Supporting System Changers: The role of system thinking, leadership and wellbeing Together with +20 ecosystem partners, academics, Fellows, and intermediaries, we share our global Ashoka Fellowship Program experience on how we support social innovators to change social structures, co-create cross-sector collaborations, and anchor wellbeing at the center of work.
Supporting System Changers: The role of system thinking, leadership and wellbeing | Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program
Recent Updates Page 142
A Constructivist’s View of POSIWID:
POSWID or “Purpose Of a System Is What It Does” is a famous dictum in Cybernetics. This is attributed to the Management Cybernetician Stafford Beer. Beer noted:
A good observer will impute the purpose of the system from its actions and thus from the resultant state.
Hence the key aphorism:
The purpose of a system is what it does.
There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it consistently fails to do.
I have written about this before here – https://harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/purpose-of-a-system-in-light-of-vsm/ and here – https://harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/2020/06/14/hegel-dialectics-and-posiwid/
In cybernetics, the emphasis is on what a “system” does, and not especially what a “system” is, or what the designer or management of the “system” claims what the “system” is doing. Thus, we can see that POSIWID has a special place in every cybernetician’s mind. A “system” is a collection of variables that an…
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Complexity-Informed Evaluation – An Exploration in Understanding Pattern, Predictability, and How Change Happens.
Description
I am presenting a professional development workshop at the upcoming meeting of the European Evaluation Association. The workshop description appears below.
The content of this workshop will be a succession of lectures, group discussions, and breakout exercises to provide participants with the understanding needed to recognize how complex behavior might play a role in the models they develop, the methodologies they devise, and what messages they extract from their data. Without this understanding, evaluators cannot correctly describe what programs are doing, and why. If they get it wrong, so too will evaluation users and stakeholders.
Understanding the application of Complexity Science to Evaluation requires understanding the relationship between specific constructs and general themes. Each specific construct is useful in its own right, but its full value lies in appreciating the epistemology in which that theme is embedded. This workshop will treat both specific constructs that can be applied to…
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Complexity Research
Where do we come from? Where are we going? New research from the Santa Fe Institute explores key questions related to humanity, society, and the existence of life in our world.
Part 1: The Principles of Complexity: Understanding the Hidden Sources of Order by Dr. Stefani Crabtree
Part 2: Autocatalytic Sets: Complexity at the Interface of Chemistry and Biology by Dr. Wim Hordijk
Part 3: Beyond Pairwise: Higher-Order Interactions in Complex Systems
Read the full article at: www.templeton.org
Cybernetics Society the President’s Series 17 Cybernetics in Design and Workflow Automation Gustav Borgefalk and Russell Bee – YouTube
Pres Series 17 Cybernetics in Design and Workflow Automation Gustav Borgefalk and Russell Bee
(1) Pres Series 17 Cybernetics in Design and Workflow Automation Gustav Borgefalk and Russell Bee – YouTube
The Form of the Firm | Baecker (2006)
The Form of the FirmDirk Baecker2006, Organization
(6) The Form of the Firm | Dirk Baecker – Academia.edu
Food, and the creativity between chaos and order
Food, and the creativity between chaos and orderHow to get creative things doneChristian Lemp
Food, and the creativity between chaos and order
University of Michigan – COMPLEX SYSTEMS IS HIRING – Postdoctoral Research Fellow
The Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS) at the University of Michigan is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to conduct complex systems research and teach one undergraduate course per semester (two total for the academic year). CSCS is a broadly interdisciplinary center within the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA), more info here: https://lsa.umich.edu/cscs. The Fellow will create independent research projects related to their particular field of interest which may include computer science, mathematics, sociology, epidemiology, economics, physics, biology and political science, among others. This position is for one year, beginning August 29, 2022, and may be renewed annually for up to three years.
COMPLEX SYSTEMS IS HIRING!
