I like this. It recalls Jane Searles’ Circles of Need model which was implemented in Chorley District Council (under the leadership of Donna Hall, who went on to Wigan and The Wigan Deal):
For computer science grad students, this course fulfills breadth requirements in:
Methodology 4 (Human-Centered and Interdisciplinary Computing) *and*
Research Area 15 (Emerging areas in interdisciplinary computer science)
Note: You cannot take this course for credit if you previously took my course CSC2602 in Winter 2013, nor if you took any instance of DGC2003.
About the Course
This course is unlike any other graduate course you have taken. You will play games, solve puzzles, and tell stories. Each activity will create a system around you, with its own dynamics. Sometimes you will try to beat the system and discover you cannot. Other times you will discover you can change a system by changing your perspective of it. In the process, you will discover how complex patterns of behaviour can arise from simple structures and simple rules. You will draw on such insights to develop a deeper understanding of how the world works. You will start to see the systems around you in a whole new light, and you will develop a new mental toolkit for analyzing complex global issues, modeling their structure and behaviour, and understanding how and why change happens.
Along the way, you will read about the theory and practice of systems thinking, trace the history of the key ideas, and discover how they have been applied. You will explore how systems thinking provides new ways of studying the relationships between the most important global challenges of the twenty-first century, including globalization, climate change, conflict, democracy, energy, health & wellbeing, and food security.
Key topics will include:
General Systems Theory, developed by Bertalanffy for understanding biological systems;
Cybernetics: the study of feedback and control in living organisms, machines, and organizations;
Systems Dynamics approaches for modelling and analyzing non-linear feedback mechanisms in complex systems;
Complexity science and complex adaptive systems;
The role of computational modelling and simulation as a central tool for understanding systems
Philosophical roots of systems thinking as a counterpoint to the reductionism used widely across the natural sciences;
Emergent concepts from systems thinking, such as limits to growth, planetary boundaries, tipping points, sustainability, resilience, and chaos;
Soft Systems Methodology and Critical System Theory for engaging multiple stakeholders in processes of change;
Use of systems thinking to explore competing perspectives, trans-disciplinary synthesis, and modeling of global dynamics.
Course Requirements:
Class participation: Show up, do stuff, get credit.
Oral presentation: Research and present a 5 minute talk on a topic to be determined. Bonus marks if you do it as a Pecha Kucha. You must negotiate you choice beforehand, so we don’t have duplicates.
Term paper: Topic is negotiable. Suggestion: A case study applying ideas from the course to your own research work – preferably something that could be published, although there’s no requirement to seek publication. (Due by the end of the term; length & style should be typical for the journal you would publish it in).
Note: This is the sixth incarnation of this course. It was originally developed in the summer of 2012 as part of the Dynamics of Global Change Collaborative Program, and taught again in the summer of 2013. It then migrated to the Computer Science department in the winter terms 2014 and 2016. The previous course pages are archived at:
If you’re looking for more opportunities to meet systems thinkers and discuss how we can apply systems thinking to solve important societal problems, you might be interested in the Systems Thinking Ontario group, which meets in Toronto every month.
Course Outline (Draft – may change!)
Note: Some of this page still refers to the version of the course taught in the winter of 2018. I’ll update the outline and readings list as we go through the course.
Activities this week included: Avalanche and Frames
Three good introductory books:
Meadows (which we’ll be using as an initial text);
Weinberg (which provides a good entry into systems thinking for people in the natural sciences);
Walker and Salt (who provide a set of case studies showing how hard it is to understand and manage complex ecosystems)
For next seminar:
Read:Chapters 1 & 2 of Meadows “Thinking in Systems”. (Note: Readings for this course are only available from the U of T campus network. If you need access from off campus, please email me!)
We talked a little about the relative merits of stock and flow diagrams versus causal loop diagrams. For a detailed analysis of the weaknesses of causal loop diagrams, see Richardson 1986.
We ended with a case study of the Earth’s climate as a stock and flow diagram, and identified three places to intervene to combat global warming:
Solar Radiation Management – reduce the flow of heat from the Sun to the Earth. See Alan Robock’s essay for why this is probably a very bad idea.
Carbon Dioxide Removal – increase the flow of carbon out of the atmosphere. See this article from Columbia for an overview of proposed technologies and their feasibility. TL;DR: We cannot yet do this cheaply enough at scale, but might eventually.
Stop Burning Fossil Fuels – stop the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. As long as this flow is non-zero, the problem gets worse. But we’ve been avoiding doing this for 30 years.
Note that we’ll probably need to use all three approaches eventually, because we’ve been too slow to reduce emissions.
