Nice intro
An Introduction to the Viable Systems Model – Robert Lamb
Author Archives: antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor
Complexity Spectacles – Experiential initiations into complexity thinking – 8-12 April 2019, De Elegast (Nijmegen, Netherlands)
Source: Complexity Spectacles | Whitemergence
Whitemergence
Complexity Spectacles & You!
Complexity Spectacles
The phenomenon complexity manifests in many appearances. Complex spectacles invites you to interactively meet many of them throughout a five-day immersive experience. You will be challenged to investigate the many meanings in relation to your own situations and interests. This approach asks for a profound commitment and engagement of you as a participant. Throughout this joint endeavour you will learn to look through complexity spectacles. These are glasses that aspire to broaden and enrich the way you envisage the complexity of human organising in relation to the world around and aim to help you navigate complex dilemmas in the future.
& You!
The second part of this five-day session starts from you as a person, it aims to give you a new perspective on your personal key questions. You will explore how you want to relate to the complexity of life: how to deal with wicked personal problems and how you want to be meaningful in a complex world.
Join the first Complexity Spectacles ever! 8-12 April 2019
Program and approach
- Part 1 – Monday and Tuesday – Spectacles
The general approach of the first two days is an organic interplay between experiences, theory and making meaning. Compilations of information, thoughts and activities constitute small modules, each addressing certain topics, phenomena and many interrelated concepts. Profound commitment is asked from the participants, however, the modular approach provides you to dynamically check in and out. The whole is a dynamic and associative interweaving of many theoretical concepts related to real life. - Wednesday – Passage to part 2
Between the two parts of the course, there will be a one-day experimental open space to harvest and share insights, experiences and ideas. There is also the possibility for new participants to join the group for the rest of the week.
Besides that you will explore, develop and refine your core personal questions. These questions will be taken to the second part. - Part 2 – Thursday and Friday – You!
What does it mean to act wise in a complex world? Throughout a journey, also outside of the domain, we will search for answers.
Information
liesbeth@whitemergence.org
+32 484 133 212
CFP | ISTC 2019 | Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in the 21st Century
Call for papers to the 19th International Social Theory Consortium conference ISTC 2019 on “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in the 21st Century: System as the future of modern society?”
Co-organizers:
- Harry F. Dahms, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA*
- Steffen Roth, La Rochelle Business School, France, and Kazimieras Simonavičius University in Vilnius, Lithuania*
- Ilaria Riccioni, Free University of Bolzano, Italy
- Frank Welz, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Date: 5-7 June 2019
Venue:Inter-University Center Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik, Croatia
Paper submission: Per email to the corresponding co-organizers (*). Deadline: 15 March 2019.
The theme of this year’s conference pertains to affinities and complementarities between systems theory and critical theory for purposes of analyzing modern societies in the twenty-first century as social systems whose stability, functioning and future increasingly is in doubt. Conventionally, critical theory and systems theory have been regarded and treated as mutually exclusive treatments and modes of analyzing of societies undergoing transitions from premodern to postmodern conditions. …
View original post 432 more words
Prisoner of a Heartless Ideology: Part II – Barry Oshry
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/prisoner-heartless-ideology-part-ii-barry-oshry/
Prisoner of a Heartless Ideology: Part II
Power is the drive of human systems (nations) to individuate, that is, for the system parts – individuals and groups – to function independently of one another, to go their separate ways. And, as the parts go their separate ways, they tend to differentiate, they become more different from one another. The Power state of systems is characterized by freedom, energy, competition, variety, innovation, and growth.
Love is the drive of systems (nations) to integrate, for the parts to come together as interacting components of an integrated whole. And, as the parts come together in common effort, they tend to homogenize, developing more commonality with one another. The Love state of systems is characterized by togetherness, cooperation, uniformity, oneness of purpose.
Nations survive by developing a balance between Power and Love processes, and what differentiates one nation from another is the balance and intensity with which these processes are expressed.
Systems self-destruct when one process totally drives out the other.
Anarchy develops when Power completely drives out Love. The welfare of the parts supersedes the welfare of the system. Parts lose their commonality with one another. Competition devolves into warfare and internal struggles for survival. The system as a whole dis-integrates.
Totalitarianism develops when Love completely drives out Power. Freedom is suppressed in the service of cooperation. Difference is suppressed in the service of uniformity. Individuality, entrepreneurism, and innovation are suppressed, as is the human spirit. The systems collapses under its own weight.
