Vacancy Details IRC2362539

Senior Systems Thinking Manager

As Senior Systems Thinking Manager, you’ll be one of the leading Systems Thinking practitioners within the organisation, helping shape how the railway approaches complex operational, strategic and organisational challenges.
– Full Time Hours
– Salary: £85,395 – £104,160
– Location: London Puddle Dock, Blackfriars
– Closing Date: 30/08/2026

https://q.thenhsalliance.org/get-involved/events/exploring-the-role-of-the-knowledge-weaver

https://guild.host/events/cybernetics-in-the-annex-tbara6

Encounters with the Other
​
How we continue to misunderstand,   dehumanize, scorn, humiliate,  oppress − and even kill − others. 
And how we can stop.
​
Barry Oshry

Encounters with the Other – Triarchy Press

SysPrac26 21-22 Sept 2026 | SCiO – Systems and Complexity in Organisation https://www.systemspractice.org/SYSPRAC26

I’ll be at this, and doing a workshop, just to warn you 😉

https://www.systemspractice.org/SYSPRAC26

https://cmminstitute.substack.com/p/on-conversational-confluences-at

ccs26.cssociety.org

Second Law of Technodynamics – by Ivo Velitchkov

https://tavinstitute.org/whats-on/lunchtime-talk-with-dr-lennox-joseph-consultant-and-author-on-wednesday-16-september-2026

Lunchtime Talk with Dr Lennox Joseph, consultant, author & NTL Institute for Applied Behavioural Science practitioner

Date: Wednesday 16 September 2026, 1pm — 2.30pm
Location: Online
Link: Tickets

All you need to do to contribute https://transduction.systems/#view=contribute and offer contributions, things to cover (especially collections that are web-accessible), corrections, usability issues etc etc

https://transduction.systems/

v0.17 now live

• ‘surprise me’ button on home page (surprisingly, in a different font, for now)

• better tracking https://transduction.systems/submissions/ of contributions https://transduction.systems/#view=contribute

and a start of thoughts and mapping on inclusion/exclusion https://transduction.systems/canon-and-lineage/

Another really significant figure sadly gone, and Merrelyn was still working and contributing very recently. I’ll leave the first brief obituary to the Socio-Technica Systems Round Table, as per their mailing list announcement:

It is with great sadness that we share the news of Merrelyn Emery‘s passing last week, after a long illness. Anyone who worked with Merrelyn will recognise the feeling right now: that mix of loss and enormous, uncomplicated gratitude. She gave so much, to so many of us, for so long. Over five decades, Merrelyn — with Fred Emery and then in her own right — developed Open Systems Theory and refined the Search Conference and the Participative Design Workshop into methods that put people back in charge of their own work and their own communities. She was rigorous, direct, generous with her time, and utterly unwilling to accept that people needed to be managed rather than trusted. Her legacy stays with us. It’s in the practitioners she trained, the communities she helped find their own way, and the organisations still being designed around her ideas today. Her body of work, decades of papers on the genotypical organization design principles, democratising organisations, education, media and perception, and theory turned into practice, remains freely available at Social Science That Actually Works.  We’d encourage anyone who hasn’t explored it to do so. Thank you to everyone who supported and worked alongside her over the years.  The work continues — and that is exactly how she would want it. In gratitude and loss, all of us at the Socio-Technical Systems Roundtable (STS RT)

This week in systemic design

The Porter Ratio (Quinn Porter, AHQ papers) is R = λ_self / λ_env.
λ_self is the rate of internal structure restoration and propagation.
λ_env is the rate of environmental disruption.

When R ≥ R★ (the ostiary/coherence threshold), prior states remain active, forming a self-sustaining interior with temporal depth and recursive coherence. Below it, structure dissipates and the system stays externally driven.

Primary sources:
https://philarchive.org/rec/PORATT-2
https://philarchive.org/rec/PORTCT-15

Some obvious similarities to Hoverstadt’s: “to survive, the system must be capable of a rate of change that is greater than or equal to the rate of change in the environment on which it depends”: ΔS ≥ ΔE. (Grammar of Systems, 2022)

(he also says the strategies to achieve this include moving faster, retarding the environmental change rate, or directing environmental change)

See

https://researchgate.net/profile/Patrick-Hoverstadt/publication/332082232_Organisational_agility_and_its_measurement/links/5c9e5a9da6fdccd460438dae/Organisational-agility-and-its-measurement.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com&__cf_chl_rt_tk=PIder.UzjUOsdZLeNwyBUII3oE1kRQb3Sc7_6SoFK7E-1786986626-1.0.1.1-E2LwoKpdqyPkvzAMkczO8p92KOHOQ5zW0hRzdRDJOJM (2018)

https://mesg.ch/en/organisational-agility/ (2021)

https://systemspractice.org/system/files/2022-03/2022.2%20hoverstadt.pdf (2022)

The 2018 measurement paper and 2021 MESG piece turn ΔS ≥ ΔE into a practical diagnostic: quantify environmental change rate, then assess scanning, orientation, decision speed and pivot capacity. Those levers directly raise the effective internal rate, matching the three strategies and the quantitative Porter threshold.