De vereniging Systeemdenken voor doelgerichte mensen
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De afgelopen jaren is de aandacht naar de wijze waarop we organisaties anders kunnen vormgeven enorm toegenomen. Het is een zoektocht naar meer flexibele organisatievormen, waarbij men put uit een waaier van nieuwe benaderingen (Holacracy, Agile, Spotify, Lean, Sociocracy 3.0, Liquid O, Semco, Socio-technical approach,…). Ze delen eenzelfde bedoeling, namelijk beter overleven in een omgeving die voortdurend verandert.
De centrale vraag in deze naar de wijze waarop je de samenhang van het geheel in een verregaande decentralisatie kan waarborgen. De Viable Systems benadering geeft hier een coherent antwoord op. Het is een benadering die in de jaren zeventig en tachtig van vorige eeuw is ontwikkeld door Stafford Beer en die veelvuldig wordt gebruikt bij het begrijpen van organisaties en het opnieuw ontwerpen ervan.
In de UK groepeert de Systems and Complexity in Organizations (http://www.scio.org.uk/) een zeer uitgebreid netwerk van top managers en bedrijfskundigen die systeembenaderingen toepassen in de manier waarop ze hun organisatie laten evolueren.https://www.youtube.com/embed/Sjz6MLbtEZA?feature=oembed
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In March 2016 we hosted, Knowing Systems Thinking in Manchester. The event provided an introduction to systems theory and an understanding of its practical applications in a living system. Access all our resources from the day and listen to our special edition of the DoODcast which goes behind the scenes of the event and also shares the challenges OD leads working on ‘Devo Manc’ are facing as they support the merger of health and social care for 2.7m people.
‘Knowing’ and understanding systems thinking
To frame our event and help delegates understand systems thinking we looked at John Heron’s ‘Ways of knowing’. Heron takes the concept of knowledge beyond traditional boundaries of academic thinking and describes four ways of ‘knowing’ that together create a holistic, deep and valid way of understanding something.
One: Experiential knowing, this happens through direct face-to-face encounters with a person, place or thing. Knowing happens through the immediate experiences of perceiving something. This is the solid grounding on which presentational knowing is built.
Two: Presentational knowing takes the lived experience and translates it into an expression revealed through drawing, sound, movement and metaphor. Presentational knowing helps us make sense of our experiences. This leads us to propositional knowing, the most common and accepted way of knowing.
Three: Propositional knowing is knowing about something and expressing it in intellectual terms through ideas, theories and written statements.
Four: Practical knowing is a skill, a knack, a competence and is a result of the other three ways of knowing. We become able to do something and we know something practically.
Resources from the day
If you missed the event these resources will help you develop your knowledge and understand how the theory has been practically applied in the NHS.
Doing systems thinking Download the presentation given by Anne Benson and Coreene Archer from the Tavistock Institute. This presentation shares an overview of key systems thinking theories and models that underpin our practice.
Blog: Exploring patterns that connect Gareth Evans, senior organisational development officer at Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, illustrates how systems thinking can help us notice and understand patterns of behaviour in our organisation, drawing on an example we may be familiar with – the team member who isn’t managed.
Patterns that connect: Systems thinking in Wales Learn how senior organisational development officer, Gareth Evans used systems thinking in his trust. Download his presentation slides which covers how he applied the theory to his work
In this special edition of the DoODcast, recorded at our Manchester event, our speakers share a summary of their work, advice for practitioners and how they are applying systems thinking in their NHS trusts.
We also follow Helen Parker, Associate Director of Organisation Development at Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, as she meets with OD leads from across Greater Manchester. Helen meets with her fellow practitioners to discuss the implications of Devo Manc and how as a team they will collaboratively support the many different healthcare organisations to work together in a new and unprecedented way.
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/262450735&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false Do OD is a leading workforce programme delivered by NHS Employers in partnership with the NHS Leadership Academy.
Lane, D. C. and M. C. Jackson (1995). “Only Connect! An annotated bibliography reflecting the breadth and diversity of systems thinking.” Systems Research (now Systems Research and Behavioral Science) 12(3): 217-228.
Free events coming up and a lot of international and online action from SCiO, the systems practitioner professional body:
all at https://systemspractice.org/events
28 September, FREE virtual networking event
19 October, members development event on Systems Laws (membership only £30/year) – https://systemspractice.org/membership
20 October, Wie sichert man die Zukunftsfähigkeit von Organisationen? (SCiO DACH – in German, paid)
28 October, SCiO Belgium, FREE – on Patterns of Strategy, with Patrick Hoverstady
16 November – FREE virtual open meeting
Systems and Complexity : nothing changed, nothing new – Gareth Evans and Introduction to Critical System Heuristics – Tony Korycki
Join us for our intimate, reflective and strategic Masterclass on Systems Practice. We will start in October. Expect practical frameworks and lots of thoughtful, focused, reflective time with a super interesting group of people working on systems change.