Activities this week included Living Loops and Postcard Stories
I briefly talked about economic growth in the context of the anthropocene, and mentioned that it’s principal measure, GDP is a flow measure, rather than a stock. Here’s quick overview of what GDP means, and here’s a short discussion of why GDP (a flow) cannot really assess wealth (a stock). For a critical look at whether economic growth is even necessary, see Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth.
For a more theoretical account of the effects of delay in a dynamical system, dive into how engineers deal with this problem in Control Theory, with this classic paper from Brown & Coombs: Notes on Control with Delay
We talked about the results from the beer game, and other systems where delay causes a problem, and looked at the “fixes that fail” pattern. The example for how road building nearly always fails to solve traffic congestion is discussed in this blog post on the Cobra Effect.
We talked a little about the idea of geo-engineering the artificially cool the planet. The modeling study I mentioned is Berdahl et al. 2014, and the paper on reasons why its a really bad idea is Robock, 2008. For more on geoengineering see here and here.
We spent some time practicing drawing Causal Loop Diagrams. So it’s a good time to revisit tips on constructing these diagrams in Guidelines for Drawing Causal Loop Diagrams
Today’s game was Group Juggle. Here’s one version of a causal loop diagram (drawn by Linda Booth Sweeney) to explain the behaviour seen during the game.
We started by playing with the Shodor fire models Fire and the slightly more sophisticated A Better Fire. If you want to explore more of these models, take a look at:
Rabbits and Wolves (we didn’t get time to look at this, but it’s worth a play!)
We talked about how sensitivity to initial conditions affects weather forecasting. For a great overview of this, and where the current state-of-the-art is in weather forecasting, read Bauer et al, The Quiet Revolution of Numerical Weather Prediction.
I didn’t use many slides this week, but here they are anyway.
We talked some more about chaos theory and how it relates to climate and weather. If you want to read more on this, I highly recommend Ed Lorenz’s book, The Essence of Chaos, which also includes an an appendix the text of his original “Butterfly” talk.
We explored how stock market data also exhibit some self similarity (aka self-affinity). The diagrams were from an article by Mandelbrot in Scientific American. Note that Mandelbrot is not claiming that stock market data forms a fractal pattern, just that it shares some of the statistical properties of fractals, notably that volatility in the stock market follows a power law, so that you see the same kinds of oscillation at all timescales.
We talked a lot about the COVID-19 virus and global pandemics. During class I noted the World Health Organisations (WHO) had not yet declared it a pandemic. The next day (March 11), they did. Here’s the chart I showed on flattening the curve, and the animated version that shows how the “carrying capacity” of the healthcare system is affected.
For more on resilience, I highly recommend Walker & Salt’s book, “Resilience Thinking“, which also, I think, offers a clearer introduction to the panarchy model too.
See also Stirling’s paper “Keep it Complex“, where he points out that there’s a tendency to over-simplify policy prescriptions when we look for science-based policymaking, and that a more pluralistic approach that is needed, one that takes the complexity seriously
By way of introduction to Critical Systems Thinking, I talked about Stephen Toulmin‘s work on the structure of arguments. Here’s a blog post from Ulrich tracing the philosophical roots of his thinking to Toulmin and Habermas.
We used a mindmap of “Solving Global Warming” (from this site) as a warm-up exercise for boundary critique. The mindmap on its own is a good summary of the messages we typically hear about what we ought to do to address climate change. But an examination of what has been left out and why is interesting: this kind of message completely lets governments and corporations off the hook, and suggests it’s up to us as individuals to change what we do. Which means inevitably, action on climate change is seen as a voluntary lifestyle choice, rather than a deeper systemic dilemma.
We also met Ulrich’s observation that researchers ought to trangress a boundary at least once a week. Here’s a blog post in which he expands on this idea.
I mentioned Michael Jackson’s book, Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers. Don’t let the “for managers” in the title put you off. It’s a surprisingly good overview of the main strands of systems thinking over the past half century or so. The book is expensive to buy from major online retailers, but Abe Books has plenty of used copies.
I skimmed over the intellectual history of Systems Thinking, but you might want to explore further using this map of the history of systems thinking and complexity science. There’s also the ASC timeline for cybernetics, and Robert Horn’s mural(although I can only find a sketch of it online).
Meadows is the main text we’ll use for the first half of the course. Its a book I thorooughly recommend buying (as you’ll want to re-read it every few years). It’s a very readable introduction to the basics of systems dynamics.
