Launching the Decision Support Tool for Systems Thinking
The Systems School presents a new online, open access Decision Support Tool for Systems Thinking.
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In our work building capacity for systems thinking with individuals, teams, and collaborations , we have found that the greatest hurdles to application are:
understanding which systems method to use and when
access to clear instructions on how to apply the method
indications of potential outcomes from application
analytical questions to reflect and makes sense of the new insights gained
Our development of the Tool aims to support these systems learning and application needs.
In this event we will share what the Tool is and how it works, followed by an opportunity for questions.
On 15-17 June 2020, the Skoll Centre’s Map the System competition held its Global Final virtually. As a member of this year’s judging panel, Ed Straw shares his insights.
The more researchers are conscious of their ‘traditions of understanding’ in relation to the subject, the less biased will be the output. Through culture, education and experiences of many forms, everyone holds preconceptions about their field of study – their ‘positionality’. The tendency for many is for US-European norms in economics, democracy, science and so on to be the starting point. As a judge for the Map the System competition, surfacing my own inbuilt assumptions in relation to each of the 31 finalists is a tenet of systems thinking. This was not easy. The entries ranged from the Youth Suicide Crisis in India to Why Women-Owned Businesses in South African Townships Fail, from Consumer Food Waste in Navarre to Affordable Housing in Utah. Everywhere is different.
Yet, I came away with the sense of ‘Yes, and Everywhere is the Same.’ What struck me most was the commonalities in many of the entries. The most obvious example is menstruation. This is actually an issue that affects over 3.5bn people for long parts for their lives. Normalising periods, treating them as just another bodily function requiring proper facilities and materials to be readily available in every institution, being able to talk about them in an understanding and knowledgeable way, not stigmatizing and so on would benefit so many lives. It is a common global issue. ‘There will be blood’ as one entry put it so succinctly. At its root, it is about shifting social norms.
This theme extended to several other entries where appalling norms in the treatment of women are underlying high adolescent pregnancy in Peru, female genital mutilation in Somalia and modern slavery in Papua New Guinea. But where is the global learning in shifting social norms?
Youth homelessness in Vancouver brought out another commonality – the lack of coordination and integration by public and third sector agencies. Funding is not the issue: masses of it appear to be available. As so often, it is poor overall governance leaving lots of intermediate interventions with few aimed at the whole person and the purpose of the funding. How often have I seen that. At what point will the world of government know instinctively that sound governance is where any solution has to start?
Poor plastic waste disposal in Accra Ghana, fake news in Germany, systemic barriers to public transportation in Boston US, the flooding crisis in Canada, type 2 diabetes in Latino-American communities, and depression in China are all entries with universal insights. Yet few of them get transported around the world, as a matter of course.
This led me on to thinking about the sort of ‘global learning engine’ that has been so effective in developing world class manufacturing from Japanese practice in automotive and consumer electronics from the 80s onwards, which is now almost universal in its application. It is the reason we can buy products of such extraordinary complexity, use and reliability, and at such comparatively low cost. These learning engines consist of management gurus, consultants, trade and specialist journals and news media, design authorities, business schools, industry analytics, trade associations, professional institutes, software developers, state funded R&D institutions and more. All of them are intent on scouring the world for what works best, why, and how, and transferring this knowledge.
Could world class governing and government be developed through a global learning engine? Bits and pieces of knowledge transfer do happen. The OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation is working hard in this direction. A few university departments are active (e.g. Arend Lijphart at the University of California). This competition is a fine example. But the total is tiny compared to the billions spent on knowledge acquisition and application in the commercial world. And typically governments are spending 40% of a country’s GDP, a vast sum that would be spent so much better stimulated by universal knowledge transfer and application.
The faster this learning platform can be activated and institutionalized, the faster governments will improve. None of the situations of concern analysed by the entrants would be solved through the application of today’s, often ramshackle political processes. Politics is more often an obstacle than an answer. Systems thinking works. In 2017 the UN, the WHO and OECD all called for the use of systems thinking to deal with highly complex problems. Which issue in government these days is not? Rise up systems thinkers – our time has come.
