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Pluralism and Systems Thinking: | Harish’s Notebook – My notes… Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

Pluralism and Systems Thinking:

In today’s post, I am looking at the idea of pluralism, something that is important to hold in Systems Thinking. I am relying on the ideas of the British philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin. Berlin is most famous for his ideas on freedom. He coined the terms negative and positive freedom. Loosely put, negative freedom is the freedom from constraints or interference from others. And positive freedom is the freedom to act upon one’s own desires and ambitions.

My favorite lesson from Berlin is pluralism – his take on anti-monism. Monism is the idea that there is only one true answer to questions

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Pluralism and Systems Thinking: | Harish’s Notebook – My notes… Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

Hmmm… this seems mostly like a nice summary of progress and revision in science – and, of course, we might all be able to read confirmation of our biases into ‘the brain is a network’.

And yet, and yet… ‘brain science’ seems weirdly subject to the problems of all science – trends and fashions, prevailing orthodoxies, reification of models, confirmation or theory bias, all kinds of holding strongly what might better be held lightly. And of course we need people to hold their models strongly, against orthodoxies and trends, to make breakthroughs in understanding… but when I see either/or thinking, I get worried – and especially when I see quotes like: “The brain literally is a network… It’s not a metaphor.” However, the article ends with:

For Sporns, the marriage is a natural one. “Networks are not so much an antidote to localizationism,” he says. “They’re more like a way of combining a framework where you look for local differences with one where you look at the system as a whole.” Perhaps, then, even as network neuroscience becomes increasingly popular, Broca’s legacy will live on.

A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring | WIRED

But I’m certainly no expert in this space, so here it is:

GRACE HUCKINSSCIENCE08.17.2020 07:00 AM

A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring

Network neuroscience could revolutionize how we understand the brain—and  change our approach to neurological and psychiatric disorders.

IN MID-19TH CENTURY Europe, a debate was raging among early brain scientists. Strangely, this academic disagreement had its roots in the pseudoscience of phrenology, the practice of measuring bumps on the skull to determine someone’s personality. Phrenology had found purchase at fairs and was quite popular with the general public, but it had been roundly rejected by most scholars. For others, though, this carnival trick held a pearl of inspiration. Phrenology depended on the assumption that different parts of the brain are associated with different traits and abilities, a position called “localizationism.” And the absurdity of skull-measuring did not necessarily invalidate this notion.

But others disliked the stench of charlatanism that clung to any ideas associated with phrenology. This second camp contended that capacities are evenly distributed throughout the brain, and so damage to any one brain region would have the same effect as damage to any other. The debate between these groups raged until 1861, when Paul Broca, a French neurologist, reported on a patient with a bizarre set of symptoms. Though this man could not speak, he was entirely capable of understanding language, and his intelligence seemed unaffected. When the patient died and Broca dissected his brain, he discovered a lesion, or site of severe damage, low on the left side of his brain. Here was an individual who had sustained brain damage in a specific area and had lost a very specific ability—while the rest of his functions remained intact! Localizationism had been vindicated. For the next 150 years, it would be the dominant position in brain science.

Operating under the assumption that different parts of the brain have separate functions, neuroscientists have made remarkable progress toward understanding how the brain works. They have discovered that vision happens at the back of the head, that a tiara of tissue at the top of the brain sends commands to the muscles so that the body can move, and that a small structure beneath the ear has the specific responsibility of recognizing faces. All of these regions are made of gray matter, a type of tissue that contains neuron cell bodies and covers the surface of the brain. Underneath lies the white matter, which stretches in bundles of fiber between regions of gray matter and carries messages all over the brain. But though figuring out the function of a particular piece of gray matter can be straightforward enough—look for someone with damage to that area and see what they are unable to do—white matter has proven more difficult to pin down. “For a long time, we’ve been ignoring that connectivity because we didn’t know how to talk about it,” says Danielle Bassett, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

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A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring | WIRED

(If you find out, kindly let me know)

https://wiki.metagame.wtf/

Source:

Learning Got “Cancelled”: The Cancel Culture Arrives at The Learning Organization | by Michael Lissack | Aug, 2020 | Medium

