Building Complex Organizations through Simple Constraints: Zappos — with John Bunch John Bunch explains why Zappos uses research on cities to inform its internal structure, and the ambition to create an anti-fragile company that can be around for 1000 years and more. That puts pressure on evolving the company quickly to respond to new market demands and opportunities, while ensuring that people in the organisation are fully aligned with its core values and can move swiftly within its enabling constraints.

Building Complex Organizations through Simple Constraints: Zappos — with John Bunch | by Simone Cicero | Jul, 2020 | Stories of Platform Design

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The Seeing Systems Blog: Marginality: In Nationality, Religion, Profession, and Race

Marginality: In Nationality, Religion, Profession, and Race

1.While reading Can We Truly See the Other, it struck one reader that she is two “others.” Born in America with Mexican heritage, the family then moved to Mexico; and she now lives and moves back and forth between the two cultures. In Mexico, she is seen as American, and in America she is seen as Mexican. Never fully one or the other. Always marginal. At first, marginality feels like a deficit, but is there also a positive side, a unique contribution marginality can make to both cultures?

2. We were doing an “identity” exercise as part of a residential When Cultures Meet Workshop. All participants would be working on their identities, and the staff pressured me to work on my White identity. I resisted. Others would be working on deep emotionally-charged identities – racial, sexual, aging. Whiteness wasn’t that for me. In the end, I did it for the team. And I got into it, although with a headache.

White identity: WE Whites created civilization; WE brought civilization to peoples across the world; WE created great and lasting literature, philosophies, music, scientific breakthroughs; WE created magnificent cities with awe-inspiring architecture; and more… (Please don’t tell me about all the other gifts WE brought – slavery, oppression, genocide, cultural extinction…That wasn’t my mandate.)

What was painful to me was this: I am a first generation American; my parent came to America as children from Russia, poor and speaking no English. As heritage goes, in Russia they were not known as White. They were Yids, kikes, vermin, and such. Definitely, not White. That was my deep emotionally charged identity.

3.Jewish Marginality. One of the many things Hitler had against the Jews was that they weren’t real Germans regardless of how long they lived in the country, the wars they fought on behalf of the country, or the contributions they made to the country. They were internationalists, citizens of the world, therefore either actually or potentially disloyal. He was partly right, but the point he missed was that as “citizens of the world” they were not full citizens anywhere. Wherever they lived, they were marginal.

That got me to wonder: What if marginality itself is an identity? Marginals are part of the culture, yet never fully inside it. Marginality brings to a culture some not always appreciated gifts. Marginals are potentially free of blind loyalty, groupthink, unquestioned patriotism. My country/organization right or wrong is not the Marginal’s motto. We may love and be proud of our country/organization, yet, in our marginality, we are freer of blind attachment and, as a consequence, we are more able to see and accept its faults as well as its virtues.

4. By now, I assume that some of you organizational specialists and consultants are beginning to recognize marginality as significant part of your identity. That is your gift (again not always appreciated) to the systems you serve. You help insiders see what their chauvinism and patriotism keep them from seeing. However, this gift can come in empathy-free packaging.

5. Marginals may see themselves as bearers of truth, as forces not for destroying systems – organizations, countries – but for helping them live up to their full potential. Some insiders may appreciate the gift, while others might see Marginals as disloyal, ever critical, not true patriots or team players, as disruptive forces, and as problems to be eliminated. And, with some accuracy, they may feel that Marginals don’t really understand or appreciate the inside experience. Our organization exercises (Top, Middle, Bottom, Customer interactions) are often humbling experiences for experienced consultants (Marginals) who become Top Executives or Middle Managers in the exercises only to find that what seemed so simple from the margins was considerably more complex on the inside. The humility that comes from living on the inside might well temper the righteousness of one’s evaluations from the margins.

