How do systems-change approaches address the root causes of deeply entrenched societal problems rather than the symptoms only? What are examples of systems-change strategies led by social entrepreneurs in Africa? What are key learnings for key stakeholders to scale social innovation on the continent?
Ashoka is launching the Roots of Change report with 5 cases of Ashoka Fellows in Africa to demystify systems change and contextualize it for the African continent. The report also distills How To’s and insights for social change leaders, impact investors and philanthropists, and influential players such as corporates and governments to accelerate positive change.
Much still needs to be done to support systems-changers in Africa. Please help us spread the word!
Roots of Change: How Social Entrepreneurs Advance Systems Change in Africa
It’s six weeks to the SCiO Global mini-Conference and AGM on Wednesday 4th October 2023 – to be held online.
This is our first SCiO global meeting and we hope you will join us. The AGM will be held during the meeting – all can attend but only members can vote. ALL ARE WELCOME.
Details of speakers and sessions currently confirmed (not necessarily in this order!)
Whatever works – Adventures of a couple of systemic consultants in IT organizations – Ed van der Winden (SCiO NL)
In this light-hearted talk Ed van der Winden will share some of his experiences in trying to help IT departments move to a better place. A lot of systemic models have played a role in this: the talk will focus on examples of their practical use. Some of the more well-known models that will be discussed in this talk will be: The Viable System Model, causal loop diagrams and Fernando Flores’ conversations-for-action model. But also lesser known models have been used, such as the 4D-model for dealing with organizational stress (based on Perceptual Control Theory), Will McWhinney’s Paths of Change and the use of the makigami technique from Kaizen and Lean to ‘go to the gemba’.
The Purpose Thing…. – Patrick Hoverstadt
There is a split within Systems in both thinking and practice around purpose. Is it about ‘intention’ or is it about effects – the POSIWID position. This split is not limited to the field of systems, as an example it also splits the field of ethics, but for us in our discipline it has had enormous consequences. This talk will explore this from several angles – why the split exists, how different approaches are grouped either side of the split, how it has driven factionalism and mutual incomprehension in the past and how the split itself represents one of the most fundamental issues in systems thinking and presents a dilemma for the systems practitioner and one that needs to be worked with. Finally we’ll look at the resolution of this in practice.
New Meta-systems Thinking for Regenerative Leadership – Jan de Visch (SCiO Belgium)
Socially, we see a trend in organizations toward being more conscious and sustainable. The number of companies seeking to reduce their carbon footprint to zero is growing. To achieve this, new business and operational models are emerging, often focused on ecosystemic collaboration. Often a broad common ground is lacking, and one must cooperate in diversity.
The leadership required for this requires significantly better assessing the parties’ positions to influence ideas and solution developments in real time. Systemic thinking is a necessary requirement here but perhaps insufficient. Meta-systemic thinking is needed to handle the potential areas of tension in real-time and make evaluative comparisons between different systemic options. It is thinking based on assessing the blind spots in systemic thought processes.
Jan De Visch illustrates how this meta-systemic thinking leads to the estimation of new opportunities the way CEOs deal with climate challenges and develop a kind of regenerative leadership.
Additional sessions and speakers to be confirmed
SCiO Global mini-Conference and AGMWed 4 October 2023 09:00–13:00 GMT+1Organiser(s):SCiOEvent access:All welcome
Note the care in making these distinctions with awareness of the teleological fallacy and the superiority fallacy.
The overall project at https://www.majortransitions.org/about is fascinating from a systems | cybernetics | complexity perspective (I wonder if they have any reference to cybernetics?) in identifying possible major distinct forms of ‘intelligence’. It makes me speculate about how different forms of utopian (or merely normative) prescription for organisation might usefully be distinguished as targeting different forms of ‘cognition’ as ‘optimal’…
How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results has started to deliver answers.
Complexity theorists are confronting their most puzzling problem yet: complexity theory itself.
