antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 5:10 am on April 14, 2018

Understanding Systems Science: A Visual and Integrative Approach – Andreas Hieronymi – 2013

Abstract

Systems thinking is considered a much‐needed competence to deal better with an increasingly interlinked and complex world. The many streams within systems science have diversified perspectives, theories and methods, but have also complicated the field as a whole. This makes it difficult to understand and master the field. Short introductions to fundamental questions of systems science are rare. This paper is divided into three parts and aims to do the following: (1) to provide a broad overview of the structure and purpose of systems science; (2) to present a set of key systems principles and relate them to theoretical streams; and (3) to describe aspects of systems‐oriented methodologies within a general process cycle. Integrative visualizations have been included to highlight the relationships between concepts, perspectives and systems thinkers. Several new attempts have been made to define and organize system concepts and streams in order to provide greater overall coherence and easier understanding. © 2013 The Author. Systems Research and Behavioral Science published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND AND PROBLEM

What skills are needed for the 21st century that have been neglected in the past? It has become increasingly clear that the problems and challenges we face are highly interlinked, complex and multidisciplinary. A comparative study (Wiek et al., 2011) came to the conclusion that one of five key competencies for a sustainable future is ‘systems thinking competence’. Peter Senge, one of the key promoters of organizational learning and systems thinking in management (1990), argues that three core capabilities are necessary: We need to increase ‘collaboration across boundaries’, ‘see systems’ as a part of larger systems and learn to ‘create a desired future’ (Senge et al., 2010, p. 44). These three challenges are closely related to the three foundational aspects of systems science explored in this paper.

The goal of this paper is to make key perspectives and concepts of systems thinking and systems science more understandable to researchers and to persons involved practically in fields such as education, consulting or management. To achieve this goal in the limited space of this paper, emphasis will be on visual maps that help us to integrate systemic knowledge from diverse streams and to highlight relations. More detailed descriptions of the concepts mentioned can be obtained in the cited references. Troncale (1985, p. 30) states ‘There is a need to make general systems theory more user‐friendly’. Among other solutions, he recommends overcoming obstacles by use of graphic techniques.

Complete paper in source:Understanding Systems Science: A Visual and Integrative Approach – Hieronymi – 2013 – Systems Research and Behavioral Science – Wiley Online Library

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 1:33 pm on April 11, 2018

Norbert Wiener’s 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found – The New York Times

In 1949, he imagined the age of robots

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 5:54 am on April 11, 2018

The Beyond Partnership Nora Bateson – Liminal Leadership – 13 & 14 June 2018 – The Beyond Partnership

Nora Bateson – Liminal Leadership – 13 & 14 June 2018

Liminal Leadership

Early Bird Price: £395+VAT= £474 includes lunches and refreshments
(Booked and paid by 16th May 2018)

Standard Price: £435+VAT= £522
(Booked and paid after 16th May 2018)

Venue: Hilton Hotel, Bath

Join the wonderful Nora Bateson for this special two day exploration into the further reaches of a new leadership.

“Whatever leadership used to be — it used to be. Now, it has to be something different. Now, we all have to be more than we were. The kind of leadership that I want to explore may not be identifiable as leadership at all. I am interested in a kind of mutually alert care and attention to the well-being of all people and ecological systems. This kind of leadership cannot be found in individuals, but rather between them. It cannot be found in organizations, nations, religions or institutions, but rather between them. I have called it Liminal Leadership to highlight the relational characteristics.”
Nora Bateson.

Liminal Leadership – The Workshop

This is the era of the in-between. In this workshop we will be attending to what keeps us stuck and trapped and what will enable us forward to fresh and more rewarding possibilities. Some of the ideas and themes we will be exploring are:

Liminal realms: the era of the in-between. We are between cultures, between the ways of living of the past, and the ways of living of the future. We have old habits that cast shadows across the visions for new becomings. Old ways of living that are premised upon exploitation of human and ecological rights are not yet gone, and new ways of living have not yet manifested. The word liminal refers to this ripe, but confusing state, mid-transformation.

What is change?: mechanistic and linear notions of change are susceptible to mechanistic and linear solutions, what other change might there be?

Symmathesy: Looking at living systems as contexts of mutual learning.

Who are we now?: Mythology of heroes, leaders and the crisis of perception. Redefining these roles for the pathways ahead.

