SCiO UK

SCiO UK Virtual Open Meeting – July 2023

Mon 10 July 2023 18:30–21:00 GMT+1

Virtual Open Meeting: A series of presentations of general interest to Systems & Complexity in Organisation’s members and others. The focus of this meeting is the environment.

Laws of Transformative Change – Gioia Caminada

Hospital management from a systemic perspective, using VSM – Matvei Tobman (Dr)

All welcome; Free; Online event; English; Book now

SCiO UK Virtual Development Event – August 2023

Tue 15 August 2023 18:30–20:30 GMT+1

SCiO’s Development Events offer an opportunity to draw upon the collective expertise of SCiO members in a friendly and supportive atmosphere. By taking Development Events online, using the Zoom meeting platform, we aim to make them accessible to more SCiO members Development Events are both for members who are just starting out on a journey to explore Systems Thinking approaches, and for those who have many years of exploration and practice…. Read more

Members only; FREE; Online event; English; Book now

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SCiO Professional Development Courses

PoS1 Patterns of Strategy – Foundation (1.0d)

Fri 21 July 2023 9:30 GMT+1

This one-day course will provide learners with an overview of the Patterns of Strategy approach. Patterns of Strategy is a revolutionary approach to developing business strategy. It’s effective and simple to use, yet extremely powerful. Conventional approaches to strategy fail to deliver than 70% of the time (and more than 90%, according to some surveys) because they don’t take into account the systemic forces which are in play. Patterns of Strategy provides a framework and new vocabulary to understand the underlying forces driving strategic relationships and shows how to harness them so tha… Read more

All welcome; £500; Online event; English; Book now

Introduction to Gathering Information (0.5d)

Fri 4 August 2023 09:30 GMT+1

A half-day course that will introduce leaners to gathering information within systems thinking interventions and practice. The purpose of the session to enable learners to plan and conduct collaborative and systemic enquiry as part of a wider intervention or change project. It will include theory and definitions, tools, and some discussions and group work. We will consider the position and role of enquiry and of analysis within an intervention cycle, including challenges and risks, and the issue of unknowability. We will define ‘information’, ‘enquiry’ and ‘analysis’ in systemic terms and wi… Read more

All welcome; £250; Online event; English; Book now

Are you a Systems Convener?

Survey with a view to a Community of Practice at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfqaRtrsucoANx4471sTXOLQ0rAIhFwTrZv_Oxv2ptlo3HC4A/viewform

A Polycentric Control Story

Link: https://blogs.wright.edu/learn/johnflach/2023/06/29/a-polycentric-control-story/

Polycentric Control and Requisite Variety

Link: https://blogs.wright.edu/learn/johnflach/2023/06/18/polycentric-control-and-requisite-variety/

https://www.neiltheiseofficial.com/media

https://www.transformationscommunity.org/2023-conference/overview

Sydney, Australia + Prague, Czechia | Wed July, 12th – Fri July, 14th

Online | Tue July, 11th – Fri July, 14th

Portland, Maine, USA | Mon July, 17th – Wed July, 19th

Connect with inspiring transdisciplinary scholars, practitioners and creatives working on transformations towards regenerative and just futures. We favour short presentations, long conversations, and practical workshops. 

Your regular reminder that MDPI has sometimes been listed as a ‘borderline predatory’ publisher. I’m not equipped to make definitive judgements on that, but a scan of these titles does not, to me, suggest a hugely coherent and relevant body of work…

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/11/6

Cover Story (view full-size image): China’s response to COVID-19 is worth learning and discussing. We summarize the characteristics and process of emergency resource allocation (ERA) in public health emergencies by analyzing the situation in China. Firstly, we identified intelligent technologies that affect ERA based on China’s relevant research in recent years. Then, we constructed an intelligent ERA mechanism from the following four aspects: medical intelligence, management intelligence, decision-making intelligence, and supervision intelligence. Further, we evaluated the impact of intelligent technologies on ERA and ranked their criticality. Finally, we provide direction and suggestions for further research on the application of intelligent technology in ERA. View this paper

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/11/6

link https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545662/context-changes-everything/

