Public health agencies tasked with improving the health of communities are poorly supported by many ‘business-as-usual’ funding practices. It is commonplace to call for more funding for health promotion, but additional funding could do more harm than good if, at the same time, we do not critically examine the micro-processes that lead to health enablement – micro-processes that are instigated or amplified by funding. We are currently engaged in a university-and-policy research partnership to identify how funding mechanisms may better serve the practice of community-based health promotion. We propose three primary considerations to inform the way funds are used to enable community-based health promotion. The first is a broader understanding and legitimising of the ‘soft infrastructure’ or resources required to enhance a community’s capacity for change. The second is recognition of social relationships as key to increasing the availability and management of resources within communities. The third consideration understands communities to be complex systems and argues that funding models are needed to support the dynamic evolution of these systems. By neglecting these considerations, current funding practices may inadvertently privilege communities with pre-existing capacity for change, potentially perpetuating inequalities in health. To begin to address these issues, aspects of funding processes (e.g., stability, guidance, evaluation, and feedback requirements) could be designed to better support the flourishing of community practice. Above all, funders must recognise that they are actors in the health system and they, like other actors, should be reflexive and accountable for their actions.
• Systemic-level action can either facilitate or hinder change.
• The realities of systemic change often alienate philanthropists and investors.
• A new funding structure has to come into being to support systemic change.
Systemic change is on everyone’s lips in 2020. The pandemic is laying bare the flaws of our politicians, institutions and healthcare systems. Pushed to the background, progress on climate action remains woefully slow. Wealth inequality continues to rise. Gender parity appears unlikely to happen for a hundred years. Black people keep dying in police custody.
Browse the blog of your favourite organization, private or public, and there’s probably an article there urging that something should be done about these systemic problems; these texts are often heavy on outrage and light on logistics.
“The purpose of a system is what it does”, or POSIWID for short, is a dictum coined by Stafford Beer, a leading Systems Thinker in the field of cybernetics; and the creator of management cybernetics – the application of cybernetic principles to the management of large organisations.
To use Beer’s own words, from a talk he gave at the University of Valladolid, in 2002:
It stands for a bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than familiar attributions of good intentions, prejudices about expectations, moral judgements, or sheer ignorance of circumstances
POSIWID is an important Systems Thinking concept and has several implications when thinking about, and/or working on complex systems, be they political, social or business related. Firstly, it is a question to reflect upon when analysing a given situation – to go deeper and investigate what is really going on. Richard Veryard puts it well in his blog “Exploring the Purpose of Things” when he suggests:
Ignore the official purpose of the system, ignore what the designers and custodians of a system say, and concentrate on its actual behaviour. Conversely, if there is some unexplained pattern of behaviour, look for a system whose purpose this pattern reveals.
In the field of politics, this stance can be very profound, particularly in the age of fake news and disinformation. It seems, increasingly, that nothing is as it appears. Also in the corporate world, where at the time of writing, serious questions are being asked of Facebook; and the gap between what it says and what it does – an interesting example of “unexplained patterns of behaviour”.
But it is equally relevant to the design of services and service operations, not least in the more ‘political’ areas of law enforcement, education and health. Always focus on actual behaviour, not on intentions. When ‘side effects’, or ‘unintended consequences’, reveal that the behaviour of the system is poorly understood, it is necessary to go deeper, to gain a better understanding of the system you are working on.
Secondly, it requires designers to take care when defining the purpose of a service, or service operation. As designers, this is typically one of the first things we want to do. But, what we are actually defining is the ‘intended purpose’; and this may be very different from the actual purpose of the service or service operation under investigation, which may be multiple and contingent upon certain events, or conditions. The system’s actual purpose comes from its emergent properties and this is best determined by observing its behaviour. This is why the ‘discovery’ phase of a project is so critical, to first understand the situation under investigation, e.g. the actual, rather than the perceived nature of demand.
Further Reading….
There is not a lot of published material that explores POSIWID and its implications, but I can recommend Dan Lockton paper, “POSIWID and determinism in design for behaviour change” (2012). And I’ve already included a link to Richard Veryard’s blog, but you should definitely catch his short critique on some common errors when applying POSIWID.
This session welcomes papers which discuss and critique the philosophical and methodological foundations of different systems approaches. Relevant papers will examine the manner in which the theoretical underpinnings of a systems approach (or approaches) impact – for better or worse – on its ability to address issues arising from the complexity of our highly interconnected world. Contributions that suggest how systems methodologies, and their theoretical assumptions, can be modified to make them more successful in practice will be welcome. As will contributions that debate how different systems approaches can be used in combination to manage complexity.
