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We Can’t Include Everything and Everyone. So, what to do? On Boundaries – Evaluation Uncertainty

We Can’t Include Everything and Everyone. So, what to do? On Boundaries

Emily Gates
Assistant Professor, Boston College
emily.gates@bc.edu

I am an evaluator who also teaches evaluation courses and conducts research on evaluation. In my work, I draw on the ideas of boundaries and boundary critique from critical systems thinking. These ideas have deep philosophical roots and the potential to alter or affirm the way you see the world, and act and interact within it. They are fundamental to what ‘system’ and a ‘systems approach’ mean. In the limited space here, I share five points about boundaries.

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We Can’t Include Everything and Everyone. So, what to do? On Boundaries – Evaluation Uncertainty

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Improvisation Blog: The Exams Crisis: The Establishment Crumbles from Society’s Children Upwards

• Improvisation Blog

Wednesday, 12 August 2020

The Exams Crisis: The Establishment Crumbles from Society’s Children Upwards

Coronavirus is exposing the poverty of understanding of what really matters in society. If education  has been seen to be a priority at all, it is because the function of school in “keeping the kids off the streets” has been prioritised (behind lots of bluster about “learning”). 

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Improvisation Blog: The Exams Crisis: The Establishment Crumbles from Society’s Children Upwards

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Unlocking systems transformation – A business view – Business Fights Poverty

Unlocking systems transformation – A business view

The term “systems transformation” is increasingly being used to describe what is needed to achieve sustainable development. Players across government, industry, academia and civil society are more and more aligned in their position that the sustainable development challenges we face are complex, highly interconnected and systemic, and that incremental change will not be enough to achieve a truly sustainable future.Share this story   

Filippo Veglio, Managing Director, People Program & Outreach, WBCSD

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• Unlocking systems transformation (Vision 2050 Issue Brief)REPORT

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Wednesday July 1 2020

The term “systems transformation” is increasingly being used to describe what is needed to achieve sustainable development. Players across government, industry, academia and civil society are more and more aligned in their position that the sustainable development challenges we face are complex, highly interconnected and systemic, and that incremental change will not be enough to achieve a truly sustainable future.

However, despite the continued popularization of the concept of systems transformation, this term is often interpreted differently and applied with varying levels of ambition. To give us the best possible chance of securing genuine change and ensuring that systemic risks and vulnerabilities do not continue to accumulate, it is vital that we develop a clear and collective understanding of what systems transformation actually involves, how it happens and the levers that different actors, including the private sector, can pull to accelerate the lasting change that is urgently required.

A new issue brief released by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)  sets out to answer these questions. Drawing on a broad literature review and a series of expert interviews, it lays out a common theory and vocabulary for business that will support the uncommon task of driving the transformation of key economic systems in the critical years ahead.

This piece of work is an interim output from WBCSD’s current refresh of its Vision 2050, a landmark 2010 report that laid out a pathway to a world in which nine billion people are able to live well, within planetary boundaries, by mid-century. WBCSD is working together with 40 of its member companies to update this work and again provide business with a common agenda for action over the decade to come. Among the resources that have already been produced are an analysis of Macrotrends & Disruptions shaping 2020-2030, and a piece of work looking at The consequences of COVID-19 for the decade ahead.

In the coming months the Council will release further thought pieces, supporting companies as they navigate the challenges of responding to the socio-economic turmoil unleashed by COVID-19, all the while maintaining (and increasing) ambition on realizing sustainable development.

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Unlocking systems transformation – A business view – Business Fights Poverty

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Affordance – Wikipedia

Affordance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to search“Afford” redirects here. For other meanings, see Afford (disambiguation).

Affordance is what the environment offers the individual. James J. Gibson coined the term in his 1966 book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems,^[1] and it occurs in many of his earlier essays (e.g.^[2]). However, his best-known definition is taken from his seminal 1979 book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.— Gibson (1979, p. 127)^[3]

The word is used in a variety of fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, industrial design, human–computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, user-centered design, communication studies, instructional design, science, technology and society (STS), sports science and artificial intelligence.