Author:
Ed Straw, Visiting Research Fellow at the Open University’s Applied Systems Thinking in Practice unit, headed by Professor Ray Ison, with whom he recently co-authored a book on The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking, and its application to governments and governance.
The SSG is closely following the evolution of the global Covid-19 pandemic. We will identify important reports on understanding and coping with this dangerous virus, as well as plans for less-restricted post-Covid-19 futures. Our focus will be on economic and social impacts, especially concerning health security and the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Security and Sustainability Guide seeks to identify and briefly describe international organizations, and nation-oriented organizations of possible international interest, that are focused on the two basic human goals of Security and Sustainability–both broadly defined.
Security Organizations are concerned with human security, human rights, peacekeeping, conflict prevention, terrorism, nuclear issues, weapons, cyber-security, military organizations, etc. Sustainability Organizations focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustainable development, food security, water security, energy security, economic security, oceans, biodiversity, human population, green business and economics, etc.
There are thousands of guides to countries and cities, as well as flora and fauna. It is time for some guide to the rapidly growing number of security and sustainability organizations. But this is no easy matter, because human organizations are in flux, intertwined, and more difficult to classify.
Please excuse errors and inconsistencies; the S&S Guide is a continuing work-in-progress.
Access to these hundreds of organizations is provided here in several ways:
In addition to providing information on like-minded organizations and the wide range of organizations associated with security and sustainability, the S&S Guide has three key findings:
Remarkable Growth
The remarkable growth of Security and Sustainability organizations (see Chart) , with a median start-up date of 2002, is greatly under-appreciated by media and researchers; this is especially true for organizations supporting green business as a new type of capitalism.View Businesses»
Alliances, Coalitions & Networks
Formation of alliances, coalitions, consortia, and networks to overcome fragmented efforts is important; the Guide identifies nearly a hundred such groups, and more are probably desirable.View Networks »
Security + Sustainability
A small but growing group of organizations is linking both security and sustainability concerns realizing that we cannot have security without sustainability and vice versa.Why Security & Sustainability? »
Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and the evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910, American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of thermodynamics and on the principle of entropy.[1][2]
The 1944 book What is Life? by Nobel-laureate physicistErwin Schrödinger stimulated further research in the field. In his book, Schrödinger originally stated that life feeds on negative entropy, or negentropy as it is sometimes called, but in a later edition corrected himself in response to complaints and stated that the true source is free energy. More recent work has restricted the discussion to Gibbs free energy because biological processes on Earth normally occur at a constant temperature and pressure, such as in the atmosphere or at the bottom of the ocean, but not across both over short periods of time for individual organisms.
Thanks, an interesting read. Reminded me of something I discovered a couple of years ago, captured in this early draft of something I wrote (the Forester bit didn't make the final cut). Start with the last sentence for context.
There's a body of new work based on the Warfield and Christakis community of practice from the SDD Symposium 2015 https://t.co/RKYHNGpo3W and a recent Springer book https://t.co/ZoqnzYT1bS
— Peter Jones, New England Daytonian expat (@redesign) August 18, 2020
"Warfield argued that 'higher-quality language' had more impact on science than hypothesis testing, an extraordinary claim and one underdeveloped in science studies."
Thanks for pulling this idea Pete. Warfield's aim in much of his foundational work – Interactive Management, Generic Design Science, DoSM – was to engage the right variety to generate "high-quality observations" that serve as a generating system for deep insight & leverage.
— Peter Jones, New England Daytonian expat (@redesign) August 18, 2020
Innovation to improve the work of protecting and serving refugees requires problem solving methods that uncover structural and human barriers, and tools for thinking through, testing and experimenting with possible solutions.
Innovation and organizations scholars Dave Francis and John Bessant (2005) have identified four types of innovation within an organization: changes to products and services, changes in the way those products and services are created and delivered, changes in how products and services are communicated, and changes in what the organization actually does.
To drive these innovations, innovators need to understand the systems they are working within, whether those are internal systems created by human resources or local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) crucial for delivering emergency aid. They need to understand the motivations of the various stakeholders, the norms and values shaping the organization’s culture, and policies and procedures that create formalized standards within the organization.
