A hyperlinked and reverse-linked copy of Donnella Meadows’ classic Leverage Points piece, set up in www.roamresearch.com by Bardia Pourvakil
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System Metadata: Author: [[Donella Meadows]] Source: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System Recommended By: [[David Perell]] Tags: #Essay Notes #complex systems #Science #Systems Theory
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jywqMIbNuvY
also by the same person
Erik Pruyt (2013) Small System Dynamics Models for Big Issues: Triple Jump towards Real-World Dynamic Complexity
https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:10980974-69c3-4357-962f-d923160ab638/datastream/OBJ/link.pdf
Thanks to John Raven for the links
June 9, 2020 daviding 0 Comments
In the famous 1965 Emery and Trist article, the terms “causal texture” and “contextual environment” haven’t been entirely clear to me. With specific meanings in the systems thinking literature, looking up definitions in the dictionary generally isn’t helpful. Diving into the history of the uses of the words provides some insight.
The article presumes that the reader is familiar with the 1965 Emery and Trist article,. The background in the Appendix provides some hints, but is more oriented as context in a history of science.
Continues in source:
Causal texture, contextualism, contextural – Coevolving Innovations
In today’s post, I am looking at Hegel’s dialectical approach and using it to gain a better understanding of the purpose of an organization. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) was a German philosopher who furthered the ideas of German Idealism in Philosophy after Immanuel Kant. Hegel’s writing is quite dense and he is often considered to be one of the hardest philosophers to understand. With this introduction, I should note here that my post is “inspired” by his dialectical approach.
When we look at a phenomenon say “A”, we are speaking about our understanding of “A”. This understanding automatically brings in the opposite or “notA” to the realm of the understanding. We can denote “notA” as “!A”. Our understanding of “A” lies somewhere between “A” and “!A”. To improve our understanding of “A”, we should also look at “!A”. This is a very simple view of Hegel’s dialectic…
View original post 1,630 more words
Our recent explorations into the development of psychology (back to Tolman, Brunswik, Pepper from 1931) and systems thinking coincides with the appearance of a comic strip rerun in the Saturday Toronto Star.
Continues in source:
Behavioral responses in an ecology (via For Better or For Worse) – Systems Changes – Open Learning Commons
Link to original article (free pdf) at https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/04/15/the-causal-texture-of-organizational-environments-emery-and-trist-1965/
Causal Texture of the Environment June 10, 2020 dougmcdavid 0 Comments For those who haven’t read the 1965 Emery and Trist article, its seems as though my colleague Doug McDavid was foresighted enough to blog a summary in 2016! His words have always welcomed here, as Doug was a cofounder of this web site. At the time of writing, the target audience for this piece was primarily Enterprise Architecture practitioners. [DI]
Causal Texture of the Environment – Coevolving Innovations
The Dialectic of Bottom-up and Top-down Emergence in Social Systems January 1970TripleC 3(2):28-50 DOI: 10.31269/vol3iss2pp28-50 LicenseCC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Christian FuchsWolfgang Hofkirchner
(19) (PDF) The Dialectic of Bottom-up and Top-down Emergence in Social Systems
Social relations: Building on Ludwig von Bertalanffy Wolfgang Hofkirchner First published:29 April 2019
Social relations: Building on Ludwig von Bertalanffy – Hofkirchner – 2019 – Systems Research and Behavioral Science – Wiley Online Library
Information Systems Frontiers volume 22, pages281–298(2020)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10796-019-09921-1
Podcast:
Episode 34 covers an important article by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting,” published in the journal Human Relations in 1951. Eric Trist was a British social scientist best known for his contributions to the field of organization development and one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute. Ken Bamforth was a miner and industrial fellow of the Tavistock Institute.
34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth – Talking About Organizations Podcast
Summary of the classic Trist and Bamforth piece:
I cannot struggle with wordpress block editor any more but these pieces are also well worth reading!
https://medium.com/gentlyserious/systems-and-democracy-2fa1b515360
https://medium.com/gentlyserious/decolonising-time-b1aaaa2361f5
https://medium.com/gentlyserious/a-very-corporate-pandemic-71f42b9ae18#_ftnref1
https://medium.com/gentlyserious/axiomatic-nonsense-1120f5b9c923
Three related systems thinking blogs
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<blockquote class=”wp-block-quote”><p>Grounding what we eat
Aidan Ward
Jun 11 ·
Food distribution, but of what?
Not just our food chain but the whole of life on earth depends on soil; soil is where it happens. Macro fauna and flora, like ourselves and the trees, are largely irrelevant in the scale of things. We don’t see it like that because we are macro and filled with our own importance. But we are discovering (again, this is how civilisations collapse) that both in the quantity and the quality of what we eat, the soil is where it is at.
