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Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 5:46 am on July 24, 2019  

Complexity Explorables | Repliselmut

 

Source: Complexity Explorables | Repliselmut

 

“Repliselmut”

Yet another Complexity Explorable on evolution

An organic simulation of the replicator-mutator equation

EXPLORABLES

by Dirk Brockmann , Santa Fe Institute*

This explorable illustrates how variation and selection in a population of replicating organisms naturally leads to a gradual increase in the population’s overall fitness. The explorable simulates a system that is captured (to some extent) by the Replicator-Mutator Equation which is both, a generalization of the famous Replicator Equation and the Quasispecies Equation.

This explorable is similar to the Explorables “Maggots in the Wiggle Room” and “A Patchwork Darwinge”that illustrate key features of evolution. In those two explorables individuals of different species interact directly in a competitive way. Here however, individuals do not interact directly. They merely reproduce at different rates proportional to their fitness and die at equal rates. So competition is only indirect.

[TO PLAY, GO TO THE WEBSITE]

This is how it works

Initially the system has a population of 100 individuals all of the same kind (same color and fitness). When the system runs each individual in the population replicates at a rate proportional to its fitness. Each individual can also die at a constant rate so eventually replication and death balance when the population is around 400.

While this is happening, mutations can occur. At a rate you can set with the mutation rate slider an individual can have a baby with a different fitness indicated by a different color. A new species is born. The new species can have a lower or a higher fitness with symmetric probability. How much the variation of fitness can be for a newborn species can be controlled with the variation magnitude slider. The third slider Selection Strength controls how sensitive the difference in reproduction rate between species depends on their fitness difference.

Fitness dynamics

As the system unfolds you will see that every now and then new species emerge with a fitness higher than all the other species and oftens they “take over” the entire population until yet another new strain emerges that repeats the process.

In the plot below the controls every species in the system is represented by a dot in the same color on the fitness axis. The larger, more transparent circle represents the fraction of that species in the entire population. When species go extinct a little white dot below the axis is drawn, so one can see the series of extinction events.

The large red dot is the average fitness of the population. As time passes, the average fitness of the population increases steadily, despite the fact that mutations do not favor higher fitness.

* Acknowledgements

This explorable was coded in part in the atrium of the Santa Fe Institute when I was a guest there in July 2019. I want to thank Jenna Marshall for hosting me and the Santa Fe Institute as a whole for providing such a great and inspiring environment.

Source: Complexity Explorables | Repliselmut

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:31 am on July 24, 2019  

A system approach to

gregfell500's avatarSheffield DPH

We are going to take a whole system approach to xxxx

Some thoughts on this based on observations

This is the fourth of a series.

Blog 1 – brief notes

Blog 2 – responses to complex problems

blog 3 – influencing SYSTEMS

Starting out

• Have you set out a mission and vision.

• We talk complex adaptive systems. All three words matter – complex, adaptive, system. Think about it

• Have you mapped the system, all of the constituent parts, how they interact, who are the key actors and their role, whether they share the broad vision.

Approach

• There may be no single controller. Or no single person knows all of the things that are going on to achieve the broad goal 

• command and control is (probably) impossible. If you must adopt command and control mindset, seek to command and shift the most important leverage points in…

View original post 372 more words

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:50 am on July 24, 2019  

Lessons from the History of Socio-Technical Systems

Looks interesting and apart from Trist (obvious link to Agile – too little enquired into), features Enid Mumford, who deserves more attention. InfoQ registration required to access slides.

 

Source: Lessons from the History of Socio-Technical Systems

 

Summary

Sallyann Freudenberg looks at the origins of socio-technical systems theory and how it applies to software systems.

Video 43:17

Bio

Sallyann Freudenberg @salfreudenberg

is a software developer, agile consultant and trainer who assists companies in transitioning to more nimble, customer-centric and human(e) ways of working. She holds a PhD in the Psychology of Collaborative Software Development.