To identify the right problem to solve, innovators use systems thinking. Systems thinking is a methodology for identifying the root causes of complex problems and identifying interventions for systems change. This holistic approach to problem solving is critical for humanitarian innovation that works to create change within the sector by both introducing new ways of doing work or improving current practices (Warner, 2017).
In his insightful article, Human-Centered, Systems-Minded Design, Thomas Both, Director of the Designing for Social Systems Program at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, tells the story of Jill Vialet (Both, 2018).
Vialet is the founder and CEO of PlayWorks, an organization that helps schools help their kids do their best by improving how they play during class breaks. School leaders often told Vialet they faced a shortage of substitute teachers. When a teacher called in sick, they did not have a reliable pool of substitute teachers to cover the classes. This created a challenge for the schools, as they would have to move teachers around or rush to find a replacement. As a result, teacher absences had adverse effects on the classroom and on the students’ learning outcomes.
Vialet wanted to take this challenge on. Most people working to solve this problem would assume the school simply needed to hire more substitute teachers. But as Both reports, when Vialet studied the substitute teacher system, she found that the problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough substitute teachers. In fact, there was a large pool of people already in the system, but few taught on a regular basis.
Vialet spent time with substitute teachers to identify the root cause of the problem and how to change the system. She found that, “Substitutes felt they weren’t respected or valued by schools, and felt they didn’t have a community of support in schools or among their fellow subs,” writes Both. Schools had to change how they interacted with and supported substitute teachers. This is quite a different intervention than simply recruiting more people. As a result of this work, Vialet founded Substantial Classrooms to help schools improve how they train and support substitute teachers.
Vialet was able to solve this complex problem because she employed both human-centered design and systems thinking. As Both writes,
“For both human- and systems-level challenges, we need to identify the problems worth addressing if we are to create meaningful change. Understanding the right problem, we can better create effective solutions. A very simple characterization of a design approach is that we move from working to understand a challenge, to working on creating solutions in response to the challenge.”
Systems thinking is a methodology for understanding complex problems. It helps us understand the motivations and beliefs of people involved, as well as structural dynamics at play. Knowing the dynamics of the systems we are trying to innovate will help us know where to act.
Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a dynamical regime between order and disorder attain the highest level of computational capabilities and achieve an optimal trade-off between robustness and flexibility. Recent results in cellular and evolutionary biology, neuroscience and computer science have revitalised the interest in the criticality hypothesis, emphasising its role as a viable candidate general law in adaptive complex systems. In this paper we provide an overview of the works on dynamical criticality that are -to the best of our knowledge- particularly relevant for the criticality hypothesis. We review the main contributions concerning dynamics and information processing at the edge of chaos, and we illustrate the main achievements in the study of critical dynamics in biological systems. Finally, we discuss open questions and propose an agenda for future work.
This paper shows that learning about how your firm works is equivalent to gaining Lovecraftian Secret Knowledge. Promising managers asked to do process redesign at their firm learn how messed up it all is, so they give up rising careers & become hermits at the edges of the firm pic.twitter.com/1SneEF86hQ
What causes people to make a sanity check is when they learn that the features of their organization are not, in fact, part of a Grand Plan, but rather socially constructed, random, & in flux. The highlighted quote says it all.
