Message from Peter Jones in the Systemic Design Group on LinkedIn:
The board of the Systemic Design Association is pleased to announce that Volume 1 of Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal is now available online, with a collection of five distinctive articles and an editorial, in online and PDF formats. We first announced the journal project at RSD10 and showed the first articles in press at RSD11, and it’s now live as of today. Please find the journal page at https://lnkd.in/gvbApvfq and the articles at https://lnkd.in/gaGMGzyq We are actively seeking articles for Volume 2 (2023). Contexts is a continuous publishing process, and includes everything published within the year as the volume. New research and rigorous practice papers from authors in relevant fields are invited to submit to Contexts today. Manuscripts can be submitted online via the familiar process of the EasyChair conference site (which has a reviewer’s backend). Special thanks to the SDA Publications team (Silvia Barbero, Josina Vink, Amina Pereno, and especially co-designer Cheryl May – who is now mostly done with a week of final build) Thanks for support and guidance throughout the near-year development period.
oldeuropeanculture on Twitter https://twitter.com/serbiaireland/status/1622272014332444674?s=12&t=9XUuE_CTrnYOGQHUgWwp9A
“Thread: My favourite example of a (group) reality evolution is a story about my son and the Secret Army of Super Children. It all started last year when I mistakenly showed my 7 year old son Ghost Busters film, thinking we will all have a great laugh together…”
Thread:
My favourite example of a (group) reality evolution is a story about my son and the Secret Army of Super Children.
It all started last year when I mistakenly showed my 7 year old son Ghost Busters film, thinking we will all have a great laugh together… pic.twitter.com/tdl19iFOCp
One of the concepts that seems hard to grasp with regards to Cybernetics is the idea of “informational closure”. This idea was introduced by Ross Ashby as “informational tightness”. Ashby defined Cybernetics as the study of systems that are open to energy but closed to information and control – systems that are “information-tight”. Just like something that is described as water-tight, where water does not enter it from outside, information-tight refers to the condition where information does not enter it from outside.
Ashby also said that when a machine breaks, it changes its mind. Ashby referred to “machine” as a collection of parts that interact on one another and an “organization” as the specific way they are put together. For example, when a user pushes on a button, a door opens. The machine in this case is the button together with the wiring that can interact…
Chapter 4 on “Process philosophy” follows after Chapter 3 on “The Systems Idea”. For context here’s an outline of the sections on the philosophy Chapter 3.
3.1 The Meaning of ‘Systems Philosophy’
3.2 The Boundary Concept
3.3 The ‘Enemies’ of Systems Thinking: Mechanism, Reductionism and Subject/Object Dualism
One of the things that make complexity science so fascinating is the diversity of the systems that it applies to. In this series so far, you’ve learnt about everything from ecologies to economies, tipping points in ecologies and economies, to power and influence in the 1400s, and even the spread of coronavirus in the lungs and the thing that brings all of these different topics together is complexity. This means that we can study one system to help us understand other systems — including bees.
In today’s episode, Orit Peleg, Faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, explains how bees self-organise and produce sophisticated behaviour. In this case, you’ll hear how thousands of bees can work out where their queen is at any given point.
This is the end-January 2023 monthly events mailing from SCiO. Click on the flags or group titles below to go to the events that interest you. Please remember that you can attend online events organised by any of the SCiO groups if they are held in a language you speak/understand. Further details of events may be available by clicking on the event titles below and you can also book each event directly from the Book now text.
The SCiO Ireland group has now arranged its first online meeting for March on the highly topical subject of ‘Systemic Transformations to Sustainable Futures’ and invites enquiries.
Note that some groups post events quite late, so it is always worth checking the website – also for changes to dates and times. Please click here to see all the events in a browser.
Professional Development Courses We have embarked on a round of new professional development courses – these are the same as those offered to apprentices – but can be booked separately. The number will increase over the next months, but for now, please go to the PDP page to see what is available. These include courses in CSH (Critical Systems Heuristics), VSM and interventions skills for now, and are priced at commercial rates. Dates are indicated for some, for others please enquire using the enquiry buttons.
