Thanks, an interesting read. Reminded me of something I discovered a couple of years ago, captured in this early draft of something I wrote (the Forester bit didn't make the final cut). Start with the last sentence for context.
There's a body of new work based on the Warfield and Christakis community of practice from the SDD Symposium 2015 https://t.co/RKYHNGpo3W and a recent Springer book https://t.co/ZoqnzYT1bS
— Peter Jones, New England Daytonian expat (@redesign) August 18, 2020
"Warfield argued that 'higher-quality language' had more impact on science than hypothesis testing, an extraordinary claim and one underdeveloped in science studies."
Thanks for pulling this idea Pete. Warfield's aim in much of his foundational work – Interactive Management, Generic Design Science, DoSM – was to engage the right variety to generate "high-quality observations" that serve as a generating system for deep insight & leverage.
— Peter Jones, New England Daytonian expat (@redesign) August 18, 2020
Innovation to improve the work of protecting and serving refugees requires problem solving methods that uncover structural and human barriers, and tools for thinking through, testing and experimenting with possible solutions.
Innovation and organizations scholars Dave Francis and John Bessant (2005) have identified four types of innovation within an organization: changes to products and services, changes in the way those products and services are created and delivered, changes in how products and services are communicated, and changes in what the organization actually does.
To drive these innovations, innovators need to understand the systems they are working within, whether those are internal systems created by human resources or local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) crucial for delivering emergency aid. They need to understand the motivations of the various stakeholders, the norms and values shaping the organization’s culture, and policies and procedures that create formalized standards within the organization.
To identify the right problem to solve, innovators use systems thinking. Systems thinking is a methodology for identifying the root causes of complex problems and identifying interventions for systems change. This holistic approach to problem solving is critical for humanitarian innovation that works to create change within the sector by both introducing new ways of doing work or improving current practices (Warner, 2017).
In his insightful article, Human-Centered, Systems-Minded Design, Thomas Both, Director of the Designing for Social Systems Program at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, tells the story of Jill Vialet (Both, 2018).
Vialet is the founder and CEO of PlayWorks, an organization that helps schools help their kids do their best by improving how they play during class breaks. School leaders often told Vialet they faced a shortage of substitute teachers. When a teacher called in sick, they did not have a reliable pool of substitute teachers to cover the classes. This created a challenge for the schools, as they would have to move teachers around or rush to find a replacement. As a result, teacher absences had adverse effects on the classroom and on the students’ learning outcomes.
Vialet wanted to take this challenge on. Most people working to solve this problem would assume the school simply needed to hire more substitute teachers. But as Both reports, when Vialet studied the substitute teacher system, she found that the problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough substitute teachers. In fact, there was a large pool of people already in the system, but few taught on a regular basis.
Vialet spent time with substitute teachers to identify the root cause of the problem and how to change the system. She found that, “Substitutes felt they weren’t respected or valued by schools, and felt they didn’t have a community of support in schools or among their fellow subs,” writes Both. Schools had to change how they interacted with and supported substitute teachers. This is quite a different intervention than simply recruiting more people. As a result of this work, Vialet founded Substantial Classrooms to help schools improve how they train and support substitute teachers.
Vialet was able to solve this complex problem because she employed both human-centered design and systems thinking. As Both writes,
“For both human- and systems-level challenges, we need to identify the problems worth addressing if we are to create meaningful change. Understanding the right problem, we can better create effective solutions. A very simple characterization of a design approach is that we move from working to understand a challenge, to working on creating solutions in response to the challenge.”
Systems thinking is a methodology for understanding complex problems. It helps us understand the motivations and beliefs of people involved, as well as structural dynamics at play. Knowing the dynamics of the systems we are trying to innovate will help us know where to act.
Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a dynamical regime between order and disorder attain the highest level of computational capabilities and achieve an optimal trade-off between robustness and flexibility. Recent results in cellular and evolutionary biology, neuroscience and computer science have revitalised the interest in the criticality hypothesis, emphasising its role as a viable candidate general law in adaptive complex systems. In this paper we provide an overview of the works on dynamical criticality that are -to the best of our knowledge- particularly relevant for the criticality hypothesis. We review the main contributions concerning dynamics and information processing at the edge of chaos, and we illustrate the main achievements in the study of critical dynamics in biological systems. Finally, we discuss open questions and propose an agenda for future work.
