Source: Wicked Problems: The Implications for Public Management

January 2008

Source: Wicked Problems in Public Policy

January 2008

Brian Head

Quite a good intro

Source: Cybernetics – Wikipedia

I can’t think that we’ve had this link before

Source: :::::CYBERSYN/Cybernetic Synergy::::

Source: Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations

Source: Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations

Source: The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk | Science | The Guardian

The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk

Hate may be less like a cancer and more like bubbles, says Neil Johnson, who applies physics theory to human behavior

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco

 @juliacarriew Fri 23 Aug 2019 14.46 BST

Source: [1908.07034] Modeling Major Transitions in Evolution with the Game of Life

Source: [1908.07034] Modeling Major Transitions in Evolution with the Game of Life

Source: Empowering the Whole System – Distributed Leadership in Action Tickets, Tue 8 Oct 2019 at 15:00 | Eventbrite

Oct 8

Empowering the Whole System – Distributed Leadership in Action

by Future Considerations, JB Vista & Living Leadership

£70

Discover the power of Barry Oshry’s work
See how context shapes behaviour
Lead with systems insight

Barry Oshry‘s powerful work on system dynamics reveals how context shapes behaviour and consciousness – what we see, think and feel about ourselves and others.

Oshry’s work highlights that the problems we believe to be personal or interpersonal – “I’m not being effective in my role”, “If only I had a better boss, things would be OK”,”We’re not a good team“ – are not primarily personal problems. The workshop illuminates how our blindness to context kills trust, increases blame, corrodes potentially supportive and productive relationships and stops us from making a reality of distributed leadership.

This facilitated online workshop uses an experiential simulation to briefly immerse people in three leadership contexts that we encounter every day. We explore how we blindly fall into limiting patterns of behaviour and we highlight the empowering actions that are possible in each context. Distributed leadership sees an organisation as an interconnected whole where each part has unique power to contribute to the survival and vitality of the system. Oshry’s work throws new light on what constrains and enables distributed leadership.

What can you expect?

• An engaging and thought-provoking workshop.
• Experiential work and dialogue with some of the world’s leading practitioners of this approach.
• Identifying next steps to deepen your systems leadership

By the end of the workshop you will:

• Understand the impact of context on leadership behaviours and actions.
• Gain new insights into how to make distributed leadership a reality.
• Have tasted the breadth and depth of Barry Oshry’s work.

When?

1500-1700 BST, Tuesday 8 October.

This workshop time is particularly convenient for those in European, USA, Canada & South American timezones. (London BST 1500, Boston EST 1000, Chicago CST 0900, Vancouver PST 0800, Rio De Janeiro 1100).

Limited numbers, prior booking essential.

How long and where?

2 hour duration via Zoom online platform.

How much?

GBP £70 (approx USD $90). Limited bursaries available.

Who is leading the workshop?

John Watters is one of the leading authorities on Barry Oshry’s systems leadership work having worked closely with Barry Oshry for 20 years. John uses this framework in his consulting work with organisations of all sizes and sectors across the world. He specialises in working with complex challenges that involve multiple stakeholders; creating the conditions for fundamental shifts in performance and realising personal and organisational purpose. John is Managing Director of Living Leadership, Associate of Future Considerations and Senior Associate of Power+Systems.

Ali Warner is an Associate of Future Considerations and Living Leadership, and an experienced trainer in all of Barry Oshry’s frameworks. She specialises in arts-based facilitation practices including graphic harvesting, creating eye-catching hosting materials and leading voice & body work, which she offers in a wide range of contexts from large organisations to community groups. She also performs as a singer, with a particular focus on traditional song and experimental free improvisation.

Julie Beedon is Director of JBVista, an accredited trainer in the Organisation Workshop and a long-time collaborator of Barry Oshry. Julie brings a passion, energy and depth of experience in applying whole systems change principles and is a pioneer in the field of working with large groups. Julie is also a Director of the NTL UK OD Certificate Programme and on the Board of ODN Europe.

For any questions, please contact: angela@futureconsiderations.com

Participant feedback from first online ‘Empowering the Whole System’ workshop, 3 April 2019

“ Very apt and applicable to all types of organizations. And the learning is to find ways of improving clarity and communication to break the negative patterns”“The impact of the online activity – simple yet impactful”

“An interesting exercise with lots of insights to take away”

“Introduction of the core idea and research – clear, simple, thorough, friendly”

“ Interesting that it’s the same everywhere! Good to see a light at the end of the tunnel for changing how we work”.

“ We were 3 consultants from EU and US – and all saw these patterns in our client organizations”

“ That we all step in and out of these roles within our lives and there seems to be the possibility to empower ourselves in any moment by “seeing” our emergent responses and then asking what our “creative contributions” might be.

“Great event, got plenty of new ideas”

Testimonials about Barry Oshry’s Organisation Workshop

“Insightful, moving. The best training I’ve ever taken part in.”

