via Bill Drayton on systems change and teams of leaders #SkollWF – YouTube
Category Archives: Discussion
A view or perspective on the world
Wu Wei at the Gemba:
In today’s post, I am looking at wu wei. “Wu wei” is an important concept detailed in the Chinese classic text “Tao Te Cheng” by Lao Tzu. This term is generally translated into English as Wu = No, Wei = Action, or no-action. There are other similar concepts in Taosim such as Wu-shin or no-mind.
Alan Watts, the delightful English philosopher described wu wei as “not forcing”:
The whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating, self-governing, indeed democratic organism. But it has a totality that all goes together and this totality is the Tao. When we can speak in Taoism of “following the course of nature; following the way”, what it means is more like this. Doing things in accordance with the grain. It doesn’t mean you don’t cut wood, but it means that you cut wood, along the lines where wood is most easy to cut, and…
View original post 807 more words
Four Stories of Systems Change – emrosebaz on Medium
Artwork by young people who are refugees and migrants, in The Children’s Society’s Birmingham office. Sketched hearts with “love” written in them.
Four Stories of Systems Changeemrosebaz
Following
Jan 24 · 6 min readI spent August — December 2019 working with The Children’s Society to prototype how they might operate differently to better achieve their strategy, which includes being systems-led. I have struggled with the academic nature of a lot of systems change writing. Like everyone, I’ve personally experienced broken systems, but I haven’t seen (or perhaps haven’t noticed) many examples of tangible systems change and how it was implemented. Until I worked with The Children’s Society.
Systems change is a small, experimental (but growing) part of The Children’s Society’s work, led by practitioners. What I heard during my user research with practitioners and policy teams: systems change is 5% post-its and 95% unglamorous hard graft. Systems change is sending 10 emails to the local authority until you find the person with the ability to make a policy change. It is justifying to your manager the time that you’re spending building relationships with organisations and groups (instead of with young people directly). It is managing yourself so you have the confidence to turn up to a meeting you’re not invited to and the resilience to keep going when you’re turned away. It is keeping a campaign alive for five years to change our national laws.
Gigamapping samples and Systems Oriented Design
Systems Oriented Design
The designerly way to work with systems
The main mission of Systems Oriented Design is to build the designers own interpretation and implementation of systems thinking so that systems thinking can fully benefit from design thinking and practice and so that design thinking and practice can fully benefit from systems thinking.
https://systemsorienteddesign.net/
GIGA-maps Samples
| By Birger Sevaldson
Here are some samples of GIGA-maps. Clicking the pictures below will open up very large size maps. Remember to click the maps to zoom in. To zoom in and out, use ctrl & + or ctrl & – or ctrl + mouse wheel. A collection of exemplars This is a collection of exemplars, not a typology. The intention with this collection is to inspire and you, showing that there are many ways of designing a Gigamap and that there are many uses and functionalities of the maps. Therefore, the maps were not chosen because of their quality, but rather to demonstrate as many different arrangements as possible. Each map involves a design process to reach a graphic interpretation that is tailored bespoke for the particular situation. The maps are design artefacts produced in nested design processes. They are expressions of the designer’s constructed (or designed) knowledge. This implies a reference to constructionist learning, which means that learning is not a one-way process or to be compared to filling a vessel of wisdom or a hard disk with information. Constructivism implies that we actively construct our individual knowledge. This implies that knowledge is internalized and individualized when shared. We suggest moving from using a metaphor of constructing knowledge to using a metaphor of designing knowledge. The Gigamaps are devices for designing knowledge and they are the designed artefacts representing our knowledge about complex systems, and how they might be changed. The Gigamaps are devices for actively co-design our shared knowledge according to the needs of the individual designers and their clients, experts and stakeholders involved and according to the needs of the project. The mapcollection shown below is organised according to two main groups. The first group displays different organisational or structural principles to inspire you to develop your own organisation and structure. The second group displays Gigamaps designed for special functions showing examples of adapting gigamapping to special content so to inspire you to design the maps to be especially made for its purposes. The samples are from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, the Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Chalmers Technical University and others. Last updated November 2017 |
Continues in source: Gigamapping samples
How social and physical technologies collaborate to create | Aeon Essays
via How social and physical technologies collaborate to create | Aeon Essays
Our world is a system, in which physical and social technologies co-evolve. How can we shape a process we don’t control?