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Affordance – Wikipedia

Also:

James J. Gibson From: the Ecological Approach to Visual Perception Chapter 8 the Theory of Affordances

James Jerry GibsonPublished 2013I have described the environment as the surfaces that separate substances from the medium in which the animals live. But I have also described what the environment affords animals, mentioning the terrain, shelters, water, fire, objects, tools, other animals, and human displays. How do we go from surfaces to affordances? And if there is information in light for the perception of surfaces, is there information for the perception of what they afford? Perhaps the composition and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/James-J.-Gibson-From%3A-the-Ecological-Approach-to-8-Gibson/eab2b1523b942ca7ae44e7495c496bc87628f9e1

The Theory of Affordances – http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_url?url=https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs137/readings/Gibson-AFF.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm1u77-ND8s2osd8bXUebAuYO48WOg&nossl=1&oi=scholarr

The Perception of the Visual World http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/The%20Perception%20of%20the%20Visual%20World-GibsonJJ.pdf

Mark Johnson’s blog entry:

Improvisation Blog: Alternative Natural Philosophy Association Online

Read the blog entry for fascinating history and connections, link below to event page:

ANPA 41 Web Conference Details (August 2020)

Monday 10th August – Friday 4th September

Daily Presentation at 17:00 UK;  16:00 Zurich; 10:30 CDT;  11:30 EST;  9:30 MDT

(Opening on Mon. 10th  30 minutes earlier)

Zoom link was emailed to you our simply type into your browser:  iow.li/anpa

event page: http://anpa.onl/2020/anpa-41-web-conference-details-august-2020/

Mark Johnson’s blog entry: Alternative Natural Philosophy Association Online

Improvisation Blog: Alternative Natural Philosophy Association Online

“It was called the ‘wiring diagram’. John Hoskyns – who had one of he first systems houses – prepared it as an analysis of why it was so hard to do business in the UK at the time, and what to do about it. It was adopted by the Tories and became the Thatcher revolution.”

Like a dystopian class warfare version of Taiichi Ohno’s Autonomation

The division of labor between humans and computer systems has changed along both technical and human dimensions. Technically, there has been a shift from technologies of automation, the aim of which was to disallow human intervention at nearly all points in the system, to technologies of “heteromation” that push critical tasks to end users as indispensable mediators. As this has happened, the large population of human beings who have been driven out by the first type of technology are drawn back into the computational fold by the second type. Turning artificial intelligence on its head, one technology fills the gap created by the other, but with a vengeance that unsettles established mechanisms of reward, fulfillment, and compensation. In this fashion, replacement of human beings and their irrelevance to technological systems has given way to new “modes of engagement” with remarkable social, economic, and ethical implications. In this paper we provide a historical backdrop for heteromation and explore and explicate some of these displacements through analysis of a number of cases, including Mechanical Turk, the video games FoldIt and League of Legends, and social media.

‘we shape our tools – and, afterwards, our tools shape us’

certainly not the most reliable guide to evolution, but very interesting

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The Part Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man

Works of Frederick Engels 1876

The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man

Written: in May-June 1876;
First published: in Die Neue Zeit 1895-06;
Translated: from the German by Clemens Dutt;
First published in English: by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1934;
Transcribed: by director@marx.org, Jan 1996.

This article was intended to introduce a larger work which Engels planned to call Die drei Grundformen der Knechtschaft – Outline of the General Plan. Engels never finished it, nor even this intro, which breaks off at the end. It would be included in Dialectics of Nature.

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The Part Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man

so – the link between Jordan Peterson and Stafford Beer, including the Enneagram?

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[PDF] Cybernetic Big Five Theory. | Semantic Scholar

Cybernetic Big Five Theory

Journal of Research in Personality, 56, 33-58 – June 2015
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.07.004

Authors

1. Colin G. DeYoung – University of Minnesota

Abstract

Cybernetics, the study of goal-directed, adaptive systems, is the best framework for an integrative theory of personality. Cybernetic Big Five Theory attempts to provide a comprehensive, synthetic, and mechanistic explanatory model. Constructs that describe psychological individual differences are divided into personality traits, reflecting variation in the parameters of evolved cybernetic mechanisms, and characteristic adaptations, representing goals, interpretations, and strategies defined in relation to an individual’s particular life circumstances. The theory identifies mechanisms in which variation is responsible for traits in the top three levels of a hierarchical trait taxonomy based on the Big Five and describes the causal dynamics between traits and characteristic adaptations. Lastly, the theory links function and dysfunction in traits and characteristic adaptations to psychopathology and well-being.Less

Acknowledgements

I thank Jordan Peterson for introducing me to many of the ideas synthesized by CB5T and for developing a theory capable of explaining human activities from the most trivial to the most abstract (Peterson, 1999). Thanks to Valerie Tiberius for conversations about virtues and values; to Bob Krueger for thoughts on clinical relevance; to Jacob Hirsh for testing the limits of my distinction between traits and characteristic adaptations; and to Steve DeYoung and Alex Rautu for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Cybernetic Big Five Theory.