 

 

Source: Lessons from the History of Socio-Technical Systems

 

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 12:05 pm on July 23, 2019  

Making Institutions Work, by Geoffrey Vickers – The Neglected Books Page

Oh, how we could use Geoffrey Vickers now! Or several of his ilk…

 

Source: Making Institutions Work, by Geoffrey Vickers – The Neglected Books Page

 

Making Institutions Work, by Geoffrey Vickers

Excerpt

In an increasingly interdependent world, each of us becomes inescapably a member of many systems, each of which makes its own demands on us, as well as giving its own assurances. These demands conflict. If we acknowledge them all, we have to resolve or contain a mounting load of internal conflict. It we deny any, we disrupt some relation on which we depend. Every human association makes some demand on its members for responsibility, loyalty, and mutual trust. We are unaccustomed to respond to, perhaps incapable of responding to so many and such conflicting demands as are generated by our increasing inter-dependence on each other. The memberships we acknowledge fall increasingly short of those we need to acknowledge, if we are to sustain all the relations on which we in fact depend. The conflicts of our day reflect our failure to meet the demands of our multiple memberships.

So we have either to increase our capacity for resolving or containing conflict or to simplify the world (or allow it to simplify itself) by cutting down what we expect of it, or each other, and of ourselves to the measure of our capacities. War, famine, and pestilence will do the second except in so far as we succeed in doing the first.

Editor’s Comments

Cover of first edition of 'Making Institutions Work'“I have an unpopular answer to an unwelcome question,” Geoffrey Vickers writes at the start of Making Institutions Work:

The question is posed by two familiar but staggering changes of the last hundred years. One is the escalation of our expectations; the other is the escalation of our institutions. The two have combined to make demands on each of us ordinary men and women … which few have begun to notice, still less to accept as valid and inescapable. The question is how, if at all, these demands can be met and at what cost. Since these costs are the price we shall have to pay to maintain the systems which now sustain us or any viable alternative, I describe the theme as the price of membership.

I don’t suppose that I can manage to get too many readers excited about a thirty-six-year-old collection of sociological essays from academic journals with such dry names as Policy Sciences, Human Relations, and The Wharton Quarterly. Yet for me, Making Institutions Work has easily been one of the most stimulating books I’ve read a long time, one whose pages I’ve dog-eared, whose lines I’ve underlined, whose passages I’ve been tempted to grab people and force them to listen to. In many ways, it seems to me to be the closest thing I’ve found to a manual for how we need to operate if we have any hope of avoiding having all our conflicts settled by war, famine, pestilence, and climatic disaster.

Sir Geoffrey VickersSir Geoffrey Vickers led a remarkable life. He joined the British Army in 1914 and spent as much time as perhaps any other officer serving in the trenches on the Western Front, earning the Victoria Cross and numerous other combat medals for his bravery. After the war, he returned to university, took a law degree, and worked as a solicitor. He served again during World War Two and as an administrator and board member in government and industry. In his sixties, he turned to writing, particularly on the topic of social systems analysis, and became a leading contributor to the development of systems analysis and thinking, particularly as they related to human society. Making Institutions Work collects eleven articles and lectures Vickers gave in the late 1960s and early 1970s and focuses on the specific issue of how we can learn to deal effectively in a world where we are at all times members of multiple and overlapping institutions–family, culture, nation, organization, religion, teams, clubs, neighborhoods, and others.

I work in an institution. From the day I stopped mowing lawns for money and went to work part-time in a university library, I have worked in one institution or another. And now I work in an instituion–NATO–where competing and conflicting demands of membership can be seen in every activity. The tensions between commitment to the objectives of this alliance and national loyalty are palpable in every meeting of every committee, working group, panel, board, and forum. In NATO, the fundamental mechanism of decision-making is consensus: if one nation does not agree to a decision, the decision is deferred or redefined or taken off the table.

In a consensus-driven institution, no single member ever wins all or loses all. Everything tends to favor not the most popular solution but the least objectionable one. As a result, all solutions that are supported by consensus tend to be sub-optimal. For anyone with the professionalism and pride to strive for well-crafted plans and efficient designs, the experience of working in NATO is one of constant frustration. Military officers, who comprise a good percentage of NATO’s staff at the headquarters level and below, find it particularly frustrating as they have spent their careers trying to boil things down to clear, simple, and quickly-executed orders: defining the shortest path between today and their mission’s objectives. In a consensus-driven institution, the shortest path is almost always guaranteed to lead nowhere but into a brick wall.

