23ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true

Click arrow to play

Powerpointhttps://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/jocVidhoQsUaKu

Dione Hills has been involved in evaluation and consultancy activities at the Tavistock Institute for over 30 years. For the last 3 years she has taken a lead in the Institute’s partnership with CECAN, contributing to guidance documents such as the Magenta book complexity evaluation guidance, to training activities and workshops and several blogs.

Richard Allen is a Principal Researcher and Consultant at the Tavistock Institute who has more than 30 years working in the ‘not for profit’ and public sectors in a variety of project and senior management roles largely concerned with generating change and improving organisational performance. At the Tavistock Institute, he works across a range of consultancy and evaluation projects.

David Drabble is a senior researcher at the Tavistock Institute with over ten years of experience and a keen interest in organisational systems. He often works in the health field and on evaluating innovative and disruptive interventions. He has a specialised role in data presentation, analysis, and project management.

‘Systems thinking at the Tavistock Institute – past, present and future’ was presented as part of the Tavistock Institute’s Food For Thought series.

Systems thinking at the Tavistock Institute – past, present and future Presented by Dione Hills, Richard Allen and David Drabble.

Systems thinking at the Tavistock Institute – past, present and future – The Tavistock Institute

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Mapping the Ripple Effect — Gloucester Community Building Collective

Mapping the Ripple Effect

Aug 26

Measuring the impact of community led change is a constant challenge for those of us working in organisations that are seeking to grow community capacity rather than ‘do to’ communities.

Within more traditional project-based approaches, its often easier to predefine the outcomes at the start of the project and deliver on those. However, in taking a community building approach, our role is to enable the capacity of others, so they own the change they want to see. In doing so citizens will also often inspire other friends and neighbours to get involved, which leads to many unintended outcomes. This results in a ripple effect.

To capture this process and the outcomes that emerge from community driven development, the Gloucester Community Building Collective is working with Dr James Noble from the University of Bristol and the team at We Can Move to assess the impact of community building.

James explained why its critical that organisations engaged in community building need different ways of evaluating impact. Put simply ‘Ripple Effect Mapping’ offers a way of understanding the wider, intended and unintended, impacts of a project or programme over time. This is important as is demonstrates the catalytic role that organisations play in enabling citizens and achieving social change https://www.youtube.com/embed/tq3A-ETnZFU?wmode=opaque&enablejsapi=1

The process works by initially mapping your intended course of action, but over time also mapping what actually happened and what unintended outcomes occurred.

The mapping process often starts off with something like this…

But it ends up like this

Obviously, our hand written versions are somewhat messier! But the information can be transferred using software called Vensim https://vensim.com/vensim-software/

From this mapping process, you can identify the critical catalytic actions that led to the outcomes achieved, irrespective of whether you instigated them or not. It also allows you to identify key themes that could be a focus for systems change.

Gloucester Community Building Collective will be using this approach understand the impact of community building across Gloucester. We hope to share more about the process and the outcomes as we engage in this approach.  

Credit: Dr James Noble, NIHR, university of Bristol

We Can Move, Active Gloucestershire

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Mapping the Ripple Effect — Gloucester Community Building Collective