1.2 Critical Systems Thinking Michael Jackson 12 views•31 Aug 2020 1 0 SHARE SAVE WOSCORG 53 subscribers SUBSCRIBED This session welcomes papers which discuss and critique the philosophical and methodological foundations of different systems approaches. Relevant papers will examine the manner in which the theoretical underpinnings of a systems approach (or approaches) impact – for better or worse – on its ability to address issues arising from the complexity of our highly interconnected world. Contributions that suggest how systems methodologies, and their theoretical assumptions, can be modified to make them more successful in practice will be welcome. As will contributions that debate how different systems approaches can be used in combination to manage complexity. Papers that reflect on what ‘improvement’ means, from a systems perspective, are encouraged. Finally, papers that demonstrate the case they make by using examples of practical application will be much appreciated. SHOW LESS
My particular take on complexity and systems is called human systems dynamics (HSD). It is a field of theory and practice that applies principles of complex adaptive systems to help people see, understand, and influence emergent patterns in complex human systems. HSD is applicable at all scales of human experience from intrapersonal reflection and cognition through global patterns of economic and cultural interaction (Eoyang, 1997). For more information about the models and methods of HSD, visit our website www.hsdinstitute.org. Here, I would like to introduce the basic features of the theory and practice that form the foundation of HSD.
HSD theory is drawn from the field of complex adaptive systems (Dooley, 1997). In this approach, a system is defined as a collection of agents that interact to generate system-wide patterns. Those patterns then constrain…
This event is held in coordination with the British Cybernetics Society’s virtual event “Cybernetics and the 21st Century: Stories of Practice.” The ASC invites you to participate in the “ASC 2020 Global Conversation,” September 12-13. This event will consist of a series of live online conversations running across two days and various time zones. Online conversations will be organized as moderated panel discussions, where panelists interact with each other and the audience. Panelists will provide brief pre-recorded presentations, which will be available for advance viewing by all registrants.
Call for Presentations / Panels To participate in a panel discussion, please submit a video recording up to ten minutes in length and a brief description of it. Lengthier recordings can be accepted but should be cut into several segments of 10 minutes each. Group submissions are accepted and encouraged (to form 1 hour themed panels) subject to availability of time slots. Panelists will be grouped for a one-hour time slot consisting of a moderated conversation for 30 minutes, followed by a brief breakout session for viewers to develop questions for the panelists to respond to. The remaining time of the one hour time slot will be dedicated to discussion driven by the audience. For proposals of themed panels, please contact the organizers.
Submission deadline for pre-recorded presentations (EXTENDED): August 31
This virtual event will be held in coordination with the British Cybernetics Society’s event “Cybernetics and the 21st Century: Stories of Practice.” Schedules for both events are coordinated such that participants will be able to take part in both events. Participants are kindly requested to register with BOTH the ASC and CYBSOC. For more details and registration at CYBSOC, see here.
Registration Details
Registration deadline: September 11. After registration, access codes for all conversations will be sent to you.
Registration: Registration is required for all participants including those who do not participate in a panel discussion.
Cost: The event is free to all current ASC Members and all current CYBSOC members.
To Register: Follow the Link to the Registration Page. There is no fee to register, but non members of the ASC will be requested to join or to make a self-determined contribution.
Joining/Renewing: To join or renew follow the link ASC2020 Membership to ASC’s 2020 Membership Page hosted by Cvent. (Memberships are good for one year.) Alternatively, follow the link on ASC’s webpage: http://asc-cybernetics.org/join
Non-Member Contributions: Non-members wishing to participate are requested to make a Self-Determined Donation to the ASC via PayPal. . Follow the yellow ‘Donate’ Button at the bottom right on our website. http://asc-cybernetics.org. (Before or after the event — your choice.)