Vickers is the first writer I can recall to acknowledge that frustration is part of the price of competing membership demands. He identifies, in fact, “[T]he ability to tolerate greatly increased frustration without lapsing into apathy or escapism or erupting into polarised conflict,” as one of the essential survival skills for life in a world of overlapping and competing memberships. We long ago ran out of frontiers into which we could escape and, psychologically at least, pursue the myth of pure self-sufficience. But relative to the long run of human existence, this situation is still something of a novelty:

This institutions of today carry a far greater load than human institutions have ever carried before. Men are more dependent on them and make greater demands on them than ever before. Their performance is far more exposed to view and is judged by far higher standards than before. They are no longer supported in their task by being regarded as part of a natural order and for the same reason their critics are no longer muted.

Still, Vickers argues, institutions are here to stay: “[A]ny world which generations younger than mine may create or preserve on the other side of the dark decades ahead will include an institutional dimension and will make the same demands on us as players both of institutional and of personal roles.” Since these roles will inevitably create conflicts such as those I see every working day in NATO, there is an increasing need, in Vicker’s view, for what he calls (in a perhaps less than fortunate phrase) “institutionalised persons”:

By an institutionalised person I mean one who accepts the constraints and assurances of membership in all the systems of which he forms part and therefore with the responsibility for managing his share of the conflicts which they involve.

This begins to capture a distinguishing characteristic of many of the people and processes that I encounter working in NATO. Time and time again, when conflicts arise, the value that tends to win out most consistently is that of the importance of preserving the ability to work together again tomorrow. And in this way, this frustrating, multi-national, multi-lingual, bureaucratic, consensus-driven institution seems, like the U.N., the European Union, the U.S. Congress, and many of the other collaborative political institutions we frequently curse, to represent the most realistic approach to dealing with conflict in this hot, flat, and crowded world.

Ironically, the most memorable statement in the whole of Making Institutions Work is not Geoffrey Vickers’, but the epigraph, which comes from an even more obscure paper by Saul Gorn, a pioneer in computer science:

We spend the first year of our lives learning that we end at our skin; and the rest of our lives learning that we don’t.

In Vicker’s view, this task, more than anything else, is a matter of learning to pay our dues:

Those who depend so completely as each of us does on our membership of many human systems cannot afford to withhold the dues which they demand and need from us if they–and consequently we–are to survive and function. These dues are payable not merely in money–though the money dues also will have to rise–but in all the qualities which are needed to resolve or contain human conflict; in responsibility, loyalty and mutual trust; in intellectual effort and informed debate; in extended sympathy and tolerance; in brief, in a dramatic extension of the frontier which divides self from other and present from future.

And to that extent, one can find few better guides to this lifelong task than Geoffrey Vickers.

 

Source: Making Institutions Work, by Geoffrey Vickers – The Neglected Books Page

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 7:47 am on July 23, 2019  

Origins of the concept of ‘Ecosystem’

A quick and slightly unsatisfactory look at the history of the idea of ‘ecosystem’

 

The History of the Ecosystem Concept: http://www.appstate.edu/~neufeldhs/ecosystems/originspart1.htm

 

The ecosystem concept: A search for order – August 1991, Ecological Research

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02347157 (can’t find open full text link)

 

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem

The term ecosystem was first used in 1935 in a publication by British ecologist Arthur Tansley.[fn 1][7] Tansley devised the concept to draw attention to the importance of transfers of materials between organisms and their environment.[8] He later refined the term, describing it as “The whole system, … including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment”.[9] Tansley regarded ecosystems not simply as natural units, but as “mental isolates”.[9] Tansley later defined the spatial extent of ecosystems using the term ecotope.[10]

G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a limnologist who was a contemporary of Tansley’s, combined Charles Elton‘s ideas about trophic ecology with those of Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. As a result, he suggested that mineral nutrient availability in a lake limited algal production. This would, in turn, limit the abundance of animals that feed on algae. Raymond Lindeman took these ideas further to suggest that the flow of energy through a lake was the primary driver of the ecosystem. Hutchinson’s students, brothers Howard T. Odum and Eugene P. Odum, further developed a “systems approach” to the study of ecosystems. This allowed them to study the flow of energy and material through ecological systems.[8]

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 7:14 am on July 23, 2019  

Entropy | Special Issue : Thermodynamics and Information Theory of Living Systems

cxdig's avatarComplexity Digest

One of the defining features of living systems is their ability to process, exchange and store large amounts of information at multiple levels of organization, ranging from the biochemical to the ecological. At the same time, living entities are non-equilibrium—possibly at criticality—physical systems that continuously exchange matter and energy with structured environments, all while obeying the laws of thermodynamics. These properties not only lead to the emergence of biological information, but also impose constraints and trade-offs on the costs of such information processing. Some of these costs arise due to the particular properties of the material substrate of living matter in which information processing takes place, while others are universal and apply to all physical systems that process information.