This course is being offered in the next two months:
The SCiO/Cherith Simmons Apprenticeship is now running, please continue to register expressions of interest. For more information click here. Please also see the attached brochure,
This message is confidential to the intended recipient. It does not constitute a legally binding document on the part of either the sender or the recipient. If this message has been received by you in error please reply to: steve.hales@systemspractice.org with UNSUBSCRIBE as the title
Systems and Complexity in Organisation Ltd is a company registered in England with Company Number: 3499590 Registered address: Unit 14 Tower Street, Century Building, Brunswick Business Park, Liverpool L3 4BJ UK
SCiO’s Development Events offer an opportunity to draw upon the collective expertise of SCiO members in a friendly and supportive atmosphere. By taking Development Events online, using the Zoom meeting platform, we aim to make them accessible to more SCiO members Development Events are both for members who are just starting out on a journey to explore Systems Thinking approaches, and for those who have many years of exploration and practice.
Members only; FREE; Online event; English; Book now
SCiO UK Virtual Open Meeting – March 2023
Mon 20 March 2023
There will be an Open Meeting on Monday 20th March, but currently we are still investigating a live venue and speakers. As soon as this is clarified, the event will go on the website and Eventbrite. Apols
SCiO organises Open Meetings to provide opportunities for practitioners to learn and develop new practice, to build relationships, networks hear about skills, tools, practice and experiences. This virtual session will be held on Zoom and has an environmental focus.
This first meeting of the new SCiO Ireland chapter will be online with two speakers arranged. For further information and to register- join the mailing list for SCIO Ireland by clicking on Enquire or Book Now.
Speakers: Anne Pender, University College Dublin; and Dr. Tadhg O’Mahoney, Research Fellow at
Dublin City University Centre for Climate & Society, and an expert advisor at the Finland Futures Research Centre.
In de deep dive cylcus nemen we het Viable System Model in-depth onder de loep en toetsen we dit aan de praktijk. De cyclus zoomt in op het praktisch maken van het werk van Stafford Beer, aan de hand van de publicaties van één van zijn belangrijkste leerlingen, nl. Fredmund Malik. “Twee CEO’s aan een zakelijk diner: A: Zeg, staat je gsm af? B: Neen hij staat altijd aan, ik ben 24/7 bereikbaar. A: Waarom rinkelt deze dan nooit? B: Eenvoudig, ik heb mijn bedrijf zo georganiseerd dat mensen niet continu dingen hoeven te checken bij mijIn deze derde sessie putten we uit de veelheid aan inzichten uit Malik’s boek ‘Corporate Policy and Governance. How Organizations Self-Organize. We staan stil bij de drie cybernetische basisinterpretaties van het (1) business concept, (2) omgevingsconcept, en (3) management concept en verkennen hoe we met deze inzichten aan de slag kunnen gaan.’
Kon. Astridlaan 144, 2800 Mechelen, Belgium; Members only; FREE; Dutch; Book now
In deze sessie zal Jan vooral inzoomen op het HOE. Immers, Beer (de grondlegger van het Viable System Model) gaat wel in op de functies die levensvatbare systems dienen te realiseren, maar hij besteedt weinig aandacht aan de eigen aard van de structuren en technologieën die daarvoor nodig zijn. Eenvoudig gezegd: Beer zegt wel WAT een systeem moet kunnen om levensvatbaar te zijn. Maar HOE je dat dan kan organiseren, bijvoorbeeld door de inrichting van de structuur van een organisatie, blijft bij Beer onderbelicht.
Einführung in das Viable System Model durch Carola Roll. Der Termin richtet sich an „VSM-Neulinge“, aber auch an alle Interessierten, welche sich eingehend mit den Basics des Models beschäftigen wollen. Nach der Präsentation und einigen Beispielen aus der Praxis besteht die Möglichkeit, Fragen zu stellen und zur allgemeinen Diskussion.