Identity in complexity: You are an ecology of selves. Identity is at the core of our perception process. Bringing complexity to identity makes it more possible for the complexity of others to be more visible.

The Paradox of Agency: You are you, and you are your contexts.

Ecology of institutions: The institutions of our world have formed an inter-dependency that we are having difficulty extracting from. Economy, technology, medicine, education, politics, religion—these institutions are woven into each other now, and woven into our lives.

Please read this beautifully written, bold and provocative article on Liminal Leadership by Nora,

it will describe to you the territory of this workshop and the importance of this liminal approach moving forward

www.kosmosjournal.org/article/liminal-leadership

“Gregory Bateson was the great systemic thinker of the 20^th Century and his daughter Nora Bateson is one of the greatest systemic thinkers of the 21^st century, helping many of us to undertake the much needed shift in human consciousness. Wish I was able to come to the workshop – I will contact you if something cancels.”
Peter Hawkins, Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School

“It’s hard to know where to start in engaging with Nora Bateson’s work. But that matters not one jot, as long as we do just, actually, start. It seems practically impossible to achieve new ways of seeing and describing and enacting the connections and behaviour that will serve our emerging times. Nora is a pioneer in inviting us into this space, incorporating and moving beyond her inheritances from her father and other seminal, edge-place thinkers. But you have to be prepared to catch yourself doing what you always do, so don’t leave your sense of humour at home.”
Julie Allan

“Nora Bateson’s work needs to be experienced to even begin to integrate the richness it contains. The result is like being given a special lens which offers you the opportunity to see the world differently. It is truly an aesthetic form of wisdom.”
Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, authors of Metaphors in Mind

Booking Your Place

To book please email info@thebeyondpartnership.co.uk with your name and invoicing address.

Nora Bateson describes herself as an “interdisciplinary interloper” she travels between conversations in different fields and with different audiences bringing multiple perspectives into view to reveal larger patterns.

She teaches internationally, leading conversations and seminars. Currently she is developing her next film and has recently published a book about the practical application of systems thinking and complexity theory in everyday life entitled, “Small Arcs of Larger Circles”.

Nora is also a filmmaker, lecturer, writer, as well as director & producer of the award-winning documentary film, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father Gregory Bateson’s way of thinking, follow link here.

She is the president of the International Bateson Institute,(IBI), in Stockholm Sweden. The IBI brings together the sciences, arts and vocational wisdoms, to projects from around the world, that require interdisciplinary research reaching into and beyond the academic frame.

You can view Nora’s Blog postings here, these include, Practicality in Complexity and one introducing Symmathesy.

Her previous workshops for us have focused on Symmathesy: Learning & Change. We are working with her to create a new event working with Warm Data to address ‘Wicked Problems’.

Other Comments about Nora

“Brilliant.”

“Really delightful and inspiring.”

“Exceptional, extraordinary”

“Wonderful on so many levels.”

“Thought provoking and challenging…..”

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:18 am on April 11, 2018

Integrated Care Systems: Finding inspiration in unexpected places. – Systems Thinkers Anonymous

This post recounts an email discussion a few of us had about an article Chris Ham of the the Kings Fund published last month on the subject of “Integrated Care Systems”, an NHS evolution of the concept of “Accountable Care Organisations”. I shared an anonymised version of the email string with a friend in the systems/complexity community, who has an interest in the topic and he suggested I post it as a blog, so here it is.

The article in question can be found here:

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2018/02/what-does-future-hold-integrated-care-systems

It’s a good article and our critique was not of the article or the author, but rather on the approach it describes and lessons we might learn from elsewhere. As ever, the views expressed here are personal and not necessarily those of our employers, or any other organisations we’re involved with.

A conversation began

We were first made aware of the article when a group member shared it and said:

“It’s getting hard to keep up with all the changes!”

continues in source: Integrated Care Systems: Finding inspiration in unexpected places. – Systems Thinkers Anonymous

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 8:03 am on April 10, 2018

Food Systems Thinking: Dealing with Incomplete Knowledge

Harley Pope

Innovative Food Systems Teaching & Learning (IFSTAL) educational coordinator at the University of Reading. I also lecture on food security and development.