Michael Lissack

Aug 17 · 27 min read

What the media and its critics often fail to note about the “cancel culture” is its deep roots in some of the most hollowed out parts of our so-called meritocracy. We have millions of teachers teaching students about content they know little about, because they were busy studying “how to be a teacher” instead. We have hundred of thousands of management consultants and their ilk who claim a mystical expertise in “process” can replace a deep understanding of the industry and subject matters they “consult” about. We have tens of thousand of journalists, who, like the teachers, studied “journalism” and use that as a pretext to write about subjects they barely understand and yet claim a “moral imperative” to pass that amateur knowledge off to an unsuspecting public as “knowledge”, “news” and “expert opinion.” The meritocracy has become a “mirror-tocracy.” If you act like, look like, sound like, or spout off “truthies” like these so called “experts,” you are “approved.” If you dare to disagree? Last century, disagreement with members of the “professions” above would have led to dialogue — and learning. In the third decade of this century: disagree and risk being cancelled.

I and my work were cancelled this week by none other than the academic journal which claims to speak for, of all things, “The Learning Organization.”

I had been invited to write the article in question. It was peer-reviewed and edited twice. It was accepted and ready for publication.

But, I dared to be critical. So I was cancelled. The editor included these helpful lines from a second set of reviewers he sent the article to to kill it off:

The way LO is portrayed is my main concern. The way the article is written also suggests that LO simply promotes reductionism and simplification, and that the current LO literature denies or dissuades reflection, agency, context and the possibility of emergence. The main reason for rejecting your manuscript is the lack of clear and relevant connections to the field of the learning organization.

The Learning Organization and the concept for which it claims to speak would rather cancel criticism than engage in dialogue. Agreement and praise are not the foundation for learning. But they are the mirror on which the consultants who preach about learning organizations depend. As noted in my opening paragraph, these “professionals” tell organizations how to be more open to “learning” as if naked process alone was sufficient. It has fostered a huge industry. But, unless the learning is about what matters to the organizations’ purposes, goals, and business, it is a giant waste. There I said it again. Medium, however, will not cancel me.

I present the Learning Organization intended article below and, unlike they, welcome your feedback.

Not learning but reflecting and dialoguing: updating the concept of a learning organization through cybernetics

Purpose

In a learning organization it is believed that a culture of learning can overcome the traditional thought that reductionism is “good,” and complexity is “bad.” Yet the very concept of a learning organization treats what is learned as a stock of knowledge, a resource to be exploited. The learned thereby gets reduced to another “simple” object. This article suggests an alternative. There is an inherent power in each manager’s role as a sense-maker, helping participants etc. to discern coherence. Shifting from a stress on an ascribed coherence (measured by adhesion to labels and categories) to a culture which promotes emergent coherence (determined by contextualization and open to change) can offer new tools and perspectives to organizations facing complexity, uncertainty, and change.

Design/methodology/approach

What happens to the concept of a learning organization when its focus is shifted from the current emphasis on processes to a new focus on what it is that is worth learning?

Findings

I suggest that learning which contributes to self-reflection of choices made and shortcuts, or representation used is worthwhile … and that the pursuit of learning processes which fail to so contribute is not. Coherence is the goal. Learning is one of many potential means.

Value

Helping managers to determine what is behind the shortcuts they make with regard to their assigned responsibilities and their many contexts becomes the reflective and dialoging tasks which can both redefine what a learning organization “ought” to be and promote resilience therein.

Key Words: Learning, Cybernetics, Ashby Space, Context, Coherence, Reflection

Introduction — The Critical Role of Ceteris Paribus in Modern Management

Modern management’s successes and failures can be traced to a common root: how well does ceteris paribus hold, thereby allowing the simplifications, chunking, modularity, isolation, and other forms of reduction on which traditional management is based to flourish? The ability of a manager to reduce complicated problems to a set of well-defined tasks is the key to success. Doing so often means ignoring the manifold layers of inter-related systems of which a given organization, its participants, users, resources, and context are a part. The oft suggested solution to this ignorance is to create a learning organization — where a culture of learning can overcome the traditional thought that reductionism is “good,” and complexity is “bad.” Yet the very concept of a learning organization treats what is learned as a stock of knowledge, a resource to be exploited. The learned thereby gets reduced to another “simple” object. This article suggests an alternative. There is an inherent power in each manager’s role as a sense-maker, helping participants, etc. to discern coherence. Shifting from a stress on an ascribed coherence (measured by adhesion to labels and categories) to a culture that promotes emergent coherence (determined by contextualization and open to change) can offer new tools and perspectives to organizations facing complexity, uncertainty, and change.