This paper shows that learning about how your firm works is equivalent to gaining Lovecraftian Secret Knowledge. Promising managers asked to do process redesign at their firm learn how messed up it all is, so they give up rising careers & become hermits at the edges of the firm pic.twitter.com/1SneEF86hQ
What causes people to make a sanity check is when they learn that the features of their organization are not, in fact, part of a Grand Plan, but rather socially constructed, random, & in flux. The highlighted quote says it all.
For those interested in the details (or frustrated by the paywall), there is a great summary of the research and implications in HBR, as @ellahafermalz found! https://t.co/xf204nPmuC
Drag image to reposition📡Human SystemsHuman Systems is a network of people who care about designing better social systems. We run a club where social designers get feedback on their designs. We have trainings and a methodology for social designers. And you can talk to us about everything from ritual design to organizational process change to social app redesign (seebelow).Social SystemsHuman Systems is for designers of social systems: systems made of people, where there are codified and mutually understood roles and responsibilities. These designs can range from dinner table conversation games to social networks and global governance structures.Examples of Social Systems
The Social Design ClubEvery week we host an online event where someone presents a social design and gets feedback. Soon we’ll add presentations of successful and interesting social designs, and debates about what kind of social designs will best serve society.Last week Malcolm Ocean presented social features for a work tracking platform. This week, Ed Sapiera presents a next generation online video platform. You can RSVP for our next meeting at thestoa.ca.🌈The SDC is a collaboration between Human Systems, the Stoa, and Ḟreyjạ.Trainings and MethodologyWe also teach a method for designing social systems that focuses on human values, on the evolution of social norms in a system, and on the structural features which make it easier or harder for participants in a system to live and interact in the ways they value.•Learn to precisely articulate values—yours and those of others— and see when and how they are crowded out by other motivations and situational factors.•Redesign systems (workplaces, schools, family structures, social apps, etc) so as to support meaningful lives, interactions, and work. Use the HS Redesign Method.•Make rituals, games, group practices, organizational policies, institutions, or social technologies around values that are important to your community but lack space for full expression.•Join a vibrant and diverse network of meaning-first designers, and collaborate on your designs. Structural Features
Redesign Method
Imagine redesigning — News Feed, Family Dinners, Classroom Workgroups🌈We’ve been improving the Human Systems trainings for the last 3 years. Our school has trained 300+ well-positioned product people in our design methods and metrics. Our alumni have applied our methods at Facebook, Github and Apple; they’ve changed product direction at startups, and redesigned smaller systems like schools, co-living settlements, and families.🚀Learn more at 😎HS101 Deluxe.Talk to UsDepartment of Ritual Design•Hire help for a thorny ritual design task. Members of the Department of Ritual Design create customized rituals based on what is meaningful to the people involved. They start by articulating values in an interview. Then they design a custom ritual that supports participants in showing up in ways they find inspiring.👉Learn more at the 🌱Department of Ritual Design Design of Org Processes and Governance•Hire people to think about org change and flag values at risk. You can now hire HS-trained and certified teams to add to your organizational change process. These teams will assess the impact of potential features or redesigns on the values of users or workers. These “Values-at-Risk Assessments” will surface important values in the user or worker population that could be suppressed by an organizational change. The teams will present these potentially suppressed values, along with actionable steps that could be taken for each value at risk.👉Learn more at the 💼Design of Org Processes & Governance Dept Design of Social Apps and Environments•Hire people to join a design process and flag values at risk. You can now hire HS-trained and certified teams to add to your social app design process. These teams will assess the impact of potential features or redesigns on the values of users or workers. These “Values-at-Risk Assessments” will surface important values in the user or worker population that could be suppressed by a social design. The teams will present these potentially suppressed values, along with actionable steps that could be taken for each value at risk.👉Learn more at 🔗Design of Social Apps and Environments Dept Questions?🙋FAQ🙏Testimonials🚀Our MissionDepartments🌱Department of Ritual Design💼Design of Org Processes & Governance Dept🔗Design of Social Apps and Environments DeptPrograms👩🏻🎨Social Design Club😎HS101 Deluxe✍HS201: Redesigning Large Social Systems around Values📈HS202: Monitoring for Values and How They’re Working Out Miscellany🤓HS101 Self Study🎳Corona Games
Get ready to take your place at the profession’s flagship event – the Operational Research Society’s annual conference.
