In recognition of the need to address systemic problems that have hindered the potential growth of Africa for decades and accelerate systems change initiatives across the continent, African Philanthropy Forum (APF) launched the APF Systems Change Program to build an African network of systems change leaders and philanthropists who can help cultivate conditions to make their transformative visions a reality.
The Systems Change Program, which began with a rigorous selection process managed by Dalberg, is a pilot with six initiatives led by system entrepreneurs who are solving problems in multiple SDG areas, including quality education, decent work, and economic growth, good health and wellbeing, clean water and sanitation and reduced inequality. It is a direct response to the need to think differently and accelerate when considering Africa’s problems and solutions.
The Program commenced in May 2020 and was publicly launched at a virtual event on August 20, where panelists and the system entrepreneurs took part in a stimulating conversation about Driving Systems Change in Africa towards achieving sustainable and inclusive development. The speakers included Randy Newcomb, Senior Advisor at The Omidyar Group; Dr. Angela Gichaga, CEO of Financing Alliance for Health; Mosun Layode, Executive Director, African Philanthropy Forum; Elena Bonometti, CEO, Tostan International; as well as Jeff Walker, Chairman New Profit/APF Board Member who served as the moderator.
“There is a need to work and change the whole system rather than focus on smaller group activities.” – Jeff Walker.
Tuesday, October 27, 2020 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM GMT+1
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“Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” ―Obi-Wan Kenobi The Force in organisations is real. It can shape and control you and your organisation – or you can learn to shape them. This will be an introduction to the jedi arts of management cybernetics.
Benjamin is the chief executive of the Public Service Transformation Academy, a not-for-profit social enterprise working with the UK government, managing partner/founder at RedQuadrant. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University before becoming co-ordinator of a youth development charity. He then worked at the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham for seven years, from the front line to Adviser to Mayor/Leader. He has provided service consultancy at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sector Projects (part of Capita group), where he worked with clients from the Government of Armenia to Birmingham City council. He has undertaken voluntary accreditation missions for Youth Business International in Bangladesh and Dominica.
Benjamin is passionate about commissioning, systems thinking, customer-led transformation, lean, and better ways to run and lead organisations. He holds a lean six sigma black belt and is an accredited power+systems trainer. Benjamin is a visiting lecturer in applied systems thinking at Cass Business School, City University, and has lectured at Nottingham Business School and Oxford Said/HEC Paris.
Management Cybernetics and the Force in organisational life
Tuesday, Oct 27, 2020, 6:00 PM
Online event ,
19 Members Attending
“Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” ―Obi-Wan Kenobi The Force in organisations is real. It can shape and control you and your organisation – or you can learn to shape them. This will be an introduction to the jedi arts o…
Driving Systems Change Forward Webinar Registration
Driving Systems Change Forward
Multisite, cross-sector initiatives bring together stakeholders to tackle difficult issues – housing, health, education, and more – facing communities across the United States.
In the new report Driving Systems Change Forward, authored by the Urban Institute and published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, you’ll learn key lessons from initiatives from across the country about what it takes to advance systems change forward by shifting power and promoting racial equity.
Join us for a virtual coffee chat on August 31 from 4pm – 5pm ET with one of the report authors—Corianne Scally—from the Urban Institute and contributing practitioner, Andrea Akita, who leads the Communities of Opportunity Initiative for King County, Washington. They’ll discuss the report findings and how initiatives can build on this learning to change the structures, relationships and attitudes that keep racism rooted in place and communities struggling.
Can’t make the exact time to join? Registering also means you’ll be notified when the recording is available, normally within 24 hours of live event.
Joining us for this discussion are:
Andrea Akita, Communities of Opportunity Director, King County Public Health
Corianne Payton Scally, Principal Research Associate, Urban Institute
Title: Driving Systems Change Forward Date: Monday, August 31 Time: 4pm – 5pm ET Cost: Free
A slate of multisite, cross-sector initiatives has emerged to address structural root causes of inequities by changing the systems that shape community conditions and individual well-being. These new, connected sets of activities were planned and implemented to achieve a goal that spans more than one site (e.g., a neighborhood, school, city, region) and involve a mix of institutions from the public, nonprofit, philanthropic, and/or private sectors. This report reflects on recent progress and shortcomings and provides strategies for initiative funders, intermediaries, sites, and evaluators who wish to evolve their efforts in ways that drive systems change forward. The findings highlight the complex intersections of systems, racial equity, and power that can work for or against systems change.