Emma Kenny, Head of Strategy, National Citizen Service, UK

“It’s easy to underestimate the power of Oshry’s work until you have taken this workshop. It was a life changing experience. You will find instant applications to both your personal and professional life.”

Seema Malhotra, MP for Feltham and Weston, UK

“The Organisation Workshop is an astonishing and reliable process. I’ve experienced it in several different cultures and amongst very different people. It never fails to reveal the dynamics of leadership and power in organisations that are universal.”

Margaret J, Wheatley PhD, Author, Who Do you Choose to Be?

Source: Empowering the Whole System – Distributed Leadership in Action Tickets, Tue 8 Oct 2019 at 15:00 | Eventbrite

I think that if this is, as Dave Snowden claims in explaining that he set up this event, truly focused on avoiding gurus and fads (“Generally each fad provides value but suffers by (i) rejecting everything that happened in the past and (ii) seeing to claim universal applicability”), and set up to “understand differences and commonalities and in general advance the field”, then that would be a good thing.

Source: Complexity in Human Systems Symposium

Source: Complexity in Human Systems Symposium

“The systems thinking community has an ecology of approaches. How can we make sense of when and where we might apply specific theories and/or methods?”

See source for images

Source: Systems Thinking Ontario – 2019-09-16

Source: Systems Thinking Ontario – 2019-09-16

Worth going to the source to look at the comments

Source: Complicated & Complex Systems in Safety Management | Safety Differently

When General Stanley McChrystal took over the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command[1] (JSOC) in Iraq during the mid-2000s, he inherited an organisation struggling to overcome the Al Qaeda insurgency plaguing the country. After a few weeks in the job, he realised his new team had been viewing their enemy through the wrong lens, and therefore had been using the wrong strategies to defeat them. Ultimately, this insight led him to revolutionise the Command’s structure, and challenge its very core beliefs about how it could win the war.

At the heart of McChrystal’s revolutionary strategy was an appreciation for the difference between systems that are complicated and those that are complex.[2]

When people describe something as complex, what they usually mean is they think it’s really complicated. This suggests that there is a continuum of ‘complicatedness’ and that the difference between a complicated and a complex system is one of degrees, rather than type. In reality, a complex system is fundamentally different from a complicated one. It’s critical that we understand how they are different, and why this knowledge is important if our goal is to manage the safety of a system.[3]

What is a system?

A system can be defined as anything that involves ‘a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network’.[4] Examples of systems include an analogue watch, an underground rail network, an air conditioner, a business, a car, a skeleton, an aeroplane, a person, or a government. The way we think about the systems around us influences the methods we choose to solve the problems they pose.

It’s complicated

Traditional thinking tends to lead us to see all systems around us as complicated. A complicated system is usually something technical or mechanical and has many interacting parts.

Think of a jet engine. It contains thousands of mechanical parts, and to understand how it works you can read a manual that will tell you everything you need to know. If it stops working, you can take it apart, locate the broken component, replace it, and return the engine to service. This type of problem-solving works well with complicated systems because they work in a linear way, and are fully knowable (with enough study). The whole is equal to the sum of its parts.[5]

In complicated systems, unwanted events and outcomes (e.g. oil leak) are usually the direct result of component failures. The possible range of outcomes is finite because the system has been carefully designed for a specific purpose.

Unfortunately, problems start to arise when we treat complex systems as if they were complicated. This is exactly where the JSOC found themselves in the fight against Al Qaeda when McChrystal took over. They had been imagining their adversary as a traditional, hierarchical army with clear lines of vertical command and control; a complicated system. In reality, Al Qaeda was a complex web of cells interacting and operating in unpredictable ways, for which traditional battle tactics were useless.

No, it’s complex!

Complex systems are fundamentally different from their complicated cousins. They contain the same technical components (e.g. physical equipment and computers) but also consist of human elements and vast social networks.

A prime example of a complex ‘socio-technical’ system is an organisation, such as an airline. Airlines consist of many technical elements, like the aircraft and the IT, but also many forms of social systems, like management teams, frontline workforces, and customers.

Systems typically become complex by default when individuals or groups of people are added to them. Returning to the example of the jet engine – which we recognise as a complicated technical system – as soon as we decide to perform some maintenance on that engine, the new system we’ve created, ‘jet engine maintenance’, automatically becomes complex. This new system contains human, social and organisational elements (policies, procedures, culture etc.), as well as technical parts.

In complex systems, unwanted outcomes do not occur solely due to individual component failure, but most often they emerge from the unpredictable interactions between the components. For example, the way an engineer interacts with company policies, procedures, goal conflicts, organisational culture, their team, the environment, etc. when maintaining an engine.

If we think of the total aviation system, acknowledging that it is complex, then we recognise that the millions of sub-systems within it (ATC, airports, airlines, manufacturers, maintainers, etc.) will all interact with each other in complex and unpredictable ways. That means that any attempt to assert control over the system will ultimately fail because complex systems cannot be controlled in the same way that complicated ones can.

Critically, in a complex system, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts because outcomes emerge in ways that cannot be totally controlled or predicted.