In the past decade, the relationship between thermodynamics and information has received renewed scientific attention, attracting an increasing number of researchers and achieving significant progress. Despite this, the field is full…

View original post 113 more words

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:23 am on July 23, 2019  

Courses from CoCreative | We create Collaborative Innovation Networks

From the Systems Studio newsletter. Having met Russ Gaskin, I believe that these courses will be very good.

 

Source: COURSES | CoCreative | We create Collaborative Innovation Networks

 

COURSES

We’ve taken the best of over two dozen approaches to collaboration, strategy, and change—and designed a
training program just for you.

ALL COURSES

Collaborative Innovation Essentials (2.5 days)

This is our intensive introduction to the collaborative innovation methodology, covering critical success factors, key dynamics, and the essential tools we use to build alignment and progress toward audacious goals. In this hands-on course, you’ll learn the core Collaborative Innovation methods that have driven powerful changes in industries and communities around the world. Centered around your own initiative or a challenge that you care about, you’ll apply these methods in real time, making progress on your project while building your capacity to lead collaborative change.

This workshop will support you to:

  1. Design and lead multi-stakeholder collaborations fueled by real alignment, engagement, and momentum

  2. Lead more confidently through the fear and uncertainty of leading complex change across ideological and cultural boundaries

  3. Help groups navigate the confusion and polarization that shows up when engaging diverse constituents

You will leave this workshop with increased effectiveness and skill in:

  • Establishing the conditions for powerful collaboration

  • Aligning diverse interests around a powerful shared goal

  • Mapping a shared understanding of system dynamics

  • Helping stakeholders develop real empathy for everyone affected by the work

  • Identifying the critical shifts that need to happen in order to realize your goal

  • Developing a powerful set of ideas, build them into working prototypes and test them in the real world

  • Scaling up the work and the impact

  • Building a shared learning environment

During the Essentials course, you’ll work with a group of five other participants and a coach from our team to deepen your learning alongside other change leaders working on challenges in social justice, shared prosperity, and sustainability.  During the evening meal, we’ll share more stories and learning with one another about how to lead the change that our world needs. Building a network of dynamic leaders from across sectors to support your work over time is just one of the many benefits of participation in our programs.

Session inputs: None required

Registration cost: $950 – $1,750 per person

(Need financial support to attend? Get in touch with us)

Course length: 2.5 days, 10:00 AM – 5 PM; 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM; 8:30 AM – 3:00 PM

Trainers: Russ Gaskin, Maren Maier, Heather Equinoss

Collaborative Leadership Essentials (1.5 days)

This is a highly experiential workshop covering an integrative and powerful approach to leading collaboration. It focuses on the nuts-and-bolts planning, facilitation, and leadership practices to help diverse groups move from goal setting to advancing real work together. We combine mini-lectures with applied facilitation in real situations, covering both virtual and in-person collaboration. We also use real facilitation challenges faced by participants to learn and apply methods for moving through conflict, confusion, and uncertainty in groups.

This workshop will support you to:

  1. Combine the best of leadership and collaboration to lead change more powerfully

  2. Lead more effectively through confusion and avoid conversations that run in circles

  3. Set and work with others from a clear shared intent

You will leave this workshop with increased effectiveness and skill in:

  1. Setting an intentional agenda

  2. Setting the context, space, and pace at the beginning of a meeting

  3. Establishing a culture of accountability

  4. Shaping the conversation and giving direction during and between meetings

  5. Creating a narrative for the group that builds momentum

  6. Moving from discussion and insight to real work products

Session inputs: None required

Registration cost: $575 – $1,050 per person

(Need financial support to attend? Get in touch with us)

Course length: 1.5 days, 8:45 AM – 5 PM; 8:45 AM – 1:00 PM

Trainers: Russ Gaskin, Maren Maier, Heather Equinoss

Leveraging Conflict for Innovation (1.5 days)

To lead complex change across cultural, sectoral, and functional boundaries, we need to foster genuine alignment, not just superficial compliance, among diverse stakeholders. This need requires that we find effective and reliable ways to draw on the diverse values and experiences of everyone involved to form a greater, more integrated view of both the problems and the opportunities we face.