An aerial view shows a typically busy Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, deserted amid the deadly coronavirus outbreak that originated in the city. 27 January 2020. Photo by Hector Retamel/AFP/Getty
Continues via source How social and physical technologies collaborate to create | Aeon Essays
The ergodicity problem in economics, Ole Peters (2019) | Nature Physics
via The ergodicity problem in economics | Nature Physics
- Perspective
- Published:
The ergodicity problem in economics
Nature Physics volume 15, pages1216–1221(2019)
- An Author Correction to this article was published on 06 December 2019
Abstract
The ergodic hypothesis is a key analytical device of equilibrium statistical mechanics. It underlies the assumption that the time average and the expectation value of an observable are the same. Where it is valid, dynamical descriptions can often be replaced with much simpler probabilistic ones — time is essentially eliminated from the models. The conditions for validity are restrictive, even more so for non-equilibrium systems. Economics typically deals with systems far from equilibrium — specifically with models of growth. It may therefore come as a surprise to learn that the prevailing formulations of economic theory — expected utility theory and its descendants — make an indiscriminate assumption of ergodicity. This is largely because foundational concepts to do with risk and randomness originated in seventeenth-century economics, predating by some 200 years the concept of ergodicity, which arose in nineteenth-century physics. In this Perspective, I argue that by carefully addressing the question of ergodicity, many puzzles besetting the current economic formalism are resolved in a natural and empirically testable way.
Marco Valente on Twitter – List of books that have helped me make sense of Complex Adaptive Systems and work in them more skillfully, each with a mini description.
Video: Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World – A Search for New Perspectives – Anthony Hodgson, Ph.D.
Ecology of Bad Ideas | Drain Magazine
via Ecology of Bad Ideas | Drain Magazine
Ecology of Bad Ideas
There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and its characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.
Gregory Bateson, Pathologies of Epistemology, 1971
Gregory Bateson, Pathologies of Epistemology, 1971
The ecology of bad ideas is the product of the propagation of epistemological error. Akin to the meme, as defined by Dawkins, the ecology of bad ideas is manifest in the transmission and integration of idea into environment and, subsequently, the rearrangement of ecological conditions in its aftermath. Contrasting the hubris of the Anthropocene—and its lingering tones of “Man’s” rational progress and dominance over “Nature” writ on a planetary scale—the ecology of bad ideas unfolds in the mess of the cumulative mental, social, and environmental assemblage of inherited ideas: oblivious, opportunist, oversimplified, corrupt, fraudulent, stubbornly inflexible, and pathologically upheld out of narrow and shortsighted self-interest.
This issue of Drain presents artists, researchers, theorists, cultural producers, commentators, and multimodal makers, thinkers, and doers that examine and engage the dispersion, proliferation, mutation, and normalization of bad ideas and bad ecologies. These contributors analyze and participate in complex ecological entanglements within, beyond, and against ecologies of bad ideas. Essays included in this issue examine—within Art (SPURSE), Humanism (Kauffman), and Race/ Nationalism (Feshami)—the persistence, as well as ramifications, of Western epistemology’s impulse to carve the world into dualities: human and non-human, culture and nature, subjective and objective, self and other, us and them, pure and impure. Thought Experiments, Interviews, and Art Projects in this issue address a broad range of anthropogenic and ideational modifications to Earthly matter through multiform engagements with systems—and nodes within systems—of biology, ecology, economy, agronomy, extraction, human settlements, technology, waste, governance, and more.
Underpinning many, if not all, contributions to this issue of Drain lies a utopian impulse to question the inherited ideas and forms with which we shape and are, in turn, shaped by and ask: What forms of salvage or alterity might be employed within the kludge of bad ideas that constitute our present bio-socio-ecological conditions and to what effect?
content via source: Ecology of Bad Ideas | Drain Magazine
Deming Society UK April Development Meeting – Organisational Identity – 2 April 2020, Coventry UK (£55 or become a member)
April Development Meeting
02 April 2020 | Nettle Hill, COVENTRY Booking form
When: Thursday, 2 April 2020, 09:30 for a 10:00 startWhere: The Round, Nettle Hill, Brinklow Road, Ansty, COVENTRY CV7 9JL, Tel: 02476 621 899
Prices: Deming Alliance members: The attendance fee for this meeting is included in your yearly membership fee. Non-members: £55 (lunch and refreshments included). Become a member and save £22 per meeting.