Apr 10

Food Systems Thinking: Dealing with Incomplete Knowledge

In my last blog post on food systems thinking, I highlighted three challenges that appear when we try to think about or address problems in food systems: incomplete knowledge, the limitations of human cognition, and our limited capacity to intervene. In this article, I’ll address some of the ways in which we can direct our thinking to engage more effectively in situations where our knowledge might be lacking.

When trying to consider the global food system, we’re bound to run into the issue of incomplete knowledge. As systems get larger, more complicated and complex, the less we can understand them. Moreover, what we do know is subject to greater uncertainty as we try to generalise and overextend our limited contextual knowledge into situations where it does not fit.

It’s natural to feel disheartened by this, especially given the scope and importance of problems that emerge from the different processes occurring across food systems, such as food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and all the different forms of malnutrition. However, by becoming aware of our thinking and combining this with appropriate strategies, we are able to become more effective at analysing and intervening in the types of complex problems mentioned above.

Wake up! Becoming Aware of Our Metacognition

Meta-cognition is the awareness and understanding of our own thought processes…

Continued in source: Food Systems Thinking: Dealing with Incomplete Knowledge

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 8:02 am on April 10, 2018

Learning from Nature: Kyocera’s Amoeba Management System

Transition Consciousness

Credit: Farnishk, Wikipedia Images

Slime mould is a fascinating organism to study, because it has two distinctive phases in its lifecycle. When food is plentiful, in the form of bacteria, this species exists as free-living and independent amoeba. However, as soon as food becomes scarce, something quite extraordinary happens; the previously independent amoeba begin to act as a coherent whole. After an eight-hour interphase process, some of the amoeba start to aggregate around cells, which act as centres, sending out chemical signals consisting of cAMP.

There are two forms of action. In the first instance, cells which receive the signal then repeat the signal by sending it out to other cells. In the second instance, cells receiving the signal move towards the origin of the signal. This behaviour is shown in the beautiful black and white films of biology professor emeritus John Bonner, who has studied slime mould for almost…

View original post 944 more words

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:56 am on April 10, 2018

Elevator pitch for the systems approach | CSL4D – Sjon van ‘t Hof

Elevator pitch for the systems approach

Posted on April 10, 2018by Sjon van ’t Hof

In our working lives and beyond we are increasingly faced with ill-structured complexities that defy conventional problem solving methods. Underlying assumptions, scope, purposes, patterns, mechanisms, and their relevance or significance must be critically examined and so should the selection of people who can best contribute to this critique. A well-founded methodology for doing so is the dialectical systems approach of Churchman, an American philosopher and management scientist who lived from 1913 to 2004. A powerful step-by-step method for learning Churchman’s approach is described in “Wicked Solutions: a systems approach to complex problems.” This method provides (1) a common framework and vocabulary to (2) structure complex organizational and business problems and develop (3) innovative, effective ways to address them. It is (4) a highly generic approach suited to a broad range of team learning conditions. It also introduces learners to (5) critical and systems thinking, generally. The approach is well suited for (6) integration in secondary and tertiary curriculum. No student should leave college or university without critical working knowledge of the general characteristics of ill-structured, wicked problems and one or more generic methods to address them. (First approximation, 180 words).

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:47 am on April 10, 2018

The Systems View of Life: Dr Fritjof Capra delivers the second Annual Mike Jackson Lecture on Systems Thinking, Hull University 17 April 2018

17 April 2018, 6-7:30pm

Allam Lecture Theatre, Hull University Business School

BOOK NOW

The Centre for Systems Studies invites you to the second Annual Mike Jackson Lecture on Systems Thinking to be delivered by Dr Fritjof Capra, the internationally celebrated award winning writer, scientist, educator and activist.

This year’s lecture is about the cultural transformation that is taking place in science and society as we are confronted with the grand challenge of our times: to build and nurture sustainable communities in the midst of the current global crisis.

Capra maintains that ‘There are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and society, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican revolution. Unfortunately, this realisation has not yet dawned on most of our political leaders, who are unable to “connect the dots,” to use a popular phrase.’

He will take us through the new understanding of life in terms of complexity, networks, and patterns of organisation that have emerged at the forefront of science, leading to a new vision of reality and a new understanding of the social implications of this cultural transformation for dealing with our global ecological crisis and the continuation of life on Earth.