Ideological struggles. Warfare develops as humans attach values to the neutral processes of Power and Love, seeing one as the good and the other as evil.
The advocates of Power champion Power as freedom and liberty, and they see Love as all that crushes freedom and liberty.
The advocates of Love champion Love as equality, community, and unity, and they see Power as all that destroys equality, community, and unity.
Both advocates are correct in one respect. Power and Love have their creative and destructive properties. Power can and has destroyed community, equality, and unity. (See the hollowed-out cities, the growing inequality, and divisiveness in the US and other western societies.) And Love can and has crushed freedom and liberty. (See the history of communist nations.)
No system is pain free. Even in balanced societies – systems of Love and Power – Power both liberates individuals and groups and it weakens and destroys community and leads to inequality and divisiveness.
And Love both creates equality and mutuality and #it suppresses freedom and independence.
So, for example, both the US and Scandinavian countries are balanced systems; Scandinavian countries are weighted more on Love, resulting in less inequality at a cost of some freedom; the US is weighted more on Power, resulting in more freedom at the cost of inequality and divisiveness.
That complexity of system life is just how it is.
Advocates tend to stress the creative aspect of Love or Power while denying or ignoring the destructive consequences.
It is paradoxical that, in their ideological purity, prisoners of heartless ideologies insist on destroying the very processes that are essential to system balance and survival.
[1]For those unfamiliar with my work on whole system processes, see Barry Oshry, Context Context Context,Axminster, U.K., Triarchy Press, 2018
Complex Systems in Transition – Stellenbosch Centre for Complex Systems in Transition
A journey towards becoming a systemic practitioner: becoming a project manager and an educationalist – Ian Joseph Cammack
The ‘Cammack toolkit’ available as a pdf on here is a nice guide to reflective practice.
A journey towards becoming a systemic practitioner: becoming a project manager and an educationalist
- HDL HANDLE:
- http://hdl.handle.net/10547/337220
- TITLE:
- A journey towards becoming a systemic practitioner: becoming a project manager and an educationalist
- AUTHORS:
- ABSTRACT:
- This thesis is a systemic examination of my practice as an educator specialising in the development of early career project managers. This inquiry is conducted through an internal inquiry into my living theory and an externally focussed inquiry into the journey that the early career project managers take to becoming a project manager. Four broad foci of my living theory are identified, ‘Soft Systems Methodology’, ‘Action Learning’, ‘Reflective Practice’ and ‘Systemic Practice’. These are discussed in order to consciously consider the foundations of my practice and to identify areas where the practice has been eroded through familiarity and developed through innovation. The external inquiry draws on three sources of qualitative data. The first two sources of data explore the experiences of students enrolled on the MSc in Project Management at Lancaster University during an action learning project. These two sources are an analysis of ‘word clouds’ and ‘critical incidents‘ presented in the dissertations that reflect on these projects. The third source of data is a series of interviews held with alumni of the MSc in Project Management at Lancaster University. These two areas of inquiry combine to present a framework for project management practitioner education that comprises of three broad areas of development. These areas of development align to the ‘ways of knowing’, ‘ways of doing’ and ‘ways of being’. The ways of knowing zone is made up of the development of a systematic approach to project management. This zone is complemented by the ‘ways of doing’ that looks at the development of this systematic perspective through the development of a range of analytical and social skills. It is suggested that systemic eloquence may be gained by enhancing the ‘ways of knowing’ and ‘ways of doing’ with a systemic perspective that encompasses relational dispositions to the practice of project management. This relational disposition covers the ways in which project managers learn to understand the dynamics of the problem situations that they co-create with their stakeholders. Furthermore, it is noted that the development of project management practitioners should be facilitated through their experience in the practice of projects. This ‘hands on’ engagement combined with an approach to self-development founded on reflective practice helps to develop people capable of delivering projects rather than talking about the delivery of projects.
- CITATION:
- Cammack, I.J. (2013) ‘A journey towards becoming a systemic practitioner: becoming a project manager and an educationalist’. PhD thesis. University of Bedfordshire.