[PDF] Cybernetic Big Five Theory. | Semantic Scholar

Commentary: Illuminating Michael Lissack’s “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective” Using the Process Enneagram – Knowles (2019)

Richard N.Knowles

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Illuminating Michael Lissack’s “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective” Using the Process Enneagram – ScienceDirect

She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation

Volume 5, Issue 4, Winter 2019, Pages 386-390

Commentary: Illuminating Michael Lissack’s “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective” Using the Process Enneagram

Richard N.Knowles

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Illuminating Michael Lissack’s “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective” Using the Process Enneagram – ScienceDirect

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Using Enterprise Models to Explain and Discuss Autopoiesis and Homeostasis in Socio-technical Systems | Bider | Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly

Using Enterprise Models to Explain and Discuss Autopoiesis and Homeostasis in Socio-technical Systems

Ilia Bider, Gil Regev, Erik Perjons

Abstract

The article links two seemingly different fundamental theoretical concepts of autopoiesis and homeostasis and tries to apply them to the realm of socio-technical systems with the use of the Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM). Autopoiesis is the property of a system that constantly reproduces itself. Homeostasis describes a way a complex system constantly maintains its identity while adapting to changes in its internal and external environment. To be able to use FEM for this task, the original version of FEM has been extended by adding special elements for representing the system’s context – part of the environment to which the system is structurally coupled. The approach taken in this article differs from other works in the same field in having the focus on the “body” (concrete elements being reproduced) of the socio-technical system, as well as on identifying concrete processes that reproduce the system, and demonstrating concrete ways of how a specific system adapts or can adapt to the perturbations in the environment (i.e. internal and external disturbances that affect the system).

DOI: 10.7250/csimq.2020-22.02

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Using Enterprise Models to Explain and Discuss Autopoiesis and Homeostasis in Socio-technical Systems | Bider | Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly

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[PDF] The science of the unknowable: Stafford Beer’s cybernetic informatics | Semantic Scholar

• DOI:10.1108/03684920410523535

The science of the unknowable: Stafford Beer’s cybernetic informatics

Andrew Pickering

Published 2004

Kybernetes

This paper explores the history of Stafford Beer’s work in management cybernetics, from his early conception and simulation of an adaptive automatic factory and associated experimentation in biological computing, through the development of the Viable System Model and the Team Syntegrity technique for discussion and planning. It also pursues Beer into the fields of micro‐ and macropolitics and spirituality. The aim is to show that all of Beer’s projects can be understood as specific instantiations and workings out of a cybernetic ontology of unknowability and becoming: a stance that recognises that the world can always surprise us and that we can never dominate it through knowledge. The thrust of Beer’s work was, thus, to construct systems that could adapt performatively to environments they could not fully control.

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[PDF] The science of the unknowable: Stafford Beer’s cybernetic informatics | Semantic Scholar

