Author Archives: antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 11:00 am on September 6, 2018  

Principles of Chaos Engineering

PRINCIPLES OF CHAOS ENGINEERING

Last Update: 2018 May

Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system
in order to build confidence in the system’s capability
to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

Advances in large-scale, distributed software systems are changing the game for software engineering.  As an industry, we are quick to adopt practices that increase flexibility of development and velocity of deployment.  An urgent question follows on the heels of these benefits: How much confidence we can have in the complex systems that we put into production?

Even when all of the individual services in a distributed system are functioning properly, the interactions between those services can cause unpredictable outcomes.  Unpredictable outcomes, compounded by rare but disruptive real-world events that affect production environments, make these distributed systems inherently chaotic.

We need to identify weaknesses before they manifest in system-wide, aberrant behaviors.  Systemic weaknesses could take the form of: improper fallback settings when a service is unavailable; retry storms from improperly tuned timeouts; outages when a downstream dependency receives too much traffic; cascading failures when a single point of failure crashes; etc.  We must address the most significant weaknesses proactively, before they affect our customers in production.  We need a way to manage the chaos inherent in these systems, take advantage of increasing flexibility and velocity, and have confidence in our production deployments despite the complexity that they represent.

An empirical, systems-based approach addresses the chaos in distributed systems at scale and builds confidence in the ability of those systems to withstand realistic conditions.  We learn about the behavior of a distributed system by observing it during a controlled experiment.  We call this Chaos Engineering.

CHAOS IN PRACTICE

To specifically address the uncertainty of distributed systems at scale, Chaos Engineering can be thought of as the facilitation of experiments to uncover systemic weaknesses.  These experiments follow four steps:

  1. Start by defining ‘steady state’ as some measurable output of a system that indicates normal behavior.
  2. Hypothesize that this steady state will continue in both the control group and the experimental group.
  3. Introduce variables that reflect real world events like servers that crash, hard drives that malfunction, network connections that are severed, etc.
  4. Try to disprove the hypothesis by looking for a difference in steady state between the control group and the experimental group.

The harder it is to disrupt the steady state, the more confidence we have in the behavior of the system.  If a weakness is uncovered, we now have a target for improvement before that behavior manifests in the system at large.

ADVANCED PRINCIPLES

The following principles describe an ideal application of Chaos Engineering, applied to the processes of experimentation described above.  The degree to which these principles are pursued strongly correlates to the confidence we can have in a distributed system at scale.

Build a Hypothesis around Steady State Behavior

Focus on the measurable output of a system, rather than internal attributes of the system.  Measurements of that output over a short period of time constitute a proxy for the system’s steady state.  The overall system’s throughput, error rates, latency percentiles, etc. could all be metrics of interest representing steady state behavior.  By focusing on systemic behavior patterns during experiments, Chaos verifies that the system does work, rather than trying to validate how it works.

Vary Real-world Events

Chaos variables reflect real-world events.  Prioritize events either by potential impact or estimated frequency.  Consider events that correspond to hardware failures like servers dying,software failures like malformed responses, and non-failure events like a spike in traffic or a scaling event.  Any event capable of disrupting steady state is a potential variable in a Chaos experiment.

Run Experiments in Production

Systems behave differently depending on environment and traffic patterns.  Since the behavior of utilization can change at any time, sampling real traffic is the only way to reliably capture the request path.  To guarantee both authenticity of the way in which the system is exercised and relevance to the current deployed system, Chaos strongly prefers to experiment directly on production traffic.

Automate Experiments to Run Continuously

Running experiments manually is labor-intensive and ultimately unsustainable.  Automate experiments and run them continuously.  Chaos Engineering builds automation into the system to drive both orchestration and analysis.

Minimize Blast Radius

Experimenting in production has the potential to cause unnecessary customer pain. While there must be an allowance for some short-term negative impact, it is the responsibility and obligation of the Chaos Engineer to ensure the fallout from experiments are minimized and contained.

Chaos Engineering is a powerful practice that is already changing how software is designed and engineered at some of the largest-scale operations in the world.  Where other practices address velocity and flexibility, Chaos specifically tackles systemic uncertainty in these distributed systems.  The Principles of Chaos provide confidence to innovate quickly at massive scales and give customers the high quality experiences they deserve.