- PUBLISHER:
- ISSUE DATE:
- Jan-2013
- URI:
- http://hdl.handle.net/10547/337220
- TYPE:
- Thesis or dissertation
- LANGUAGE:
- en
- DESCRIPTION:
- A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Professional Doctorate in Systemic Practice
- APPEARS IN COLLECTIONS:
Complexity Explorer – Fractals and Scaling course starts 15 January
Source: Complexity Explorer
About the Course:We will begin by viewing fractals as self-similar geometric objects such as trees, ferns, clouds, mountain ranges, and river basins. Fractals are scale-free, in the sense that there is not a typical length or time scale that captures their features. A tree, for example, is made up of branches, off of which are smaller branches, off of which are smaller branches, and so on. Fractals thus look similar, regardless of the scale at which they are viewed. Fractals are often characterized by their dimension. You will learn what it means to say that an object is 1.6 dimensional and how to calculate the dimension for different types of fractals.
In addition to physical objects, fractals are used to describe distributions resulting from processes that unfold in space and/or time. Earthquake severity, the frequency of words in texts, the sizes of cities, and the number of links to websites are all examples of quantities described by fractal distributions of this sort, known as power laws. Phenomena described by such distributions are said to scale or exhibit scaling, because there is a statistical relationship that is constant across scales.
We will look at power laws in some detail and will give an overview of modern statistical techniques for calculating power law exponents. We will also look more generally at fat-tailed distributions, a class of distributions of which power laws are a subset. Next we will turn our attention to learning about some of the many processes that can generate fractals. Finally, we will critically examine some recent applications of fractals and scaling in natural and social systems, including metabolic scaling and urban scaling. These are, arguably, among the most successful and surprising areas of application of fractals and scaling. They are also areas of current scientific activity and debate.
This course is intended for anyone who is interested in an overview of how ideas from fractals and scaling are used to study complex systems. The course will make use of basic algebra, but potentially difficult topics will be reviewed, and help is available in the course discussion form. There will be optional units for more mathematically advanced students and pointers to additional resources for those who want to dig deeper.
Course Outline
1. Introduction to fractals. Self-similarity dimension. Review of logarithms and exponents.
2. Box-counting dimension. Further examples of fractals. Stochastic fractals.
3. Power laws and their relation to fractals. Rank-frequency plots. How to estimate power law exponents.
4. Empirical examples of power laws. Other long-tailed distributions: log normals and stretched exponentials. Implications of long tails.
5. Mechanisms for generating power laws. Rich-get-richer phenomena. Phase transitions. Other mechanisms.
6. Metabolic scaling. West-Brown-Enquist scaling theory.
7. Urban scaling.
About the Instructor(s):
David Feldman is Professor of Physics and Mathematics at College of the Atlantic. From 2004-2009 he was a faculty member in the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School in Beijing, China. He served as the school’s co-director from 2006-2009. Dave is the author of Chaos and Fractals: An Elementary Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012), a textbook on chaos and fractals for students with a background in high school algebra. He has thrice offered a MOOC on Chaos and Dynamical systems on the Complexity Explorer site, in addition to this MOOC. Dave was a U.S. Fulbright Lecturer in Rwanda in 2011-12.
Casey Acklin is a graduate of College of the Atlantic, where he studied neuroscience and anthropology from 2011-2015 and frequently worked with Dave Feldman as both a student and a teaching assistant. After graduation he worked at The Jackson Laboratory studying Alzheimer’s disease, and now plans to serve for one year as an AmeriCorps VISTA member working with the Dementia Engagement, Education, and Research program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Casey likes to say: “A day without math is like a day without sunshine!”
What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life.
Complexity and Management Conference – 17th– 19th May 2019, Roffey Park Institute.
One of the difficulties of thinking, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is that it tends to unravel things. Next year’s conference will address a theme which has come up again and again in previous conferences, the degree to which questioning, particularly of our own assumptions and value positions, can unsettle. It’s not always easy to question what’s going on, particularly in organisations which encourage us to align and be positive, but what are the ethical consequences of not doing so?
In a recent piece of research carried out for LFHE/Advance HE, we discovered that senior managers in Higher Education establishments may feel conflicted about some of the change projects they are responsible for. Keen to do a good job on the one hand, on the other they may also entertain doubts about the long-term effects…
View original post 312 more words
Chris Beiser on Twitter… the role that complex systems theory played in letting Xi Jinping centralize power in China… with cybernetics. https://t.co/NqPXKdlnHk
via @meaningness
One thing that makes this a great paper is that it makes clear that at the highest level, faith in centralization comes from the idea that feedback loops can replace participatory mechanisms. (I mentioned Qian Xuesen’s OCGS the other week—here’s what the party thinks)
The idea of the OCGS is a particular type of system which is problematic for science: too many variables, no fixed boundaries with the outside, the systems themselves are in flux. This is much like what design thinking refers to as a “wicked problem.”