Book Details

pdf

https://watermark.silverchair.com/book_9780262374774.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAApQwggKQBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKBMIICfQIBADCCAnYGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMhOmNjeoB5CdRLwBvAgEQgIICRwFwQt2_hrOP3xwC9TK_JoJ4exZ841ZXM3hq2pFeLy0UaEYo3B0AteUfIDwtgu_papsOqHTgzrt-0KVWbcaJaPxGOsRB9Cuo4wb04xBt_7YvuSJLnlEuYB6cUA3dRxnUbvWuLWjv2uXlGbAal2UsQZSduUX7JNDWNm8psu2hgjEK5URlVe9haKcJas-8d7W6P-3T7XlaA01pEdxT5fEOl1UxLcOjR42bDS0wecO1KwPTpQaku8SLbP2sFFmrra1W7L-zev14QMjSPbRlZ5WOL_5avM7Nkl3va9I7zPKcChLevRA6KnOORKgEWxBHSzqcCVcpx47BdUJ_VzAF_9YdbEMY_YqoIrANiiiKJ_rtXmBSJ99vcFMW8ygMCq0_365vY2bhJXIDzwXDUViRAdEjdSDmkXNtkeietdMe9igyKoWHE8qW8wbfBHl9th-cpfT9V1RMJFsrPhkuoyHmB8Y0UEfzK63yfiWOR87e4UF0Uoakb02QARSyFMcROJfRlXv_BRJm8zXwz55lwsGrjghibonYG1IA1kHXLtcbcmWw8-arBMRIFem7KRyJFJkpAXov2sFDYplYVhqSlOesZk4tiQw2l808KlbOL5j8EwFrhyuGp-9WuDCvrjX9fJveFDpWzb_Z1MoFCMzNkSVoykOaXf1UpoBWB0_Ddcw8JLt7Lzp8m_Z8AzqDE6ECRTnM4XYG5oTsfiowvlhRwQz2ppTiE3fOfGEtsATub5CE6T9zbJLthwj86twsXL10b5fTOsuncSIGIxhesOI

Call for Papers

Please consider submitting by 4th August 2023 for:

The 9th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Perspective in IS development (STPIS’23). This year, STPIS will take place at the University of Portsmouth, UK. You can click here to submit your paper.

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Important dates:

• Initial submission deadline: 4^th August 2023Author notification : 15^th September 2023Registration deadline: To be announcedCamera ready deadline: 1^st October 2023Conference dates: 27-28 October 2023

All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE) (UTC -12).

I'm very happy to announce that our paper on "proxy failure" — analogues of Goodhart's Law ranging from molecular biology to brains to business to ecology — has been made available at Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

A thread. 🧵https://t.co/yUDmey8jbD.

— Yohan J. John (@DrYohanJohn) June 26, 2023

Paper (sadly paywalled):

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/dead-rats-dopamine-performance-metrics-and-peacock-tails-proxy-failure-is-an-inherent-risk-in-goaloriented-systems/89408A43F6D14BFD368FE5225A573032

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. For example, when standardized test scores in education become targets, teachers may start ‘teaching to the test’, leading to breakdown of the relationship between the measure–test performance–and the underlying goal–quality education. Similar phenomena have been named and described across a broad range of contexts, such as economics, academia, machine-learning, and ecology. Yet it remains unclear whether these phenomena bear only superficial similarities, or if they derive from some fundamental unifying mechanism. Here, we propose such a unifying mechanism, which we label proxy failure. We first review illustrative examples and their labels, such as the ‘Cobra effect’, ‘Goodhart’s law’, and ‘Campbell’s law’. Second, we identify central prerequisites and constraints of proxy failure, noting that it is often only a partial failure or divergence. We argue that whenever incentivization or selection is based on an imperfect proxy measure of the underlying goal, a pressure arises which tends to make the proxy a worse approximation of the goal. Third, we develop this perspective for three concrete contexts, namely neuroscience, economics and ecology, highlighting similarities and differences. Fourth, we outline consequences of proxy failure, suggesting it is key to understanding the structure and evolution of goal-oriented systems. Our account draws on a broad range of disciplines, but we can only scratch the surface within each. We thus hope the present account elicits a collaborative enterprise, entailing both critical discussion as well as extensions in contexts we have missed.

Images from tweet thread (linked above)

MAKING SENSE OF MANAGING & DECISION-MAKING &  COMPLEXITY6/3/2023

https://www.improconsult.co.uk/service-design-systems-thinking-blog/systemic-design-framework-complex

Wonderful account of the founding of AI/cybernetics, centering Walter Pitts, who with Warren McCulloch invented neural computation.

Striking here: a classic stage 4.5 postrationalist nihilist depression, when his faith in mathematical logic collapsed. https://t.co/Hb9DXEpx3C pic.twitter.com/gNp8Uc3MCW

— David Chapman (@Meaningness) June 25, 2023

link at https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1672763417948745728

The piece he’s commenting on is in Nautlius, ‘the man who tried to redeem the world with logic’, by Amanda Gefter – I’m sure I can’t find it here but (once again demonstrating that search for syscoi.com is rubbish), I can’t find it.