OR62 Online is shaping up to be the most engaging virtual gathering of OR and analytics thought leaders, advanced practitioners and rising talent.
This event, held online for the first time, is being developed to provide our dynamic profession with a wealth of opportunities to learn, collaborate and inspire.
Let’s stay connected, celebrate the achievements within our profession, and get ready for the future together. Free to attend with convenient access over the three days from your computer and smart device.
The OR62 Online organisers are proud to announce the plenary speakers for OR62 Online. Each speaker is a leading thinker and innovator in their field. They will share their ground-breaking work with delegates in formal 60-minute presentations.
You can read more details about their talks and biographies by clicking read more.
Ellen D. Lewis, PhD Ethos of Engagement Consulting
Talk Title: Inclusive Systemic Evaluation: Deepening Understandings of Engagement and Community
Prof Patrick M. Reed Cornell University
Talk Title: Conflict, Coordination & Control: Do We Understand the Actual Rules Used to Balance Flooding, Energy, and Agricultural Tradeoffs in River Basins?
We are seeing an increased recognition of the need for deliberative democracy. Peter Miles FRSA shares his experience of a technology-enabled structured dialogue methodology that actively supports a diverse group of stakeholders and experts to develop a deep and shared understanding of a complex challenge and then commit with confidence to a way forward.
While there are many group deliberation methods around, most rely on simple technology (such as the humble but ubiquitous post-it note), or apply computing in a passive mode as a way of documenting and sharing text. Almost always there is a tacit assumption that words and sentences have a single meaning.
The structured dialogue methodology introduced here has its roots in Interactive Management, developed in the 1970s by John Warfield and Alexander Christakis in the US. This approach spread around the world under a variety of names, including Structured Dialogic Design, Structured Democratic Dialog and Demosophia. It is designed to avoid ‘cognitive overload’ and reduce distortion due to power imbalances, to integrate diverse expertise and perspectives, and it enables deep mutual understanding as a solid foundation for progress. While the technology plays an active part and the process of facilitation plays an important role, the content is always owned by the participants.
Let us start with an outline of the experience of the participant. First of all, they will be in the room – known as a Colab – for a reason; the participation group will have been carefully designed at an earlier stage of the process, taking account of the overall context, and aiming above all for cognitive diversity. They may be deeply involved in the particular issue and care about any potential changes, as a stakeholder; or they may have sway over resources that will be needed for implementation. They could be an expert of some sort – possibly technical, or financial, or from working in a frontline position – that gives them a specific insight into how things really work.
Participants will be asked to answer a ‘trigger question’, initially working on their own. The question will be a broad one, designed to cover the scope of the situation, and along the lines of: ‘What are the main issues, barriers and challenges we face in achieving X?’ Everyone will then be asked to provide just one answer. That answer will be captured in a software tool, along with answers from everyone else and this process continues until a number of answers are captured. Then participants get the opportunity to clarify the answers that others have given and these clarifications are again recorded and captured, always using their own words. Further understanding emerges during a grouping phase, where answers are contrasted and compared.
OSWALD WIENER: “SCIENCE AND BARBARISM GO VERY WELL TOGETHER“
Interviewby Hans-Christian Dany
When the Vienna Actionists urinated, masturbated, and vomited at an event titled “Art and Revolution” in Vienna University’s Lecture Hall 1 in 1968, the proceedings were accompanied by a lecture on the relationship between speech and thought by the then thirty-two-year-old Oswald Wiener. One year later his literary montage die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (the improvement of central europe, a novel) was published. With its excurses on linguistics and cybernetics, it now reads as an astonishing foreshadowing of the Internet and virtual reality. Later, Wiener turned to the figure of the dandy, who maintains his difference from machines by cultivating a practice of self-observation. Hans-Christian Dany visited him at his home in southeast Austria to talk about the peculiar standstill of art and science in the digital age.