For those interested in the details (or frustrated by the paywall), there is a great summary of the research and implications in HBR, as @ellahafermalz found! https://t.co/xf204nPmuC
Drag image to reposition📡Human SystemsHuman Systems is a network of people who care about designing better social systems. We run a club where social designers get feedback on their designs. We have trainings and a methodology for social designers. And you can talk to us about everything from ritual design to organizational process change to social app redesign (seebelow).Social SystemsHuman Systems is for designers of social systems: systems made of people, where there are codified and mutually understood roles and responsibilities. These designs can range from dinner table conversation games to social networks and global governance structures.Examples of Social Systems
The Social Design ClubEvery week we host an online event where someone presents a social design and gets feedback. Soon we’ll add presentations of successful and interesting social designs, and debates about what kind of social designs will best serve society.Last week Malcolm Ocean presented social features for a work tracking platform. This week, Ed Sapiera presents a next generation online video platform. You can RSVP for our next meeting at thestoa.ca.🌈The SDC is a collaboration between Human Systems, the Stoa, and Ḟreyjạ.Trainings and MethodologyWe also teach a method for designing social systems that focuses on human values, on the evolution of social norms in a system, and on the structural features which make it easier or harder for participants in a system to live and interact in the ways they value.•Learn to precisely articulate values—yours and those of others— and see when and how they are crowded out by other motivations and situational factors.•Redesign systems (workplaces, schools, family structures, social apps, etc) so as to support meaningful lives, interactions, and work. Use the HS Redesign Method.•Make rituals, games, group practices, organizational policies, institutions, or social technologies around values that are important to your community but lack space for full expression.•Join a vibrant and diverse network of meaning-first designers, and collaborate on your designs. Structural Features
Redesign Method
Imagine redesigning — News Feed, Family Dinners, Classroom Workgroups🌈We’ve been improving the Human Systems trainings for the last 3 years. Our school has trained 300+ well-positioned product people in our design methods and metrics. Our alumni have applied our methods at Facebook, Github and Apple; they’ve changed product direction at startups, and redesigned smaller systems like schools, co-living settlements, and families.🚀Learn more at 😎HS101 Deluxe.Talk to UsDepartment of Ritual Design•Hire help for a thorny ritual design task. Members of the Department of Ritual Design create customized rituals based on what is meaningful to the people involved. They start by articulating values in an interview. Then they design a custom ritual that supports participants in showing up in ways they find inspiring.👉Learn more at the 🌱Department of Ritual Design Design of Org Processes and Governance•Hire people to think about org change and flag values at risk. You can now hire HS-trained and certified teams to add to your organizational change process. These teams will assess the impact of potential features or redesigns on the values of users or workers. These “Values-at-Risk Assessments” will surface important values in the user or worker population that could be suppressed by an organizational change. The teams will present these potentially suppressed values, along with actionable steps that could be taken for each value at risk.👉Learn more at the 💼Design of Org Processes & Governance Dept Design of Social Apps and Environments•Hire people to join a design process and flag values at risk. You can now hire HS-trained and certified teams to add to your social app design process. These teams will assess the impact of potential features or redesigns on the values of users or workers. These “Values-at-Risk Assessments” will surface important values in the user or worker population that could be suppressed by a social design. The teams will present these potentially suppressed values, along with actionable steps that could be taken for each value at risk.👉Learn more at 🔗Design of Social Apps and Environments Dept Questions?🙋FAQ🙏Testimonials🚀Our MissionDepartments🌱Department of Ritual Design💼Design of Org Processes & Governance Dept🔗Design of Social Apps and Environments DeptPrograms👩🏻🎨Social Design Club😎HS101 Deluxe✍HS201: Redesigning Large Social Systems around Values📈HS202: Monitoring for Values and How They’re Working Out Miscellany🤓HS101 Self Study🎳Corona Games
Get ready to take your place at the profession’s flagship event – the Operational Research Society’s annual conference.
OR62 Online is shaping up to be the most engaging virtual gathering of OR and analytics thought leaders, advanced practitioners and rising talent.
This event, held online for the first time, is being developed to provide our dynamic profession with a wealth of opportunities to learn, collaborate and inspire.
Let’s stay connected, celebrate the achievements within our profession, and get ready for the future together. Free to attend with convenient access over the three days from your computer and smart device.
The OR62 Online organisers are proud to announce the plenary speakers for OR62 Online. Each speaker is a leading thinker and innovator in their field. They will share their ground-breaking work with delegates in formal 60-minute presentations.
You can read more details about their talks and biographies by clicking read more.
Ellen D. Lewis, PhD Ethos of Engagement Consulting
Talk Title: Inclusive Systemic Evaluation: Deepening Understandings of Engagement and Community
Prof Patrick M. Reed Cornell University
Talk Title: Conflict, Coordination & Control: Do We Understand the Actual Rules Used to Balance Flooding, Energy, and Agricultural Tradeoffs in River Basins?