Join the ongoing discussion of the Principles of Chaos and their application in the Chaos Community Google Group.

Translations: FR | RU | 中文 (简体) | 한국어 | Spanish | TR | PT-BR | العَرَبِيَّة‎ | 日本語
If you want to add your translation, please submit a pull request against the Github repository.

Source: Principles of Chaos Engineering

 

Cheat sheet: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/chaos-engineering-a-cheat-sheet/

 

The rise of: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/04/the-rise-of-chaos-engineering/

 

History, practices, principles: https://www.gremlin.com/community/tutorials/chaos-engineering-the-history-principles-and-practice/

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 5:12 am on September 6, 2018  

2003/07 Governance and the Practice of Management in Long-Term Inter-Organizational Relations | Coevolving Innovations

2003/07 Governance and the Practice of Management in Long-Term Inter-Organizational Relations

Authors

David Ing, David Hawk, Ian Simmonds, and Marianne Kosits

Abstract

Outsourcing, strategic alliances and joint ventures are dominant forms of extending organizational reach. The scope and direction of these associations is set through management and governance of the inter-organizational relation. Yet, an understanding of the distinctions between management and government are often missing, both for those who initiate and for those who operate within a joint initiative.

This article reviews the concepts of management and governance in an inter-organizational context from the foundations of general systems and social theory. The motivations of efficiency and synergy are compared. Choices made about long-term alliances are highlighted in distinctions between designs that are complicated and designs that are complex, and between interactions that are loosely coupled and interactions that are tightly coupled. The influences of management and governance are considered in the cybernetic frame that distinguishes between external control and self-control.

Recommendations for business include considering of multiple lines of authority, as heterarchy; and the adoption of a social practice perspective that can include aspects of solidarity and style, uncovered in the disclosing of new worlds.

Citation

David Ing, David Hawk, Ian Simmonds, and Marianne Kosits, “Governance and the Practice of Management in Long-Term Inter-Organizational Relations”, Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the System Sciences, at Hersonissos, Crete, July 7-11, 2003.

Content

Source: 2003/07 Governance and the Practice of Management in Long-Term Inter-Organizational Relations | Coevolving Innovations

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:42 pm on September 5, 2018  

Social interactions shape individual and collective personality in social spiders

cxdig's avatarComplexity Digest

The behavioural composition of a group and the dynamics of social interactions can both influence how social animals work collectively. For example, individuals exhibiting certain behavioural tendencies may have a disproportionately large impact on the group, and so are referred to as keystone individuals, while interactions between individuals can facilitate information transmission about resources. Despite the potential impact of both behavioural composition and interactions on collective behaviour, the relationship between consistent behaviours (also known as personalities) and social interactions remains poorly understood. Here, we use stochastic actor-oriented models to uncover the interdependencies between boldness and social interactions in the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola. We find that boldness has no effect on the likelihood of forming social interactions, but interactions do affect boldness, and lead to an increase in the boldness of the shyer individual. Furthermore, spiders tend to interact with the same individuals as their neighbours. In general, boldness decreases…

View original post 117 more words

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:00 pm on September 3, 2018  

Entropy | Special Issue : Information Theory in Complex Systems

cxdig's avatarComplexity Digest

Complex systems are ubiquitous in the natural and engineered worlds. Examples are self-assembling materials, the Earth’s climate, single- and multi-cellular organisms, the brain, and coupled socio-economic and socio-technical systems, to mention a few canonical examples. The use of Shannon information theory to study the behavior of such systems, and to explain and predict their dynamics, has gained significant attention, both from a theoretical and from an experimental viewpoint. There have been many advances in applying Shannon theory to complex systems, including correlation analyses for spatial and temporal data and construction and clustering techniques for complex networks. Progress has often been driven by the application areas, such as genetics, neurosciences, and the Earth sciences.

The application of Shannon theory to data of real-world complex systems are often hindered by the frequent lack of stationarity and sufficient statistics. Further progress on this front call for new statistical techniques based on Shannon information…

View original post 87 more words

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 7:17 am on September 3, 2018  

The Anastomotic Reticulum (Stafford Beer) – an incomplete note in search of further elucidation

This is an incomplete note about an important and interesting concept, in the hope that it will create an attractor for more explanation!