Correspondence to Dr Kaveh Shojania, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Rm H468, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4N 3M5; kaveh.shojania@sunnybrook.ca
Government agencies struggle to address wicked problems because they are open-ended, highly interdependent issues that cross agency, stakeholder, jurisdictional, and geopolitical boundaries. While both quantitative modelling and qualitative problem structuring methodologies have been used to support interagency decision making in the past, co-designing an effective interagency organization to collaboratively tackle wicked problems is more challenging. Few approaches have been developed to enable such efforts. This paper explains how the viable system model (VSM) was implemented through a board game, which was employed to co-design an interagency meta-organization that would be capable of more effectively collaborating to jointly address a wicked problem: international organized drug crime and its interface with local gangs in Chicago, USA. The board game was developed to make the VSM easier for the participants to learn, given that the cybernetic language and engineering-influenced diagrams in the original literature can be off-putting to leaders and managers. The board game was used as the final stage of a multi-method, systemic approach, which involved boundary critique and problem structuring as well as deployment of the VSM. The research findings indicate that the VSM board game, used as part of a larger mixed-methods systemic intervention, contributes to building trust in the value of systems thinking amongst the participants, and sets up a rich context for collaboration on multi-agency co-design. The game therefore offers significant promise as part of the co-design of interagency responses to wicked problems because it creates an embodied process for stakeholders to learn about the VSM. It also reduces the work involved in this learning. Thus, the game enables an effective appropriation of the VSM language and criteria.
On Twitter, Pedro Carcamo Petridis said (translated)
(Almost) sure that these notes are not published anywhere (maybe I’m wrong, but I have not found copies on the web). They are Synco project documents. I’d like to post them somewhere so they’re available. There are 8 short documents
This was spotted by Jaime Alvarez, who flagged it on the Systems Change Finland (https://systemschange.fi/) Slack under a discussion on the Morozov podcasts (https://stream.syscoi.com/2023/07/22/the-santiago-boys-nine-episode-podcast-season-yevgeny-morozov-on-project-cybersyn/) where Mikael Seppala pinged me.
So here we have the eight documents from Pedro, who in an email says (paraphrased):
Here are the cybersyn project documents that I have. These belonged to my grandfather Lautaro Cárcamo, a Chilean engineer who participated as a consultant on the project and forged a close friendship with Stafford Beer. Among the documents, some in Spanish and some in English, there are texts written by Stafford, as well as others by Lautaro Cárcamo and Humberto Gabella, a partner in my grandfather’s company and also a consultant on the project. I am grateful for their publication, I believe they will be of interest to researchers.
I am currently going through archives and old documents to see if I can find anything else that might be of interest. I will let you know if I find anything. I personally have also followed cybernetics studies closely (much more on the philosophy and sociology side) so I am very grateful also for the possibility to meet people who have somehow been involved in all this.
I’ve put Pedro in touch with some folks who will find the papers interesting and provide further connections (and see if these really are unpublished – I’ve found that one of these papers was referenced in a Liverpool John Moores University PhD)
(Casi) seguro que estas notas no están publicadas en ningún lado (quizás me equivoco, pero en web no he encontrado copias). Son documentos de proyecto Synco. Me gustaría publicarlos en algún lado para que estén disponibles. Son 8 documentos breves pic.twitter.com/ZPGpE0vGp5
What does it mean to be marginalized? Does marginalization give some people more epistemic authority than others? And, if so, what should we all do with this information? In episode 84 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about standpoint theory, its complex intellectual history, and its relationship to W. E. B. DuBois’ concept of double consciousness. They welcome an expert on the subject: Dr. Briana Toole, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. In their conversation, they chat about how standpoint theory makes sense of electoral politics, educational policy, bizarre reality TV, and much more. They also discuss Corrupt the Youth, a philosophy outreach program founded by Dr. Toole that brings philosophy to high schools in the U.S.
Briana Toole, “On Standpoint Epistemology and Epistemic Peerhood” and “Demarginalizing Standpoint Epistemology” Kate Chopin, The Awakening W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture David Foster Wallace, This Is Water Black. White. (2006)
These are all just words therefore subject to over-familiarisation, co-option by the existing paradigm and by chancers and the innocent, and general misuse and abuse.
But… it would IMO be perfectly reasonable to say:
– Wicked Problems were a way of defining specific criteria of *problems* (and problems in *planning*, originally), which involved people, politics, and which from the perspective of planning appeared irresoluble and met a clustered set of criteria, and called for a specific type of approach to them. (Not a million miles from Ackoff’s ‘messes’, of course).
– VUCA relations to *conditions* – initially on a battlefield, if I understand correctly, then in the competitive and general environment of a business. It embeds its own specific criteria and is context specific.