We have been working on the International Systems Change Field Building project Illuminate – specifically launching a new program for Bridgers, people who of the systems change world, to surface and learn together.
We have an increasing number of individual coaching sessions with women systems leaders to explore everything from transitions to strategy to equity. Reach out if you’re looking for support.
OUR THINKING Our small Cohort Masterclass on Systems Practice kicking off this October.
Must read – this is long, but brilliant Systems Change & Deep Equity. How can funders design for and measure progress on systems change? New report from Skoll, Ford and Draper Richards Kaplan Foundations, Porticus, and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
Please, see my talk for Cybernetics Society Annual Conference: 21st Century Stories of Practice:
‘There’s nothing like the real thing’ (Kenny, 2009). The talk will be ‘connecting what is with what if’ (Thackara, 2019). It will look at complexities of feedback loops in Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance (SAAP) field’s multicentred methodology and processes where the designer oscillates between being inside and outside of the system. This will be exemplified on several research by design projects’ cases, indigenous references and their crossrelations. SAAP deals with rather small hyperobjective ecosystemic interventions that are codesigned and redesigned across complex multiscalar biodigital feedback loops across the biosphere. Therefore, these interventions interact with the existing ecosystem and are generative, regenerative, and adaptive. The talk will show that similar way it has been present in indigenous cultures. Such adaptive, generative, and regenerative systems are codesigned and coperformed by multispecies, living and non-living stakeholders and communities’ members…
Those who have followed this podcast in the past, and those who follow developments in cybernetics in the present, will be no strangers to the name Ranulph Glanville. This brilliant, multiple-PhD holding polymath who co-mingled cybernetics with ethics, pedagogy, and, above all, design, has, through his voluminous body of ground-breaking papers, had a greater influence upon the field than, arguably, any scholar since Heinz von Foerster.
At the 2015 Conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences in Berlin, a group of self-proclaimed “Glanvillians” made up largely of former students and collaborators of Glanville, and a few interlopers like myself, met over a breakfast table at the Scandic Hotel, Potzdammer Platz, Berlin and, at the prompting of Thomas Fischer and Candy Herr, committed themselves to consolidating Glanville’s legacy and pointing the way to future extensions and investigations of his central claim that design is the practice of cybernetics and cybernetics is theory for design.
The result is Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New (Springer) edited by Fischer and Herr. Featuring an eclectic blend of mid-career and senior scholars, the assembled chapters probe the vital relationship between conversation and design, the commitments of a radical constructivist epistemology, the virtues of being “out of control”, the embracing of error, and the seemingly paradoxical notion of getting “lost with rigour” across a wide array of artistic and scientific domains.
As both the interviewer and a contributor to the book, I have, in the sprit of “walking our talk”, eschewed the erasure of error by editing and left, in full view, the meandering trail of a wandering and, at times, stumbling conversational journey featuring prolonged gaps in thinking, confusion between different articles by the same author, technical miscues, and even a pitched battle between my two cats, in order to model our commitment to process over perfection and personify Glanville’s favourite Samuel Beckett quote: “Try again, fail again, fail better.” I hope you find the stops along the way of this meandering journey as stimulating as I did.
Thomas Fischer is a design researcher, epistemologist and cybernetician. He is a Professor and Director of Research at the Department of Architecture at XJTLU in Suzhou, China. Thomas is also a Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Christiane M. Herr is an architectural researcher and educator focusing on the areas of structural design, digitally supported design, radical constructivism, design pedagogy and traditional Chinese approaches to creative thinking. Christiane is a Senior Associate Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China, where she directs the Master of Architectural Design as well as the Bachelor of Architectural Engineering programmes.
Adam, with whom I seem to see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, and Bulent, of whom I suspect the same, have shared some great content relating to the book and worshop / approach Patterns of Strategy, (which I think ought to revolutionise strategy).
It is our pleasure to welcome you to the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Complexity in Education (IJCE). The aim of the journal is to disseminate mainly empirical research about the application of complexity theory paradigm to educational processes in the broadest sense of the word. The new paradigm focuses on general and specific properties of complex systems and includes the related subfields, such as chaos theory, agent-based modeling, social network analysis, cellular automata and catastrophe theory. In addition, it embraces all other theories and methods that have been developed explicitly to capture complex and unpredictable processes. The above comprise a distinct intellectual tradition that focuses on the study of all things complex, systemic, dynamical and nonlinear and while they typically utilize quantitative approaches, qualitative inquiries are not excluded as long as they adhere to philosophical –ontological and epistemological-considerations of Complex Adaptive Systems (…)
In a famous article written 50 years ago this week, Milton Friedman argued ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’. The statement remains a lightning rod for the debate on ‘corporate purpose’ – whether public corporations should be managed just for the benefit of shareholders or for a broader set of stakeholders, including employees, suppliers and the community.
