I was away for January, and am only now catching up.
I only have… ummm… about 130 emails with potential content to get through.
Stand by for incoming…
Recent Updates Page 289
Systems Change Vs Systems Optimisation: What they can do for the climate crisis
The case for contextual intelligence: horses for courses – Sonja Blignaut
via The case for contextual intelligence: horses for courses
The case for contextual intelligence: horses for courses
My first formal introduction to Complexity was in 2002. I vividly remember being in the audience of an IBM-sponsored event where I first heard Dave Snowden speak about Complexity theory and the Cynefin sense-making framework. Maybe it was my background in meteorology, or perhaps a natural disposition towards messiness, but I experienced an immediate resonance with thes ideas. Ever since that day, Complexity has become the primary lens through which I view the world.
One of the foundational principles of Dave’s Cynefin framework is “bounded applicability”. This is not an unfamliar concept. We have many idioms we use in every day language that illustrate an understanding of this … horses for courses (which alludes to racehorses performing best on particular racecourses), and different strokes for different folks (we all have different tastes). As with many other common wisdoms, we forget about this in business contexts and too often apply methods and tools as if they are universally applicable. In reality, methods and tools have utility only within appropriate contexts. Methods and tools that work in ordered and predictable domains don’t work in complex and emergent ones. (You can find out more about the difference between ordered and complex contexts in this post.)
My own interest is specifically in Complexity, its implications and how to practically apply learnings from that field in organisations. Current business and management paradigms are firmly rooted in a mechanistic worldview. Much of my writing has therefore been aimed at critiquing practices and ways of thinking that are not appropriate in complex contexts. I may not always make it clear enough that such critiques are not meant to be general. Taylorism, reductionism, linear processes, standard operating procedures, best practices are valid within boundaries. In appropriately ordered contexts they have value, in complex contexts, they either make no impact (best case) or make things worse.
We cannot evaluate the usefulness of a method or tool independent from the context in which it will be applied.
Everything centers around an understanding of context. We cannot evaluate the usefulness of a method or tool independent from the context in which it will be applied. Claims of the universal applicability of methods and tools are at the heart of many expensive failed initiatives I encounter in client organisations. For example, Agile transformations fail because particular frameworks are universally forced onto teams regardless of the nature of their work. Similarly, Lean has many benefits, but when misapplied, it can create near irreparable damage. One example is the famously quoted 3M case that credits Six Sigma with destroying their innovation capability.
As the world becomes more aware of Complexity and more and more “complexity consultants” make their appearance, it will serve us well to remember that not everything is Complex. We are, however emerging from a few decades where order and control were dominant paradigms. There is a need to challenge old ways of thinking and ensure that leaders and practitioners are enabled to be effective in complex contexts. We must just be careful that we don’t allow the pendulum to swing too far the other way where we denigrate things that remain useful in ordered contexts. It won’t serve any of us if Complexity is seen as just the next “fad”.
via The case for contextual intelligence: horses for courses
Tenth International Conference on Complex Systems July 26-31, 2020, in Nashua, NH, USA— New England Complex Systems Institute
via Tenth International Conference on Complex Systems — New England Complex Systems Institute
About ICCS 2020
The International Conference on Complex Systems is a unique interdisciplinary forum that unifies and bridges the traditional domains of science and a multitude of real world systems. Participants will contribute and be exposed to mind expanding concepts and methods from across the diverse field of complex systems science. The conference will be held July 26-31, 2020, in Nashua, NH, USA.
more in source Tenth International Conference on Complex Systems — New England Complex Systems Institute
Appendix: Further reading | Meaningness
Wow – a lot of good stuff, well summarised – e.g. the Winograd and Flores piece below…
via Appendix: Further reading | Meaningness
Winograd and Flores
In the late 1960s, Terry Winograd designed SHRDLU, perhaps the most impressive AI system of all time. In the mid-’80s, he recognized that Dreyfus’ critique was mainly correct.