(There’s also TUNA from Rafael Ramirez relating specifically to scenario planning and futures – Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, and Ambiguous – I prefer this to VUCA for a number of reasons)
– Then the ‘poly crisis’ relates to a usually non-specific set of globally interacting crises which do inter-relate in truly complex ways, with the main implication being that it seeps into all contexts and is in a sense inescapable.
There’s some implication in the polycrisis (and explicitly in the problematised ‘meta-crisis’, which I think is potentially an argument for that term being useful and making a meaningful distinction) that it brings in ‘sensemaking’ in terms of our own way of understanding and responding to all the elements of the polycrisis and to them as a whole. There’s a sensible multi-layer point to make that if *not only* are we unable to cope with the polycrisis, we’re also unable to orientate ourselves to it in any meaningful way, and our very orientation to the problem becomes a problem. That seems to me to be a meaningful distinction.
– you’ve left out ‘the World Problematique’ https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803124817999;jsessionid=9367733DD4AF0A3EBCF74C658ABC0522 from the Club of Rome which is a set of (fairly comprehensive) specific interlocking wicked problems which interact to form a polycrisis… though again, it might be reasonable to say that the Club of Rome occasionally veered into a mechanistic worldview or over-simplifying to try to achieve change (hence, for example, removing water cycles from the modelling of the climate crisis, leaving us with the fixation on carbon). So this seems to definitely have been an early version of the ‘polycrisis’ though it was more focused and less implying infinite ramification into all spheres including the social and mental – just total world collapse 🙂
So in my mind if we want to make a useful differentiation, we can go:
Wicked problems a special class of problem in planning (planning in the broadest sense of making plans, but also specifically in land use and social planning)
Messes a special class of problem in primarily business-related categories
VUCA a context in a contested space (battlefield or business)
TUNA a context we encounter in our attempts to meet with the future
World Problematique – specific problems (that might be defined as Wicked) interrelating in a way inescapable to our living of our lives (all-encompassing context)
Poly-crisis – non-specific problems, many of them wicked, interrelating in a way that intimately impacts the living of all our lives
Meta-crisis – the poly-crisis problematising the way we make sense of the poly-crisis
I could quibble with all of these – e.g. wicked problems do contain elements of sense-making being problematised, at the least from multiple social perspectives – but I do think these are helpful and defensible differentiations. That’s because all these definitions come with some meaningful definition of:
A *context* in which they can be meaningfully defined (planning, business, contested space etc)
A *purpose* or intent which we have which is interlocked with the context (successful planning, winning, etc)
We are too often guilty, IMO, of using these terms and talking in general about the experience of confronting ‘complexity’ etc without explaining the factors which generate complexity, which are all due to interaction and contextualisation agent and context:
Intent, framing, perspective, interpretation, ability, learning, history, understanding etc etc.
(Which in practice usually means we have one context in mind but accidentally or intentionally are not disclosing it to others, because it’s obvious to us).
The problems with leaving these parts out are:
We falsely give the impression that the ‘problem’ is inherent in the world (the problem is never inherent in the world), cutting off most of the sense-making potential
We prevent people from making the useful distinctions to tailor their approach in different contexts of engagement
We allow people to simply describe their understanding of the problem then receive back a version of that purporting to confirm that this is ontologically true
I once had a split with a collaborator because they insisted that, in the era of the climate crisis, *everything* just *was* a Wicked Problem. I was perfectly happy to concede that that was a valid way of looking and everything you did (in business, the unspoken, assumed context) could and probably should be related to the climate crisis, but that wasn’t enough for them… but in my opinion approaching *everything* as a wicked problem (what does that even mean?) would be a huge mistake.
As soon as you ask ‘what does that even mean?’ with regard to ‘*everything* is a wicked problem’, you get into the more useful conversation: ‘is brushing your teeth a wicked problem?’ opens up a proper conversation about relationships to contexts etc. But killing off that conversation before it even starts is, to me… a problem.
We are excited to be joined again by Evgeny Morozov, host of The Santiago Boys, a new narrative podcast series about the history of Cybersyn, the geopolitics of its creation in Cold War Latin America, and the legacy of Salvador Allende, Fernando Flores, and the man who looms largest of all: Stafford Beer. This podcast series is not like any story of Cybersyn you might have read before. Morozov has take a mountain of research — over 200 hundred original interviews, deep archival investigations, all compiled into an online resource accessible via the link below — and turned it into a thrilling narrative about a radical system that almost was, a world that could have been, and the people who fought to the end for those dreams.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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