Chris Beiser @ctbeiser
Qian identifies failures of authoritarian high modern thought, and then proposes that feedback loops and modeling can make solve them—including in the social sciences.
Interestingly, this claim rests largely on the esteem of AI researchers working on expert systems, immediately before the AI winter. Around the time this paper was published, everything in that space was imploding. Perhaps Xi Jinping should have read @Meaningness.
Chris Beiser @ctbeiser
Now, what has Xi Jinping brought back with his newfound certainty through cybernetics? One that OP misses is Mass Line Theory. The Wang Shaoguang essay I linked the other day gives it’s best defense as a mode of representation: https://www.readingthechinadream.com/wang-shaoguang-representative-and-representational-democracy.html …
The mass line was a mao-era process by which revolution was carried out. In short: 1. Listen to the people’s unsystematic complaints. Directly. 2. Systematize them 3. Sell those back to the people 4. Use the people’s energy as a way to enact that state and reap political capital.
Xi Jinping has been reviving the theory—with the distinction that the fourth step is gone. Instead, the policy is pitched as an iterative process by which government realizes the people’s desires. ie—cybernetic governance.
Chris Beiser @ctbeiser
And apparently, that pitch was what convinced the party elites that in spite of some bad results from strong central leaders in the past, Xi’s plan for centralization could go differently. I’d love to know what they think now.
Chris Beiser @ctbeiser
I wanted to talk about mass line governance and the details of the OCGS, but you should definitely read @Scholars_Stage‘s thread linked at top, which is much more comprehensive.
PS: worth reading up on Qian’s life: 
Co-founded JPL 
Becomes a prof at Caltech 
Is deported to China on false suspicion of being communist 
Builds the Chinese nuclear and space programs 
Invigorates a generation of CCP thought with the OCGS
Chris Beiser @ctbeiser
(If one wanted a worst case on unexpected consequences from “trying to keep defense infrastructure away from Chinese nationals”—a popular topic these days—you could hardly imagine a clearer case study.)
End of conversation
New conversation
iinteresting, the bear case on democracy has always been about the improvement in other systems of feedback loops making it no longer the efficient frontier on legibility and synchronicity
Kevin Kwok @kevinakwok
Damn, seems some of these links quoted and replied are paywalled, do you have shareable folder of them somewhere?
The paper in OP is on sci-hub; the Qian Xuesen one I link here:
One more: Qian Xuesen’s “A New Discipline of Science The Study of Open Complex Giant System and Its Methodology”, in which a leading Chinese rocket scientist solves “wicked problems” with cybernetics. Apparently hugely influential. …
Please clone Xi and have him reform US medicine using systems theory. Also clone him and have him teach me how to get promoted using systems theory. Thanks.
The Simplicity of Complexity with Peter Sloot
Ralph Stacey on complex responsive processes
This video is a very poor quality recording of Ralph Stacey giving his last exposition of complex responsive processes at the Complexity and Management Conference June 2018 before his retirement.
Apologies for both sound and picture quality.
Complexity and Self-Organization | Frontiers Research Topic
Complexity occurs when relevant interactions prevent the study of elements of a system in isolation. These interactions between elements may lead to the self-organization of the system. In computational intelligence, complexity and self-organization have been studied and exploited with different purposes. This Research Topic aims to bring together novel research into a coherent collection, spanning from theory and methods to simulations and applications.
Computational measures of complexity and self-organization have been proposed and applied to study a broad range of phenomena. Methodologies for facing complexity and harnessing self-organization have been used to design and build a variety of systems. Computer simulations have been tools which enabled us to study complexity and self-organization, from cellular automata and artificial neural networks to multi-agent systems and computational social science. The applications of these approaches have been vast.