Image from this weird notes page (incomplete): Norm-Critical Innovation | Knowledge Management Research Group

 

I came across this in https://medium.com/@aidan.ward.antelope/of-bullshit-anastomosis-767bc0fc4e57

The detection of bullshit is a crucial feature of our lives: we are, after all, drowning in it. If you think anastomosis probably IS bullshit, go to the bottom of the class. Anastomosis seems to be little known about but is a crucial structure for bullshit filtering. Nassim Taleb, in his latest popular book, Skin in the Game, says his whole series of books including the Black Swan and Antifragile amount to a life project of bullshit detection. Spoiler alert: he finds no shortage of BS, especially in government functions.

Anastomosis? I have three pillars. Stafford Beer, whose Viable Systems Model I have used extensively, describes the cybernetic function of our brains as an anastomotic reticulum. Alan Rayner, in The Origin of Life Patterns, has anastomotic flow forms as how reality happens. And in a recent article which we will explore a little, Wired into Pain, Tom Jesson explains how our nervous system uses anastomotic patterns to separate the pain we need to pay attention to from all the other signals that are not as significant in preserving our life. Yes, our pain has bullshit filtering built in.

In James Scott’s wonderful new book Against the Grain, it seems that the cradle of civilisation itself was the system of marshes and braided distributory channels in lower Mesopotamia (Greek — between the rivers). Our very being is anastomotic whether we know it or not. The complex ecologies that surged back and forth, our ability to partake of multiple food webs, the social structures that were played with and developed. How far we have fallen.

 

 

This article gives part of an explanation (pdf):

Click to access 10.1007%2F978-3-642-15509-3_14.pdf

 

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastomosis:

An anastomosis (plural anastomoses) is a connection or opening between two things (especially cavities or passages) that are normally diverging or branching, such as between blood vessels, leaf veins, or streams. Such a connection may be normal (such as the foramen ovale in a fetus’s heart) or abnormal (such as the patent foramen ovale in an adult’s heart); it may be acquired (such as an arteriovenous fistula) or innate (such as the arteriovenous shunt of a metarteriole); and it may be natural (such as the aforementioned examples) or artificial (such as a surgical anastomosis).

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 11:42 am on September 2, 2018  

Inquiring Organizations – Courtney, Croadsell, Paradice

INQUIRING ORGANIZATIONS
September 14, 1998  James F. Courtney, Texas A&M University
David T. Croasdell, Texas A&M University
David B. Paradice, Texas A&M University
 ABSTRACT
Churchman (1971) developed five archetypal models of inquiring systems in an effort to expand the field of management information systems along a philosophical path. Contemporary businesses can use the ideas developed by Churchman to become productive and efficient inquiring organizations. This paper explores the relationship between inquiry and learning in organizations and how information technology can be used to support the process of knowledgecreation in the context of inquiring systems.
CONTENTS
  1. INTRODUCTION
  2. A REVIEW OF INQUIRING SYSTEMS
  3. CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING
  4. INQUIRING ORGANIZATIONS
  5. IT SUPPORT OF INQUIRING ORGANIZATIONS
  6. SUMMARY
  7. REFERENCES

This paper has been published in Australian Journal of Information Systems, Volume 6 Number 1, September 1998. For details of this journal please refer to the Australian Journal of Information Systems web site http://www.uow.edu.au/ajis/ajis.html.

 

source at: https://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/inqorg.htm

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 11:40 am on September 2, 2018  

Systemic Business Community — “System Cracks are Where the Light Gets In: Models and Measures of Services in the Benefit of Context” – Hawk and Parhankangas

“System Cracks are Where the Light Gets In: Models and Measures of Services in the Benefit of Context”

Authors

David Hawk and Annaleena Parhankangas

Abstract

A paradox is emerging for those concerned about management theory and practice. The paradox lies with the activities and products of organizations becoming more fluid while organizational structure and management models remained fixed. Managerial emphasis favor the more “solid” aspects of organizations while their leading edges become more “fluid.” Management lore and principles continue to be taught, and practiced, as if what was remains timeless. Management continues to base its decision-making on information from statistical and reductionistic analysis. The result is a noteworthy mismatch between the rate of change in the environmental and the human desire for constancy. The mismatch is showing up on the surface of situations in what we herein called “cracks.” Cracks can also be seen in the surfaces of organizations, products and customer bases.