In this session, you will experience and learn Polarity Thinking—a method for seeing, mapping and leveraging the fundamental differences among stakeholders’ values in order to convert conflict and polarization into authentic alignment and productive collaboration. By providing a practical framework and tool for addressing the underlying fears, values, and aspirations at play in any situation, Polarity Thinking lays a foundation for success in working on even the most polarizing challenges.

This workshop will support you to:

  1. Build genuine trust and collaboration among people who must work together but often don’t even like each other

  2. Transcend conflict and help others see and value the wisdom in ”conflicting” perspectives

  3. Anticipate and get ahead of conflicts and limited solutions by seeing more of the whole picture

​

You will leave this workshop with increased effectiveness and skill in:

  1. Seeing the underlying values driving stakeholders’ motivations, fears, and behaviors

  2. Mapping these value dynamics to reveal the sources of unproductive conflict and polarization

  3. Clearly understanding and describing what polarities are and how they work in organizations

  4. Distinguishing “problems to solve” from “polarities to leverage”

  5. Helping groups get unstuck from conflict and polarization

  6. Reframing fear and resistance in a more positive and constructive light using the polarity lens

  7. Foster collaboration at the level of values, resulting in much more resilient solutions

Session inputs: None required; We offer an optional organizational or team polarity assessment to identify key polarities to work with during the training (if desired)

​

Registration cost: $575 – $1,050 per person

​(Need financial support to attend? Get in touch with us)

Course length: 1.5 days, 8:45 AM – 5 PM; 8:45 AM – 1:00 PM

Trainers: Russ Gaskin, Maren Maier, Heather Equinoss

Design & Systems Thinking for Transformational Change (3 days)

A highly experiential and applied intensive workshop on using the best of both human-centered design and systems thinking to see what’s happening across a system, identify critical intervention points, and design powerful and resilient solutions. In this workshop, you’ll gain two powerful tools for helping everyone make sense of what’s going on, connect much more deeply to the need for profound change, map a powerful strategy, and design solutions that really work.

This workshop will support you to:

  1. Align everyone around a shared analysis of the whole system and deep empathy with people in the system

  2. Identify critical leverage points for change

  3. Design robust, resilient solutions that will stick

  4. Connect leaders much more deeply into the work, and garner profound commitment and ownership

You will leave this workshop with increased effectiveness and skill in:

  1. Using human-centered design to reveal real human needs, experiences, and aspirations, so solutions will make a real difference for people

  2. Using systems thinking to help everyone gain the same picture of what’s going on and where the key areas of change lie

  3. Using tools and methods from design and systems thinking to accelerate analysis, impact, and transformational change

  4. Aligning strategy and interventions with a clear and powerful blueprint for change

  5. Developing deeper ownership among key stakeholders

Session inputs: None required.

Registration cost: $1,150 – $1,950 per person

​(Need financial support to attend? Get in touch with us)

Course length: 3 days, 8:45 AM – 5 PM

Trainers: Russ Gaskin, Maren Maier, Heather Equinoss

Advanced Collaborative Leadership (3 days)

This dynamic program is for people who are involved in organizational change and large-scale system transformation. Based on the Gestalt theory and practice, this three-day intensive provides you with a combination of theory, conceptual presentations, and opportunities to practice your intervention skills and receive feedback from other participants and intensive leaders.

This intensive workshop will support you to:

  1. Develop yourself as an effective instrument of change

  2. Focus energy on solving the challenges at hand rather than solely working within a culturally-preferred model

  3. Recognize levels of system and the appropriate types of intervention

  4. Create appropriate designs for interventions that consider the consequences for individuals, groups, and the organization

You will leave this workshop with increased effectiveness and skill in:

  1. Examining and changing your own worldview and way of making meaning

  2. Increasing your ability to intervene effectively

  3. Enhancing the skills needed to implement and support others implementing required changes

  4. Discriminating between observations, interpretations, judgments, descriptions, and evaluations

  5. Identifying, supporting, and facilitating clear, meaningful interactions among all stakeholders who are part of your system