The executive summary and full report are available here.
Editors’ note: This article was excerpted, with minor edits, from Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice (Minor Compositions, 2020),for the summer 2020 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly. This edition of the magazine is about the need to understand the often unacknowledged and unspoken design principles behind some of the practices and structures that pervade our work. We recommend the book highly. All illustrations are by Ayako Maruyama.
Activists, artists, philanthropists, young people, academics—all manner of folks—constantly battle injustices and negative effects in their lives and the lives of others. We take to the streets, to the Internet, to the voting booth, and more to fight for better outcomes. To the same degree, we argue vehemently about the ideas that underlie these injustices—from notions of public and private to ideas about categorizing our bodies, to all the “isms” that say some categories (and people) matter more than others.
But the arena for intervention that we at DS4SI want to make a case for is a less obvious one: that of the multiple, overlapping social arrangements that shape our lives. We believe that creating new effects—ones that make a society more just and enjoyable—calls for sensing, questioning, intervening in, and reimagining our existing arrangements. Simply put, we see rearranging the social as a practical and powerful way to create social change. And we want those of us who care about social justice to see ourselves as potential designers of this world, rather than simply as participants in a world we didn’t create or consent to. Instead of constantly reacting to the latest injustice, we want activists to have the tools and time to imagine and enact a new world.
As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, wrote in her 2018 debut op-ed for the New York Times:
Resistance is a reactive state of mind. While it can be necessary for survival and to prevent catastrophic harm, it can also tempt us to set our sights too low and to restrict our field of vision to the next election cycle, leading us to forget our ultimate purpose and place in history….Those of us who are committed to the radical evolution of American democracy are not merely resisting an unwanted reality. To the contrary, the struggle for human freedom and dignity extends back centuries and is likely to continue for generations to come.1
With the weight of lifetime Supreme Court appointments or healthcare or climate change seeming to hang in the balance of our elections, it is easy to get stuck there. But as Alexander points out, our fixation with politics and policies as the grand arrangement from which all other forms of social justice and injustice flow serves to “set our sights too low.”2 When do we get to imagine the daily arrangements of “human freedom and dignity”?3 We know this won’t happen overnight. It takes time and investment for social arrangements to institutionalize and endure, and it will take time to change them. But it is critical that we try. And to do that, we need to be better at sensing arrangements, intervening in them, and imagining new ones.
This article provides the most current guidelines for nurse educators and nurses to use systems thinking to manage COVID-19 in health systems. A working definition of systems thinking is offered, with a review of basic knowledge and care in the context of the system awareness model (SAM). Seven key messages assist nurse educators and nurses in the management of COVID-19 patients culminating in leadership of complex health care systems using systems thinking. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2020;51(9):402–411.]
In this in-depth interview, David Zilber, director of the fermentation lab at Noma—named the best restaurant in the world—discusses how food is culture, but fermentation is culture on a deeper level.
“Culture” and “culture” mean two different things to a biologist and an anthropologist, but in fermentation, they overlap completely.
Open events and development days, in addition to the core content, provide valuable opportunities for systems practitioners to network and mingle. Since our events are now online, this will be hard – or certainly different.
Therefore we’re running virtual networking events. Hosted by SCiO director Benjamin Taylor, with deep experience of online facilitation from five to over a hundred people, this will combine some initial small group work, Open Space-style discussions, and completely open opportunities to mingle as individuals.
Please note that you will need to attend using a desktop computer (not a tablet or phone) to get the best experience.
In today’s post, I am looking at the Conant-Ashby theorem, “The Good Regulator Theorem”, named after Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby. Ashby is one of the pioneers of the Cybernetics movement. This theorem states that:
Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.