Considering that complexity and self-organization are very broad themes, this Research Topic focusses only on the…
View original post 18 more words
Managing the unexpected in megaprojects: riding the waves of resilience | International Journal of Managing Projects in Business | Ahead of Print – Andreas G.M. Nachbagauer
via Ivo Velitchkov – can’t find free version (yet)
Managing the unexpected in megaprojects: riding the waves of resilience
- Author(s):
-
-
Abstract
Risk management and uncertainty in megaprojects is a flourishing topic in project management, while the unexpected is still a neglected matter. The purpose of this paper is to offer conceptual clarifications of the unexpected based on second-order-cybernetics and systems theory. While transferring findings from organisation theory to project management, the article provides fresh insights into managing the unexpected in megaprojects.
Design/methodology/approach
Being grounded on constructionism and systems theory, the conceptual paper explores selected research approaches from organisation theory: research on high-reliability organising, organisational resilience and organisational improvising, on contributions to managing the unexpected in megaprojects. Using the framework of meaning i.e. the factual, social and temporal dimensions, challenges of handling the unexpected are analysed and (effects of) decision-making structures for such projects are defined.
Findings
This paper argues that classic project management, while neglecting the fundamental distinction between risk, uncertainty and the unexpected, sticks to a planning-and-controlling approach. But the unexpected cannot be planned; however, organisations and managers can prepare for the unexpected. This requests a balance between structure and self-organisation in planning, communication, hierarchy and organisational culture. Understanding the contradictions inherent in managing megaprojects allows for smart decision-making when riding the waves of resilience.
Originality/value
The study adds to the literature on complexity and uncertainty in project management by enhancing the view to include the unexpected. While rejecting the universal applicability of rationality-based risk and controlling conceptions, shifting to second-order cybernetics and integrating elements of resilient organising increases the understanding of handling the unexpected in megaprojects.
- Keywords:
- Uncertainty, Resilience, Megaprojects, Project complexity
- Type:
- Conceptual paper
- Publisher:
- Emerald Publishing Limited
- Received:
- 29 August 2018
- Revised:
- 29 August 2018
- Accepted:
- 03 December 2018
- Acknowledgments:
-
This paper is based on research within the project “Der Beitrag der Human-Factors-Forschung zum Management von Unsicherheit in projektorientierten Organisationen” (“The contribution of Human factors research for managing uncertainty in projectoriented organisations”) funded by the City of Vienna/Austria, MA 23. A previous version of this paper was submitted to the Special Topic Track on “Managing Major and Mega Projects: The Importance to Broaden Classical Project Management Approaches” at EURAM 2018.
Copyright:© Emerald Publishing Limited 2019
Published by Emerald Publishing Limited
Licensed re-use rights only
- Citation:
- Andreas G.M. Nachbagauer, Iris Schirl-Boeck, (2019) “Managing the unexpected in megaprojects: riding the waves of resilience”, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-08-2018-0169
Downloads:The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 6 times since 2019
Complex Systems Summer School | Santa Fe Institute
The SFI Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS) offers an intensive 4-week introduction to complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems. Lectures are taught by the faculty of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and other leading educators and scholars. The school is for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professionals seeking to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, take intellectual risks, and ask big questions about complex systems.
The program consists of an intensive series of lectures, labs, and discussions focusing on foundational concepts, tools, and current topics in complexity science. These include nonlinear dynamics, scaling theory, information theory, adaptation and evolution, networks, machine learning, agent-based models, and other topical areas and case studies. Participants collaborate in developing novel research projects throughout the four weeks of the program that culminate in final presentations and papers.
Begins: Jun 09 2019
Ends: Jul 05 2019
Deadline extension: now Thursday, January 31.
Source: www.santafe.edu
Morphogenesis in robot swarms
Morphogenesis allows millions of cells to self-organize into intricate structures with a wide variety of functional shapes during embryonic development. This process emerges from local interactions of cells under the control of gene circuits that are identical in every cell, robust to intrinsic noise, and adaptable to changing environments. Constructing human technology with these properties presents an important opportunity in swarm robotic applications ranging from construction to exploration. Morphogenesis in nature may use two different approaches: hierarchical, top-down control or spontaneously self-organizing dynamics such as reaction-diffusion Turing patterns. Here, we provide a demonstration of purely self-organizing behaviors to create emergent morphologies in large swarms of real robots. The robots achieve this collective organization without any self-localization and instead rely entirely on local interactions with neighbors. Results show swarms of 300 robots that self-construct organic and adaptable shapes that are robust to damage. This is a step toward the emergence of…
View original post 48 more words
Systems Community of Inquiry 
You must be logged in to post a comment.