Weinberg is an interesting alternative to Meadows, especially appropriate for those with a background in the physical sciences, because he spends a lot of time contrasting systems thinking with the traditional reductionism used in science. For a review of Weinberg’s book, see here
A very detailed account of the history and philosophical roots of different strands of systems thinking. It’s comprehensive, but that makes it a little heavy going to read.
This book is about 30 of the most prominent people in the development of the field. For each person, it provides a brief biography, and an excerpt from their writings (so they speak in their own words). This will be very useful as a source book for your presentations.
Applies systems thinking to explore how to make socio-ecological systems more resilient to future shocks. Resilience is an important systems concept – it refers to the ability of a system to withstand sudden changes. The book includes five major case studies, interleaved with the conceptual chapters. Excellent reading!
Excellent book on the overall idea of what an ethical response to the challenge of climate change even means. It’s not specifically about systems thinking, but Garvey is certainly a systems thinker. He demonstrates that climate change is unusual as an ethical problem,because the causes and consequences are smeared out across time and space. He then frames the central question as how we divide up a shared limited resource: the atmosphere as a carbon sink. I reviewed the book here.
This is the book from which most of the activities on the course are taken. I suggest *not* reading this until after the end of the course – the exercises will work better if you experience them before reading about them.
For anyone who likes programming (in Python), this book covers many of the key ideas on complexity science, chaos, and self-organising systems, with a whole series of programming examples so you can build your own simulations models. And the book is free online – just click the link!
RSA Animate: Crisis of Capitalism Explores how capitalism fails to solve its problems. Introduces systemic risk, and the need for new ways of thinking.
Lenton TM, Held H, Kriegler E, et al. Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2008;105(6):1786-93.
In our myopic race towards progress humans have forgotten the interdependent web of life, putting the entire planet and its living beings deeper into issues of climate change, food scarcity, financial instability, energy shortages and resource unavailability. It is only through the lens of systemic thinking, with an understanding of the relational nature of action on any scale being resonated at all levels, can resolving of these issues be meaningful. We can with shifting our focus to a holistic human service approach and revisiting our ‘ways of understanding’ synchronise nature’s dynamic balance and our well-being.
The Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium series started at AHO in Oslo in 2012. The series has the intention to promote and foster the emerging practices and theory development for systemic design for service systems, social systems, policy development and complex contexts. RSD has been held in Europe and North America, in Oslo, Banff, Toronto, Torino, and Chicago. In 2020, RSD will be held at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India.
The RSD conferences are organized by the local hosts with the sanction, guidance and assistance of the Systemic Design Association (SDA) a democratic membership organisation registered in Norway. Become a member of the SDA on the same site today.
We will soon communicate any plans for contingencies and virtual alternatives. Look for registartion to open in June, as well as the conference program, travel and accommodation updates.
By bailing out the sources of systemic fragility with trillions of dollars, the Fed has shifted the risk to the entire financial system and the nation’s currency.
That the global economy is fragile is painfully obvious to all. What is less obvious is the bailouts intended to “save” the fragile economy actively increase its fragility, setting up an inevitable collapse of the entire precarious system.
Systems that are highly centralized, i.e. dependent on a handful of nodes that are each points of failure–are intrinsically fragile and prone to collapse. Put another way, systems in which all the critical nodes are tightly bound are prone to domino-like cascades of failure as any one point of failure quickly disrupts every other critical node that is bound to it.
Ours is an economy in which capital, wealth, power and control are concentrated in a few nodes of the network/ecosystem we call “the economy.” A handful of corporations own the vast majority of the media, a handful of banks control most of the lending and capital, a handful of hospital chains, pharmaceutical companies and insurers control healthcare, and so on.
Control of digital technologies is even more concentrated, in virtual monopolies: Google for search and Youtube, etc. and Facebook / Instagram and Twitter for social media, Microsoft and Apple for operating systems and services derived from OS, and so on.
The vast majority of participants in the economy are tightly bound to these concentrated nodes of capital and power, and these top-down, hierarchical dependencies generate fragility.
When unexpectedly severe variability and volatility occur, the disruption of a few nodes brings down the entire system. Thus the disruption of the subprime mortgage subsystem–a relatively small part of the total mortgage market and a tiny slice of the global financial system–nearly brought down the entire global financial system in 2008 because the GFS is a tightly bound system of centralized concentrations of capital, power and control.
Currently, we’re seeing the fragility of a meat production system that has concentrated ownership and production of meatpacking into a relatively few nodes on which the entire food supply chain is totally dependent.
And so what’s the status quo “fix” when this intrinsically fragile system comes apart? Increase its fragility by bailing out the most tightly bound, dominant nodes. This is what the monopoly on creating currency, the Federal Reserve, is doing on a vast scale.