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Articles

Articles

• Richardson K, Tait A (2015). On the dynamic structure of complex networks. Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Forum, 31 December 2015.
• Richardson K, Tait A (2013). When spreadsheets go bad. OR Insight 26, 270-277.
• Sipple J W, Vink J, Francis J, Williams J, Morgan J, Brady S, Tait A (2012). Making data open & useful: providing enhanced access to public data through web and app tools to facilitate better local decisionmaking. Presented at 6th International Technology, Education and Development Conference, Valencia, Spain, 5-7 March 2012.
• Richardson K, Goldstein, J A, Allen, P M, Tait A (2008). Complexity and Neo-Expertise. E:CO Annual 2008, pp. ix-xiv.
• Richardson K, Tait A (2008). Confronting Complexity. Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Volume 10 Number 2, 2008.
• Brady S, Tait A (2006). Arizona and New York Schools Push the Envelope. Perspectives on Performance, Volume 5; Issue 2 – October 2006.
• Tait A (2006). Speed Confrontation Management. Victor Svetlov has produced a Russian translation of this paper. (EPUB) (Mobipocket/Kindle)
• Tait A (2006). Mario’s career crisis.
• Tait A (2006). Modeling confrontations using Options Boards.
• Koehn D, Tait A, Crannell M (2005). Absolving the Sin of Collaboration. “inside collaboration”, Volume IV Issue V 06/05.
• Crannell M, Howard N, Norwood G, Tait A (2005). A C2 system for ‘winning hearts and minds’: tools for Confrontation and Collaboration Analysis. Proceedings of the Tenth International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, McLean, VA, 13-16 June 2005.
• Crannell M, Howard N, Norwood G, Tait A (2004). How to assess an exit strategy: Measures of Merit for compliance. Proceedings of the 2004 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Coronado Bay Resort, San Diego, CA, 15-17 June 2004.
• Brady S, Tait A (2004). No Organization Left Behind — “Mass Market” Data Envelopment Analysis. Invited paper at CORS/INFORMS Joint International Meeting 2004, Banff, Canada, 16-19 May 2004.
• Baan A, Howard N, Tait A (2003). “COM as Shooter” — Operational Planning using C2 for Confronting and Collaborating. Proceedings of the 8th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, National Defense University, Washington, DC, 17-19 June 2003.
• Smith R, Howard N, Tait A (2002). Commanding Anti-Terrorist Coalitions: A Mid-East Illustration. Proceedings of the 7th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, 11-13 June 2002.
• Tait A, Flower A (2001). Information security…let’s talk business. White paper for finance industry.
• Smith R, Howard N, Tait A (2001). Confrontations in War and Peace. Proceedings of the 6th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, 19-21 June 2001.
• Richardson K, Tait A, Lissack M (1999). The potential role of group decision support tools in the coherent management of complex projects. IRNOP IV, September 1999.
• Stubbs L, Tait A, Howard, N (1999). How to Model a Confrontation — Computer Support for Drama Theory. Proceedings of the 1999 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Naval War College, Newport, RI, June 29 – July 1 1999.
• Howard N, Tait A (1998). Power: an approach based on drama theory. Presentation to Symposium on Analytical Approaches to Studying Power and Influence in Contemporary Political/Military Affairs, DERA, Farnborough, October 1998.
• Tait A (1997). ‘Facilitation Environments’ for Negotiation and Mediation. Cooperation – or Conflict, 11 (4), July 1997.
• Tait A (1997). Drama without Tears. Operational Research Society Tutorial Papers, YOR10.
• Williams T M, Eden C, Ackermann F, Tait A (1995). Vicious Circles of Parallelism. International Journal of Project Management, 13 (3), 151-155.
• Williams T M, Eden C, Ackermann F, Tait A (1995). The Effects of Design Changes and Delays on Project Costs. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 46, 809-818.
• Bennett P G, Tait A, MacDonagh, K (1994). INTERACT: Developing Software for Interactive Decisions. Group Decision and Negotiation, 3, 351-372.

Posters

• Cognitive mapping poster
• Confrontation analysis poster

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Articles

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Improvisation Blog: Luhmann and Biology

Luhmann and Biology

Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory is one of the most impressive achievements in the social sciences in the second half of the 20th century. Widely appreciated and mainstream in Germany and across mainland Europe, it remains far less well-known in the Anglo-Saxon world, beyond the realms of systems theorists who knew about Luhmann’s hinterland, cybernetics, Maturana, etc. 

Loet Leydesdorff is about to publish a new book detailing the intellectual relationships that Luhmann had with Habermas and the intellectual elite in the 60s and 70s. This history is important because its not just our institutions that are in a mess at the moment, but our disciplines – not least, sociology. 

For those who want to critique Luhmann, his dependence first on the biological cybernetics of Maturana and Varela is a cause to claim “biological reductionism”, or his later fascination with Spencer-Brown as a kind of sophistry which doesn’t convince Leydesdorff.  It’s remarkable that despite these criticisms, and indeed the criticism by Maturana that Luhmannn had misappropriated his theory, that Luhmann is the only figure from mainstream cybernetics to have had a major transformative impact on a discipline, with important work drawing on it – from Kittler’s media theory (again, pretty much unknown to Anglo-Saxon media departments) to Yuk Hui’s recent and brilliant “Recursivity and Contingency” which is spreading around the world. People reading Hui will learn about Ashby, Maturana, Von Foerster, Simondon, etc from this.

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Improvisation Blog: Luhmann and Biology