The moment I get into the hire car, I know they’ve given me the right vehicle for my mission. A small screen shows what I could drive into should I choose to reverse. I hesitate briefly but resist the temptation. On the way there I don’t see anything but the road. The world has disappeared into fog, but a voice is guiding me. My destination is somewhere just before the border to Slovenia and Hungary. On a mountain there lives a who professes to have been cultivating idiocy for fifty years. Where I come from, he enjoys an almost magical reputation. When I told my friends I was going to meet him, they looked at me in disbelief. “I didn’t think he really existed”. And indeed, it isn’t easy to imagine the life of a person who described, fifty years before the fact, the peculiar irreality that would come to pass through the Internet. A person who seems to rise above the current of time, one whose life story reads like a novel. A person who today hopes that our attention might again shift to the self-observation of human thought as a form of artistic research.
“You have reached your destination”. I park the Nissan in front of an inconspicuous house. The name Wiener really does appear on the door. Ingrid Wiener, easily recognisable by the melody of her speech, opens it. Further back, in the darkness of the kitchen, I make out Oswald Wiener. The seventy-nine-year-old seems real enough, and bears no resemblance to a fictional character who can travel in time inside his own head. One wonders whether it was just such an interconnection of real and linguistic existence that enabled him to write one of the most shattering novels of the twentieth century. Or whether it was this way of thinking that enabled him to use the historical figure of the dandy to cast light on the problems of the artificial intelligences of the future. For this was the kinetic logic of a writer who it was impossible to pin down, who would disappear behind pseudonyms or among gold prospectors at the furthest ends of the world, only to return with recordings of the songs of wild Canadian dogs. This was the author of a work that for a long time appeared to be hopelessly fragmented, but which today has constituted itself as a compelling intellectual achievement. A blinding sun is shining through the window. I unwrap my recording device from a white silk cloth. The man opposite me picks up exactly the same device, and sets it up next to the first one like a reflection. At one and the same time, both of us say: a good machine.
You initially wanted to be a jazz musician, but then you switched from playing the trumpet to working for Olivetti.
Jazz was implanted in me at the age of twelve. There was a radio station run by the American Occupation, the Blue Danube Network, which was a kind of request programme for the soldiers. It was on seven days a week, and once a week it played a piece of jazz. This was in 1947/48. I was living in a reform school at the time, and all the boys had a germanium diode crystal receiver with a piece of wire that you could bend and adjust until you got the right frequency. For headphones we used earpieces stolen from phone box telephones. And with them we’d listen to the radio under the covers every evening. Then, in the 1950s, my childhood friend Konrad Bayer inducted me into the circle of artists and poets. My interest in poetry grew with my realisation that my musical talent was not going to turn me into a world-famous jazz trumpeter. I liked the poems of Gerhard Rühm or H.C. Artmann as much as I liked music. Then I got sick of all that as well, I saw that my poetry was a kind of imitation of Rühm’s – at best, an imitation with different intentions to his own. That was the end of my foray into art, and now I wanted to do the exact opposite: marry, have children, take up a bourgeois profession. I very quickly had a successful career at Olivetti; they were waiting for a guy like me. That’s where I learned the principles of programming.
Was this applied programming, or was it linked to the debate over cybernetics that was going on at the time?
The term cybernetics had only just reached Central Europe. People didn’t exactly know what it meant. In 1959 I stole the first copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics from the lending library of the Vienna Information Center, a propaganda institute run by the American occupation forces. At the time I didn’t entirely understand it. I still don’t know whether I entirely understand it today.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Automatic for the People? Cybernetics and Left‐Accelerationism
Michael E. Gardiner
First published: 06 August 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12528
Ecosystem resilience to drought and floodingOne of the three projects that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund is aimed at the question how the robustness of plant ecosystems to drought and flooding depends on the plasticity of individual plants and heterogeneity of the plant population. The research proposal was written by Prof. Kirsten ten Tusscher, Prof. Stefan Dekker and Dr. Hugo de Boer.Read more »
Leveraging a food transition for Arctic indigenous communities Indigenous Arctic communities are experiencing a fundamental, undesired and unsustainable shift in their food system. Science-based visions of sustainable solutions are lacking, and the capacity within communities to evoke change is low. Dr. Ine Dorresteijn and Prof. Bert Theunissen received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund for their project aimed at leveraging a food transition for indigenous communities in the Bering Sea.Read more »
Stability of underdetermined dynamical systems Another project that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund focuses at the role of networks in the dynamics of random dynamical systems. The research proposal was written by Dr. Ivan Kryven, Dr. Mara Baudena and Dr. Anna von der Heydt, who address their research question on the level of mathematical foundations, as well as by studying several real-world examples where networks are anticipated to play a crucial role in systems dynamics.Read more »
In today’s post, I am looking at the idea of pluralism, something that is important to hold in Systems Thinking. I am relying on the ideas of the British philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin. Berlin is most famous for his ideas on freedom. He coined the terms negative and positive freedom. Loosely put, negative freedom is the freedom from constraints or interference from others. And positive freedom is the freedom to act upon one’s own desires and ambitions.