The theory behind the paper comes from the early 1940s. Cracks point to system forces that were not been reconciled within the limits of the system. “Crackage” may also be a sign of systems reaching their limits. Herein the systems of interest are social organizations and their management. The main interest thus becomes management theory, where cracks appear where a principle appears inadequate, even humorous, in the face of an organizational challenge. Such cracks are more obvious with time. Using command and control strategies to manage internet information access and use is one example. Such cracks can be seen as early indicators of larger problems looming for organizations. This point was at the center of a discussion held in the business systems interest group session of last year’s ISSS Conference. It was argued that radically different forms and norms of management were needed. One metaphor proposed from that discussion was to find more “fluid” methods of management for dealing with increasingly fluid entities and environments. This idea is used herein to describe one of the major events now taking place in economic and business systems, the transformation from goods to services. The shift from solid to fluid processes and products is clearly seen in the emergence of the importance of services. An alternative software operating system, called Linux, is presented as a leading example of why this change is different and fundamental. Linux provides a doorway into an alternative model of business management. Linux illustrating an interesting progression from problems in solids that are manageable, but tend to crack, to fluids that don’t crack but tend to be beyond understanding and management.

[click here for the Acrobat document]

Citation

David Hawk and Annaleena Parhankangas, “System Cracks are Where the Light Gets In: Models and Measures of Services in the Benefit of Context”, Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the System Sciences, Jennifer Wilby and Janet K. Allen, editors, at Asilomar, California, July 8-13, 2001.

[click here for the ISSS 2001 conference]

Source: Systemic Business Community — “System Cracks are Where the Light Gets In: Models and Measures of Services in the Benefit of Context”

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 11:35 am on September 2, 2018  

CSH | W. Ulrich | Ulrich’s Home Page: A Mini-Primer of Boundary Critique

A very short introduction o boundary critique, the methodological core idea of critical systems heuristics (CSH)

Source: CSH | W. Ulrich | Ulrich’s Home Page: A Mini-Primer of Boundary Critique

 

 

  “Boundary Critique“ is the methodological core idea of critical systems heuristics (CSH, Ulrich 1983). Increasingly, it is also recognized as a central concept of critical systems thinking and of critical professional practice in general. In the terms of CSH, the idea is that both the meaning and the validity of professional propositions always depend on boundary judgments as to what ‘facts’ (observations) and ‘norms’ (valuation standards) are to be considered relevant and what others are to be left out or considered less important. Such boundary judgments are constitutive of the reference systems to which refer all our claims to knowledge or rationality, in professional practice as well as in everyday life. Copyright © 2001, 2005, 2017
Last updated on 12 Jun 2017
  The quest for systemic thinking cannot alter the fact that all our claims remain “partial” (Ulrich 1983), in the double sense of being selective with respect to relevant facts and norms and of benefiting some parties more than others. This is what boundary critique (Ulrich 1996, 2000, 2017) is all about; it aims at disclosing this inevitable partiality.

A systematic process of boundary critique is to achieve three basic requirements:

  1. It needs to identify the sources of selectivity that condition a claim, by surfacing its underpinning boundary judgments.
  2. It needs to question these boundary judgments with respect to their practical and ethical implications and to surface options, through discussions with all concerned stakeholders (note that their selection in turn represents a boundary judgment in need of critique).
  3. Based on these two critical efforts it may then become necessary to challenge unqualified claims to knowledge or rationality by compelling argumentation, through the emancipatory use of boundary critique.

CSH offers a conceptual framework for all three tasks. Basic to the entire process of boundary critique is grasping the ways in which a specific claim is conditioned by boundary judgments. CSH explains this by means of the “eternal triangle” of reference system, facts, and values: Whenever we propose a problem definition or solution, we cannot help but assert the relevance of some facts and norms as distinguished from others. Which facts and norms we should consider depends on how we bound the reference system, and vice-versa; as soon as we modify our boundary judgments, relevant facts and norms are likely to change, too (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The ‘eternal triangle’ of
boundary judgments, observations, and evaluations
(Source: Ulrich 2000, p. 252; also in 2003, p. 334)

Thinking through the triangle means to consider each of its corners in the light of the other two. For example, What new facts become relevant if we expand the boundaries of the reference system or modify our value judgments? How do our valuations look if we consider new facts that refer to a modified reference system? In what way may our reference system fail to do justice to the perspective of different stakeholder groups? Any claim that does not reflect on the underpinning “triangle” of boundary judgments, judgments of facts, and value judgments, risks have us claim too much, by not disclosing its built-in selectivity. The result is an iterative process of reflection or dicscourse that I call “systemic triangulation” (see Ulrich, 2000, p. 18f, and 2003, p. 334, and for a somewhat more extensive introduction Ulrich, 2017).