6. And how does marginality relate to otherness- for example, to the Black and Brown experience? Isn’t marginality an additional layer to that experience, one that brings with it the unique marginal perspective – making visible what was invisible, the blatant aggressions and the not-so-obvious yet painful microaggressions that pass for business as usual on the inside. That perspective can make for painful, yet useful, listening. And there is a challenge (questionable, I suppose): Can that painful and useful gift from the margins come with understanding or even empathy for the inside experience?

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The Seeing Systems Blog: Marginality: In Nationality, Religion, Profession, and Race

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Enabling people to govern themselves – The Hindu

Enabling people to govern themselves

Arun Maira

JULY 14, 2020

With the pandemic showing up flaws in governance institutions, this is a better way for humanity to face new challenges

Governance systems at all levels, i.e. global, national, and local, have experienced stress as a fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Architectural flaws have been revealed in their design. Breakdowns in many subsystems had to be managed at the same time — in health care, logistics, business, finance, and administration. The complexity of handling so many subsystems at the same time have overwhelmed governance. Solutions for one subsystem backfired on other subsystems. For example, lockdowns to make it easier to manage the health crisis have made it harder to manage economic distress simultaneously. In fact, the diversion of resources to focus on the threat to life posed by COVID-19 has increased vulnerabilities to death from other diseases, and even from malnutrition in many parts of India.

A mismatch is evident

Human civilisation advances with the evolution of better institutions to manage public affairs. Institutions of parliamentary democracy, for example, and the limited liability business corporation, did not exist 400 years ago. Institutions of global governance, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, did not exist even 100 years ago. These institutions were invented to enable human societies to produce better outcomes for their citizens. They have been put through a severe stress test now by the global health and economic crises. The test has revealed a fundamental flaw in their design. There is a mismatch in the design of governance institutions at the global level (and also in India) with the challenges they are required to manage. Designed like machines for efficiency, they are trying to fit themselves into an organic system of the natural environment coupled with human society. It seems that government institutions are square pegs forcing themselves into round holes.

Interconnected issues

The global challenges listed in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which humanity must urgently address now, are systemic challenges. All these systemic problems are interconnected with each other. Environmental, economic, and social issues cannot be separated from each other and solved by experts in silos or by agencies focused only on their own problems. A good solution to one can create more problems for others, as government responses to the novel coronavirus pandemic have revealed.

Even if experts in different disciplines could combine their perspectives and their silo-ed solutions at the global level, they will not be able to solve the systemic problems of the SDGs. Because, their solutions must fit the specific conditions of each country, and of each locality within countries too, to fit the shape of the environment and the condition of society there. Solutions for environmental sustainability along with sustainable livelihoods cannot be the same in Kerala and Ladakh, or in Wisconsin and Tokyo. Solutions must be local. Moreover, for the local people to support the implementation of solutions, they must believe the solution is the right one for them, and not a solution thrust upon them by outside experts. Therefore, they must be active contributors of knowledge for, and active participants in, the creation of the solutions. Moreover, the knowledge of different experts — about the environment, the society, and the economy — must come together to fit realities on the ground.

A case for local systems

Governance of the people must be not only for the people. It must be by the people too. Gandhiji and his economic advisers, J.C. Kumarappa and others, developed their solutions of local enterprises through observations and experiments on the ground (and not in theoretical seminars in capital cities). E.F. Schumacher, founding editor of the journal, Resurgence, and author of Small is Beautiful, had pointed out by the 1970s, the flaws in the economics theories that were driving public policy in capitalist as well as communist countries. He had proposed a new economics, founded on local enterprise, very consistent with Gandhiji’s ideas. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 2009, had developed the principles for self-governing communities from research on the ground in many countries, including India.

When there are scientific explanations for why local systems solutions are the best, if not the only way to solve complex systemic problems, and when the Indian Constitution requires this too, then why does not the government devolve power to citizens in villages and towns in India for them to govern their own affairs?

