antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 10:46 am on June 14, 2020

Causal Texture of the Environment – Coevolving Innovations – Doug McDavid notes

Link to original article (free pdf) at https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/04/15/the-causal-texture-of-organizational-environments-emery-and-trist-1965/

Causal Texture of the Environment June 10, 2020 dougmcdavid 0 Comments For those who haven’t read the 1965 Emery and Trist article, its seems as though my colleague Doug McDavid was foresighted enough to blog a summary in 2016! His words have always welcomed here, as Doug was a cofounder of this web site. At the time of writing, the target audience for this piece was primarily Enterprise Architecture practitioners. [DI]
Causal Texture of the Environment – Coevolving Innovations

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 7:24 am on June 13, 2020

The Dialectic of Bottom-up and Top-down Emergence in Social Systems – Fuchs and Hofkirchner, 1970

The Dialectic of Bottom-up and Top-down Emergence in Social Systems January 1970TripleC 3(2):28-50 DOI: 10.31269/vol3iss2pp28-50 LicenseCC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Christian FuchsWolfgang Hofkirchner

(19) (PDF) The Dialectic of Bottom-up and Top-down Emergence in Social Systems

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 7:23 am on June 13, 2020

Social relations: Building on Ludwig von Bertalanffy – Hofkirchner – 2019

Social relations: Building on Ludwig von Bertalanffy Wolfgang Hofkirchner First published:29 April 2019
Social relations: Building on Ludwig von Bertalanffy – Hofkirchner – 2019 – Systems Research and Behavioral Science – Wiley Online Library

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 7:22 am on June 13, 2020

A bit more on socio-technical systems

Published: 03 May 2019

Socio-Technical Perspectives on Smart Working: Creating Meaningful and Sustainable Systems

Information Systems Frontiers volume 22, pages281–298(2020)

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10796-019-09921-1

Podcast:

Episode 34 covers an important article by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting,” published in the journal Human Relations in 1951. Eric Trist was a British social scientist best known for his contributions to the field of organization development and one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute. Ken Bamforth was a miner and industrial fellow of the Tavistock Institute.
34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth – Talking About Organizations Podcast

Summary of the classic Trist and Bamforth piece:

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/org_theory/barley_articles/trist_coal.html#:~:text=Trist%2C%20E.%20L.%20and%20K.%20W.%20Bamforth%20(1951).&text=Basically%20the%20conversion%20to%20the%20longwall%20method%20destroyed%20the%20social%20relations.&text=The%20new%20mechanized%20longwall%20method,each%20shift%20did%20different%20things.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:36 pm on June 11, 2020

What is Life? The Future of Biology. Stuart A. Kauffman (2020) – YouTube

soure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8sgGtgro1w

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 5:44 am on June 11, 2020

More from GentlySerious – Medium

I cannot struggle with wordpress block editor any more but these pieces are also well worth reading!

Systems and democracy

https://medium.com/gentlyserious/systems-and-democracy-2fa1b515360

Decolonising time

https://medium.com/gentlyserious/decolonising-time-b1aaaa2361f5

A very corporate pandemic

https://medium.com/gentlyserious/a-very-corporate-pandemic-71f42b9ae18#_ftnref1

Axiomatic Nonsense

https://medium.com/gentlyserious/axiomatic-nonsense-1120f5b9c923

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 5:41 am on June 11, 2020

Grounding what we eat / Active Gut, Passive Brain / Crimes against humanity – GentlySerious – Medium

Three related systems thinking blogs

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<blockquote class=”wp-block-quote”><p>Grounding what we eat

Aidan Ward

Jun 11 ·

Food distribution, but of what?
Not just our food chain but the whole of life on earth depends on soil; soil is where it happens. Macro fauna and flora, like ourselves and the trees, are largely irrelevant in the scale of things. We don’t see it like that because we are macro and filled with our own importance. But we are discovering (again, this is how civilisations collapse) that both in the quantity and the quality of what we eat, the soil is where it is at.
Assessing our food supply chain is that simple. Does the food we eat and how it was distributed and how it was grown protect the vital asset it is based on? Or does it degrade that asset for short term gain, or indeed for any other reason? Since the vast majority of the world’s soils are not only being degraded but are being eroded away entirely, we can guess that the food supply chain is utterly broken.</p><cite><a href=”https://medium.com/gentlyserious/grounding-what-we-eat-e639d1aa9222″>Grounding what we eat – GentlySerious – Medium</a></cite></blockquote>
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Active Gut, Passive Brain