A really good version of this theorem comes from Daniel L. Scholten, who says – Every good key must be a model of the lock it opens. The key must match the lock in order for it to open it. As Conant and Ashby put it:
Any regulator that is maximally both successful and simple must be isomorphic with the system being regulated… Making a model is thus necessary. The theorem has the interesting corollary that the living brain, so far as it is to be successful and efficient as a regulator for survival, must proceed, in learning, by the…
We’re at a unique moment in the 200,000 years or so that Homo sapiens have walked the Earth. For the first time in that long history, humans are capable of coordinating on a global scale, using fine-grained data on individual behaviour, to design robust and adaptable social systems. The pandemic of 2019-20 has brought home this potential. Never before has there been a collective, empirically informed response of the magnitude that COVID-19 has demanded. Yes, the response has been ambivalent, uneven and chaotic – we are fumbling in low light, but it’s the low light of dawn.
At this historical juncture, we should acknowledge and exploit the fact we live in a complex system – a system with many interacting agents, whose collective behaviour is usually hard to predict. Understanding the key properties of complex systems can help us clarify and deal with many new and existing global challenges, from pandemics to poverty and ecological collapse.
In complex systems, the last thing that happened is almost never informative about what’s coming next. The world is always changing – partly due to factors outside our control and partly due to our own interventions…
In the early days of Scrum we were steeped in complex adaptive systems theory and autonomous intelligent systems. This area of research is emerging in a new form called Ambient Intelligence (AmI) due to the proliferation of intelligent devices on the internet. This proliferation and the applications we use with them caused Wired Magazine to declare “The Web is dead” in September 2010.
Work in this area can help us understand Scrum better and ensure that basic collaboration mechanisms are in place to make Scrum work. The environment must be set up so that people have an incentive to help one another in order to optimize the whole, rather than optimizing their individual niche at the expense of the larger community. Failure to do this will prevent individuals and companies achieving the full benefits of Scrum.
ACM Transactions on Autonomous Adaptive Systems has many articles worth reading to understand the issues in more depth. In particular, the article below reviews much of the literature upon which Scrum is based and proposes a better approach to achieve cooperation among networked systems.
We address the problem of cooperation in decentralized systems, specifically looking at interactions between independent pairs of peers where mutual exchange of resources (e.g., updating or sharing content) is required. In the absence of any enforcement mechanism or protocol, there is no incentive for one party to directly reciprocate during a transaction with another. Consequently, for such decentralized systems to function, protocols for self-organization need to explicitly promote cooperation in a manner where adherence to the protocol is incentivized.
In this article we introduce a new generic model to achieve this. The model is based on peers repeatedly interacting to build up and maintain a dynamic social network of others that they can trust based on similarity of cooperation. This mechanism effectively incentivizes unselfish behavior, where peers with higher levels of cooperation gain higher payoff.We examine the model’s behavior and robustness in detail. This includes the effect of peers self-adapting their cooperation level in response to maximizing their payoff, representing a Nash-equilibrium of the system. The study shows that the formation of a social network based on reflexive cooperation levels can be a highly effective and robust incentive mechanism for autonomous decentralized systems.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.2.11 [Artificial Intelligence]: Distributed Artificial Intelligence— Multiagent systems; C.2.1 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Network Architecture and Design—Distributed networks
General Terms: Algorithms Additional Key Words and Phrases: Cooperation, decentralized systems, self-organization ACM Reference Format: Allen, S. M., Colombo, G., and Whitaker, R. M. 2010. Cooperation through self-similar social networks. ACM Trans. Autonom. Adapt. Syst. 5, 1, Article 4 (February 2010), 29 pages.Comments are moderated and may take up to 24 hours to appear.
The Covid-19 crisis is a cataclysmic event and caught us all by surprise. It is considered a health and economic crisis, but at the same time and rarely discussed, it also reveals the weaknesses in the systemic processes in our society and organizations. The Viable System Model (VSM) by Stafford Beer allows us to structure the various weaknesses and to put them into a coherent framework. The VSM postulates that all social systems need a minimum set of systemic functions to become viable. This article explains the vital role of these systemic functions during the Covid 19 crisis. It discusses how their (in)adequate functioning decides about the prevention and mastery of the crisis. The VSM offers thus a formal framework to better understand the systemic processes needed for the prevention and mastery of crisis.
Collective computation: Complexity can arise from simple interactions among components but does it happen this way in nature—complexity at the microscale suggests not (https://t.co/RxLubGc758). The origins of this view lie in model systems like cellular automata yet von Neumann pic.twitter.com/SHDLxepzAu
Launching the Decision Support Tool for Systems Thinking
The Systems School presents a new online, open access Decision Support Tool for Systems Thinking.
