[With the generous inclusion of my Substack (I’ll share the perhaps more accessible LinkedIn version directly here in a minute), there’s a lot here that will be of interest to SysCoI readers]

Over 50+ newsletters that help me find signal out of noise 📡

TIJN TJOELKER

MAR 27, 2024

My Favourite NewslettersOver 50+ newsletters that help me find signal out of noise 📡TIJN TJOELKERMAR 27, 2024

My Favourite Newsletters – by Tijn Tjoelker – The Mycelium

https://tijntjoelker.substack.com/p/newsletters

Alidad explains Open Systems Theory:

Alidad Hamidi is a consultant who helps guide organizations to their full potential. Alidad is an expert on self-management and offers training and consulting services that enable it. He is passionate about applying Open Systems Theory in service to achieving improved business outcomes through self-management, including faster time to market, better products, and happy customers. Alidad is located in Sydney Australia and you can connect with him on LinkedIn.

 March 21, 2024  daviding

Systems Changes Dialogues on Social Innovation | Centre for Social Innovation | 2024-03-18 – Coevolving Innovations

Connect with self, nature and the heart of what truly matters on this weekend Circle of Trust® retreat deep in the Sussex countryside.

By John Watters & Céline McKeown

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-heart-of-what-matters-making-meaning-in-a-time-of-crisis-tickets-765311315747?aff=DWM

[An excellent podcast taking in the origins of adtech, the difference between history and origins, the way any technology of prediction and understanding can become one of control and direction, the connections between advertising and insurance, the challenge of setting the terms of what you optimise (lots about Operations Research), and ‘risk is a metaphysical property’, and more…]

This Machine Kills

We are joined by Lee McGuigan — author of Selling the American People — to discuss the origins of advertising / adtech and how the ad industry has been deeply entangled with operations research and information technology since the 1940s, way longer than the usual stories of when advertising and technology joined together. As Lee’s work shows, the ad industry is a perfect case study for better understanding how the science / ideology of (algorithmic) optimization broke free from its confines in military strategy or economic planning and became a set of universal methods and solutions that should be applied everywhere.

328. The Universal Science of Advertisement (ft. Lee McGuigan)This Machine Kills 8 hours ago8 hours agoLikeRepostShareCopy LinkAdd to Next upMore 2,258 plays2,258This Machine Kills 886 followers886 349 tracks349FollowReportFollow This Machine Kills and others on SoundCloud.Sign inCreate a SoundCloud accountWe are joined by Lee McGuigan — author of Selling the American People — to discuss the origins of advertising / adtech and how the ad industry has been deeply entangled with operations research and information technology since the 1940s, way longer than the usual stories of when advertising and technology joined together. As Lee’s work shows, the ad industry is a perfect case study for better understanding how the science / ideology of (algorithmic) optimization broke free from its confines in military strategy or economic planning and became a set of universal methods and solutions that should be applied everywhere.

Stream 328. The Universal Science of Advertisement (ft. Lee McGuigan) by This Machine Kills | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

From Unfreezing-Refreezing, to Systems Changes Learning | EQ Lab Dialogic Drinks | 2024-03-14/15 – Coevolving Innovations

FREE

DETAILS

March 28, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm AEDT

Cost:Free: Chapter Events, Webinar

ORGANIZER

Oceania ChapterView Organizer Website

The Oceania Chapter of the System Dynamics Society Webinar Series.

What does it mean? Beyond connecting the dots.

Presenter: Gene Bellinger, Storyteller & Recovering Systems Thinker

Abstract:In this webinar, Gene will share some of his most memorable ‘aha’-moments that occurred during his almost five decades of searching for understanding on the other side of complexity.
Gene is highly respected member of the systems thinking community, authored hundreds of models and articles, and over 1000 videos on Systems Thinking.
He developed Systems-Thinking and SystemsWiki websites and has been a major contributor to the development of Insight Maker and Kumu. In 2013,  he co-authored “Beyond Connecting the Dots: Modeling for Meaningful Results”  with Scott Fortmann-Roe,  the developer of Insight Maker.
Presently, Gene’s effort is expressed in “SystemsWiki’s Musing”, understanding relationships and their implications.

The Oceania Chapter of the System Dynamics Society Webinar Series.