Assessing our food supply chain is that simple. Does the food we eat and how it was distributed and how it was grown protect the vital asset it is based on? Or does it degrade that asset for short term gain, or indeed for any other reason? Since the vast majority of the world’s soils are not only being degraded but are being eroded away entirely, we can guess that the food supply chain is utterly broken.</p><cite><a href=”https://medium.com/gentlyserious/grounding-what-we-eat-e639d1aa9222″>Grounding what we eat – GentlySerious – Medium</a></cite></blockquote>
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Active Gut, Passive Brain
Philip Hellyer
Jan 31, 2019
What would it mean if our brains were passive? Passive to aspects of our environment that we are not even aware of? What would it mean literally but also as a metaphor of our hubris? What do we know and what are we prepared to hear? And given all that, what use can we make of these brains of ours? My increasingly ancient but still spry mother read Peter Frankopan’s Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Her favourite sport is goading the sticks-in-the-mud at her local church. This history is told as the title suggests from a non-western perspective, and my mother’s summary is “Aidan, we are just specks. All this happened and we are nothing in the bigger picture”. His New Silk Roads is her preferred entry into current affairs. Maybe I am my mother’s son, without reading either book. Let me try and rehearse a fantastic narrative from Zack Bush. I am increasingly allergic to the exuberant ‘American’ style and to medical doctors. I don’t like slick presenters, I want authenticity.[1] I came at this from my course on soil regeneration with Didi Pershouse. And I watched an interview-style presentation that lasts 94 minutes. Ugh! And yet.
Active Gut, Passive Brain – GentlySerious – Medium
Crimes against humanity
Aidan Ward
Feb 5, 2019
The original template for capitalism is sugar plantations in Brazil. The recipe is this. Occupy an area of land by force. Kill off anyone who happens to live there. Wipe out all the trees and plants to create bare soil. Import some slaves from Africa, keep them isolated so they have nowhere to run to. Plant sugar cane and harvest for as long as the soil still works for you. Export the sugar to wreck peoples’ health elsewhere. If you were a Portuguese gentleman with some spare cash, you could invest it in such an enterprise and never know the misery that allowed your investment to grow. You didn’t need to know anything other than you were not cheated in the returns. Capitalism in the raw. When we speak of crimes against humanity we generally think of naked aggression: Cortes in Mexico, Stalin and Mao, Apartheid, the Holocaust. Here, we pay more attention to misinformation about the health effects of tobacco, corruption of climate science by the oil majors, killing people with processed food. These are closer to the raw capitalist model: just make sure your investors don’t know and don’t care — killing millions of people is OK, it is just business. And very respectable, caring, liberal-minded people don’t even notice; the officially sanctioned history doesn’t get written. Yet? I want to add one to the list that I was not properly aware of until my studies this week. In two hundred years Australia was turned from a green and pleasant land into largely a desert and desertifying hell of 50 degrees centigrade. And that change is so significant that it tilts the warming and aridification of the whole world. How many people does that kill? I don’t mean to suggest that the enormity of a crime is measured by the number of dead bodies: but I do want to rescue our imagination from the immediacy of death camps to the long slow impoverishment and starvation of masses of people. We have written before about slow violence. The rehearsal of the true history is immensely important, vital even.
Source:
Adapting to Uncertainty: Complexity Science and COVID-19 – Niskanen Center
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdu16JAzgw8
Also related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbcBWdeIcyY
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg&t=149s
Read by computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F7cd8ilLVI
Shannon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Whj_nL-x8
von Neumann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2jiQXI6nrE
As 2020 is often called a ‘make-or-break’ year – a half-decade after the 2015 Paris Accord and the start of the SDGs – the r3.0 International Virtual Conference from 8th to 11th of September offers a framework for redesigning our economy around the principles of regeneration and distribution. This framework is based around the r3.0 work ecosystem: the family of 9 interlinked Blueprints, 5 already developed, and 2 to be released and 2 initiated at this conference; 6 prior r3.0 conferences; the networks of our Academic Alliance and Advocation Partners; our Research and Test Lab collaborations, and our Global Thresholds & Allocations Council initiation. We feel uniquely positioned to gather world-class “game-changing and mind-blowing” speakers in a highly interactive “sleeves-rolled-up” working conference setting.
Due to the event and travel restrictions of Covid-19 the conference is moved to be an online event with reduced price structures and a prolonged agenda from 2 to 4 days in total, ensuring maximum possible interaction. Also, an adapted timing of the sessions will allow participation in more time zones, globally.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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