Inspired by Alison Guthrie-Wrenn’s presentation at Metaphorum 2023 (all from Bard/Bing/ChatGPT)

• Why don’t systems thinkers play hide and seek?

– Because good luck hiding when you’re connected to everything!

• Why don’t cyberneticists make good chefs?

– They’re always trying to reduce the kitchen’s entropy, but it just ends up in more chaos!

• Why did the cybernetician get fired from the circus?

He kept trying to feedback the elephants.

• What do you call a cybernetician who is always late?

A time-delay element.

• Why did the cybernetician get lost in the woods?

He was following a recursive path.

• Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

– The circular causality

• What do you call a cybernetician who is always talking about himself?

A self-referential system.

• What do you call a cybernetician who is always getting lost?

A nonlinear system.

• How many complexity theorists does it take to change a light bulb?

– It depends on the initial conditions.

• How do you tell the difference between a linear and a nonlinear system?

– A linear system is predictable, a nonlinear system is chaotic, and a complex system is both.

• Why did the systems thinker break up with their partner?

– They had too many negative feedback loops.

• How do you catch a systems thinker?

– Bait the trap with “the big picture.”

• Why did the complexity theorist go broke?

– Because they couldn’t predict the emergent properties of their bank account.

• What does a cyberneticist bring on a first date?

– A model for understanding the potential relationship dynamics.

• Why don’t complexity theorists make good cooks?

– Because they’re always trying to avoid tipping points.

• Why did the system thinker refuse to play chess?

– They were too concerned about the unintended consequences of each move.

• How do you know if a system is complex?

– If you can’t explain it in a tweet, it’s complex. If you can explain it in a tweet, but no one understands it, it’s also complex.

• What do you get when you cross a cyberneticist and a comedian?

– A cyberneticist who laughs at his own feedback loops.

• Why did the chicken cross the road?

– Because it was part of a self-organizing emergent circular phenomenon that resulted from the interaction of multiple agents and environmental

https://medium.com/block-science/disambiguating-autonomy-ca84ac87a0bf

BlockScience

Jan 26

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24701475.2023.2183643

Simplifying Complexity

@BHComplexity

1/ The 10 Features of Complex Systems: No 5 – Spontaneous order and self-organisation “Spontaneous order and self-organisation: complex systems exhibit structure and order that arise out of the interactions among their parts.”

Hey – we’re running a workshop test in Brussels tomorrow, and we’d like some extra test audience, please forward this to anyone who might be interested.

—–

In this workshop we shall learn new ways to play, and learn to understand the world through play. We shall try to come to see, perhaps re-see, that collective play, such as that which young humans and animals do together is a form of collaborative genius.

In this session in particular, through embodied play we shall learn some of the core principles of emergence, self-organisation, complex adaptive systems and cybernetics. The very principles through which one can think about brains, networks, ecosystems, economies, games design, collective intelligence, and much more besides.

At the heart of this workshop lies the understanding that play and complex adaptive systems share a profound connection. Play, with its intrinsic self-organisation and embodiment, mirrors the dynamics of complex adaptive systems. By engaging in playful experiences, we gain insights into the principles of complexity, cybernetics, and emergence. Simultaneously, our understanding of play deepens through the lens of complexity. In essence, play becomes a gateway to exploring and comprehending the intricate nature of systems.

During the workshop, we will collaboratively create and explore a shared research playground. Drawing upon the principles of complexity—where simplicity gives rise to spontaneous order through the interactions of relatively autonomous agents—we will examine the tipping point at which simplicity transforms into complexity.

Play must never be subordinated or instrumentalised. Play is, and must remain. sensual, giddy, improvised, and simply fun for its own sake. Likewise we should never mistake the cajoling, backflipping and chirruping of animals for mere training for life, or evolutionary survival advantage. (Whilst it may be true that it is also those things.) First and foremost it’s vital to approach life as play, and then, to have the skills and knowledge to extract any kind of knowledge from that play at the moment that it is needed.

Orion Maxted is an artist, theatre maker and director of artscience at The Center Leo Apostel for Transdisciplinary research, at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels together with colleagues Evo Bussenairs, a researcher in mathematical anarchism, and Professor Francis Heylighen, a renowned researcher in cybernetics, self-organisation, emergence and consciousness. David Tann is a clown and researcher in biomimicry.

Please bring comfortable clothes that you can move around in.

Cost: € Free

Contact: Orion Maxted

This paper concerns the strongly theory based organisational intervention – Stafford Beers’ Viable Systems Diagnosis (VSD). The assumption that organisations have difficulty in transforming good theories into effective workplace practices is examined using VSD. We propose levels of knowledge or recursions of the Beer system that are appropriate and effective in terms of organisational interventions. We contend that the lexis emanating from Brain of the Firm, and The Heart of the Enterprise exacerbates the complexity of VSD causing readers to focus on Diagnosing the System. We suggest this outcome contributes to the non-popularity of VSD, but that Beer himself cannot be exonerated. The lack of fundamental VSD principles, identified as a deficiency in Diagnosing the System is expanded from the antecedents, Brain and Heart. The paper concludes by considering a systematic categorisation of Beer’s work that will guide organizational change agents wishing to use this intellectually complex and powerful system.

https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/journal_contribution/Demystifying_Beer_Do_You_Want_Fries_With_That_/5073121/1

In 1969, the first edition of Systems Thinking: Selected Readings was published in the Penguin Modern Modern Management series.