Event Schedule
Saturday 12th September 2020
UK 11am to 1pm // New York 6am to 8am – CYBSOC UK 1pm to 3pm // New York 8am to 10am – ASC UK 3pm to 5pm // New York 10am to 12noon – CYBSOC UK 5pm to 7pm // New York 12 noon to 2pm – ASC UK 7pm to 8pm / New York 2pm to 3pm – ASC Keynote: Anthony Hodgson
Sunday 13th September 2020
UK 11am to 1pm // New York 6am to 8am – CYBSOC UK 1pm to 3pm // New York 8am to 10am – ASC UK 3pm to 5pm // New York 10am to 12noon – CYBSOC UK 5pm to 7pm // New York 12 noon to 2pm – ASC
ASC2020 Global Conversation Keynote
Speaker: Anthony Hodgson
Anticipation in a World of Radical Uncertainty – Lessons From 2nd Order Cybernetics
Anthony Hodgson
Speaker Bio: Anthony Hodgson, Ph.D, F.R.S.A., Member IFF Anthony Hodgson is a founding trustee of H3Uni – towards a university of the third horizon. This as an initiative born out of the recognition by a small group of foresight and strategy practitioners that most higher education does not address the huge shift in the skills of collaboration and resilient thinking that are needed to successfully navigate a turbulent world challenged by major issues not previously experienced on a global scale. Anthony Hodgson has over forty years of experience of providing consulting and facilitation services in foresight and strategy to major corporations and in the public sector in the UK. It is in this role that Anthony Hodgson developed new methods of participative repatterning of shared thinking in groups As an experienced practitioner of systems thinking and scenario futures methods and as a founder member of the International Futures Forum think tank working especially on transformative innovation and new methods of cooperation to match the needs of the Anthropocene. Anthony Hodgson’s doctorate is in systems science from the University of Hull. As a Research Fellow with the University of Dundee Anthony Hodgson is currently doing original work on integrating foresight methods with systems thinking and modelling through second-order cybernetics, phenomenology of time perception and futures methods. As well as published papers Anthony Hodgson has published a book on some of this work titled Systems Thinking for Turbulent Times: A Search for new perspectives (Routledge, 2020). Contact: anthony.hodgson[at]h3uni.org
ASC 2020 Global Conversation September 12-13 2020, online To Register (Free for ASC Members): Registration Page
Message from Paul Pangaro: Dear Colleague I’m writing to invite you to the launch of #NewMacyMeetings in September 2020. This will be a modest first session, one of a series of experiments before a more formal, large-scale effort in 2021. Our first session is called Why Can’t Cybernetics Tame Pandemics? This first session will be held from Noon to 1pm EDT via Zoom on Sunday September 13, part of the 2-day Global Conversation Conference, a joint effort of the American Society for Cybernetics and the British Cybernetics Society. Registration is required and a donation is completely optional. Please go to this ASC page for more information and for the link to register. You will receive a Zoom video invitation thereafter. I hope you will join and contribute your views and critique in an evolving project. As some of you will know, the original Macy Meetings were held in the 1940s and 50s and they comprised seminal trans-disciplinary conversations that began the wide-spread influence of cybernetics across all the major disciplines of the second-half of the last century. The world is different now, overtaken by pandemics of biology and technology, racism and inequality, environment and justice. #NewMacyMeetings asks the question, Can cybernetics help tame today’s pandemics? In addition to a trans-disciplinary conversation, in order to be effective — that is, leading to effective action — our #NewMacyMeetings must also be trans-global (diverse and inclusive) as well as trans-generational (engaging all ages). There is more detail of the overall direction of #NewMacyMeetings at this link.Please feel free to share this email or to forward the blog post here. Please let me know if you have questions or comments. Thank you. -Paul
ASC 2020 Global Conversation
September 12-13 2020, online
To Register (Free for ASC Members): Registration Page
This event is held in coordination with the British Cybernetics Society’s virtual event “Cybernetics and the 21st Century: Stories of Practice.”
The ASC invites you to participate in the “ASC 2020 Global Conversation,” September 12-13. This event will consist of a series of live online conversations running across two days and various time zones. Online conversations will be organized as moderated panel discussions, where panelists interact with each other and the audience. Panelists will provide
Systems thinking at the Tavistock Institute – past, present and future
Presented by Dione Hills, Richard Allen and David Drabble.
Systems Thinking has been an important feature in the Tavistock Institute’s research and consultancy work from the beginning in 1947. Central to our action research work with major industries in the 1950-70’s, it formed the core of theory and practice related to ‘sociotechnical systems’ work. This tradition continued within our evaluation activities from the 1980’s onward, and features in several of our current projects. These have received added impetus from the growing interest in complexity theory and its application to evaluation practice, encouraged by our involvement in activities such as the Centre for Complexity in Evaluation across the Nexus (CECAN) and the writing of an annex to the revised Magenta book (Cross-Government Evaluation Group) published on 27 March this year.
This talk on Systems Thinking offered the opportunity to consider what we have learnt from the past, how we are currently applying this – and where systems thinking will be taking us next.