Philip Hellyer

Jan 31, 2019

What would it mean if our brains were passive? Passive to aspects of our environment that we are not even aware of? What would it mean literally but also as a metaphor of our hubris? What do we know and what are we prepared to hear? And given all that, what use can we make of these brains of ours? My increasingly ancient but still spry mother read Peter Frankopan’s Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Her favourite sport is goading the sticks-in-the-mud at her local church. This history is told as the title suggests from a non-western perspective, and my mother’s summary is “Aidan, we are just specks. All this happened and we are nothing in the bigger picture”. His New Silk Roads is her preferred entry into current affairs. Maybe I am my mother’s son, without reading either book. Let me try and rehearse a fantastic narrative from Zack Bush. I am increasingly allergic to the exuberant ‘American’ style and to medical doctors. I don’t like slick presenters, I want authenticity.[1] I came at this from my course on soil regeneration with Didi Pershouse. And I watched an interview-style presentation that lasts 94 minutes. Ugh! And yet.

Active Gut, Passive Brain – GentlySerious – Medium

Crimes against humanity

Aidan Ward

Feb 5, 2019

The original template for capitalism is sugar plantations in Brazil. The recipe is this. Occupy an area of land by force. Kill off anyone who happens to live there. Wipe out all the trees and plants to create bare soil. Import some slaves from Africa, keep them isolated so they have nowhere to run to. Plant sugar cane and harvest for as long as the soil still works for you. Export the sugar to wreck peoples’ health elsewhere. If you were a Portuguese gentleman with some spare cash, you could invest it in such an enterprise and never know the misery that allowed your investment to grow. You didn’t need to know anything other than you were not cheated in the returns. Capitalism in the raw. When we speak of crimes against humanity we generally think of naked aggression: Cortes in Mexico, Stalin and Mao, Apartheid, the Holocaust. Here, we pay more attention to misinformation about the health effects of tobacco, corruption of climate science by the oil majors, killing people with processed food. These are closer to the raw capitalist model: just make sure your investors don’t know and don’t care — killing millions of people is OK, it is just business. And very respectable, caring, liberal-minded people don’t even notice; the officially sanctioned history doesn’t get written. Yet? I want to add one to the list that I was not properly aware of until my studies this week. In two hundred years Australia was turned from a green and pleasant land into largely a desert and desertifying hell of 50 degrees centigrade. And that change is so significant that it tilts the warming and aridification of the whole world. How many people does that kill? I don’t mean to suggest that the enormity of a crime is measured by the number of dead bodies: but I do want to rescue our imagination from the immediacy of death camps to the long slow impoverishment and starvation of masses of people. We have written before about slow violence. The rehearsal of the true history is immensely important, vital even.

Crimes against humanity – GentlySerious – Medium

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:16 am on June 11, 2020

Adapting to Uncertainty: Complexity Science and COVID-19 – Niskanen Center

Source:
Adapting to Uncertainty: Complexity Science and COVID-19 – Niskanen Center

Adapting to Uncertainty: Complexity Science and COVID-19

BY ROBERT JONES

JUNE 10, 2020

Executive Summary

What are complex systems, why are they so hard to predict, and what can complexity science tell us about how we can respond to the novel coronavirus and ultimately defeat it?

Both human society and the COVID-19 pandemic are complex adaptive systems. That is, they are dynamic networks of independent and interconnected agents that adapt to their environments.
Complex systems exhibit emergent behavior — the whole is more than the sum of its parts — which makes them hard to study, predict, or control with conventional analytical tools.
Complexity science offers clues for how society can fight this virus while minimizing the risk of cascading failures. In periods of high uncertainty, we need to prioritize adaptability over efficiency, distributed processing over hierarchical processing, evolution over design, and experimentation over mandates.
During this adaptive period, central governments should focus on facilitating innovation and the free flow of information and resources across society.
Complexity science also offer lessons for solving other stubborn problems that have long plagued society.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 5:02 am on June 10, 2020

Norbert Wiener – Wiener Today (1981) – YouTube

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdu16JAzgw8

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg&t=149s

Read by computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F7cd8ilLVI

Shannon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Whj_nL-x8

von Neumann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2jiQXI6nrE

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 6:48 pm on June 9, 2020

7th International r3.0 Conference, online, 8-11 September 2020: Redesign for a Regenerative & Distributive Economy: Closing Systemic Gaps

Source: https://conference2020.r3-0.org/

About the Conference

r3.0 is pleased to announce its 7th international conference, on 8th to 11th of September 2020, strategically placed right after the summer break in Europe/North America, to help set a sufficiently ambitious tone for the fall/winter conference season …

As 2020 is often called a ‘make-or-break’ year – a half-decade after the 2015 Paris Accord and the start of the SDGs – the r3.0 International Virtual Conference from 8th to 11th of September offers a framework for redesigning our economy around the principles of regeneration and distribution. This framework is based around the r3.0 work ecosystem: the family of 9 interlinked Blueprints, 5 already developed, and 2 to be released and 2 initiated at this conference; 6 prior r3.0 conferences; the networks of our Academic Alliance and Advocation Partners; our Research and Test Lab collaborations, and our Global Thresholds & Allocations Council initiation. We feel uniquely positioned to gather world-class “game-changing and mind-blowing” speakers in a highly interactive “sleeves-rolled-up” working conference setting.