The Annual Mike Jackson Lecture has been made possible by the support of University of Hull honorary graduate, Dr Andrew Chen. It is in recognition of the work of Professor Mike Jackson OBE, founding Dean of Hull University Business School, who served from 1999 until 2011 and is world-renowned for his work applying systems thinking to management.

About the Speaker

Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California and serves on the Council of Earth Charter International. He is the author of several international bestsellers, including The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, and The Hidden Connections. He has coauthored, with Pier Luigi Luisi, the multidisciplinary textbook, The Systems View of Life, on which his online course (www.capracourse.net) is based.

Capra was the first subject of the BBC’s documentary series, Beautiful Minds, and is the focus of over 60 television interviews and documentaries in Europe, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Japan. He has featured in major newspapers and magazines internationally. His many awards include the American Book Award, Medal of the President of the Italian Republic, Gold Medal of the UK Systems Society, the Media Ecology Association’s Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Leonardo da Vinci Medallion of Honor, Bioneers Award, New Dimensions Broadcaster Award, and the Gold IndieFab Award from Foreword Reviews.

About The Centre for Systems Studies

The Centre for Systems Studies is the Faculty for Business, Law and Politics nexus for inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research on complex socio-economic systems. As an international centre of excellence for ground breaking research on systems thinking and practice, the Centre has strong links with other research institutes and with practitioners in public, private and third-sector organisations.

The Centre’s research is concerned with advancing the understanding of systemic phenomena in our inter-connected world– from the emergence of local community action and business ecosystems through to the impact of global policy interventions and climate change. This work is critical for addressing complex problem situations and anticipating the (often unintended) consequences of interventions, and for designing structures, actions and strategies for innovation, resilience and sustainability in dynamic contexts.

Free admission. Please register here.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:28 am on April 10, 2018

Tony Blair, numbers and the taste of orange peel: Practical applications of embodied cognition • Meaning Guide

Something I’ve noticed from interviewing leaders is the number of times they use numbers in their answers. “There are four things you need to understand about that.” “I’ll give you two – no wait – three, examples.” “Two things to mention here …” And so on. It sounds planned, but it’s usually impromptu. It’s like […]

Source: Tony Blair, numbers and the taste of orange peel: Practical applications of embodied cognition • Meaning Guide

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:23 am on April 10, 2018

The Great Strength and Debilitating Weakness of Modern Medicine… and Management | Henry Mintzberg

The Great Strength and Debilitating Weakness of Modern Medicine… and Management

30 March 2018

Medicine has made profound advances in treating many diseases, but in its great strength lies its debilitating weakness.

Organizing for Professional Work

To understand this, consider how professional work tends to be organized. Much of it is rather standardized, carried out by highly-trained people with a good deal of individual autonomy—at least from their colleagues, if not from the professional associations that set their standards. Just as the musicians of a symphony orchestra play in harmony while each plays to the notes written for his or her instrument, so too can a surgeon and anesthetist spend hours in an operating room without exchanging a single word. By virtue of their training, each knows exactly what to expect of the other.

Accordingly, much of modern medicine does not solve problems in an open-ended way so much as categorize patients’ conditions in a restricted way. Each is slotted into an established category of disease—a process known as diagnosis—to which an established, ideally evidence-based treatment—referred to as a set of protocols—can be applied.

This standardization is not, however, absolute: it takes the form of tailored customization. (See our article Customizing Customization.) The predetermined standards—those protocols—are tailored to the condition in question. The patient presents with a pain in the chest; the diagnosis indicates a blocked artery; a particular stent is installed in a particular place; and an administrative box is ticked so that a standard payment can be made.

Misfits

The great strength of modern medicine lies in the fits that work. The patient enters the hospital with a diseased heart and leaves soon after with a repaired one. But where the fit fails can be found modern medicine’s debilitating weakness. Fits fail, more often than generally realized, beyond the categories, across the categories, and beneath the categories.

Beyond the categories lie those illnesses that fit into no predetermined category of disease. The patient may not be treated at all—indeed, sometimes dismissed as a hypochondriac—or forced into an inadequate, if convenient, category. Think about IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), a label for ignorance, or some auto-immune conditions.