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In our work building capacity for systems thinking with individuals, teams, and collaborations , we have found that the greatest hurdles to application are:
understanding which systems method to use and when
access to clear instructions on how to apply the method
indications of potential outcomes from application
analytical questions to reflect and makes sense of the new insights gained
Our development of the Tool aims to support these systems learning and application needs.
In this event we will share what the Tool is and how it works, followed by an opportunity for questions.
On 15-17 June 2020, the Skoll Centre’s Map the System competition held its Global Final virtually. As a member of this year’s judging panel, Ed Straw shares his insights.
The more researchers are conscious of their ‘traditions of understanding’ in relation to the subject, the less biased will be the output. Through culture, education and experiences of many forms, everyone holds preconceptions about their field of study – their ‘positionality’. The tendency for many is for US-European norms in economics, democracy, science and so on to be the starting point. As a judge for the Map the System competition, surfacing my own inbuilt assumptions in relation to each of the 31 finalists is a tenet of systems thinking. This was not easy. The entries ranged from the Youth Suicide Crisis in India to Why Women-Owned Businesses in South African Townships Fail, from Consumer Food Waste in Navarre to Affordable Housing in Utah. Everywhere is different.
Yet, I came away with the sense of ‘Yes, and Everywhere is the Same.’ What struck me most was the commonalities in many of the entries. The most obvious example is menstruation. This is actually an issue that affects over 3.5bn people for long parts for their lives. Normalising periods, treating them as just another bodily function requiring proper facilities and materials to be readily available in every institution, being able to talk about them in an understanding and knowledgeable way, not stigmatizing and so on would benefit so many lives. It is a common global issue. ‘There will be blood’ as one entry put it so succinctly. At its root, it is about shifting social norms.
This theme extended to several other entries where appalling norms in the treatment of women are underlying high adolescent pregnancy in Peru, female genital mutilation in Somalia and modern slavery in Papua New Guinea. But where is the global learning in shifting social norms?
Youth homelessness in Vancouver brought out another commonality – the lack of coordination and integration by public and third sector agencies. Funding is not the issue: masses of it appear to be available. As so often, it is poor overall governance leaving lots of intermediate interventions with few aimed at the whole person and the purpose of the funding. How often have I seen that. At what point will the world of government know instinctively that sound governance is where any solution has to start?
Poor plastic waste disposal in Accra Ghana, fake news in Germany, systemic barriers to public transportation in Boston US, the flooding crisis in Canada, type 2 diabetes in Latino-American communities, and depression in China are all entries with universal insights. Yet few of them get transported around the world, as a matter of course.
This led me on to thinking about the sort of ‘global learning engine’ that has been so effective in developing world class manufacturing from Japanese practice in automotive and consumer electronics from the 80s onwards, which is now almost universal in its application. It is the reason we can buy products of such extraordinary complexity, use and reliability, and at such comparatively low cost. These learning engines consist of management gurus, consultants, trade and specialist journals and news media, design authorities, business schools, industry analytics, trade associations, professional institutes, software developers, state funded R&D institutions and more. All of them are intent on scouring the world for what works best, why, and how, and transferring this knowledge.
Could world class governing and government be developed through a global learning engine? Bits and pieces of knowledge transfer do happen. The OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation is working hard in this direction. A few university departments are active (e.g. Arend Lijphart at the University of California). This competition is a fine example. But the total is tiny compared to the billions spent on knowledge acquisition and application in the commercial world. And typically governments are spending 40% of a country’s GDP, a vast sum that would be spent so much better stimulated by universal knowledge transfer and application.
The faster this learning platform can be activated and institutionalized, the faster governments will improve. None of the situations of concern analysed by the entrants would be solved through the application of today’s, often ramshackle political processes. Politics is more often an obstacle than an answer. Systems thinking works. In 2017 the UN, the WHO and OECD all called for the use of systems thinking to deal with highly complex problems. Which issue in government these days is not? Rise up systems thinkers – our time has come.
Author:
Ed Straw, Visiting Research Fellow at the Open University’s Applied Systems Thinking in Practice unit, headed by Professor Ray Ison, with whom he recently co-authored a book on The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking, and its application to governments and governance.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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