McChrystal helped his team to see Al Qaeda as a complex web of unpredictable and adaptive elements. This meant employing fundamentally different strategies of battle, which ultimately led to significantly greater success in their fight.

What does this mean for how we manage safety and risk?

It’s natural and normal for us to treat complex problems as if they were complicated; to reduce them down to their parts and change out the troublesome component. This is after all how most formal education teaches us to solve problems; by ‘analytical reductionism’.

But in 21st-century airline safety, most of the time we’re dealing with human work performed by pilots, engineers, ground staff, and cabin crew. We can’t truly understand human work – how it normally goes right and sometimes go wrong – using the same methods we use to understand technical objects.

This means that when we’re looking for strategies to solve human-centred safety problems, we need to apply complex systems thinking to the task. This means avoiding the temptation to disassemble the problem to find the broken ‘component’ (human).

As safety leaders and practitioners we should use the thinking, methods, and tools that help us to understand the complex and dynamic nature of the systems we operate. We need to study the interactions, patterns and feedback loops in our systems and identify how small changes can lead to disproportionately large and unintended consequences.

Whether we’re designing new policies and procedures, investigating a maintenance error, or risk assessing a new piece of equipment, we instead need to consider safety in the context of the overall system – to think holistically and embrace complexity.

When writing about systems, one can’t finish a piece without quoting the great Russell Ackoff. A little Ackoff wisdom goes a long way:

“To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interaction of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.”

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Special_Operations_Command

[2] https://tinyurl.com/y4vcogp9

[3] https://tinyurl.com/y2ty5wkw

[4] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/system

[5] https://www.skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/2882.pdf

Source: Complicated & Complex Systems in Safety Management | Safety Differently

From what I’ve seen, there seems to be a great and positive increase in activity and engagement in the ISSS at the moment – no disrespect to past Presidents, but Peter Tuddenham seems to have kicked off a lot of activity – for example, weekly Special Interest Group Zoom calls internationally. Worth a look!

Website with membership: Register

Recent update summarising the ISSS 2019 conference and annual meeting below – some content available to members only…

Source: Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems – Open SUNY Textbooks

Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems

Author(s): Hiroki Sayama

Keep up to date on Introduction to Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems at http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~sayama/textbook/!

Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems introduces students to mathematical/computational modeling and analysis developed in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Complex Systems Science. Complex systems are systems made of a large number of microscopic components interacting with each other in nontrivial ways. Many real-world systems can be understood as complex systems, where critically important information resides in the relationships between the parts and not necessarily within the parts themselves. This textbook offers an accessible yet technically-oriented introduction to the modeling and analysis of complex systems. The topics covered include: fundamentals of modeling, basics of dynamical systems, discrete-time models, continuous-time models, bifurcations, chaos, cellular automata, continuous field models, static networks, dynamic networks, and agent-based models. Most of these topics are discussed in two chapters, one focusing on computational modeling and the other on mathematical analysis. This unique approach provides a comprehensive view of related concepts and techniques, and allows readers and instructors to flexibly choose relevant materials based on their objectives and needs. Python sample codes are provided for each modeling example.

This textbook is available for purchase in both grayscale and color via Amazon.com and CreateSpace.com.

REVIEWS:

Hiroki Sayama’s book “Introduction to the Modeling and Simulation of Complex Systems” is … a unique and welcome addition to any instructor’s collection. What makes it valuable is that it not only presents a state-of-the-art review of the domain but also serves as a gentle guide to learning the sophisticated art of modeling complex systems. –Muaz A. Niazi, Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling 2016 4:3

… Sayamaʼs book is a very good instrument for students who want to read an introductory text on modeling and analysis of complex systems, and for instructors who need such a text in simple language for their complex systems courses and projects. The book offers a good introduction to the complex systems terminology and plenty of readily available examples with technical implementation details. … Overall, Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems offers a novel pedagogical approach to the teaching of complex systems, based on examples and library code that engage students in a tutorial-style learning adventure. It is a solid tool that may become one of the primary instruments for teaching complex systems science and help the discipline to become more established in the academic world, triggering the necessary transition from a top-down tradition to a bottom-up complex systems approach.
-Stefano Nichele, Artificial Life 22(3): 424-427, 2016. www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/ARTL_r_00209

Source: Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems – Open SUNY Textbooks

I’m a bit behind with material to post here, so this is a little out-of-date, but well worth signing up for

Source: UPDATE: More News & Stuff from CoCreative

Sample from this newsletter:

Fifty fine folks joined us on August 14th for a webinar on Collaborative Innovation: What It Is, How It’s Different & Why It Works.

Couldn’t make it? Find an archived recording of the webinar on our Vimeo channel and the slide deck we used. (Please note that some of the slides are animated, so it is best viewed in “presentation” mode.)

Ruth Malan is one of the most interesting twitterers on ‘architecture that’s not buildings’ (see https://www.ruthmalan.com/)

direct link (frequently updated):

Click to access 20190629SlideDocTechnicalLeadershipDecisions.pdf