SCIO-NL komt elke 2e vrijdag van de maand live bijeen in Vianen (Hagenweg 3c). Er staan geen vaste onderwerpen op de agenda (daarvoor organiseren we specifieke andere meetings), maar de ervaring leert dat er altijd wel een interessant gesprek op gang komt over een systemisch onderwerp.
Hagenweg 3c, Vianen, Netherlands; All welcome; FREE; Dutch Book now
SCIO-NL komt elke 2e vrijdag van de maand live bijeen in Vianen (Hagenweg 3c). Er staan geen vaste onderwerpen op de agenda (daarvoor organiseren we specifieke andere meetings), maar de ervaring leert dat er altijd wel een interessant gesprek op gang komt over een systemisch onderwerp.
Hagenweg 3c, Vianen, Netherlands; All welcome; FREE; Dutch Book now
As is well known, first order cybernetics, developed in the 1940s-50s Macy Conferences, focused on homeostasis, feedback loops and control mechanisms for human, animal and mechanical systems. A central figure in this early period was Norbert Wiener; as Peter Galison has pointed out, Wiener’s research included work for the Defense Department and was deeply involved in war planning and implementation. For historians like Galison and critics like Donna Haraway, this gave cybernetics a toxic association with the military-industrial complex, apparent in Haraway’s 1995 description of cybernetics as a techno-addiction that had “technical and popular culture . . . shooting up with all things cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s.” Starting in the early 1970s, James Lovelock changed the tenor of these connotations when he drew on first order cybernetics to argue that the Earth itself was a homeostatic entity, with living organisms tightly coupled to the environment to form a single self-regulating system. When Lovelock then joined forces with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, her work on biosymbiosis expanded the argument with convincing evidence for the power of microorganisms to change the environment even as they were changed by it. In the genealogy carefully traced by Bruce Clarke, Margulis became aware of the work of Maturana and Varela on autopoiesis, and thereafter she adopted the term “autopoietic Gaia.” In contrast to first-order cybernetics, this remained almost completely a biotic concept; machines seem to have faded from the picture (aside from a brief essay Margulis co-authored with Dorion Sagan on the evolution of machines). Clarke, for his part, argues that the Gaia theory should properly be located within neocybernetics systems theory, which focuses on recursivity, reentry, and the necessary inclusion of the observer in what is observed. However, the historically contingent manner in which cybernetics moved from homeostasis to autopoiesis left a hefty conceptual debt stemming from the way in which Maturana and Varela defined cognition, which basically conflated it with the process of living as a self-making, self-organizing and self-structuring autopoiesis. This makes it difficult to re-introduce machines into the picture, since all machines are allopoietic (that is, not able to self-make and self-maintain themselves). This talk concludes by offering an alternative way to think about cognition that enables an integrated framework for understanding our present condition of technosymbiosis, which augments and drives the further evolution of biosymbiosis as humans and nonhumans enter into deep integration with computational media. —— N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published eleven books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and her research has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a University of California Presidential Award, among other awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books have won numerous awards, including the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998-99 for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship for Writing Machines. She writes on media theory, experimental fiction, literary and cultural theory, science fiction, and contemporary American fiction. She has won two teaching awards, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton, University of Chicago as the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor, and Institute for Advanced Studies at Durham University UK, among others. Her most recent book is Postprint: Books and Becoming C’omputational (2021, Columbia UP). —– About the talk series “Cybernetics for the 21st Century” aims to firstly reconstruct the history of cybernetics, from the perspectives of different geographical locations, political projects and philosophical reflections; and secondly to ask what might be the contribution of the cybernetic movement to the new form of thinking that is urgently needed to understand and reorient our digital earth. The first edition of the program consists of eight lectures and two symposiums with the presentation of philosophers, historians of science, and sociologists, including Andrew Pickering, Katherine Hayles, Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, David Maulén de los Reyes, Michal Krzykawski, Mathieu Triclot, Daisuke Harashima. The program is hosted by Yuk Hui and curated by Jianru Wu.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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