The first half of his Understanding Computers and Cognition, written with Fernando Flores, is a short, clear meta-rational account of human activity. It is written for the STEM-educated, and may well be the best overall introduction if that’s you. For some readers, it may be a bit too short, with not quite enough detail to enable you to grasp meta-rationality.
(The second half of the book is based on speech act theory, a rationalist account of language that seems to clash with the meta-rationalism of the first half.)
I took the title of my book In the Cells of the Eggplant from a dialog in Understanding Computers and Cognition:
A. Is there any water in the refrigerator?
B. Yes.
A. Where? I don’t see it.
B. In the cells of the eggplant.
Was “there is water in the refrigerator” true?
That question can only be answered meta-rationally: “True in what sense? Relative to what purpose?”
Bill Drayton on systems change and teams of leaders #SkollWF – YouTube
Wu Wei at the Gemba:
In today’s post, I am looking at wu wei. “Wu wei” is an important concept detailed in the Chinese classic text “Tao Te Cheng” by Lao Tzu. This term is generally translated into English as Wu = No, Wei = Action, or no-action. There are other similar concepts in Taosim such as Wu-shin or no-mind.
Alan Watts, the delightful English philosopher described wu wei as “not forcing”:
The whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating, self-governing, indeed democratic organism. But it has a totality that all goes together and this totality is the Tao. When we can speak in Taoism of “following the course of nature; following the way”, what it means is more like this. Doing things in accordance with the grain. It doesn’t mean you don’t cut wood, but it means that you cut wood, along the lines where wood is most easy to cut, and…
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Four Stories of Systems Change – emrosebaz on Medium
Artwork by young people who are refugees and migrants, in The Children’s Society’s Birmingham office. Sketched hearts with “love” written in them.
Four Stories of Systems Changeemrosebaz
Following
Jan 24 · 6 min readI spent August — December 2019 working with The Children’s Society to prototype how they might operate differently to better achieve their strategy, which includes being systems-led. I have struggled with the academic nature of a lot of systems change writing. Like everyone, I’ve personally experienced broken systems, but I haven’t seen (or perhaps haven’t noticed) many examples of tangible systems change and how it was implemented. Until I worked with The Children’s Society.
Systems change is a small, experimental (but growing) part of The Children’s Society’s work, led by practitioners. What I heard during my user research with practitioners and policy teams: systems change is 5% post-its and 95% unglamorous hard graft. Systems change is sending 10 emails to the local authority until you find the person with the ability to make a policy change. It is justifying to your manager the time that you’re spending building relationships with organisations and groups (instead of with young people directly). It is managing yourself so you have the confidence to turn up to a meeting you’re not invited to and the resilience to keep going when you’re turned away. It is keeping a campaign alive for five years to change our national laws.
Gigamapping samples and Systems Oriented Design
Systems Oriented Design
The designerly way to work with systems
The main mission of Systems Oriented Design is to build the designers own interpretation and implementation of systems thinking so that systems thinking can fully benefit from design thinking and practice and so that design thinking and practice can fully benefit from systems thinking.
