2022-01-10 January 10 (the second Monday of the month) is the 96th meeting for Systems Thinking Ontario. The registration will be at https://living-becoming-st-on.eventbrite.ca Living, Becoming, Process Philosophy: Systems Thinking in Time Structure is an arrangement in space. Process is an arrangement in time. Beyond being, living systems can be seen as becoming. Are we overlooking time, when we talk about systems thinking? What happens if we base our thinking on a process philosophy? This session may lead participants to reframe their perceptions of systems. Venue: The link for a Zoom conference will be sent upon preregistration.

Systems Thinking Ontario – 2022-01-10

Evolutionary Cybernetics 101: Gaia 2.0, Web 3.0

Alex Vikoulov: Evolutionary Cybernetics 101: Gaia 2.0, Web 3.0

Bridging the Systems Thinking Capabilities Gap – YouTube

 Unlisted205 views29 Nov 20219DISLIKESHARESAVEEnlightened Enterprise Academy26 subscribersSUBSCRIBEDThis is a recording of the conference “Bridging the Systems Thinking Capability Gap: To Improve Decision-Making and Create a Better World” which took place online on November 4th 2021. Join the related LinkedIn Forum: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9001039/

Bridging the Systems Thinking Capabilities Gap

Bridging the Systems Thinking Capabilities Gap – YouTube

Systems Thinking
Systems Thinking takes the view that any problem we’re working on is part of a larger, interconnected system. Instead of making a quick fix, Systems Thinking encourages us to work with our team to discover the larger context that surrounds our current problem.

Systems Thinking | Agile Pain Relief Consulting

Audio of Interview with Jamshid Gharajedaghi:

JG – Improving Agility

Audio of Interview with Jamshid Gharajedaghi:

Jamshid Gharajedaghi (Persian: جمشید قراچه‌داغی‎, born c. 1940) is an Iranian-American organizational theorist, is known for his work of systems thinking, managing complexity, and business architecture. His full Wikipedia page is here.

Click here to access this interview. Recorded October 03, 2012. This is a recording of one of many conversations we had during that time. In this conversation we cover Forrester, Ackoff, ‘the mess’, interactive design, power duplication, life, love and happiness as emergent properties, how decentralization requires centralization, and much more.

Ram Dass Here and Now – the Mechanics of Mind

https://overcast.fm/+GdAurE7c
youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9vzf_oeNvw
podcast web page https://www.ramdass.org/ram-dass-here-and-now-ep-187-the-mechanics-of-mind/

“Ultimately, the art is you need models to function in the universe, models of mind, you need structures, but you hold them so lightly. You hold them so lightly.” – Ram Dass

General Intellect Unit
082 – John Boyd, Part 1: Destruction and Creation

youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4lbxPVlXKo
podcast web page http://generalintellectunit.net/e/082-john-boyd-part-1-destruction-and-creation/

You have to admire the indefatigability of these guys – and this is a particularly wide-ranging and brilliant discussion.

The Work: Tyson Yunkaporta on indigenous thinking and why you can’t improve your “self”
https://overcast.fm/+vZZzUjsxE
podcast web page https://shows.acast.com/thework/episodes/tyson-yunkaporta-on-indigenous-thinking

Possibly risking slight overexposure around about now, this is Tyson Yunkaporta at his humorous and sincere best IMO, on contextual dependent rationality, wisdom listening, and intentionality.

New Books in Systems and Cybernetics
Bernard Scott, “Cybernetics for the Social Sciences” (Brill, 2021)

https://overcast.fm/+LUTKMlUZ0
podcast web page https://newbooksnetwork.com/cybernetics-for-the-social-sciences

Bernard Scott on his book of the same name (), sympathetically interviewed by Tom Scholte on cybernetics as a trans-discipline

A Quick Look at 4 Films that Address Systems Change Nora Bateson

A Quick Look at 4 Films that Address Systems Change | by Nora Bateson | Jan, 2022 | Medium

Harish Jose tweeted “Organizations do not learn. Organizations are not humans. #Stacey #Complexity(?)”