The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic

https://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/climate_feedbacks

• Miguel Aguilera, 
• Masanao Igarashi & 
• Hideaki Shimazaki 

Nature Communications volume 14, Article number: 3685 (2023) Cite this article

paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39107-y

Our new paper with Masanao Igarashi and @h_shimazaki about the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of large, disordered networks (the asymmetric SK model) was just published in Nature Communications 😀https://t.co/GrIo4RjNTA

Thread about the main ideas of the paper 👇 pic.twitter.com/8O4EhXB3EI

— Miguel Aguilera (@m_aguilera_) June 23, 2023

Miguel Aguilera

@m_aguilera_

Our new paper with Masanao Igarashi and

@h_shimazaki

about the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of large, disordered networks (the asymmetric SK model) was just published in Nature Communications 😀 https://nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39107-y… Thread about the main ideas of the paper

11:27 AM · Jun 23, 2023

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Miguel Aguilera

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Brain circuits are generally asymmetrically connected, displaying reentrant connectivity and generating self-exciting activity. Perhaps one of the first to study it was Cajal’s student and cybernetic pioneer Lorente de Nó

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Miguel Aguilera

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Lorente de Nó participated in the first Cybernetics meetings hosted by Norbert Wiener, who in the first chapter of his seminar book realizes that such asymmetric structures must be governed by the physics of nonequilibrium, irreversible processes

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Miguel Aguilera

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A classic example of an irreversible process is a cup breaking. A movie of a cup breaking feels perfectly natural, but watching the same movie backward is strongly unintuitive. This is because of the emergence of an arrow of time of the entropy dissipated by the cup shattering

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Miguel Aguilera

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Neural and other networks can display a similar process. Networks in equilibrium (A) have attractors that organize the activity of the network, but behaviour is reversible. Networks out of equilibrium (B) can display interesting irreversible phenomena, like oscillations and chaos

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Miguel Aguilera

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Thermodynamically, out-of-equilibrium dynamics must dissipate entropy to the environment to sustain such irreversible activity. Thus, entropy production is a measure of the emergence of such dynamical dissipative structures

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Toby Lowe

TL:DR — It is impossible for organisations to “demonstrate their impact” if they work in complex environments. Asking them to do so requires them to create a fantasy version of the story of their work. This corruption of data makes doing genuine change work harder because it is difficult to learn and adapt from corrupted data.

Article:

https://toby-89881.medium.com/explode-on-impact-cba283b908cb

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Apply before 11:55 pm on Monday 17th July 2023

Return to search results

Details

Reference number

296085

Salary

£37,295 – £44,724

National: £37,295 – £41,425, London: £40,262 – £44,724. For details of our pay on appointment policy, please see below under the heading ‘Salary’.

A Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 27%

Job grade

Senior Executive Officer

Contract type

Permanent

Business area

DEFRA – CSA – Chief Scientific Adviser – Government Science & Engineering

Type of role

Analytical

Working pattern

Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time

Number of jobs available

3

Contents

• Location
• About the job
• Benefits
• Things you need to know
• Apply and further information

Location

Bristol, London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, York

About the job

Job summary

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is the UK government department responsible for improving and protecting the environment, growing the economy, sustain thriving rural communities and support our food, farming, and fishing industries. 

The government has set ambitious commitments through the Environment Act, the Net-zero strategy, the food strategy, and the Plan for Water. These commitments will interact with our food system, land-use system, resource and waste flows, rural economies and communities and natural environment. To deliver these commitments our policies need to be coherent with the real-world systems that they affect, and systemic insights are essential for ensuring policy coherence. 

Applied systems analysis is in high demand in Defra and we have three exciting opportunities to develop systemic insights in cross cutting and complex areas. You will join the Defra Systems Research Programme (SRP) which was established in 2019 to embed systems research principles in Defra’s policy, evidence, and research activities.  

CONTINUES IN SOURCE:

https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cgi?SID=cGFnZWNsYXNzPUpvYnMmc2VhcmNocGFnZT0xJnBhZ2VhY3Rpb249dmlld3ZhY2J5am9ibGlzdCZzZWFyY2hzb3J0PW9wZW5pbmcmdXNlcnNlYXJjaGNvbnRleHQ9Mzk5NjU5NTgmam9ibGlzdF92aWV3X3ZhYz0xODYzMTQ3Jm93bmVyPTUwNzAwMDAmb3duZXJ0eXBlPWZhaXImcmVxc2lnPTE2ODczNTcyMTAtNTlmZTQzNmQ1NzYwNjY0OTY3ZmJiNWRiMjI4ZTVhMTEyN2I3YmM1MA==