https://systemsorienteddesign.net/
GIGA-maps Samples
| By Birger Sevaldson
Here are some samples of GIGA-maps. Clicking the pictures below will open up very large size maps. Remember to click the maps to zoom in. To zoom in and out, use ctrl & + or ctrl & – or ctrl + mouse wheel. A collection of exemplars This is a collection of exemplars, not a typology. The intention with this collection is to inspire and you, showing that there are many ways of designing a Gigamap and that there are many uses and functionalities of the maps. Therefore, the maps were not chosen because of their quality, but rather to demonstrate as many different arrangements as possible. Each map involves a design process to reach a graphic interpretation that is tailored bespoke for the particular situation. The maps are design artefacts produced in nested design processes. They are expressions of the designer’s constructed (or designed) knowledge. This implies a reference to constructionist learning, which means that learning is not a one-way process or to be compared to filling a vessel of wisdom or a hard disk with information. Constructivism implies that we actively construct our individual knowledge. This implies that knowledge is internalized and individualized when shared. We suggest moving from using a metaphor of constructing knowledge to using a metaphor of designing knowledge. The Gigamaps are devices for designing knowledge and they are the designed artefacts representing our knowledge about complex systems, and how they might be changed. The Gigamaps are devices for actively co-design our shared knowledge according to the needs of the individual designers and their clients, experts and stakeholders involved and according to the needs of the project. The mapcollection shown below is organised according to two main groups. The first group displays different organisational or structural principles to inspire you to develop your own organisation and structure. The second group displays Gigamaps designed for special functions showing examples of adapting gigamapping to special content so to inspire you to design the maps to be especially made for its purposes. The samples are from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, the Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Chalmers Technical University and others. Last updated November 2017 |
Continues in source: Gigamapping samples
How social and physical technologies collaborate to create | Aeon Essays
via How social and physical technologies collaborate to create | Aeon Essays
Our world is a system, in which physical and social technologies co-evolve. How can we shape a process we don’t control?
An aerial view shows a typically busy Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, deserted amid the deadly coronavirus outbreak that originated in the city. 27 January 2020. Photo by Hector Retamel/AFP/Getty
Continues via source How social and physical technologies collaborate to create | Aeon Essays
The ergodicity problem in economics, Ole Peters (2019) | Nature Physics
via The ergodicity problem in economics | Nature Physics
- Perspective
- Published:
The ergodicity problem in economics
Nature Physics volume 15, pages1216–1221(2019)
- An Author Correction to this article was published on 06 December 2019
Abstract
The ergodic hypothesis is a key analytical device of equilibrium statistical mechanics. It underlies the assumption that the time average and the expectation value of an observable are the same. Where it is valid, dynamical descriptions can often be replaced with much simpler probabilistic ones — time is essentially eliminated from the models. The conditions for validity are restrictive, even more so for non-equilibrium systems. Economics typically deals with systems far from equilibrium — specifically with models of growth. It may therefore come as a surprise to learn that the prevailing formulations of economic theory — expected utility theory and its descendants — make an indiscriminate assumption of ergodicity. This is largely because foundational concepts to do with risk and randomness originated in seventeenth-century economics, predating by some 200 years the concept of ergodicity, which arose in nineteenth-century physics. In this Perspective, I argue that by carefully addressing the question of ergodicity, many puzzles besetting the current economic formalism are resolved in a natural and empirically testable way.
Marco Valente on Twitter – List of books that have helped me make sense of Complex Adaptive Systems and work in them more skillfully, each with a mini description.
Video: Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World – A Search for New Perspectives – Anthony Hodgson, Ph.D.
Ecology of Bad Ideas | Drain Magazine
via Ecology of Bad Ideas | Drain Magazine
Ecology of Bad Ideas
There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and its characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.
Gregory Bateson, Pathologies of Epistemology, 1971
Gregory Bateson, Pathologies of Epistemology, 1971
The ecology of bad ideas is the product of the propagation of epistemological error. Akin to the meme, as defined by Dawkins, the ecology of bad ideas is manifest in the transmission and integration of idea into environment and, subsequently, the rearrangement of ecological conditions in its aftermath. Contrasting the hubris of the Anthropocene—and its lingering tones of “Man’s” rational progress and dominance over “Nature” writ on a planetary scale—the ecology of bad ideas unfolds in the mess of the cumulative mental, social, and environmental assemblage of inherited ideas: oblivious, opportunist, oversimplified, corrupt, fraudulent, stubbornly inflexible, and pathologically upheld out of narrow and shortsighted self-interest.