Once the selectivity of the reference system in question has thus been grasped in terms of underpinning boundary judgments, systematic boundary critique then means exploring its implications for all the parties concerned, regardless of whether or not their concerns have been included in the underpinning reference system. CSH conceives of this larger context as the “context of application” of a professional proposition, as opposed to the primary system of concern. The context of application considers all the effects that a professional claim may impose on third parties, including stakeholders whose concerns are not represented by the primary system of concern. Both the primary system of concern and the context of application can be examined systematically by means of CSH’s boundary questions, see critical systems heuristics.

 

For more information see:

References:

  • Ulrich, W. (1983). Critical Heuristics of Social Planning: A New Approach to Practical Philosophy. Bern: Haupt. Paperback reprint edition: Chichester: Wiley 1994.
  • Ulrich, W. (1996). A Primer to Critical Systems Heuristics for Action Researchers.Hull: Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull.Online version of 10 Aug 2014: Werner Ulrich’s Home Page, http://wulrich.com/downhttp://loads/ulrich_1996a.pdf
  • Ulrich, W. (2000). Reflective practice in the civil society. Reflective Practice 1(2), 247-268.
  • Ulrich, W. (2003). Beyond methodology choice: critical systems thinking as critically systemic discourse. Journal of the Operational Research Society 54(4), 325-342.

Source: Adopted from W. Ulrich, “Boundary Critique,” in: The Informed Student Guide to Management Science, ed. by H.G. Daellenbach and R.L. Flood, London: Thomson Learning, 2002, p. 41f.

Suggested citation: Ulrich, W. (2005). A mini-primer of boundary critique. Rev. version of “Boundary critique,” in H.G. Daellenbach and R.L. Flood (eds.), The Informed Student Guide to Management Science, London: Thomson Learning, 2002, p. 41f. Werner Ulrich’s Home Page, http://wulrich.com/boundary_critique.html, first published 17 October 2005.

Copyright: © 2001 W. Ulrich and © 2002 Thomson Ltd (original version), © 2005 (present version). All rights reserved. Noncommercial distribution and citation permitted on the condition that proper reference is given..

Bibliographic information: A version of this page is currently also available at the ECOSENSUS project web site of the Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, at:
http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/ecosensus/publications/boundary_critique.html
Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 10:43 am on August 30, 2018  

An Interactive Introduction to Attractor Landscapes – Nicky Case

[oh, this is splendid! from the bloke who does Loopy, the wisdom and/or madness of clouds, etc – https://ncase.me/ ]

why things change, or don’t

 

an interactive introduction to

ATTRACTOR LANDSCAPES
playing time: ~5 minutes  ·  by nicky case, may 2018

A peaceful movement fights against violence and oppression for years, and nothing much changes. Then, everything changes.

Why do many complex systems – cultures, environments, economies – seem stuck (or if good, “stable”) despite lots of effort to change them? And why, when change does come, it seems to cascade (or if bad, “collapse”) all at once?

There’s a tool that can help us understand this: attractor landscapes. 

Or, in less fancy words: “a ball rolling down some hills”. This tool was first created in the field of physics, but has since been used to help us understand genetics, neuroscience, political alliances, and more!

I’ll explain attractors using an environmental example. Let’s say you’re fishing on a small, sucky pond. You can exhaust your natural resources of fish pretty easily…

More, including interactive shizzle, in source: An Interactive Introduction to Attractor Landscapes

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 11:02 am on August 29, 2018  

Resilience of Complex Systems: State of the Art and Directions for Future Research

Complexity

Volume 2018, Article ID 3421529, 44 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/3421529
Review Article

Resilience of Complex Systems: State of the Art and Directions for Future Research

Luca Fraccascia,1 Ilaria Giannoccaro,2 and Vito Albino2

1Department of Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
2Department of Mechanics, Mathematics, and Management, Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy

Correspondence should be addressed to Ilaria Giannoccaro; ilaria.giannoccaro@poliba.it

Received 26 October 2017; Revised 21 April 2018; Accepted 24 May 2018; Published 12 August 2018

Academic Editor: Manlio De Domenico

Copyright © 2018 Luca Fraccascia et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper reviews the state of the art on the resilience of complex systems by embracing different research areas and using bibliometric tools. The aim is to identify the main intellectual communities and leading scholars and to synthesize key knowledge of each research area. We also carry out a comparison across the research areas, aimed at analyzing how resilience is approached in any field, how the topic evolved starting from the ecological field of study, and the level of cross-fertilization among domains. Our analysis shows that resilience of complex systems is a multidisciplinary concept, which is particularly important in the fields of environmental science, ecology, and engineering. Areas of recent and increasing interest are also operation research, management science, business, and computer science. Except for environmental science and ecology, research is fragmented and carried out by isolated research groups. Integration is not only limited inside each field but also between research areas. In particular, we trace the citation links between different research areas and find a very limited number, revealing a scarce cross-fertilization among domains. We conclude by providing some directions for future research.

Source: Resilience of Complex Systems: State of the Art and Directions for Future Research

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 10:24 am on August 29, 2018  

CFP | Kybernetes | Futures of Media: Shifting spheres

Dr. Steffen Roth's avatarDr Steffen Roth

Shifting Spheres

Call for Papers to a special issue of Kybernetes [Clarivate Impact Factor: .980]

Guest Editors:

Markus Heidingsfelder, Habib University Karachi, Pakistan*
Holger Briel, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University, PR of China
Steffen Roth, La Rochelle Business School, France, and Yerevan State University, Armenia
*Corresponding guest editor. Email: heidingsfelder@googlemail.com. 

Focus:

The concept of publicity as a sphere was first introduced to scientific discourse by Jürgen Habermas in the 1970’s and has had a remarkable career ever since. In this special issue of Kybernetes, we want to turn our attention to three thematic spheres surrounding the concept of the sphere:

  1. The concept This may include its origins, its history, and its potential, as well as its limitations. At this meta-theoretical level, comparisons between the ostensibly antagonistic theoretical perspectives of systems theory and the theory of communicative action of the two become possible. As a consequence, the concept of…

View original post 235 more words

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 8:11 am on August 29, 2018  

Discovering my system – reblogged from Heart of the Art (Emma Loftus)

Discovering my system

 Emma Loftus

I used to think of my body as nothing more than a machine. A series of components that function in predictable and purely mechanical ways to get a job done. To hold me, nourish me and keep me alive.

When something goes wrong, treat the component at fault as best we can and move on. Not dissimilar to the way in which we traditionally think about our organisations.

But then a few years ago, something changed for me. My health began to slip. One inconvenience after another. I bounced through a series of diagnosis, and to be frank, got mightily fed up of the body that was failing me in minutely inexhaustible ways. Mostly without reason. Intangible and tangible mechanical faults, that whether I liked it or not changed the way my body could look after me, and the ways in which I could lead my immediate life and my life for a life-time thereafter.

I treated the symptoms of each of my problems individually, logically, mechanically. Taking each condition separately, treating the symptom, applying its fix and then tackling the next. But the problem was that it just didn’t fix ‘me’. It relieved the symptoms, sometimes created new ones, but didn’t actually cure me of anything. I was in a downwards spiral.

I wasn’t yet 40. Still living in that age where I was yet considered young. It was madness. I didn’t drink or smoke, wasn’t overweight, and here I was floundering around in a body that felt old, with a mind devoid of spark. And for a time, I let that flow with me. Resigned to the way it was. ‘What could I do about it’?

And then something clicked. ‘What if’? I thought ‘Everything is connected’?

It’s a simple thought. To many of you, particularly our health care and holistic readers it’s perhaps an obvious connection, but for me, it was a revelation that changed the way I consider my body, my soul and ultimately my life.

It was with a wild leap of faith and not without some imagination that I began developing a picture of myself as a whole physical being. A machine that pulses.

And that machine needed something more than treatment of its malingering symptoms. It needed attention, care, love of its whole.

Believe it or not, thinking in this way took a lot of courage. It required a change of mind-set not just about my body but about my inner self too. It was a little seed planted, that over the coming months and years took me through some of the toughest and the most valuable experiences of my entire life.