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted such contexts of complexity, uncertainty, and change and made it clear they are rather ubiquitous. The traditional lessons of modern management are coming up short. Their dependence on stability, their resistance to context dependence, and their structural inadequacies in confronting ambiguity and fluidity of meaning have all been exposed by their inability to “manage” the Covid-19 crisis.

Management has been ascendant in Western society for more than a century. Much of that success has been built on the ability of managers to effectively isolate their organization as much as possible from the vagaries and uncertainties inherent in their surrounding contexts. In the ongoing tension between efficiency and resilience, modern management has a strong preference for efficiency — individual tasks have defined goals and achieving those goals with minimal time and resources while maximizing quality is, by definition, measured in efficiency terms. Critically, not all environments nor contexts are stable. Covid-19 hasmade that instability rather obvious.

A mundane example is illustrative. Consider the role of an American football kicker. The task is easily defined — the ball is snapped to a holder; you are to kick the ball through the goalposts. Success and failure are easily measured — “did the kick succeed?”. The tasks are discrete — snap the ball, hold the ball, kick the ball. But, football, like life, is not quite that simple. There is the context — the opposing team’s goal to try to tackle the hold and the kicker. And the wider context — one’s team is either at home or away, and the game is either close (i.e., the points to be scored matter) or not. There are the internal pressures on each of the participants — perhaps there are health issues or family issues, or a lack of sleep, or severe indigestion. If the football team is to be a learning organization, it must deal with these wider considerations and not just focus on the task at hand — kicking the ball.

How businesses have adapted to the new “stay-at-home” rules arising from Covid-19 more broadly illustrates the problem. No longer is it sufficient to focus on churning out the best marketing copy a creative team might imagine. Instead, the tasks now include remote conferencing, secure document sharing, developing a sensitivity for local nes and contexts, and remote production. In a wider context they now include: working with children at home demanding attention, inability to find quiet time, multiple demands for attention, lack of proper workspaces, lack of access to needed materials and inability to segregate the professional from the personal. Traditional management, as a discipline, lacks the tools to deal with these ever-widening considerations.

While some may argue that being or becoming a learning organization can help address such issues, this article makes a different case: what is learned and “how” is much more important than “being” a learning organization.

Cybernetics offers a perspective on what needs to be learned and provides a “how.” Cybernetics is the study of feedback and its effects in purposive systems. “Cybernetic systems are complex, interacting, probabilistic networks­ such as brains, markets, living organisms, industries, battles.” (Beer, 1959) Cybernetics is a thinking and decision-making approach designed to deal with such observations as: (1) many of our interactions cannot be described with direct relationships, (2) our environments are neither fixed nor completely exogenous, (3) our actions and communications have multiple order effects, and further time-delayed effects, and (4) our goals regarding the very actions we pursue are often in flux. This sounds like Covid-19.

Cybernetics warns us that we live in a complex world where ambiguity is ever-present in our world despite our oft-exercised option to ignore it. We assert the simple in lieu of the complex, the direct in lieu of the nuanced or the subtle, the label or category in lieu of recognizing the portfolio of choices that label/category represents. By asserting the simple, we can isolate tasks and projects from contexts if we are willing to simultaneously isolate those same tasks and projects from “fit.” Our labels and categories, our self-imposed boundary constraints, are necessary if we are going to attempt to measure efficiency and efficacy and to manage so as to optimize either. But their use also functions as a set of blinders — closing the task, the project, the manager, the organization, and its artificially constrained environment off from the changes going on about it and them.

Boundaries are always shifting. Identities are unclear. As Heisenberg (1959) told us: “The world is not divided into different groups of objects but rather into different groups of relationships…. The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”

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Learning Got “Cancelled”: The Cancel Culture Arrives at The Learning Organization | by Michael Lissack | Aug, 2020 | Medium

podcast link: https://preaccidentpodcast.podbean.com/e/safety-moment-trending-destroys-fidelity/

Barry Oshry has just reissued his piece ‘can we truly see the Other’ as ‘Can the Dominant Culture Truly See the Other?’ and says:

My original title for this piece was: Can We Truly See the Other? Recently, it struck me that I needed to be clear about who the WE is that I’m addressing. This is not a message primarily aimed at people of color, although there is likely to be much of interest in it for them.  The intended audience is the White dominant culture. There are powerful forces aimed at bringing about fundamental societal transformations in policing, housing, healthcare, employment, education, governance, and more. The pressure is on the dominant culture, and fundamental to the dominants’ response to these challenges is how we (I’m one of them) see the other. Throughout our history and continuing today certain images and perceptions of the other have supported discrimination and oppression. How do such images arise and how can they be changed? Both questions are the subject of this piece.