We are seeing an increased recognition of the need for deliberative democracy. Peter Miles FRSA shares his experience of a technology-enabled structured dialogue methodology that actively supports a diverse group of stakeholders and experts to develop a deep and shared understanding of a complex challenge and then commit with confidence to a way forward.
While there are many group deliberation methods around, most rely on simple technology (such as the humble but ubiquitous post-it note), or apply computing in a passive mode as a way of documenting and sharing text. Almost always there is a tacit assumption that words and sentences have a single meaning.
The structured dialogue methodology introduced here has its roots in Interactive Management, developed in the 1970s by John Warfield and Alexander Christakis in the US. This approach spread around the world under a variety of names, including Structured Dialogic Design, Structured Democratic Dialog and Demosophia. It is designed to avoid ‘cognitive overload’ and reduce distortion due to power imbalances, to integrate diverse expertise and perspectives, and it enables deep mutual understanding as a solid foundation for progress. While the technology plays an active part and the process of facilitation plays an important role, the content is always owned by the participants.
Let us start with an outline of the experience of the participant. First of all, they will be in the room – known as a Colab – for a reason; the participation group will have been carefully designed at an earlier stage of the process, taking account of the overall context, and aiming above all for cognitive diversity. They may be deeply involved in the particular issue and care about any potential changes, as a stakeholder; or they may have sway over resources that will be needed for implementation. They could be an expert of some sort – possibly technical, or financial, or from working in a frontline position – that gives them a specific insight into how things really work.
Participants will be asked to answer a ‘trigger question’, initially working on their own. The question will be a broad one, designed to cover the scope of the situation, and along the lines of: ‘What are the main issues, barriers and challenges we face in achieving X?’ Everyone will then be asked to provide just one answer. That answer will be captured in a software tool, along with answers from everyone else and this process continues until a number of answers are captured. Then participants get the opportunity to clarify the answers that others have given and these clarifications are again recorded and captured, always using their own words. Further understanding emerges during a grouping phase, where answers are contrasted and compared.
OSWALD WIENER: “SCIENCE AND BARBARISM GO VERY WELL TOGETHER“
Interviewby Hans-Christian Dany
When the Vienna Actionists urinated, masturbated, and vomited at an event titled “Art and Revolution” in Vienna University’s Lecture Hall 1 in 1968, the proceedings were accompanied by a lecture on the relationship between speech and thought by the then thirty-two-year-old Oswald Wiener. One year later his literary montage die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (the improvement of central europe, a novel) was published. With its excurses on linguistics and cybernetics, it now reads as an astonishing foreshadowing of the Internet and virtual reality. Later, Wiener turned to the figure of the dandy, who maintains his difference from machines by cultivating a practice of self-observation. Hans-Christian Dany visited him at his home in southeast Austria to talk about the peculiar standstill of art and science in the digital age.
The moment I get into the hire car, I know they’ve given me the right vehicle for my mission. A small screen shows what I could drive into should I choose to reverse. I hesitate briefly but resist the temptation. On the way there I don’t see anything but the road. The world has disappeared into fog, but a voice is guiding me. My destination is somewhere just before the border to Slovenia and Hungary. On a mountain there lives a who professes to have been cultivating idiocy for fifty years. Where I come from, he enjoys an almost magical reputation. When I told my friends I was going to meet him, they looked at me in disbelief. “I didn’t think he really existed”. And indeed, it isn’t easy to imagine the life of a person who described, fifty years before the fact, the peculiar irreality that would come to pass through the Internet. A person who seems to rise above the current of time, one whose life story reads like a novel. A person who today hopes that our attention might again shift to the self-observation of human thought as a form of artistic research.