Due to the event and travel restrictions of Covid-19 the conference is moved to be an online event with reduced price structures and a prolonged agenda from 2 to 4 days in total, ensuring maximum possible interaction. Also, an adapted timing of the sessions will allow participation in more time zones, globally.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 6:42 pm on June 9, 2020

Trist in Canada, Organizational Change, Action Learning – Coevolving Innovations (David Ing)

Source:
Trist in Canada, Organizational Change, Action Learning – Coevolving Innovations

Trist in Canada, Organizational Change, Action Learning

June 6, 2020 daviding

0 Comments

Towards appreciating “action learning”, the history of open systems thinking and pioneering work in organization science, the influence of Action Learning Group — in the Faculty of Environment Studies founded in 1968 at York University (Toronto) — deserves to be resurfaced.

1. Trist in Canada
2. Environmental studies, and contextualism in organizational-change
3. Action learning, based on open systems theory
4. Extending action research into action learning
5. Social engagement in social science
Appendix: Contents

Continues in source:
Trist in Canada, Organizational Change, Action Learning – Coevolving Innovations

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 6:39 pm on June 9, 2020

Wellcome Library Western Manuscripts and Archives catalogue

well! @daviding has done it once again, a really interesting set of Tavistock Institute archives in the Wellcome Library (in London, UK):

1940s-2000s
Ordering Instructions	This archive record describes a grouping of orderable items: to order any of them for consultation, order copies or view them if they have been digitised, navigate down the archive hierarchy to Item level.
Name	Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
Description	This collection contains both catalogued and uncatalogued materials. Please contact collections@wellcome.ac.uk for more information or to request access to uncatalogued records.The archive provides a comprehensive record of the formation, establishment and development of the Institute over a period of 70 years from the records of the projects with the War Office Selection Board in the 1940s to those of significant projects into the 21st century. The work of key figures in the development of the socio-psychological approach to business management and the working environment is substantially represented as are signature projects in collaboration with major manufacturing companies in the 1950s and 1960s in the context of Britain’s post-War economic revival. There is a wealth of information about social structure in the field work interviews for various projects, including several studies of aspects of the health service. Records of other projects and events organised by the Institute illustrate the range of its consultancy, research, evaluation and training initiatives throughout the later 20th and early 21st centuries.

These are just the descriptions of the papers, but they are fun.

Post-WWII Civil Resettlement Units: http://archives.wellcomelibrary.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Show.tcl&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqPos=0&dsqSearch=%28RefNo%3D%3D%27SATIH%2FB%2F2%2F1%2F2%27%29

The famous Glacier Project: http://archives.wellcomelibrary.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=show.tcl&dsqSearch=(RefNo==%27SATIH%2FB%2F2%2F2%27)

The Glacier Metal Co. Ltd was a large UK manufacturer of plain bearings, with products used by many engineering companies, particularly the motor industry.

In 1949, the Government financed research work into the social aspects of industrial organisation, with a project undertaken jointly by the company and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. The research considered the labour turnover process in two factories, considering an employee’s movement through a company as a “distinctive social process with a pattern of its own”.

The project served to address industrial relations problems, identifying culture as a key element for intervention in organisational life. Elliot Jacques, in his role heading the project, used the concept of the use of social structure as a defence against anxiety. The findings of the project were later published in Jacques’ 1951 book, The Changing Culture of a Factory.

This project was initiated by the Human Factors Panel of the Committee on Industrial Productivity set up by the Lord President of the Council under the Scientific Advisor to the Government, and administered by the MRC. The Human Factors Panel also funded a Tavistock training programme, which offered postgraduate education for field workers. All six industrial fellows participated in the Glacier Project, alongside another Tavistock project. Each was also placed in a therapy group and given a personal tutor. One year into the two and a half year programme, the participants returned to their industries to share what they had learnt so far.

A later project was undertaken in 1968-1969 with the Glacier Metal Company, which considered the training of designers, draughtsmen and other technicians at Glacier.