My favorite lesson from Berlin is pluralism – his take on anti-monism. Monism is the idea that there is only one true answer to questions
Hmmm… this seems mostly like a nice summary of progress and revision in science – and, of course, we might all be able to read confirmation of our biases into ‘the brain is a network’.
And yet, and yet… ‘brain science’ seems weirdly subject to the problems of all science – trends and fashions, prevailing orthodoxies, reification of models, confirmation or theory bias, all kinds of holding strongly what might better be held lightly. And of course we need people to hold their models strongly, against orthodoxies and trends, to make breakthroughs in understanding… but when I see either/or thinking, I get worried – and especially when I see quotes like: “The brain literally is a network… It’s not a metaphor.” However, the article ends with:
For Sporns, the marriage is a natural one. “Networks are not so much an antidote to localizationism,” he says. “They’re more like a way of combining a framework where you look for local differences with one where you look at the system as a whole.” Perhaps, then, even as network neuroscience becomes increasingly popular, Broca’s legacy will live on.
A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring
Network neuroscience could revolutionize how we understand the brain—and change our approach to neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Network neuroscience isn’t simply a new way to study the brain. It’s a way to get closer to the brain’s essence, how it truly works.ILLUSTRATION: SAM WHITNEY
IN MID-19TH CENTURY Europe, a debate was raging among early brain scientists. Strangely, this academic disagreement had its roots in the pseudoscience of phrenology, the practice of measuring bumps on the skull to determine someone’s personality. Phrenology had found purchase at fairs and was quite popular with the general public, but it had been roundly rejected by most scholars. For others, though, this carnival trick held a pearl of inspiration. Phrenology depended on the assumption that different parts of the brain are associated with different traits and abilities, a position called “localizationism.” And the absurdity of skull-measuring did not necessarily invalidate this notion.
But others disliked the stench of charlatanism that clung to any ideas associated with phrenology. This second camp contended that capacities are evenly distributed throughout the brain, and so damage to any one brain region would have the same effect as damage to any other. The debate between these groups raged until 1861, when Paul Broca, a French neurologist, reported on a patient with a bizarre set of symptoms. Though this man could not speak, he was entirely capable of understanding language, and his intelligence seemed unaffected. When the patient died and Broca dissected his brain, he discovered a lesion, or site of severe damage, low on the left side of his brain. Here was an individual who had sustained brain damage in a specific area and had lost a very specific ability—while the rest of his functions remained intact! Localizationism had been vindicated. For the next 150 years, it would be the dominant position in brain science.
Operating under the assumption that different parts of the brain have separate functions, neuroscientists have made remarkable progress toward understanding how the brain works. They have discovered that vision happens at the back of the head, that a tiara of tissue at the top of the brain sends commands to the muscles so that the body can move, and that a small structure beneath the ear has the specific responsibility of recognizing faces. All of these regions are made of gray matter, a type of tissue that contains neuron cell bodies and covers the surface of the brain. Underneath lies the white matter, which stretches in bundles of fiber between regions of gray matter and carries messages all over the brain. But though figuring out the function of a particular piece of gray matter can be straightforward enough—look for someone with damage to that area and see what they are unable to do—white matter has proven more difficult to pin down. “For a long time, we’ve been ignoring that connectivity because we didn’t know how to talk about it,” says Danielle Bassett, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
What the media and its critics often fail to note about the “cancel culture” is its deep roots in some of the most hollowed out parts of our so-called meritocracy. We have millions of teachers teaching students about content they know little about, because they were busy studying “how to be a teacher” instead. We have hundred of thousands of management consultants and their ilk who claim a mystical expertise in “process” can replace a deep understanding of the industry and subject matters they “consult” about. We have tens of thousand of journalists, who, like the teachers, studied “journalism” and use that as a pretext to write about subjects they barely understand and yet claim a “moral imperative” to pass that amateur knowledge off to an unsuspecting public as “knowledge”, “news” and “expert opinion.” The meritocracy has become a “mirror-tocracy.” If you act like, look like, sound like, or spout off “truthies” like these so called “experts,” you are “approved.” If you dare to disagree? Last century, disagreement with members of the “professions” above would have led to dialogue — and learning. In the third decade of this century: disagree and risk being cancelled.