From thought to action wasn’t an immediate step. I needed time to process, to believe, to make the idea feel real, alive. But then one day, I decided, ‘enough now’ and I went for a swim. I was so scared. Terrified in fact. Not because of the swim, but because of what it represented. I knew that from that very first breath of chlorine that I would be changing my life. And I didn’t know what or where I was going.

I’d never swum for leisure before. Could only manage 2 lengths before I had to stop to rest. 12 lengths later I got out. Out of breath and hurting from the effort and the rather bad swim style.

But it was a defining moment. And it changed me forever. Here, in my life I had taken control.

That one swim turned into a swim membership, yoga, a new diet, a divorce, a new life and an almost new body along the way. Just over two years later, I don’t recognise that past me anymore. I’ve discovered, or re-found, or simply allowed to come into existence an inner me that I never knew was there.  That body that was failing me now holds me and holds me well. I haven’t cured myself. There are still some problems that are part of my biological make-up that no matter what I do I can’t undo or fix. But what I have done is change the way that these mechanical faults affect me. And some things I’ve wiped right off the map.

It’s a journey that never stops. As my physical being finds a balance within itself, developing its possibility, so does my mind. I’m finding the world anew. And it’s finding me. A shared journey exploring how my body and soul and mind, and the world are, in fact, one.

And perhaps I’m not a mechanistic being after all. I am a system. I. I am.

But here’s the thing, you and the world we are all in is a system too.

And should we treat our world as a mechanistic thing, made up of a series of separate components?

 This way of thinking is convenient. It gives us quick fix possibilities; address the faulty component, treat the symptoms and move on. But what if, just like me, everything in this world  is connected in minutely, infinitely, unfathomable, impossible ways? All of them beautiful.

Source: Discovering my system – Heart of the Art

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:23 pm on August 27, 2018  

Silverman, H., and G. M. Hill. 2018. The dynamics of purposeful change: a model – H Silverman and GM Hill

Ecology and Society

E&S HOME > VOL. 23, NO. 3 > Art. 4
Go to the pdf version of this article
The following is the established format for referencing this article:
Silverman, H., and G. M. Hill. 2018. The dynamics of purposeful change: a model. Ecology and Society23(3):4.
https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10243-230304

Synthesis

The dynamics of purposeful change: a model

1Pacific Northwest College of Art, 2University of Portland

ABSTRACT

In order to describe and depict the dynamics of purposeful change, we reexamine the concept of social-ecological systems (SES) and propose a linked but not integrated SES model. Adapting core resilience tools (stability landscape and panarchy), we construct a general model and then use a framework of key concepts (identity, logics, affiliations, affordances) to analyze the dynamics depicted therein. We illustrate this model’s use in two cases: a retrospective analysis of food-systems work amidst contending social regimes and an interpretive reading of published narratives describing individual-to-ecological stability and change. We discuss this model’s applicability in situations involving divergent perspectives, micro-meso-macro social dynamics, social regime identity, and the distinct dynamics of social and ecological systems. This examination illustrates the power and flexibility of these core resilience tools.

Key words: bricolage; institutional logics; path dependence; reflexivity; social attractors; system archetyp

Source: Ecology and Society: The dynamics of purposeful change: a model

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:35 pm on August 27, 2018  

Project Cybersyn: the afterlife of Chile’s socialist internet

[I wasn’t sure at first if this was actually new, since Cybersyn crops up so regularly – and has recently been debated in the Systems Thinking Network LinkedIn group, but is seems it is. Cybersyn did crop up with numerous links on model.report:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx26zpPg884
many links on this outdated Russian Stafford Beer tribute site: http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/beer_menu.html
links and discussion https://model.report/s/dvgunx/the_planning_machine_project_cybersyn_and_the_origins_of_the_big_data_nation
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCO3vXyR-c4]
22 AUGUST 2018

Project Cybersyn: the afterlife of Chile’s socialist internet

Through an electronic “nervous system”, Salvador Allende’s left-wing government anticipated the era of big data.

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Almost 45 years have passed since Salvador Allende’s government was overthrown in an armed coup on 11 September 1973. The late Chilean president and Marxist has long been revered by the left for his democratic credentials – he was elected freely in 1970 – and his tragic martyrdom (he shot himself with an AK-47 after refusing to surrender to Augusto Pinochet’s forces).