Amongst other little gems, a project in Spring 1978 with the Systems Group at the Open University ( http://archives.wellcomelibrary.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=show.tcl&dsqSearch=(RefNo==%27SATIH%2FB%2F2%2F77%27) ) – “Elliot Stern was approached by the Systems Group to study the problems and strains experienced in the relations between the group and the rest of the Faculty, with particular focus on understanding organisational intervention through participation. “

Joint enterprises in social services (the Cresset Project, action research):

The Cresset Project was an action research project initially funded by the Department of Health and Social Security to undertake research to inform the creation of models to facilitate contributions to community mental health and the integration of the physically handicapped and elderly with the able-bodied. The Cresset was a multi-purpose community centre which brought together commercial activities, leisure and recreation facilities, day centres for the elderly and handicapped, housing and community worker offices, and other community centres.

http://archives.wellcomelibrary.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=show.tcl&dsqSearch=(RefNo==%27SATIH%2FB%2F2%2F83%27)

And

Tavistock worked with the Community Service Volunteers to create a two day non-residential workshop on “Managing Uncertainty” with a purpose of helping attendees to become more effective in their various roles.

http://archives.wellcomelibrary.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=show.tcl&dsqSearch=(RefNo==%27SATIH%2FB%2F2%2F104%27)

Overview: http://archives.wellcomelibrary.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=NaviTree.tcl&dsqField=RefNo&dsqItem=SATIH/B/2/1/2#HERE

Item-level list: http://archives.wellcomelibrary.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Overview.tcl&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqSearch=%28AltRefNo%3D%27SA%2FTIH%2FB%2F2%27%29&dsqNum=50&PF=No&dsqPos=23

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 6:14 pm on June 9, 2020

Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems. | Jones (2014)

Source:
(52) (PDF) Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems. | Peter Jones – Academia.edu

Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems.

Peter Jones

2014, In G. Metcalf (ed.), Social Systems and Design, Gary Metcalf (editor), Volume 1 of the Translational Systems Science Series, Springer Verlag

Publication Date: 2014

Publication Name: In G. Metcalf (ed.), Social Systems and Design, Gary Metcalf (editor), Volume 1 of the Translational Systems Science Series, Springer Verlag

Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems.
(52) (PDF) Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems. | Peter Jones – Academia.edu

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 5:55 pm on June 9, 2020

Webinar Recordings – Sociotechnical Systems Roundtable

[By the way, if it’s not wholly obvious already, I’m struggling a bit with something atrocious that wordpress has introduced called ‘block editing’ which may be good for web design – I don’t know – but is utterly painful for weblogging!]

Source:
Webinar Recordings – STS Roundtable

Courtesy of @daviding, quite a few good videos from across the last five years:

Webinar Recordings

Organization Design in the Age of COVID-19: From Crisis to Positive Transformations

SmarT Organization Design Framework Crowdsourcing

Temporary Organizations and Facilitating Self-Design

Purpose and Meaning of Designing Social Ecosystems

On a new S-Curve in ORGANIZING —at the ECOSYSTEM Level!

How can Social Media help you and us

Designing Adaptive Ecosystems

Applying Social-Political-Technical Design to any Purpose no Matter How Complex

The Workers’ Voice

Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight: What is the future of Sociotechnical System Design

Designing Organizations with Information Systems in mind

Generative Questions for Organisation Design

Social Media and Organizational Transformation

Sociotechnical Systems v3.0: Designing Non-Routine Knowledge Net-Work Systems

Positive Participative Innovation

Systems’ Approaches to Organization Design

Second Order Science | Model Report: Systems Thinking, Modeling and Simulation News

Was going to link to https://www.academia.edu/11677778/Second_Order_Science_Putting_the_Metaphysics_Back_Into_the_Practice_of_Science?email_work_card=title – but then I realised that, like Bowerick Wowbagger fooled by a freak wormhole in time, I’ve I’ve already done this one at https://model.report/s/qmlhpq/second_order_science

Second Order Science: Putting the Metaphysics Back Into the Practice of Science

Michael Lissack

The traditional sciences have always had trouble with ambiguity. Through the imposition of “enabling constraints” — making a set of assumptions and then declaring ceteris paribus — science can bracket away ambiguity. These enabling constraints take the form of uncritically examined presuppositions or “uceps.” Second order science examines variations in values assumed for these uceps and looks at the resulting impacts on related scientific claims. After rendering explicit the role of uceps in scientific claims, the scientific method is used to question rarely challenged assertions. This article lays out initial foundations for second order science, its ontology, methodology, and implications.