And this generated an interesting set of responses, and the blog below from Richard Veryard.

My own initial response was to respond to this response from @fluffbuster: “Their ability to replicate their essential identity from moment to moment, irrespective of who works for it – looks a bit like – processes we explain as being enabled by ‘memory’ in the brains of living organisms. It’s a metaphor. Procedure manuals. Patents, databases, brands etc”

I said:

“Yes. This, to me, is one of those phrases ‘making one good point’ but then gets (haha) reified and misapplied (including by Stacey), leading to more misunderstanding than the original good point. The paper seems the same to me – a good point, heavily burdened by bad points.”

Between the tweet, the discussions, Richard’s typically thoughtful blog, and the original paper, there are a lot of big ideas being discussed here.

(Original paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/30383248_Learning_as_an_Activity_of_Interdependent_People – which references lots of things, including Hegel in a particularly confusing way, not that that’s hard)

My original response was simply that it is important to recognise, as Stacey surely wants us to do:

• that if we say that ‘organisational learning’ is in essence *the same thing* as ‘human learning’, we are making a category mistake
• that is we that that ‘organisations’ ‘exist’ in the same way as ‘humans’, we are making a category mistake
• that both of these mistakes are misleading and likely to be dangerous (and potentially ‘dehumanising’)

And I want to add that of course that is true, but that does not mean that it is invalid to talk about ‘organisations as learning things’, despite what Stacey says.

Amongst other good points, Richard relates this to ontological arguments about existence and location, and the possibility of emergent learning (all good points, I think) – and uses the inevitable non-definability of distinction-making at boundaries to (rightly) call into question where you could call humans ‘entities’ and see them as capable of decision-making, either.

But I want to just take a step back from this and say:

• this whole discussion illustrates how it is important to be impeccable about what our words mean in the context in which we are using them, and the need for far greater collaborative patience and better branching conversation structures in this kind of conversation than either twitter or blogs allow, especially asynchronously; we would really need to work together through a branching clarification structure to fully work this through, otherwise we are at risk of constantly talking at cross-purposes, with different definitions and contexts and implications in mind
• the ‘oppositional’ stance that Stacey uses in the quote and paper are particularly prone to this; it would be better (but less dramatic) to carefully delineate what learning is used to mean and why it can apply in that way in one context or framing or emergent situation or language game, but not another
• this kind of conversation is what makes people thinking hard about important things look like obtuse and obscure men with nothing better to do than argue amongst themselves – but it’s an almost inevitable result of a starting-point framed as controversial.

My perspective is that, first of all, it’s important to make a clear distinction between how humans can be understood through their agency, and how organisations can be understood through the concept of ‘agency’.

But this does not mean that it’s never helpful or meaningful to talk about organisational purpose, or, indeed, organisational learning.

If the perspective of seeing an organisation (accepting that it is a constructed, conceptual entity) and thinking of it learning – in ways analogous to humans (or perhaps animals or plants or teams) learning – i.e. responding differently to its environment over time in ways consistent with having realised something about its interactions with the environment and redirected its actions as a result – is useful, then it’s useful, full stop.

Of course there is a risk that this can lead to dangerous reification, to conceiving of the organisation as ‘more’ than the people who make it up (not at all irrelevant, because people often behave in these ways – but also, the belief that this is a risk is party a category error of taking ‘other than the sum of the parts’ as ‘more than the sum of the parts’ and ‘more’ as ‘more important’ rather than ‘different from’).

But there is also a risk in the other direction; if you limit yourself strictly to only conceptualising entities based on their constituent parts – even if those consitituent parts are, as Bateson says, ‘parts of people’ – you lose insight which can only be gained at the emergent level, the ‘logical level’, the level of ‘hierarchical thinking’, of conceptualising the behaviour of the whole.