Across the categories fall those patients with multiple conditions that fit several disease categories concurrently. If these can be treated sequentially, the professional model of organizing is preserved. He or she is sent from one specialist to another. But where the conditions interact in more complex ways, as in many geriatric cases, more open-ended, collaborative problem-solving can be required. (The chief of geriatrics in a Montreal hospital, big on teamwork, used to say that a physiotherapist was their best diagnostician.) While geriatric departments may be encouraged to engage in such collaboration, much of the rest of medicine, where multiple diseases implicate different departments, each grinding in its own mill, does not. How often do we hear from frustrated patients: “Why can’t they just speak with each other, instead of passing around these little notes while I am being asked to describe my condition again and again?”

Beneath the categories lies a misfit that is no less common, or significant, than the other two. The fit is correct, but insufficient for effective treatment. Here medicine has to get past the “patient”, to the person.

Dr. Atul Gawande, in a New Yorker article entitled “The Bell Curve” (6 December 2004), reported on his observation of a renowned cystic fibrosis physician. He wrote the protocols that others used, yet had much better results. Meeting a young woman, and seeing a reduced measure of lung-function, he asked if she was taking her treatments. She said that she was. But he probed further, to discover that she had a new boyfriend and a new job that were getting in the way of taking those treatments. Together they figured out how she could alter her schedule.

Here, then, lay the good doctor’s secret: he treated the person and not just the patient, by delving beneath the medical context, to her personal situation.

Management and Medicine Alike

Of course, too much contemporary administration hardly encourages this kind of probing. If the administration of that doctor’s hospital was managing in the modern way, it may have questioned why he was spending so much time with this one patient. True she might live longer, but how to measure that in a budgeting system focussed on current expenditures?

Before any physician jumps on this point with great glee, he or she would do well to recognize that the management weakness here is not fundamentally different from that of medicine. Both suffer from an excessive tendency to categorize, commodify, and calculate—indeed, much like the rest of modern society. (See my TWOG on pat and playful puzzles.) Are managers who claim that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” any more sensible than physicians who claim that “If it’s not evidence-based, it’s not proper medicine”? Subscribing to either canon would close down both management and medicine.

Evidence-guided medicine is fine, as is evidence-guided management. That good doctor used the evidence presented to him. But he probed beneath it, to that woman’s experience. Within and across the categories called medicine and management, physicians and administrators alike would do well to get past their common debilitating weakness, to engage collaboratively for better health care.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:19 am on April 10, 2018
Tags: MeToo

Opinion | The New Power Structure – The New York Times

The New Power Structure

The concepts binding successful new social movements are clear, emotional and concrete.CreditTed S. Warren/Associated Press

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

April 5, 2018

Once upon a time, power was held in the hands of a small elite. This elite occupied the commanding heights of society and controlled big, top-down organizations. It dropped products and messages from on high, and the rest of us passively consumed them.

Then along came the internet. Suddenly, information was dispersed across self-organizing, open-source networks of citizens who had the ability to collaborate, share and shape their world. Hierarchies were smashed, the wisdom of crowd was applied and transparency reigned.

O.K. That didn’t really happen. The first dreams of the tech revolution didn’t come true. Sometimes it seems power was just redistributed from one set of massive organizations to others — Amazon, Facebook, Spotify.

But something has changed. We have seen an explosion of new social organisms that don’t look like the old ones: Airbnb, Etsy, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Blockchain. If power in the Greatest Generation looked like Organization Men running big institutions, and power for the boomers looked like mass movements organized by charismatic leaders like Steve Jobs and Barack Obama, power these days looks like decentralized networks in which everyone is a leader and there’s no dominating idol.

Ccontinues in source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/the-new-power-structure.html

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:18 am on April 10, 2018

Peter Kaufman on The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking: Transcript – Latticework Investing

Peter Kaufman on The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking: Transcript

APRIL 6, 2018 / RICHARD LEWIS

Last week I had the great pleasure of attending a talk by Peter Kaufman on the Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking. I would like to thank Mr. Kaufman for delivering such an engaging and insightful talk. His ‘three bucket’ approach to implementing and understanding multidisciplinary thinking is an immensely powerful tool. I hope you all find it equally compelling.

I transcribed the full event from my audio recording which you may listen to on SoundCloud. Throughout the transcript you will find;

Time stamps, each linked to its corresponding recording location.
Links to relevant supporting information.