Recording of the talk https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/837607735&color=%23ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true
Dione Hills has been involved in evaluation and consultancy activities at the Tavistock Institute for over 30 years. For the last 3 years she has taken a lead in the Institute’s partnership with CECAN, contributing to guidance documents such as the Magenta book complexity evaluation guidance, to training activities and workshops and several blogs.
Richard Allen is a Principal Researcher and Consultant at the Tavistock Institute who has more than 30 years working in the ‘not for profit’ and public sectors in a variety of project and senior management roles largely concerned with generating change and improving organisational performance. At the Tavistock Institute, he works across a range of consultancy and evaluation projects.
David Drabble is a senior researcher at the Tavistock Institute with over ten years of experience and a keen interest in organisational systems. He often works in the health field and on evaluating innovative and disruptive interventions. He has a specialised role in data presentation, analysis, and project management.
‘Systems thinking at the Tavistock Institute – past, present and future’ was presented as part of the Tavistock Institute’s Food For Thought series.
Systems thinking at the Tavistock Institute – past, present and future Presented by Dione Hills, Richard Allen and David Drabble.
Measuring the impact of community led change is a constant challenge for those of us working in organisations that are seeking to grow community capacity rather than ‘do to’ communities.
Within more traditional project-based approaches, its often easier to predefine the outcomes at the start of the project and deliver on those. However, in taking a community building approach, our role is to enable the capacity of others, so they own the change they want to see. In doing so citizens will also often inspire other friends and neighbours to get involved, which leads to many unintended outcomes. This results in a ripple effect.
To capture this process and the outcomes that emerge from community driven development, the Gloucester Community Building Collective is working with Dr James Noble from the University of Bristol and the team at We Can Move to assess the impact of community building.
James explained why its critical that organisations engaged in community building need different ways of evaluating impact. Put simply ‘Ripple Effect Mapping’ offers a way of understanding the wider, intended and unintended, impacts of a project or programme over time. This is important as is demonstrates the catalytic role that organisations play in enabling citizens and achieving social change https://www.youtube.com/embed/tq3A-ETnZFU?wmode=opaque&enablejsapi=1
The process works by initially mapping your intended course of action, but over time also mapping what actually happened and what unintended outcomes occurred.
The mapping process often starts off with something like this…
But it ends up like this
Obviously, our hand written versions are somewhat messier! But the information can be transferred using software called Vensim https://vensim.com/vensim-software/
From this mapping process, you can identify the critical catalytic actions that led to the outcomes achieved, irrespective of whether you instigated them or not. It also allows you to identify key themes that could be a focus for systems change.
Gloucester Community Building Collective will be using this approach understand the impact of community building across Gloucester. We hope to share more about the process and the outcomes as we engage in this approach.
Credit: Dr James Noble, NIHR, university of Bristol
Adaptive management is increasingly on the ticket for development programming, and has been crucial in the wake of covid-19. I’ve been working with adaptive programmes for most of my career as DFID has often been pioneering and supportive of it as an approach. However, the question I hear frequently is ‘but what does good look like?’ and so I wanted to take time to reflect on that.
This particular blog post was prompted by a conversation I had with a colleague and friend Ben Kumpf (@bkumpf), Head of Innovation in DFID (then-called if reading after September 2020). We had been discussing enablers of adaptation and he asked me if I had any case studies of tools and methods that worked well… which is what sparked me to say ‘I don’t think I can do that, as I don’t believe those are what meant adaptation worked well’. After some…
The concept of system is central to any discussion of organisation; few managers, perhaps, would think of that concept exactly as a tool. It is, they might consider, a term to be defined, and then to be properly used. In Chapter One, however, we begin to probe the connotation of the word ‘system’. The target definition turns out to be elusive. It seems more important to recognise that we are handling a conceptual tool, because a tool has to be understood in terms of its capability to facilitate the work undertaken, and also in terms of the limitations that its own shortcomings (in this case of reliable definition) impose on that work. In an effort to elucidate all this, the chapter engages in some mental exercises intended to loosen-up rigid attitudes to whatever is systemic about enterprises, and to promote an enquiry rather than a didactic ethos for the whole book. The examples are exclusively managerial, and deal with both economic and human affairs.
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This study aims to explain and illustrate the character of Russian systems thinking and to show how it is different and similar to traditions in the West. This study’s…PDF (153 KB)
The purpose of this paper is to suggest a more central role for reflexive artistic practices in a clarified research agenda for second-order cybernetics (SOC). This is…PDF (213 KB)
The purpose of this paper to discuss ethical principles that are implicit in second-order cybernetics, with the aim of arriving at a better understanding of how…
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