An Indian anthropologist gave me an insight. She said she had observed that several Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers she knew, who seemed to have more compassion for communities than their colleagues had, were involved at some time in their careers with the evolution of community-based public health and the self-help group movements in Andhra Pradesh. She contrasted their views about how change is brought about with the views of IAS officers who have implemented the Swachh Bharat programme recently. The latter, also very fine officers, saw their role as ‘deliverers of good government’. Whereas the former, through their experience, had begun to see that the role of government is perhaps to ‘enable governance’.

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Enabling people to govern themselves – The Hindu

site: https://systemicapproachtoarchitecturalperformance.wordpress.com/

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The Long Time. Beatrice Pembroke & Ella Saltmarshe | by The Long Time Project | Medium

The Long Time

The Long Time Project

Oct 29, 2018 · 9 min read

Beatrice Pembroke & Ella Saltmarshe

A few weeks ago the IPCC released a report about climate change so devastating that some of its authors were in tears at the launch. It highlighted how our actions now will determine the kinds of lives future inhabitants of the planet will have, and ultimately whether they will have lives at all. We hold immense responsibility for the future; yet in these times of apocalyptic news cycles, it can feel that everything is extremely urgent but happening too fast to change. We hold immense power, yet feel impotent. In the face of global anxiety, we put our heads down and our horizons get closer and closer. The problem is that the tunnel vision of short-term thinking is leading to decisions that might mean we are only left with a short term as a species.

We’ve started the Long Time project as we believe that (1) Our capacity to care about the future is crucial to our ability to preserve it (2) Developing longer perspectives on our existence will change the way we behave in the short term and (3)Art and culture will be crucial to making the much needed transformative shift in attitudes and behaviours. Here we explain both why and how, proposing five paths to safeguarding the long-term…

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The Long Time. Beatrice Pembroke & Ella Saltmarshe | by The Long Time Project | Medium

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Spooky Wisdom: What Lessons Should We Be Learning from How Our Ancestors Built Cities?

The Strong Towns Podcast

http://podcast.strongtowns.org/feed.xml

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Spooky Wisdom: What Lessons Should We Be Learning from How Our Ancestors Built Cities?

Other Strong Towns and related source:

The spooky wisdom of cities – extract from Charles’ book: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/19/the-spooky-wisdom-of-cities-satbook

The spooky wisdom of incremental – Rachel Quednau https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/13/the-spooky-wisdom-of-incremental

link to the wonderful @wrathofgnon https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/988403388047024129?s=20

the article referenced in the above: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/remembering-the-spooky-wisdom-of-our-agrarian-past/

The book: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=w0WyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT12&lpg=PT12&dq=%22spooky+wisdom%22&source=bl&ots=ank8Fmgg5z&sig=ACfU3U0aA-yf3HM–MyJKpVYKUyPjhdPfQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj33cDr2snqAhXTSBUIHYipCr4Q6AEwBnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22spooky%20wisdom%22&f=false

More from strong towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/21/spooky-wisdom-as-seen-in-your-community

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Taxis – Wikipedia

Taxis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to searchThis article is about the behavioural response. For the vehicle, see taxi. For other uses, see Taxi (disambiguation).

A taxis (plural taxes^[1][2][3] /ˈtæksiːz/, from Ancient Greek τάξις (taxis), meaning ‘arrangement’^[4]) is the movement of an organism in response to a stimulus such as light or the presence of food. Taxes are innate behavioural responses. A taxis differs from a tropism (turning response, often growth towards or away from a stimulus) in that in the case of taxis, the organism has motility and demonstrates guided movement towards or away from the stimulus source.^[5][6] It is sometimes distinguished from a kinesis, a non-directional change in activity in response to a stimulus.

e.g.