Yet until recently, one of his administration’s most remarkable innovations had received little attention. In its efforts to forge a socialist economy, Allende’s government pioneered a technology that anticipated both the internet and the era
of “big data”.

Project Cybersyn, as it was known in English (a portmanteau of “cybernetics” and “synergy”), sought to avoid the waste and inefficiency that characterised the Soviet Union and other communist states, by connecting hundreds of firms to the government through an electronic “nervous system”. A national network of 500 telex machines collected real-time data from factories, such as production output, energy use and labour levels, and transmitted it to two mainframe computers in the Santiago-based control room.

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Rather than empowering an overmighty state, the aim was to encourage the free exchange of information and worker participation in planning and management.

This largely forgotten model is now being heralded by a new generation of tech-savvy leftists. Next month The World Transformed, the festival held on the Labour conference fringe, will host a session on “cybernetic socialism” featuring Raúl Espejo, the original operations director of Project Cybersyn.

The programme was the creation of Stafford Beer, a British consultant and the founder of “management cybernetics” (which he defined as “the science of effective organisation”). Beer, who argued with acute prescience that “information is a national resource” and coined the term “data highway”, was approached in 1971 by Fernando Flores, Chile’s production development co-ordinator, who later became finance minister. By the end of that year, Allende’s government had nationalised more than 150 companies, including 12 of the 20 largest Chilean firms. Flores recognised that to defy free-market critics – who warned of the fallacy of disregarding price mechanisms – the fledgling administration would need help.

Beer, an imposing, gregarious man (who in his later years cultivated a beard of Tolstoyan length), agreed to assist in exchange for a daily fee of $500 and a regular flow of wine, cigars and chocolate. “He was at the top of his capabilities,” Espejo recalled when we spoke on the phone.

“He had an extraordinary ability to work 20 hours a day and to produce reports for us at a speed that would take me a year. I was absolutely astounded.” (David Bowie would later include Beer’s Brain of the Firm on a list of his favourite books.)

As well as the telex network, Project Cybersyn also featured an economic simulator to model alternative policies. But its enduring face was the hexagonal, Star Trek-like operations room, which featured mounted screens and seven white fibreglass swivel chairs (regarded as optimal for creativity) with inbuilt push-buttons.

The programme was initially viewed with traditionalist scepticism by Allende’s Socialist Party. But Project Cybersyn’s hour arrived in October 1972 during a strike of 40,000 truck drivers led by the hard-right Confederación Nacional del Transporte. As Allende’s opponents sought to wreck the economy by preventing the transport of food and raw materials, Cybersyn was deployed to underwrite the resistance. Through the electronic network, the government was able to co-ordinate deliveries by active trucks and to evade blockades. “We felt that we were in the centre of the universe,” Espejo remarked.

After 24 days, the strike was defeated. Ministers then became “much more interested” in Cybersyn, Espejo told me. Allende even proposed transferring the operations room to La Moneda, the presidential palace.

On 10 September 1973, the government finally prepared to install an upgraded version of the system. But the following day, with the connivance of the CIA, Pinochet’s forces stormed the palace and bombed it from the air. In “Why Allende had to die”, a New Statesman essay published in March 1974, Gabriel García Márquez observed: “The most dramatic contradiction of [Allende’s] life was being at the same time the congenital foe of violence and a passionate revolutionary.”

The ascendance of Pinochet’s new military junta divided Cybersyn allies. Some urged the regime to maintain the system, while others feared the consequences of allowing it to be exploited. Yet the dilemma was swiftly resolved: Pinochet’s ultra-free-market government, inspired by the economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, crudely dismantled the project.

Espejo, who was warned by military officials to leave Chile, fled to England two months after the coup, where he later became a professor of systems and cybernetics at the University of Lincoln.

Project Cybersyn was far from an unqualified success. It was hindered by Chile’s technological limitations (worsened by a US boycott) and was prone to delays. But in its ambition, and its noble ideals, it provided a glimpse of a daringly alternative order: one in which humans are the masters, rather than the slaves, of machines.

George Eaton is political editor of the New Statesman.

Source: Project Cybersyn: the afterlife of Chile’s socialist internet

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:13 pm on August 27, 2018  

nice definition of ontological nebulosity via @meaningness