About the day: How can an organisation form a plan without understanding its own identity?
Come and learn in action. The topic of the day is one of the most fundamental for business and organisations. It is relevant for responsible consultants and management and anyone who wants to understand the world (or the Deming Alliance).
Organisational identity is the overlooked key to policy, strategy, financial management, culture, brand and customer value, process, innovation, R&D, and more. It’s typically poorly understood and knowhow is fragmented. The deep nature of identity is systemic, a (self-)organizing and functioning set of processes and patterns.This all-day hands-on/minds-on session led by Angus Jenkinson will explore such integrated identity practically — by distilling the identity of the Deming Alliance, as a group exercise. Learn a new tool and systemic approach through actual dynamic facts — in the spirit of Deming.
Virtuoso® has been almost 20 years in academic and practical development and use. It reveals the healthy potential of companies. The process will be active, empirical and enjoyable. It uses (stories of) actual events in the experience of participants. This leads to new outlooks for strategy and management, e.g. strategic initiatives are not arbitrary targets but about adjusting the systems in a process of continuous improvement towards the evolving potential of identity.
12 integrated aspects of the Deming Alliance’s Virtuoso identity will appear. These form a circular logic based on deeply researched science and practice. Virtuoso and its early version have been used across the world since 2004 in charities, small companies and start-ups, medium-sized industry leaders, and at the top end by IBM for its Brand System and Great Company Roadmap. The tool is available for you to use: https://vimeo.com/175518797Angus Jenkinson is a Former Professor of Integrated Marketing, he was hooked by Deming’s thinking three decades ago, he is a council member and trustee of the Cybernetics Society, his bio includes successful tech entrepreneur/business leader, systems designer, company chair, organization, strategy, and identity consultant, and problem-solver.
Agenda:
09:30 Coffee and networking
10:00 Introductions
10:10 Morning Session: Introduction of the ideas and approach
There will be a short coffee break during the morning.
12:45 Lunch
14:00 Afternoon Session: continuation of morning – a chance to put the thinking into practice!
There will be a short coffee break during the afternoon.
15:45 Review of the day
16:00 Any other business; sharing of current issues.
16:15 End of meeting. Time for networking.
Event booking form
via
Outcome Mapping Thinking and Practices for Systems Change
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
via What is IIASA? – What is IIASA – IIASA
What is IIASA?
Founded in 1972, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) conducts policy-oriented research into problems of a global nature that are too large or too complex to be solved by a single country or academic discipline.
IIASA is sponsored by its National Member Organizations in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Its research is independent and completely unconstrained by political or national self-interest.