We continue to go back and forth. In 2019, to much fanfare, 181 CEOs of the US Business Roundtable publicly committed to manage corporations for stakeholders – reversing their 1997 statement that upheld shareholder primacy! Not so fast, countered Harvard Law Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, who argued that stakeholderism can backfire in insulating corporate leaders from external accountability and compromising economic performance… to the detriment of broader stakeholders!
The thermostat is a simple device that is often used to describe the basic ideas of Cybernetics. Cybernetics is the art of steering. Simply put, a goal is identified and the “system” acts to get closer to the goal. In the example of the thermostat, the user specifies the setpoint for the thermostat such that when the temperature goes below the setpoint, it kicks on the furnace and stops when the internal temperature of the house meets the desired temperature. In a similar fashion, when the temperature goes above a setpoint, the thermostat kicks on the air conditioner to bring down the internal temperature. The thermostat acts as a medium for achieving a constant temperature inside the house. This is also the idea of homeostasis. In order to achieve what the thermostat does, it needs to have a closed loop. It needs to read the internal temperature at specified frequencies…
REMINDER – CECAN Webinar: Trophic Analysis of Directed Networks Tuesday 22nd September 2020, 13:00 – 14:00 BST Presenter: Professor Robert MacKay, University of Warwick You are warmly invited to join us for the following CECAN Webinar… Webinar Overview: Directed networks are used in many domains. Particularly relevant examples to evaluation and appraisal are systems maps and influence maps. Trophic analysis indicates how far up or downstream each node is and computes a quantity called trophic incoherence, but perhaps better called circularity, which indicates the extent to which the network fails to line up with each node feeding to nodes at the next level. Robert will suggest incorporating trophic analysis into systems mapping, and present relations of trophic incoherence with some other network properties, and end with an application of incomplete pairwise comparison to football leagues. Learning Outcomes:How to quantify up/down-streamness in directed networks.How to quantify the directedness (or its complement, the circularity) of a directed network. Presenter Biography – Professor Robert MacKay: Robert MacKay is a Professor in the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick and Director of Mathematical Interdisciplinary Research at Warwick. He was Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at Cambridge (1995-2000), founding Director of Warwick’s Centre for Complexity Science from 2007-15 and President of the (UK) Institute of Mathematics and its Applications for 2012-13.
His principal area of research is the theory and applications of Nonlinear Dynamics. Highlights are the discovery and renormalisation explanation of how invariant tori break for magnetic fields and Hamiltonian systems; development of a method to establish regions through which no invariant tori pass; a proof of existence of spatially localised time-periodic movements in networks of oscillators and analysis of their stability, interaction and mobility; construction and proof of a mechanical example of an Anosov system (uniformly hyperbolic); and the construction of indecomposable spatially extended deterministic dynamical systems exhibiting more than one space-time phase. How to Join: This talk will take place via a Zoom Webinar – please click here to register for a place. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. In case you are unable to attend, a recording of the webinar will be uploaded to News and Videos sections of our website following the event.
The Collective Systems Map is the result of 2 months of conversations with a group of professionals from the third sector in Spain. It tries to capture the relationships between the critical factors that will condition and impact the social and economic recovery process after the Covid19 pandemic. It doesn´t pretend to be an exhaustive model to forecast the near future, but it is a framework to enable deep conversations and to integrate the wide range of perspectives and experiences that the participants shared with us.
SYSTEMS THINKING APPROACH
Although we are using a causal loop diagram tool that is part of the systems dynamic methodology, we are not approaching this social complexity from only a positivist perspective, but also from an interpretative perspective. We believe that there are systems in place that condition the way we live and relate to each other, but at the same time people can change them by creating new meaning and acting congruently.
Our purpose is to provide social organizations with a holistic perspective to identify potential risks and threats to their mission to provide effective support to vulnerable people in this complicated moment in history.
COLLECTIVE SYSTEMS MAP
The map starts with the lockdown instigated by the Covid19 pandemic. To tackle the social and health care emergency, the Spanish Government enforced a national lockdown, reducing all economic activity and social interactions. This situation has triggered an economic recession, the size of which has prompted Germany and France to propose a 500bn€ recovery fund.
In our conversations, we focused on understanding what the economic, social, and political consequences of the pandemic could be.
Coinciding with the Conference on Complex Systems, and profiting from the opportunity offered by the presence of a wide variety of experts in different topics, we are organising one-day school for PhD students and early-stage researchers. The school is an informal one-day event that offers early-stage scientists the opportunity to learn about the scientific and life experience of young and senior researchers, try their skills in a data visualisation and have fun playing the specifically tailored online trivia.
This year, due to a worldwide pandemic situation, the school is going to be to be held online on December 4, 2020, before the main CCS conference. The school consists of two non-scientific lectures from young scientists, ask me anything session with a prominent senior researcher, data visualisation contest and an online pub quiz. The sessions will be divided by informal coffee breaks, where participants may chatter with their peers, as in a…
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