Webinar: What does it mean? Beyond connecting the dots – System Dynamics Society

Webinar: What does it mean? Beyond connecting the dots

Event by Prometheus Project

Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM (your local time)

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kduqhqzguEtWZt_fGPX-nx498W7mwH-8F

LinkedIn advert: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7168978756278190080

Stuart A. Umpleby, Tatiana A. Medvedeva & Vladimir Lepskiy (2019): RecentDevelopments in Cybernetics, from Cognition to Social Systems, Cybernetics and Systems, DOI:10.1080/01969722.2019.1574326

https://doi.org/10.1080/01969722.2019.1574326

Published online: 20 Feb 2019.

https://www.academia.edu/99413743/Recent_Developments_in_Cybernetics_from_Cognition_to_Social_Systems

[I know this isn’t precisely systems thinking – though ethno-methodography has a rich and related history – but it is very interesting and relevant. See below for two interesting facts!]

Harvard Business Review

https://hbr.org/2019/12/can-you-know-too-much-about-your-organization

How much do you know about the end-to-end operations of your organization? If you looked closely, would you see a deliberate strategy or the results of years and years of patches, workarounds, political truces, and shadow systems? Now imagine you had carte blanche to clean it up — redesign operations to be more efficient, more effective, more focused on getting things done. Would this experience change how you see your current efforts and responsibilities? According to research, it might: A study of six project teams tasked with redesigning their organization’s operations found that many ended up disillusioned with the patchwork systems they saw. Further, almost half of the participants left their established careers as managers, feeling as though they couldn’t enact meaningful change in their roles.

Paper:

• Ruthanne Huising
• Published in Organization science… 26 June 2019

Abstract: This paper examines how employees become spontaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, consistent knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction.

I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic changes employees’ orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the organization’s inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they voluntarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system. Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.

[PDF] Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates | Semantic Scholar

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Moving-off-the-Map%3A-How-Knowledge-of-Organizational-Huising/409921a252db8f9610cb22ff24acd6fc8e153e64

[Interesting facts time

1. as pointed out by @meaningness (David Chapman), this paper took a really long time to be published!

2. in googling the author, she has the highest ratings I’ve ever seen on that student review thing for professors (as well as universally positive comments on Twitter)]

What Can Systems Thinkers Learn From an Evaluation Mindset? | Cameron D. Norman + Tara Campbell | Systems Thinking Ontario 2024-02-12 March 4, 2024 daviding

What Can Systems Thinkers Learn From an Evaluation Mindset? | Cameron D. Norman + Tara Campbell | Systems Thinking Ontario 2024-02-12 – Coevolving Innovations

Understanding the Law of Requisite Variety

IVO VELITCHKOV

MAR 9, 2024

∙ PAID

Stimuli and Responses – by Ivo Velitchkov – Link & Think

https://www.linkandth.ink/p/stimuli-and-responses

Norms, processes, oprations, methods

DAVID CHAPMAN

MAR 9, 2024

This post features a draft of a piece of my meta-rationality book. It is the first half of the second chapter of Part Four of the book. (Got that?)

The first chapter was an introduction to Part Four; you can read it here.

This second chapter is an overview of meta-rational practice. It has six sections:

• When to get meta-rational
• Meta-rational norms
• Meta-rational processes, operations, and methods
• Opportunities for meta-rational improvement
• Meta-rational maxims
• Fluid competence

This post includes the first three sections. I’ll publish the second three as a separate post, so they’re each about the right length for a newsletter issue.

(Right? Or is this too long? Or would you rather have had the whole chapter at once?)

My thanks to the nine readers who signed on as paying subscribers after reading my last post! I really appreciate it. This one is part-paid: there’s a paywall about halfway through.

Meta-rational practices: Overview 1Norms, processes, operations, methodsDAVID CHAPMANMAR 9, 2024∙ PAID3ShareThis post features a draft of a piece of my meta-rationality book. It is the first half of the second chapter of Part Four of the book. (Got that?)The first chapter was an introduction to Part Four; you can read it here.This second chapter is an overview of meta-rational practice. It has six sections:When to get meta-rationalMeta-rational normsMeta-rational processes, operations, and methodsOpportunities for meta-rational improvementMeta-rational maximsFluid competenceThis post includes the first three sections. I’ll publish the second three as a separate post, so they’re each about the right length for a newsletter issue.(Right? Or is this too long? Or would you rather have had the whole chapter at once?)My thanks to the nine readers who signed on as paying subscribers after reading my last post! I really appreciate it. This one is part-paid: there’s a paywall about halfway through.

Meta-rational practices: Overview 1 – by David Chapman