Overview of IIASA Research
IIASA impact
Research Programs
IIASA Highlights 2011–2015
How one Texas rancher used pasture management to battle drought
via How one Texas rancher used pasture management to battle drought
another interesting exo-systems thinking piece from my unexpected source, Beef Magazine…
Exploring the Inner Addict: Addiction, Spirituality & Internal Family Systsems (paid event), Apr 24, 2020 |
info and booking via Exploring the Inner Addict: Addiction, Spirituality & IFS Tickets, Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 8:30 AM | Eventbrite
Exploring the Inner Addict: Addiction, Spirituality & Internal Family Systems
New York, NY
Apr. 24
| Exploring the Inner Addict: Addiction, Spirituality & Internal Family Systems | |
| When does it start? | |
| 04/24/2020 | |
| When does it end? | |
| 04/24/2020 | |
| Event Location | |
| UJA-Federation of New York 130 East 59th Street New York, NY 10022 |
|
| What kind of event is it? | |
| Conference | |
| Event Details | |
| Psychotherapy conference exploring the intersection between addiction, spirituality. recovery and Internal Family SystemsAbout this Event
Addiction has classically been defined as a disease and a compulsive behavior that interferes with daily living. Thus “addicts” must remain hyper-vigilant against the ever-present enemy of addiction. But what if we reframed addiction as sacred protection from deeper pain that could be healed and transformed with curiosity and compassion? What if loving our inner addicted parts was the key to liberating them? Richard Schwartz is the founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapeutic school that combines systems thinking with the view that the mind is composed of discrete yet intertwined sub-personalities or “parts” with their own viewpoint and purpose. Schwartz will present in the morning, followed by PSI staff-led experiential exercises and discussion in the afternoon. 5.5 Hours of Continuing Education for LMFTs, LMHCs, LCSWs, LMSWs, and LCATs. PSI is proud to partner with the Interfaith Center of New York and Trinity Church Wall Street. |
|
| Does your organization have a website you’d like to share? | |
| www.psinyc.org | |
| Does the event have a website? | |
| psi-2020-conference.eventbrite.com | |
New systemic approach needed to tackle global challenges – phys.org
via New systemic approach needed to tackle global challenges
FEBRUARY 27, 2020
New systemic approach needed to tackle global challenges
The impacts of the coronavirus on people’s health and daily life, stock markets, and businesses illustrate the increasingly interconnected nature of the challenges facing governments around the world. Putting systemic thinking at the centre of policymaking will be essential to address these issues in an era of rapid and disruptive change, according to a new joint report by IIASA and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Systemic thinking for policymaking: The potential of systems analysis for addressing global policy challenges in the 21st century, aims to highlight to policymakers how systems research can be used to understand the complex issues facing society, anticipate the consequences of our decisions, and build resilience. The authors argue that, to tackle planetary emergencies linked to the environment, the economy, and sociopolitical systems, policymakers need to understand their systemic properties, including tipping points, interconnectedness, and resilience.
“The systems approach can promote cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary collaboration in the process of policy formulation by taking proper account of the crucial linkages between issues generally treated separately within different specialisations and scientific and institutional ‘silos,'” said Gabriela Ramos, OECD Chief of Staff. “The approach provides a methodology to achieve a better understanding of the non-linear behaviour of complex systems and improve the assessment of the consequences of policy interventions. The ultimate objective is to improve the capacity of policies to deliver better outcomes for people.”
“Unless we adopt a systems approach, unless we employ systems thinking, we will fail to understand the world we are living in. This is a world made up of complex systems, systems of systems interacting with each other, and changing each other by that interaction and the links between them. If we are to tackle these issues, governments must change the ways in which they make and implement policies. An acceptance of complexity shifts governments from a top-down siloed culture to an enabling culture where evidence, experimentation, and modeling help to inform and develop stakeholder engagement and buy-in,” adds IIASA Director General Albert van Jaarsveld.
“The report shows the considerable potential of mainstreaming systemic thinking into policymaking, including within the OECD itself. As part of an agreed work program between the two organizations, the aim is to establish specific bilateral projects in the different areas of policymaking,” says Acting Chief Operations Officer of IIASA, Jan Marco Müller.
The report highlights the application of systems thinking beyond the fields of analysis, modeling, and the formulation of policy, and that systems thinking has immediate application in developing human capital through education, training, and team building. Perspectives are drawn from a range of disciplines and methodologies including economics, social science, and policymaking, but also from the physical and biological sciences and engineering. The authors show how cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary collaboration can take account of the crucial linkages between issues generally treated within different specializations, and scientific and institutional silos.
Closer trade cooperation in combination with robust land use strategies could, for instance, increase the resilience of global food markets to the impacts of climate change, while an integrated approach to the management of water, energy, and land would provide experts and policymakers with a better understanding of the benefits and challenges of sustainably meeting future demand for resources. Another example cited in the report is the link between education and demographic change, where the authors highlight how lifelong education strategies, starting from early childhood, can promote productive working lives and healthy ageing.
Explore further
More information: Systemic Thinking for Policy Making (2020). DOI: 10.1787/879c4f7a-en
via New systemic approach needed to tackle global challenges
Systems Community of Inquiry 
You must be logged in to post a comment.