From those selected readings, have we moved beyond that milestone? What do we see if we revisit the 18 chapters, the five parts, and the introduction.

David Hawk received a copy of the book from Fred Emery, when he was in graduate school at U. Pennsylvania. He thus has had the experience of supervised study, and many years of reflection on the content.

David Ing has prepared a federated wiki at https://st1969.daviding.wiki.openlearning.cc/view/welcome-visitors/view/systems-thinking-selected-readings-penguin-1969 abridging the content that will used to guide the discussion.

See more details (including links to prereadings) at https://wiki.st-on.org/2023-06-12

The link to the web conference appears on Eventbrite after registration. Mind the passcode!

Participants are welcomed to join in the conversation with questions, comments and diverging viewpoints.

Open-minded novices and learners are always welcomed. We’ll try to keep the conversations understandable by the layman, and entertain questions for clarification.

To be notified of future sessions, please join the Google Group: http://bit.ly/st-on

In this armchair-philosophy blog post, I’ll argue that we need to talk about emergence with scientific detachment, and one way of doing that would be…

A better way of thinking about emergence

[Not pretending I completely understand this, but a very valuable indicator of the trouble inherent in looking at influences, causes etc – see: systems mapping]

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/25152459221095823

pdf https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/25152459221095823

From Ben Sweeting:

Writing to draw your attention to a new journal in our field: Enacting Cybernetics – which is published by the UK Cybernetics Society and hosted, open access by Ubiquity Press. 

Its focus is on exploring and developing the many ways in which cybernetics may be practiced in the world. The journal invites contributions that engage deeply with cybernetics, its possibilities, histories, and practices, and especially those that develop its radical transdisciplinarity in tangible ways.

It is open access with no author fees. It is funded by Cybernetics Society membership, so do please consider joining to support if you are not already a member: https://cybsoc.org/

Articles are published on a rolling basis and included peer reviewed and editorially reviewed content. So far, five items are available in the first issue:

• Dulmini Perera – Design Fictioning of a Second-Order Kind: Runaway Cybernetics, Futures of Work, Possibilities of Engagement
• Howard Silverman – Recursively Contextual Identity: A Variant Formulation of First- and Second-Order
• Bernard Scott – Review of Robert Martin’s Book, Connect and Involve
• Jean M. Russell and Howard Silverman – Currencies as Cybernetic Objects: A Conversation
• Dietmar Koering – Exploring the Human-AI Nexus: A Friendly Dispute Between Second-Order Cybernetical Ethical Thinking and Questions of AI Ethics

Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editors, and members of the Cybernetics Society who have helped this come to fruition. I hope we can build this into a useful venue. If you have articles looking for a publication venue, please do consider submitting them.

https://enacting-cybernetics.org/

 May 25, 2023  daviding

Within the Systems Thinking Ontario community, we were fortunate to have Nenad Rava step up to explain how the Sustainable Development Goals came to be, and relate them to systems change.

CONTINUES IN SOURCE:

The Sustainable Development Goals: Origins, Context, and Perspectives | ST-ON | 2023-05-08 – Coevolving Innovations

CALLING ALL SYSTEMS THINKING PRACTITIONERS! YOU HAVE ONE WEEK TO RESPOND!

I am writing to the whole of my research network in the systems community and beyond, and am also extending this invitation on Facebook and LinkedIn.

There are so many different systems theories, methodologies and methods being developed by largely separate research communities. What would emerge if we could facilitate learning across all these communities?

To this end, I want to convene a really special event. As I have done over the past five years, I am going to co-organize the Systems Thinking stream at the 2023 Annual Conference of the Operational Research Society (OR65 for short). However, this year, instead of having just three parallel streams of paper presentations and workshops, I want to facilitate two significant dialogues:

The first will be at the start of the stream, and will involve everyone in a discussion of how systems thinking should be defined, and why. The second will be towards the end of the conference, after people have learned about the extraordinary variety of ideas being developed, and it will discuss “where to next for systems thinking?” I expect new collaborations to be forged!

I co-facilitated workshops like this in 1998 and 2004, and they were transformative! Not only did the opening sessions put everyone in a really open frame of mind to enable mutual appreciation and learning, but some of the collaborations that were forged in the closing workshops have lasted to the present day! I want to create a similar experience for the next generation of systems practitioners.

OR65 will be held on 12-14 September 2023 in Bath, UK. Here is the overall conference web site: https://www.theorsociety.com/events/annual-conference/

In addition to participating in the workshops, you will be able to take a 20-minute presentation slot and/or run your own participative workshop lasting up to two hours long.

If you want to present a paper, you need to create an account on the OR Conference site and then upload an abstract by 30 May 2023. PLEASE SELECT THE SYSTEMS THINKING STREAM for your abstract. If you want to run a participative workshop, PLEASE SELECT THE “MAKING AN IMPACT” STREAM for your abstract upload.

Here is where to create an account and upload an abstract: https://theorsociety.eventsair.com/…/or65abstractportal

If you need to get permission from your employer to go, or ask your employer to pay, please don’t delay – upload your abstract and sort out those details later.

If you have questions about writing your abstract or the focus of a proposed presentation or workshop, I can be contacted on g.r.midgley@hull.ac.uk However, if you have questions about the conference as a whole, please contact the organizers (not me).

I look forward to seeing you in September!

Annual Conference – The OR Society