• Thigmotaxis is the response of an organism to physical contact or to the proximity of a physical discontinuity in the environment (e.g. rats preferring to swim near the edge of a water maze). Codling moth larvae are believed to used thigmotatic sense to locate fruits to feed on.^[23]

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Taxis – Wikipedia

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Liquid or solid: what are the boundaries of a system? | by noelito | Jul, 2020 | Medium

Liquid or solid: what are the boundaries of a system?

noelito

Jul 2 · 4 min read

I’ve always been struck as to how certain people need to see the world through a single lens, sometimes through opportunism to get funding and sometimes just through sheer evangelical belief in a particular way of thinking. At the moment, it seems that everyone’s talking about systems change. As @aliceevans highlights, we need to avoid the temptation that “systems change” becomes the latest bandwagon that everyone jumps on, after social innovation, agile or design thinking, without forgetting government branded buzzwords, like Big Society, Total Place or Neighbourhood Renewal.

And we know what happens with that, as the experience of New Public Management has shown. More importantly, it’s those people at the very frontline of navigating very complex situations and even more contrived systems who are the often the pioneers of these new ways of doing before they get packaged up and institutionalised.

The leadership of Lankelly Chase, Forum for the Future, Collaborate and others on this shows that systems change isn’t a linear process or a highly professionalised way of doing things that only certain people can do. On the contrary, examples like Systems Changers by @lankellychase show that it’s not just about conceptual frameworks by policy wonks like me, it’s about how people navigate complex situations and often very contrived systems together.

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Liquid or solid: what are the boundaries of a system? | by noelito | Jul, 2020 | Medium

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The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education’

The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education’

Audrey Watters

 on 25 Apr 2015

“What do I mean when I talk about transformational productivity reforms that can also boost student outcomes? Our K–12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority. Educators were right to fear the large class sizes that prevailed in many schools. But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century.” – US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2010)

One of the most common ways to criticize our current system of education is to suggest that it’s based on a “factory model.” An alternative condemnation: “industrial era.” The implication is the same: schools are woefully outmoded.

As edX CEO Anant Agarwal puts it, “It is pathetic that the education system has not changed in hundreds of years.” The Clayton Christensen Institute’s Michael Horn and Meg Evan argue something similar: “a factory model for schools no longer works.” “How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System,” advises Joel Rose, the co-founder of the New Classrooms Innovation Partners. Education Next’s Joanne Jacobs points us “Beyond the Factory Model.” “The single best idea for reforming K–12 education,” writes Forbes contributor Steve Denning, ending the “factory model of management.” “There’s Nothing Especially Educational About Factory-Style Management,” according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess.

I’d like to add: there’s nothing especially historical about these diagnoses either.

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The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education’

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Otto Scharmer

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(PDF) Disruptive Innovation Ecosystems: Reconceptualising Innovation Ecosystems

Disruptive Innovation Ecosystems: Reconceptualising Innovation Ecosystems

Conference Paper (PDF Available) · June 2019 ·Conference: Disruptive Innovation Ecosystems: Reconceptualising Innovation Ecosystems, At Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference, London, UK

• Badziili Nthubu
  • Lancaster University

AbstractEcosystems are valuable in creating diverse and collaborative environments that enable businesses to innovate in ways that are much more difficult without them. However, business managers can be reluctant to participate in building ecosystems mainly due to lack of understanding. Specifically, businesses can be uncomfortable sharing resources, data, intellectual property and secrets with other ecosystem actors. Drawing on inter-disciplinary perspectives from literature, we use a ‘design focused ecosystem thinking’ to propose a new type of Disruptive Innovation Ecosystem (DIE). Firstly, we discuss the significance of adopting innovation ecosystems to create shared value. Secondly, we conceptualize a new type of DIE and propose steps on how DIEs can be created and fostered. Finally, we discuss DIE roles in relation to Amazon, Apple, Uber, and Siemens ecosystem cases. This paper offers a new type of DIE design process which may be leveraged by businesses towards building sustainable innovation ecosystem

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(PDF) Disruptive Innovation Ecosystems: Reconceptualising Innovation Ecosystems