Rather than reducing the fragility of the system, the Federal Reserve is increasing the fragility, guaranteeing a collapse of not just the financial system but the currency as well.
The philosophy of science that I’ve taken on is not teleology – goal-directed behavior – but teleonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy – that essentially means that you don’t work from the future-backwards, but that you are able to program options for your future.
I note with interest that in David’s Open Innovation Learning book (a section of the post signposts to a section of this for more), he points to Aristotle’s four causes:
Aristotle offered four explanations of why in four causes:
(i) material cause (that out of which)
(ii) the formal cause (the account of what it-is-to-be)
(iii) the efficient cause (the primary source of change or rest)
(iv) the final cause (the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done
This is pretty powerful stuff to play around with, and reminds me of my distinction, for organisations, between
(1) espoused purpose – the mission statement
(2) de facto purpose or POSIWID – the actual behaviour and outcomes which the organisation is producing (see forthcoming podcast interview with Allenna Leonard for more on this) an
(3) deep, meaningful purpose – the empowering purpose to which the organisation could aspire (usually neither of the above)
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, the Executive Committee has made the decision to move ICCS 2020 to an online-only event.
While the outlook for the unprecedented challenges we are facing from COVID-19 remain uncertain, our values are clearer than ever. The health and safety of our communities—academic, local, and business—are of the utmost priority. Further, we know as complex systems scientists that we must play our part by endeavoring to fragment our physical contact networks, yet strengthen our virtual social networks. We also remain committed to the pursuit of creating and sharing knowledge, and wish to honor our promise to provide a rich forum in which to do this. It is with these tenets in mind that we made the decision to make ICCS 2020 a 100% online-only event.
What you need to know:
The dates remain the same: July 26th – July 31st 2020
Register today for the April 30th Open Studio! More information on this session can be found below. We are excited to announce that Linda Booth Sweeney, systems educator and award-winning author, will be joining us live in the 9 a.m. PDT session. We will make her interview available via recording in the 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. PDT sessions.
There is no end to the connections that can be made between literature and systems thinking. This Open Studio will highlight a variety of books and the meaningful connections that can be made within and between the text and systems thinking Habits and tools. This session will feature some special guests sharing their favorite books and best systems thinking connections.
Please note, we will not be releasing the recording of this session, so if you are interested, be sure you attend! More information on the Open Studio and other upcoming sessions can be found below.
Excuse me for putting a business link here (I do it rarely) – but this is a community, principally focused on UK public services, and communities, voluntary sector – all of those with a primary focus on citizen and community outcomes) – to learn the lessons and build back better. We will be introducing systems concepts, and learning systems lessons, on an ongoing basis.
The days after – a learning community to build back better
-> We’ve been dynamic to deal with the crisis – amazing things have been achieved.
— How do we learn from these breakthroughs?
-> Things are still chaotic and confusing! And will be for some time as the ramifications continue.
— How do we make sense of things right now and for the future? How do we prepare for a real reboot in ‘the days after’ the crisis?
We at the Public Service Transformation Academy have been working with some core organisations to start to think about these questions – and are now expanding to set up a wider learning community. There is no obligation and no charge. This is a place to share and build learning together.
Membership is open to anyone from any organisation with a primary focus on citizen and community outcomes – public services at any level, community and voluntary sector organisations, and others who deliver vital public services. The focus will be on the UK; those from other countries are welcome to join to share learning.
To join, email benjamin.taylor@publicservicetransformation.org
The group will meet fortnightly online, 2-3.30pm on Wednesdays.
The first virtual round table will take place on 13 May: what will we face in ‘the days after’? An active online scenario planning session – and a look at the ‘three horizons’ model for future thinking.
The second virtual round table will take place on 27 May: how can we do radical rebuilding? This will look at application of the ‘five worlds’ and ‘five key leadership practices’ applied not to organisations, but to creating place-based, emergent, learning systems.
Further dates to be planned. A core group will meet on the ‘off weeks’ to plan and input, and materials from each session will be shared with all participants. The community is supported with free groups on WhatsApp and groups.io
Living systems exhibit complex yet organized behavior on multiple spatiotemporal scales. To investigate the nature of multiscale coordination in living systems, one needs a meaningful and systematic way to quantify the complex dynamics, a challenge in both theoretical and empirical realms. The present work shows how integrating approaches from computational algebraic topology and dynamical systems may help us meet this challenge. In particular, we focus on the application of multiscale topological analysis to coordinated rhythmic processes. First, theoretical arguments are introduced as to why certain topological features and their scale-dependency are highly relevant to understanding complex collective dynamics. Second, we propose a method to capture such dynamically relevant topological information using persistent homology, which allows us to effectively construct a multiscale topological portrait of rhythmic coordination. Finally, the method…
Three systemic points (but at the ‘technical’ not ‘adaptive’ level):
We’ve had the earthquake, now comes the tsunami, then the aftershock waves… we shouldn’t expect the effects to be in
Second and n order effects – re working from home – implications on business and real estate, and emergency preparedness and stockpiling for the future etc..