“You have reached your destination”. I park the Nissan in front of an inconspicuous house. The name Wiener really does appear on the door. Ingrid Wiener, easily recognisable by the melody of her speech, opens it. Further back, in the darkness of the kitchen, I make out Oswald Wiener. The seventy-nine-year-old seems real enough, and bears no resemblance to a fictional character who can travel in time inside his own head. One wonders whether it was just such an interconnection of real and linguistic existence that enabled him to write one of the most shattering novels of the twentieth century. Or whether it was this way of thinking that enabled him to use the historical figure of the dandy to cast light on the problems of the artificial intelligences of the future. For this was the kinetic logic of a writer who it was impossible to pin down, who would disappear behind pseudonyms or among gold prospectors at the furthest ends of the world, only to return with recordings of the songs of wild Canadian dogs. This was the author of a work that for a long time appeared to be hopelessly fragmented, but which today has constituted itself as a compelling intellectual achievement. A blinding sun is shining through the window. I unwrap my recording device from a white silk cloth. The man opposite me picks up exactly the same device, and sets it up next to the first one like a reflection. At one and the same time, both of us say: a good machine.
You initially wanted to be a jazz musician, but then you switched from playing the trumpet to working for Olivetti.
Jazz was implanted in me at the age of twelve. There was a radio station run by the American Occupation, the Blue Danube Network, which was a kind of request programme for the soldiers. It was on seven days a week, and once a week it played a piece of jazz. This was in 1947/48. I was living in a reform school at the time, and all the boys had a germanium diode crystal receiver with a piece of wire that you could bend and adjust until you got the right frequency. For headphones we used earpieces stolen from phone box telephones. And with them we’d listen to the radio under the covers every evening. Then, in the 1950s, my childhood friend Konrad Bayer inducted me into the circle of artists and poets. My interest in poetry grew with my realisation that my musical talent was not going to turn me into a world-famous jazz trumpeter. I liked the poems of Gerhard Rühm or H.C. Artmann as much as I liked music. Then I got sick of all that as well, I saw that my poetry was a kind of imitation of Rühm’s – at best, an imitation with different intentions to his own. That was the end of my foray into art, and now I wanted to do the exact opposite: marry, have children, take up a bourgeois profession. I very quickly had a successful career at Olivetti; they were waiting for a guy like me. That’s where I learned the principles of programming.
Was this applied programming, or was it linked to the debate over cybernetics that was going on at the time?
The term cybernetics had only just reached Central Europe. People didn’t exactly know what it meant. In 1959 I stole the first copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics from the lending library of the Vienna Information Center, a propaganda institute run by the American occupation forces. At the time I didn’t entirely understand it. I still don’t know whether I entirely understand it today.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Automatic for the People? Cybernetics and Left‐Accelerationism
Michael E. Gardiner
First published: 06 August 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12528
Ecosystem resilience to drought and floodingOne of the three projects that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund is aimed at the question how the robustness of plant ecosystems to drought and flooding depends on the plasticity of individual plants and heterogeneity of the plant population. The research proposal was written by Prof. Kirsten ten Tusscher, Prof. Stefan Dekker and Dr. Hugo de Boer.Read more »
Leveraging a food transition for Arctic indigenous communities Indigenous Arctic communities are experiencing a fundamental, undesired and unsustainable shift in their food system. Science-based visions of sustainable solutions are lacking, and the capacity within communities to evoke change is low. Dr. Ine Dorresteijn and Prof. Bert Theunissen received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund for their project aimed at leveraging a food transition for indigenous communities in the Bering Sea.Read more »
Stability of underdetermined dynamical systems Another project that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund focuses at the role of networks in the dynamics of random dynamical systems. The research proposal was written by Dr. Ivan Kryven, Dr. Mara Baudena and Dr. Anna von der Heydt, who address their research question on the level of mathematical foundations, as well as by studying several real-world examples where networks are anticipated to play a crucial role in systems dynamics.Read more »
One of the three projects that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund is aimed at the question how the robustness of plant ecosystems to drought and flooding depends on the plasticity of individual plants and heterogeneity of the plant population. The research proposal was written by 
Indigenous Arctic communities are experiencing a fundamental, undesired and unsustainable shift in their food system. Science-based visions of sustainable solutions are lacking, and the capacity within communities to evoke change is low. 
Another project that has received a grant from the 2020 Complex Systems Fund focuses at the role of networks in the dynamics of random dynamical systems. The research proposal was written by 
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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