You can understand a lot about organisations by thinking of them as made up of people interacting and making decisions (and of processes, technology, internal and external interactions, mythology, symbolism, artefacts and assets) – but not the same things, in the same way, as you can by thinking of them as agents in their environment.

All of the arguments which seek to limit ‘seeing as’ are ideological traps – if there are risks in ‘seeing as’ in certain ways (and of course there always are), these need to explicitly to be part of the picture.

I’m a big fan of the remind that ‘systems don’t exist’ – how we understand things is based on our perspective, framing, pre-existing knowledge, biases, tools and measures, etc etc etc. But that should never be taken as a prohibition about useful ways of ‘seeing as’. Particularly because – taken completely literally – it would also problematise talking about ‘people’; the jumbled mass of (mis)understandings and preferences and decisions and understanding and memory and learning and so on that we are.

So:

• Organisations are not humans – to act as if they were would be a mistake.
• Systems, organisations, society, ‘don’t exist’, but that is a reminder to be aware of our perspectives and preconceptions, not to deny that it is useful to think as if they exist, nor to deny the importance of the conceptual entities on people’s understandings and behaviours.
• The essence of sytems | complexity | cybernetics is to explore our terms, our understanding and what we understand at different conceptual / logical / hierarchical levels and framings, considering emergence as well as perspective (and all the other things that make up an understanding).
• There are meaningful ways and contexts in which it can be said that organisations learn (and even, famously, that buildings learn). This does not mean that we are making the mistake that organisations have brains and are human.

Here is Harish Jose’s tweet:

Richard Veryard’s blog post:

Demanding Change: Where does learning take place?

Sunday, January 2, 2022

Where does learning take place?

This blogpost started with an argument on Twitter. Harish Jose quoted the organization theorist Ralph Stacey:

Organizations do not learn. Organizations are not humans. 

@harish_josev

This was reinforced by someone who tweets as SystemsNinja, suggesting that organizations don’t even exist. 

Organisations don’t really exist. X-Company doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about its place in X-Market. @SystemsNinja

continues in source:

Demanding Change: Where does learning take place?

Why You Should Question Your Reality Erman Misirlisoy, PhD Nov 29, 2021

Why You Should Question Your Reality | by Erman Misirlisoy, PhD | Nov, 2021 | Medium

‘Perceptual creep’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214002693
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530?needAccess=true

via Marcel Froehlich @FroelichMarcel and Tom Bray @TomBray on twitter

Permaculture as a Complex System Collective Emergence

How to the empower the localization movement with local cryptocurrencies by Collective Emergence

The Radically Embodied Conscious Cybernetic Bayesian Brain: From Free Energy to Free Will and Back Again by Adam Safron

Entropy | Free Full-Text | The Radically Embodied Conscious Cybernetic Bayesian Brain: From Free Energy to Free Will and Back Again

LAWS OF FORM CONFERENCE 2022

LoF22

LAWS OF FORM CONFERENCE 2022
LoF22

The state of ultimate wisdom … provides a nucleus for a calculus of love, where distinctions are suspended and all is one. Spencer Brown has made a major step in this direction, and his book should be in the hands of all young people—no lower age limit required.Heinz von FoersterREVIEW OF LAWS OF FORM IN THE LAST WHOLE EARTH CATALOGUE, 1971CALL FOR PAPERSSubmissions for papers, panel sessions, interactive presentations, workshops, performance sessions, and creative contributions inspired by George Spencer-Brown’s work and life – and particularly his key work, Laws of Form (LoF) – are now open and welcomed from participants keen to contribute to LoF22 which will be held from Thursday 4 August to Saturday 6 August, 2022 at the University of Liverpool.

Keynotes will be given by Barry Smith and Francis Jeffrey.

Anarchism and the cybernetics of self-organising systems

Anarchism and the cybernetics of self-organising systems