This issue of Drain presents artists, researchers, theorists, cultural producers, commentators, and multimodal makers, thinkers, and doers that examine and engage the dispersion, proliferation, mutation, and normalization of bad ideas and bad ecologies. These contributors analyze and participate in complex ecological entanglements within, beyond, and against ecologies of bad ideas. Essays included in this issue examine—within Art (SPURSE), Humanism (Kauffman), and Race/ Nationalism (Feshami)—the persistence, as well as ramifications, of Western epistemology’s impulse to carve the world into dualities: human and non-human, culture and nature, subjective and objective, self and other, us and them, pure and impure. Thought Experiments, Interviews, and Art Projects in this issue address a broad range of anthropogenic and ideational modifications to Earthly matter through multiform engagements with systems—and nodes within systems—of biology, ecology, economy, agronomy, extraction, human settlements, technology, waste, governance, and more.
Underpinning many, if not all, contributions to this issue of Drain lies a utopian impulse to question the inherited ideas and forms with which we shape and are, in turn, shaped by and ask: What forms of salvage or alterity might be employed within the kludge of bad ideas that constitute our present bio-socio-ecological conditions and to what effect?
content via source: Ecology of Bad Ideas | Drain Magazine
Deming Society UK April Development Meeting – Organisational Identity – 2 April 2020, Coventry UK (£55 or become a member)
April Development Meeting
02 April 2020 | Nettle Hill, COVENTRY Booking form
When: Thursday, 2 April 2020, 09:30 for a 10:00 startWhere: The Round, Nettle Hill, Brinklow Road, Ansty, COVENTRY CV7 9JL, Tel: 02476 621 899
Prices: Deming Alliance members: The attendance fee for this meeting is included in your yearly membership fee. Non-members: £55 (lunch and refreshments included). Become a member and save £22 per meeting.
About the day: How can an organisation form a plan without understanding its own identity?
Come and learn in action. The topic of the day is one of the most fundamental for business and organisations. It is relevant for responsible consultants and management and anyone who wants to understand the world (or the Deming Alliance).
Organisational identity is the overlooked key to policy, strategy, financial management, culture, brand and customer value, process, innovation, R&D, and more. It’s typically poorly understood and knowhow is fragmented. The deep nature of identity is systemic, a (self-)organizing and functioning set of processes and patterns.This all-day hands-on/minds-on session led by Angus Jenkinson will explore such integrated identity practically — by distilling the identity of the Deming Alliance, as a group exercise. Learn a new tool and systemic approach through actual dynamic facts — in the spirit of Deming.
Virtuoso® has been almost 20 years in academic and practical development and use. It reveals the healthy potential of companies. The process will be active, empirical and enjoyable. It uses (stories of) actual events in the experience of participants. This leads to new outlooks for strategy and management, e.g. strategic initiatives are not arbitrary targets but about adjusting the systems in a process of continuous improvement towards the evolving potential of identity.
12 integrated aspects of the Deming Alliance’s Virtuoso identity will appear. These form a circular logic based on deeply researched science and practice. Virtuoso and its early version have been used across the world since 2004 in charities, small companies and start-ups, medium-sized industry leaders, and at the top end by IBM for its Brand System and Great Company Roadmap. The tool is available for you to use: https://vimeo.com/175518797Angus Jenkinson is a Former Professor of Integrated Marketing, he was hooked by Deming’s thinking three decades ago, he is a council member and trustee of the Cybernetics Society, his bio includes successful tech entrepreneur/business leader, systems designer, company chair, organization, strategy, and identity consultant, and problem-solver.
Agenda:
09:30 Coffee and networking
10:00 Introductions
10:10 Morning Session: Introduction of the ideas and approach
There will be a short coffee break during the morning.
12:45 Lunch
14:00 Afternoon Session: continuation of morning – a chance to put the thinking into practice!
There will be a short coffee break during the afternoon.
15:45 Review of the day
16:00 Any other business; sharing of current issues.
16:15 End of meeting. Time for networking.
Event booking form
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