This seems to me to link to this piece:

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The double-consciousness of the stigmatised – Professor Imogen Tyler

AUGUST 13, 2020IMOGEN TYLER

The double-consciousness of the stigmatised

A short slightly adapted extract from chapter 5 of Stigma

 Sociological Imagination

In The Sociological Imagination (1959), the American sociologist Charles Wright Mills famously stated that ‘no social study that does not come back to the problem of biography, of history and their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey’.^[i]  Indeed, the promise of sociology is the critical sensibility which it cultivates when we tease out ‘the public issue or problem contained in the private trouble’.[ii] This forging of connections between the personal and the political, between individual biographies and the histories that shape them, is particularly urgent today.  As the sociologists Nicholas Gane and Les Back argue, ‘in a neoliberal world which seeks to tear asunder private troubles from public issues, and thereby turn social uncertainty into a personal failure that is divorced from any collective cause or remedy, the linking of biography and history is a vital part of a sociology that is both politically and publicly engaged.’[iii]

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The double-consciousness of the stigmatised – Professor Imogen Tyler

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We Can’t Include Everything and Everyone. So, what to do? On Boundaries – Evaluation Uncertainty

We Can’t Include Everything and Everyone. So, what to do? On Boundaries

Emily Gates
Assistant Professor, Boston College
emily.gates@bc.edu

I am an evaluator who also teaches evaluation courses and conducts research on evaluation. In my work, I draw on the ideas of boundaries and boundary critique from critical systems thinking. These ideas have deep philosophical roots and the potential to alter or affirm the way you see the world, and act and interact within it. They are fundamental to what ‘system’ and a ‘systems approach’ mean. In the limited space here, I share five points about boundaries.

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We Can’t Include Everything and Everyone. So, what to do? On Boundaries – Evaluation Uncertainty

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Improvisation Blog: The Exams Crisis: The Establishment Crumbles from Society’s Children Upwards

• Improvisation Blog

Wednesday, 12 August 2020

The Exams Crisis: The Establishment Crumbles from Society’s Children Upwards

Coronavirus is exposing the poverty of understanding of what really matters in society. If education  has been seen to be a priority at all, it is because the function of school in “keeping the kids off the streets” has been prioritised (behind lots of bluster about “learning”). 

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Improvisation Blog: The Exams Crisis: The Establishment Crumbles from Society’s Children Upwards

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Unlocking systems transformation – A business view – Business Fights Poverty

Unlocking systems transformation – A business view

The term “systems transformation” is increasingly being used to describe what is needed to achieve sustainable development. Players across government, industry, academia and civil society are more and more aligned in their position that the sustainable development challenges we face are complex, highly interconnected and systemic, and that incremental change will not be enough to achieve a truly sustainable future.Share this story   

Filippo Veglio, Managing Director, People Program & Outreach, WBCSD

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• Unlocking systems transformation (Vision 2050 Issue Brief)REPORT

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Wednesday July 1 2020

The term “systems transformation” is increasingly being used to describe what is needed to achieve sustainable development. Players across government, industry, academia and civil society are more and more aligned in their position that the sustainable development challenges we face are complex, highly interconnected and systemic, and that incremental change will not be enough to achieve a truly sustainable future.

However, despite the continued popularization of the concept of systems transformation, this term is often interpreted differently and applied with varying levels of ambition. To give us the best possible chance of securing genuine change and ensuring that systemic risks and vulnerabilities do not continue to accumulate, it is vital that we develop a clear and collective understanding of what systems transformation actually involves, how it happens and the levers that different actors, including the private sector, can pull to accelerate the lasting change that is urgently required.