I and my work were cancelled this week by none other than the academic journal which claims to speak for, of all things, “The Learning Organization.”
I had been invited to write the article in question. It was peer-reviewed and edited twice. It was accepted and ready for publication.
But, I dared to be critical. So I was cancelled. The editor included these helpful lines from a second set of reviewers he sent the article to to kill it off:
The way LO is portrayed is my main concern. The way the article is written also suggests that LO simply promotes reductionism and simplification, and that the current LO literature denies or dissuades reflection, agency, context and the possibility of emergence. The main reason for rejecting your manuscript is the lack of clear and relevant connections to the field of the learning organization.
The Learning Organization and the concept for which it claims to speak would rather cancel criticism than engage in dialogue. Agreement and praise are not the foundation for learning. But they are the mirror on which the consultants who preach about learning organizations depend. As noted in my opening paragraph, these “professionals” tell organizations how to be more open to “learning” as if naked process alone was sufficient. It has fostered a huge industry. But, unless the learning is about what matters to the organizations’ purposes, goals, and business, it is a giant waste. There I said it again. Medium, however, will not cancel me.
I present the Learning Organization intended article below and, unlike they, welcome your feedback.
Not learning but reflecting and dialoguing: updating the concept of a learning organization through cybernetics
Purpose
In a learning organization it is believed that a culture of learning can overcome the traditional thought that reductionism is “good,” and complexity is “bad.” Yet the very concept of a learning organization treats what is learned as a stock of knowledge, a resource to be exploited. The learned thereby gets reduced to another “simple” object. This article suggests an alternative. There is an inherent power in each manager’s role as a sense-maker, helping participants etc. to discern coherence. Shifting from a stress on an ascribed coherence (measured by adhesion to labels and categories) to a culture which promotes emergent coherence (determined by contextualization and open to change) can offer new tools and perspectives to organizations facing complexity, uncertainty, and change.
Design/methodology/approach
What happens to the concept of a learning organization when its focus is shifted from the current emphasis on processes to a new focus on what it is that is worth learning?
Findings
I suggest that learning which contributes to self-reflection of choices made and shortcuts, or representation used is worthwhile … and that the pursuit of learning processes which fail to so contribute is not. Coherence is the goal. Learning is one of many potential means.
Value
Helping managers to determine what is behind the shortcuts they make with regard to their assigned responsibilities and their many contexts becomes the reflective and dialoging tasks which can both redefine what a learning organization “ought” to be and promote resilience therein.
Introduction — The Critical Role of Ceteris Paribus in Modern Management
Modern management’s successes and failures can be traced to a common root: how well does ceteris paribus hold, thereby allowing the simplifications, chunking, modularity, isolation, and other forms of reduction on which traditional management is based to flourish? The ability of a manager to reduce complicated problems to a set of well-defined tasks is the key to success. Doing so often means ignoring the manifold layers of inter-related systems of which a given organization, its participants, users, resources, and context are a part. The oft suggested solution to this ignorance is to create a learning organization — where a culture of learning can overcome the traditional thought that reductionism is “good,” and complexity is “bad.” Yet the very concept of a learning organization treats what is learned as a stock of knowledge, a resource to be exploited. The learned thereby gets reduced to another “simple” object. This article suggests an alternative. There is an inherent power in each manager’s role as a sense-maker, helping participants, etc. to discern coherence. Shifting from a stress on an ascribed coherence (measured by adhesion to labels and categories) to a culture that promotes emergent coherence (determined by contextualization and open to change) can offer new tools and perspectives to organizations facing complexity, uncertainty, and change.