Furthermore, I’d like to thank Spencer Hoff, President of the Cal Poly Pomona Economics Club, who graciously invited the Latticework Investing Community to attend. I would also like to thank the Cal Poly Pomona Economics Club for hosting such a great event.

(Note: If you’d like to receive email notifications regarding any future events, please subscribe. Also, please note that I’ve been unable to send direct emails to ‘@qq.com’ email addresses. So please register using a different account if possible.)

Transcript: Peter Kaufman on The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking

0:00 Talk Begins

Spencer Hoff: Thank you for coming. Today we’ve got Mr. Peter Kaufman, CEO of Glenair, who wrote this book, Poor Charlie’s Almanac about Charlie Munger. It’s an excellent book, best book I’ve ever read by far in my life. He serves on the board of Daily Journal with Mr. Charlie Munger and he’s going to give us a few words today. So please welcome Mr. Peter Kaufman everybody.

0:26

Peter Kaufman: Thank you. Now I’m happy to talk about a subject. I was asked to talk about the multidisciplinary approach to thinking. So I’ll start out with that. But if you guys get bored or something and say ‘Well I thought we were supposed to have fun listening to this today.’ You can raise your hand and say ‘Could you talk about leadership or team building or business strategy or ethics or something else?’ I gave a talk recently at Google, in fact I’ve given three talks at Google. And the first talk I gave they said ‘What are you going to talk about?’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you want to talk about?’ They said, ‘About whatever you want. What do you usually talk about?’ Well I usually talk about leadership, culture, team building, strategy, ethics. And they said, ‘We don’t hear about that team building crap. We get that all the time. We want to hear about self-improvement.’ So I will mix in with our multidisciplinary topic a little bit of self-improvement as well. Is that OK? OK.

So why is it important to be a multidisciplinary thinker? The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (link 1, 2, 3) who said, ‘To understand is to know what to do.’ Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that? And yet it’s a genius line, to understand is to know what to do. How many mistakes you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, ‘The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.’ You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your well, but how are you going to make any good decisions in life…the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life…if all you know is one well?

Continues in source: Peter Kaufman on The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking: Transcript – Latticework Investing

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:14 am on April 10, 2018

Lights, camera…and ACTION! | Squire to the Giants

April 10, 2018

Clapper board My last post explained the thinking behind the softening of systems thinking – to include the reality of human beings into the mix.

I ended by noting that this naturally leads on to the hugely important question of how interventions into social systems (i.e. attempts at improving them) should be approached…

What’s the difference between…?

The word ‘Science’ is a big one! It breaks down into several major branches, which are often set out as the:

Natural sciences – the study of natural phenomena;
Formal sciences – the study of Mathematics and Logic; and
Social sciences – the study of human behaviour, and social patterns.

Natural science can be further broken down into the familiar fields of the Physical sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Earth Science and Astronomy) and the Life sciences(a.k.a Biology).

The aim of scientists working in the natural science domain is to uncover and explain the rules that govern the Universe, and this is done by applying the scientific method (using experimentation¹) to their research.

The key to any and every advancement in the Natural sciences is that an experiment that has supposedly added to our ‘body of knowledge’ (i.e. found out something new) must be:

Repeatable – you could do it again (and again and again) and get the same result; and
Reproduceable – someone else could carry out your method and arrive at the same findings.

This explains why all ‘good science’ must have been subjected to peer review – i.e. robust review by several independent and objective experts in the field in question.

“Erm, okay…thanks for the ‘lecture’…but so what?!”

Continued in source: Lights, camera…and ACTION! | Squire to the Giants

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:10 am on April 10, 2018

The Organisational Homelessness of ‘Human Factors’ | Humanistic Systems

[I put this here both because I think ‘Human Factors’ and the whole safety industry has a lot of good stuff to say about systems, meaning-making etc – and because this reflects on the ‘homelessness’ of systems thinking too]

Most fields of professional activity have a settled home within the divisional and departmental structures of organisations. Operational staff work in operational divisions. Engineering staff work …

Source: The Organisational Homelessness of ‘Human Factors’ | Humanistic Systems

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 1:28 pm on April 9, 2018

‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene | World news | The Guardian

The long read: Timothy Morton wants humanity to give up some of its core beliefs, from the fantasy that we can control the planet to the notion that we are ‘above’ other beings. His ideas might sound weird, but they’re catching on…