…the managers at GE were perplexed because employment at their appliance plants in Kentucky exhibited a significant three-year cycle. …Forrester was able to show how the instability in GE employment was due to the internal structure of the firm.https://t.co/q0snywfX6V
The World Economic Forum’s Transformation Maps – a constantly refreshed repository of knowledge about global issues, from climate change to the future of work – are now publicly available for the first time and free of charge. But what are they? And what can we do with them?
What exactly are the Transformation Maps?
Transformation Maps are the World Economic Forum’s dynamic knowledge tool. They help users to explore and make sense of the complex and interlinked forces that are transforming economies, industries and global issues. The maps present insights written by experts along with machine-curated content. Together, this allows users to visualise and understand more than 120 topics and the connections and inter-dependencies between them, helping in turn to support more informed decision-making by leaders.
https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1Gb0000000LGk6EAG?tab=publications Strategic Intelligence
The maps harness the Forum network’s collective intelligence as well as the knowledge and insights generated through our activities, communities and events. And because the Transformation Maps are interlinked, they provide a single place for users to understand each topic from multiple perspectives. Each of the maps has a feed with the latest research and analysis drawn from leading research institutions and media outlets around the world.
As an example, imagine you are a student or government official, and you need up-to-date information about the dynamics of over-fishing. The Transformation Map on Oceans, curated with the University of California in Santa Barbara, has a dedicated “key issue” section dealing with this. The over-fishing section in turn links to a number of related maps, among them the Illicit Economy Transformation Map, curated with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime. This map notes, among other things, how criminals are profiting from natural resources, including fish, in a way that threatens global biodiversity.
Alternatively you could explore the topic of over-fishing from a governance perspective by consulting the map on Global Governance, curated with the University of Oxford, or through the lens of possible innovative solutions by exploring the Innovation map, curated by Nesta, an innovation foundation. There are thousands of other possible pathways throughout the interlinked Transformation Maps, which shift according to developments in the real world, reflecting and helping to demystify our complex planet.
Why do you cover this selection of topics?
The Transformation Maps cover issues that are relevant to the World Economic Forum and the people and organisations we work with. Broadly speaking, these are topics of global importance that require leaders from across different sectors to work together, from urbanization to inclusive economic growth. The list of topics is continuously reviewed and updated.
Who curates the Transformation Maps?
Most of the maps are co-curated by a leading university, think tank or international organization. Their content is subject to continuous peer review and adjustment by the Forum and its network of experts. Many co-curators come from institutions that are members of the Forum’s Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) community.
A co-curator works with the Forum to identify and explain the key trends or drivers of change for their particular topic, drawing on their expertise and the latest research in their field as well as the insights from various Forum activities and communities. They explore how the key trends affecting their subject are in turn affected by other Transformation Map topics – covering industries, countries or regions, or global issues – and in doing so, the curators create a record of the connections and inter-dependencies between the different topics. These relationships are clearly represented in the maps’ graphic representations and accompanying texts, enabling a greater understanding of the complex web of influences that surround each issue.
Why do articles and publications appear alongside the maps?
Each Transformation Map has a dynamic feed of the latest research and analysis drawn from leading research institutions and media outlets around the world. These feeds enable users to access the latest research on a topic by clicking on a link that will take them back to the original source. The research and analysis contained in the feeds does not necessarily represent the views, opinions or positions of the World Economic Forum.
I thought this was only jargon – now I discover it’s a book and a thing – thought the summaries make it sound the most half-baked, half-understood concept. (I suspect that the book is quite good on description, but turning that into prescription leads to some nonsense, but that’s only on a quick glance…)
A seminal resource, so just pulling together the links here.
The wikipedia is quite good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
There are a number of good references on the old model.report (now no longer supported, so all the activity has moved here to syscoi.com): https://model.report/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22seeing+like+a+state%22&what=all&order=relevance
You will find lots of rich references in Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer’s ‘Gently Serious’ Medium publication, e.g.: https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/03/01/healing-the-metabolic-rift-gentlyserious-medium/
Note switch of room, across the corridor from the original room!)
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