A new issue brief released by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)  sets out to answer these questions. Drawing on a broad literature review and a series of expert interviews, it lays out a common theory and vocabulary for business that will support the uncommon task of driving the transformation of key economic systems in the critical years ahead.

This piece of work is an interim output from WBCSD’s current refresh of its Vision 2050, a landmark 2010 report that laid out a pathway to a world in which nine billion people are able to live well, within planetary boundaries, by mid-century. WBCSD is working together with 40 of its member companies to update this work and again provide business with a common agenda for action over the decade to come. Among the resources that have already been produced are an analysis of Macrotrends & Disruptions shaping 2020-2030, and a piece of work looking at The consequences of COVID-19 for the decade ahead.

In the coming months the Council will release further thought pieces, supporting companies as they navigate the challenges of responding to the socio-economic turmoil unleashed by COVID-19, all the while maintaining (and increasing) ambition on realizing sustainable development.

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Unlocking systems transformation – A business view – Business Fights Poverty

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Affordance – Wikipedia

Affordance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to search“Afford” redirects here. For other meanings, see Afford (disambiguation).

Affordance is what the environment offers the individual. James J. Gibson coined the term in his 1966 book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems,^[1] and it occurs in many of his earlier essays (e.g.^[2]). However, his best-known definition is taken from his seminal 1979 book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.— Gibson (1979, p. 127)^[3]

The word is used in a variety of fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, industrial design, human–computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, user-centered design, communication studies, instructional design, science, technology and society (STS), sports science and artificial intelligence.

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Affordance – Wikipedia

Also:

James J. Gibson From: the Ecological Approach to Visual Perception Chapter 8 the Theory of Affordances

James Jerry GibsonPublished 2013I have described the environment as the surfaces that separate substances from the medium in which the animals live. But I have also described what the environment affords animals, mentioning the terrain, shelters, water, fire, objects, tools, other animals, and human displays. How do we go from surfaces to affordances? And if there is information in light for the perception of surfaces, is there information for the perception of what they afford? Perhaps the composition and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/James-J.-Gibson-From%3A-the-Ecological-Approach-to-8-Gibson/eab2b1523b942ca7ae44e7495c496bc87628f9e1

The Theory of Affordances – http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_url?url=https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs137/readings/Gibson-AFF.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm1u77-ND8s2osd8bXUebAuYO48WOg&nossl=1&oi=scholarr

The Perception of the Visual World http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/The%20Perception%20of%20the%20Visual%20World-GibsonJJ.pdf

Mark Johnson’s blog entry:

Improvisation Blog: Alternative Natural Philosophy Association Online

Read the blog entry for fascinating history and connections, link below to event page:

ANPA 41 Web Conference Details (August 2020)

Monday 10th August – Friday 4th September

Daily Presentation at 17:00 UK;  16:00 Zurich; 10:30 CDT;  11:30 EST;  9:30 MDT

(Opening on Mon. 10th  30 minutes earlier)

Zoom link was emailed to you our simply type into your browser:  iow.li/anpa

event page: http://anpa.onl/2020/anpa-41-web-conference-details-august-2020/

Mark Johnson’s blog entry: Alternative Natural Philosophy Association Online

Improvisation Blog: Alternative Natural Philosophy Association Online

“It was called the ‘wiring diagram’. John Hoskyns – who had one of he first systems houses – prepared it as an analysis of why it was so hard to do business in the UK at the time, and what to do about it. It was adopted by the Tories and became the Thatcher revolution.”

Like a dystopian class warfare version of Taiichi Ohno’s Autonomation

The division of labor between humans and computer systems has changed along both technical and human dimensions. Technically, there has been a shift from technologies of automation, the aim of which was to disallow human intervention at nearly all points in the system, to technologies of “heteromation” that push critical tasks to end users as indispensable mediators. As this has happened, the large population of human beings who have been driven out by the first type of technology are drawn back into the computational fold by the second type. Turning artificial intelligence on its head, one technology fills the gap created by the other, but with a vengeance that unsettles established mechanisms of reward, fulfillment, and compensation. In this fashion, replacement of human beings and their irrelevance to technological systems has given way to new “modes of engagement” with remarkable social, economic, and ethical implications. In this paper we provide a historical backdrop for heteromation and explore and explicate some of these displacements through analysis of a number of cases, including Mechanical Turk, the video games FoldIt and League of Legends, and social media.