Main link points to (free subscription wall I think):

Second Order Science: Putting the Metaphysics Back Into the Practice of Science By Michael Lissack

The traditional sciences have always had trouble with ambiguity. Through the imposition of “enabling constraints” – making a set of assumptions and then declaring ceteris paribus – science can bracket away ambiguity. These enabling constraints take the form of uncritically examined presuppositions or “uceps.” Second order science examines variations in values assumed for these uceps and looks at the resulting impacts on related scientific claims. After rendering explicit the role of uceps in scientific claims, the scientific method is used to question rarely challenged assertions. This article lays out initial foundations for second order science, its ontology, methodology, and implications.

Keywords: model,ambiguity,metaphysics,dependence,science

other links:

http://secondorderscience.org Second Order Science First-order science is the science of exploring the world. Second-order science is the science of reflecting on these explorations.

Source Material (links) Karl Mueller Stuart Umpleby Michael Lissack Lou Kauffman Manfred Füllsack Alrøe & Noe Aufenvenne et al

Events

During the ASC day (August 5) at the ISSS conference in Berlin (August 2-7, 2015), we will be holding a half-day symposium on Second Order Science. The panel will be led by Karl Mueller, Stuart Umpleby, and Michael Lissack. The links to the right provide insight into the perspectives of these three scholars. We hope the symposium will provide a platform for even more perspectives. Come join us. (To contribute please contact Stuart Umpleby.)

Links to papers from: Karl Mueller Stuart Umpleby Michael Lissack

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/special/second-order/ Constructivist Foundations » Special Issues Second-Order Science Special Issue of Constructivist Foundations to be published November 2014 Edited by Karl H. Müller and Alexander Riegler Send your contribution to second-order@constructivistfoundations.info Deadline for submissions: 15 May 2014 Download Call for Papers

Timetable

15 February 2014 : Expressions of interest with abstract » second-order@constructivistfoundations.info 15 May 2014 : Submission deadline for papers » second-order@constructivistfoundations.info 1 August 2014 : Revised papers due 1 October 2014 : Open Peer Commentaries (on full papers) due 15 November 2014 : Publication in Constructivist Foundations 10(1) Guidelines & Templates

Please make sure to follow the Guidelines for Authors Use this Word template for contributing articles For Open Peer Commentaries (OPCs) use this template Selected bibliography on second-order science

Glanville R. (2009) The black boox. Volume 3: 39 steps. Edition echoraum, Vienna. Glanville R. (2012) The black boox. Volume 1: Cybernetic circles. Edition echoraum, Vienna. Kauffman L. H. (2003) Eigenforms – Objects as tokens for eigenbehaviors. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 10(3–4): 73–90. Kauffman L. H. (2005) EigenForm. Kybernetes 34(½): 129–150. Kauffman L. H. (2009a) Laws of form and the logic of non-duality. Paper presented at the Conference on Science and Non-Duality, San Rafael CA, October 2009. Kauffman L. H. (2009b) Reflexivity and Eigenform: The Shape of Process. Constructivist Foundations 4(3): 121–137. Also available at http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/4/3/121.kauffman Müller K. H. (2009) The new science of cybernetics. The evolution of living research designs. Volume 1: Methodology. Edition echoraum, Vienna. Müller K. H. (2011) The new science of cybernetics. The evolution of living research designs. Volume 2: Theory. Edition echoraum, Vienna. Müller K. H. (2012) The new science of cybernetics. The evolution of living research designs. Volume 3: Research and design rules. Edition echoraum, Vienna. Müller K. H. (2013a) Second-Order Datenanalysen als neues Aufgabenfeld von sozialwissenschaftlichen Datenarchiven. e-WISDOM 4-6: 85–105. Müller K. H. (2013b) Sozialwissenschaftliche Datenarchive im Zeitalter ihrer digitalen Reproduzierbarkeit. e-WISDOM 4-6: 11–36. Müller K. H. (2014) Mapping a new and post-disciplinary research frontier: Science and cybernetics at the second-order level. In: The New Science of Cybernetics. Volume 4: An Interim Report. (In preparation) Scott B. (2011) Explorations in second-order cybernetics. Reflections on cybernetics, psychology and learning. Edition echoraum, Vienna. Umpleby S. A. (2007) Reflexivity in social systems: The theories of George Soros. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 24: 515–522. Umpleby S. A. (2010a) From complexity to reflexivity: Underlying logics used in science. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 1: 15–26. Umpleby S. A. (2010b) Science 2: Is a broader conception of science still science? Unpublished abstract. Other material on second-order science

Stuart A. Umpleby: Second Order Cybernetics Then and Now (Heinz von Foerster Lecture 2013 at the University of Vienna, 18 November 2013)