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted such contexts of complexity, uncertainty, and change and made it clear they are rather ubiquitous. The traditional lessons of modern management are coming up short. Their dependence on stability, their resistance to context dependence, and their structural inadequacies in confronting ambiguity and fluidity of meaning have all been exposed by their inability to “manage” the Covid-19 crisis.
Management has been ascendant in Western society for more than a century. Much of that success has been built on the ability of managers to effectively isolate their organization as much as possible from the vagaries and uncertainties inherent in their surrounding contexts. In the ongoing tension between efficiency and resilience, modern management has a strong preference for efficiency — individual tasks have defined goals and achieving those goals with minimal time and resources while maximizing quality is, by definition, measured in efficiency terms. Critically, not all environments nor contexts are stable. Covid-19 hasmade that instability rather obvious.
A mundane example is illustrative. Consider the role of an American football kicker. The task is easily defined — the ball is snapped to a holder; you are to kick the ball through the goalposts. Success and failure are easily measured — “did the kick succeed?”. The tasks are discrete — snap the ball, hold the ball, kick the ball. But, football, like life, is not quite that simple. There is the context — the opposing team’s goal to try to tackle the hold and the kicker. And the wider context — one’s team is either at home or away, and the game is either close (i.e., the points to be scored matter) or not. There are the internal pressures on each of the participants — perhaps there are health issues or family issues, or a lack of sleep, or severe indigestion. If the football team is to be a learning organization, it must deal with these wider considerations and not just focus on the task at hand — kicking the ball.
How businesses have adapted to the new “stay-at-home” rules arising from Covid-19 more broadly illustrates the problem. No longer is it sufficient to focus on churning out the best marketing copy a creative team might imagine. Instead, the tasks now include remote conferencing, secure document sharing, developing a sensitivity for local nes and contexts, and remote production. In a wider context they now include: working with children at home demanding attention, inability to find quiet time, multiple demands for attention, lack of proper workspaces, lack of access to needed materials and inability to segregate the professional from the personal. Traditional management, as a discipline, lacks the tools to deal with these ever-widening considerations.
While some may argue that being or becoming a learning organization can help address such issues, this article makes a different case: what is learned and “how” is much more important than “being” a learning organization.
Cybernetics offers a perspective on what needs to be learned and provides a “how.” Cybernetics is the study of feedback and its effects in purposive systems. “Cybernetic systems are complex, interacting, probabilistic networks such as brains, markets, living organisms, industries, battles.” (Beer, 1959) Cybernetics is a thinking and decision-making approach designed to deal with such observations as: (1) many of our interactions cannot be described with direct relationships, (2) our environments are neither fixed nor completely exogenous, (3) our actions and communications have multiple order effects, and further time-delayed effects, and (4) our goals regarding the very actions we pursue are often in flux. This sounds like Covid-19.
Cybernetics warns us that we live in a complex world where ambiguity is ever-present in our world despite our oft-exercised option to ignore it. We assert the simple in lieu of the complex, the direct in lieu of the nuanced or the subtle, the label or category in lieu of recognizing the portfolio of choices that label/category represents. By asserting the simple, we can isolate tasks and projects from contexts if we are willing to simultaneously isolate those same tasks and projects from “fit.” Our labels and categories, our self-imposed boundary constraints, are necessary if we are going to attempt to measure efficiency and efficacy and to manage so as to optimize either. But their use also functions as a set of blinders — closing the task, the project, the manager, the organization, and its artificially constrained environment off from the changes going on about it and them.
Boundaries are always shifting. Identities are unclear. As Heisenberg (1959) told us: “The world is not divided into different groups of objects but rather into different groups of relationships…. The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”
One of the three projects that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund is aimed at the question how the robustness of plant ecosystems to drought and flooding depends on the plasticity of individual plants and heterogeneity of the plant population. The research proposal was written by 
Indigenous Arctic communities are experiencing a fundamental, undesired and unsustainable shift in their food system. Science-based visions of sustainable solutions are lacking, and the capacity within communities to evoke change is low. 
Another project that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund focuses at the role of networks in the dynamics of random dynamical systems. The research proposal was written by 
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