Like a Lemon to a Lime, a Lime to a Lemon
Lovely juicy systemic messiness which also sort of explains why you can no longer buy *proper satsumas* in the UK:
“Most of us are trained to calibrate our equipment and to double-check our experimental designs, but how often do we reconcile our concepts?”Found from this twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1511809497978843137?s=20&t=k14lh8mHbB9-2iycfuAEfA“Reality has a surprising amount of detail”
We recently wrote a post about Maciej Cegłowski’s essay Scott And Scurvy, a fascinating account of how the cure for scurvy was discovered, lost, and then by incredible chance, discovered again. At the time we said that this essay is one of the most interesting things we’ve ever read, and that we hoped to write more about it in the future. It was, we do, and here we go.
In the other post, we talked about what the history of scurvy can teach us about contradictory evidence — stuff that appears to disprove a theory, even though it doesn’t always. In this post, we want to talk about something different: the power of concepts.
First we’re gonna show you how bad it can be if you don’t have concepts you need. Then we’re going to show you how bad it can be if you DO have concepts you DON’T…
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Tools for Thought Rocks: March 2022 – Gordon Brander, Subconscious – YouTube
Tools for Thought Rocks: March 2022 – Gordon Brander, Subconscious
Tools for Thought Rocks: March 2022 – Gordon Brander, Subconscious – YouTube
What does it take to change local systems? | by Collaborate CIC | Apr, 2022 | Collaborate
What does it take to change local systems?Following on from two previous blogs (here and here) about our work in partnership with NPC as evaluation and learning partner to Save the Children’s Early Learning Communities (ELC) programme, in this blog we share key insights from the latest systems change evaluation report. The report summarises systems change learning over the last year from across the four Early Learning Communities: in Bettws, Newport; Feltham, London; Margate and Sheffield.
What does it take to change local systems? | by Collaborate CIC | Apr, 2022 | Collaborate
The Grammar of Systems | Major Projects Association
The Grammar of Systems
The Grammar of Systems | Major Projects Association
YouTube videos
We’ll add a new tool to the page every week, so please do share and revisit.
Patrick Hoverstadt
Provides consultancy mainly in organisation design, strategy, business architecture and organisational change using systems approaches. He has developed a set of methodologies that provide different approaches for: organisational change, performance management, strategic risk, strategy, partnership governance and organisational agility. In his spare time he does a bit of academic work, for Manchester Business School and the OU and is a visiting Research Fellow at Cranfield. Patrick wrote Fractal Organisation published by Wiley, the section on the Viable Systems Model in the OU’s course text Systems Approaches to Managing Change and contributions to a number of other books on management and organisation. Together with his co-author, Lucy Loh, he published Patterns of Strategy with Gower – a book outlining a radically different and systemic approaches to business strategy. Most recently, he has published: The Grammar of Systems – From Order to Chaos and Back.
Bo Burnham: How The World Works – YouTube
Bo Burnham: How The World Works
Bo Burnham: How The World Works – YouTube
Woah, meta. h/t Helena Gallbo
FROM ANIMALS TO ANIMATS 16: The 16th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2022)
FROM ANIMALS TO ANIMATS 16: The 16th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2022)20-23 Sep 2022 Cergy-Pontoise (France)
FROM ANIMALS TO ANIMATS 16: The 16th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2022) – Sciencesconf.org
via Ivo Velitchkov
hardmaru on Twitter: “A Modern Self-Referential Weight Matrix That Learns to Modify Itself “In principle, such neural networks can meta-learn to learn, and meta-meta-learn to meta-learn to learn, and so on, in the sense of recursive self-improvement.”
A Modern Self-Referential Weight Matrix That Learns to Modify Itself“In principle, such neural networks can meta-learn to learn, and meta-meta-learn to meta-learn to learn, and so on, in the sense of recursive self-improvement.”https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05780
(1) hardmaru on Twitter: “A Modern Self-Referential Weight Matrix That Learns to Modify Itself “In principle, such neural networks can meta-learn to learn, and meta-meta-learn to meta-learn to learn, and so on, in the sense of recursive self-improvement.” https://t.co/LnLRJXsoXc https://t.co/npLDP4ybSW” / Twitter
h/t Ivo Velitchkov
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