  6. Understanding, tracking, and intervening in individual and organizational interactions across different levels of system

  7. Cultivating your openness to change and development as both a person and a change resource, including the ability to use “failures” and negative feedback constructively

  8. Applying what has been learned in your own situations back home

Session inputs: Pre-reading from Cleveland Consulting Group

Registration cost: $1,150 – $1,950 per person

(Need financial support to attend? Get in touch with us)

Course length: 3 days, 8:45 AM – 5 PM

Trainers: Herb Stevenson, Cleveland Consulting Group; Russ Gaskin, CoCreative

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:16 am on July 23, 2019  

Additional key links from the July newsletter from the Systems Studio

sign up for their excellent newsletter on this page: http://thesystemstudio.com/our-publications

 

 

LINKS FROM THE FIELD OF SYSTEMS CHANGE 

FROM THE ARCHIVE (H/T Becky Ryder)

JOBS

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:14 am on July 23, 2019  

Deep Dives — The Systems Sanctuary – focused exploration of key themes

 

Source: Deep Dives — The Systems Sanctuary

Deep Dives

Deep Dive Programs.jpg

What’s the deal?

We have identified a set of edgy issues and challenges we are facing in the field of systems change and we wanted to create the opportunity to crack these open, create time for reflection and deep dive conversation about them. In doing so we aim to strengthen our collective practice on these fronts.

These key themes have emerged during time together in our In the Thick of It and The Systems Sisterhood programs.

The deep dive series is a focused exploration of key themes including:

Health, Wellness and Burnout

How can we stay well and sane in the work we do? We heard over and over in both of our programs how systems leaders are stressed out, overworked and burnt out. They are struggling to find that balance of peace, passion and wellness and this is affecting both men and women.

We will be offering a space to acknowledge and explore this experience. We’ll offer tools to explore the patterns that lead to our exhaustion and practices to ground ourselves. As this is such a prevalent occurrence in the field, this will be a collective inquiry. We are committed to capturing and sharing this widely with the field as it develops, highlighting areas where innovation could support practitioners to flourish rather than become drained.

We will have both a women’s only Cohort and a mixed one on this topic.

Money

Money is a taboo subject and difficult to talk about. Its a theme that also came up in many different ways in The Systems Sisterhood. How can we be better at growing, asking for and negotiating finances? How does taboo and shame prevent positive flow of resources? How do we value our work when we are working to create positive change in the world? How do we balance valuing our experience and contribution with sustaining ourselves to keep doing the work we are passionate about and setting a fair price? This is murky water, not often discussed.

Interrogating Whiteness

Why is it, even in work committed to diversity and inclusion, whiteness often remains un- marked and unremarkable? How can change leaders alter this dynamic so that whiteness becomes a site of dynamic inquiry rather than seemingly invisible yet silently privileged and powerful centre from which otherness so often stems? This deep dive will show how whiteness is worthy of further investigation in conjunction with anti-racist pedagogy and practice. It also stresses how white fragility often impedes these kinds of discussions due to white guilt, white paralysis, white privilege, white tears and/or white rage.

This workshop offers a variety of activities for leaders of all races that can help participants to articulate, interrogate and de-centre whiteness and white privilege.

Being More of Ourselves at Work

Shifting systems requires people to do and be different. As women, the systems that we work in are usually not designed to allow us to be fully ourselves and we end up sidelining some of our most powerful skills. From using our intuition, fully accounting for the roles we play inside and outside work, to having the confidence to be both gentle and fierce when needed, what might we achieve if we were able to show up in the fullness of ourselves?  This will be a women’s only group.

Who is this for?

Participants will be working in the field of systems change, or in a field that aligns and overlaps (like design, social entrepreneurship, social innovation, social finance etc).

This is for you if you read these topics and instantly know what we’re talking about. This is your experience.

You have no space to talk about this and yet, if we get you on the topic, you have a lot of say about it.

Space will be limited and we expect it to fill up fast. We will have a maximum of 25 participants, per group. Registration is first come first served basis.

What will happen on the calls?

  • Leading experts and practitioners in the field will share their latest thinking to inform our thinking and reflection

  • We will create the space to exchange and learn from one another in small, intimate groups, on and off our calls

  • Through our peer exchanges and individual reflection processes, we will be guided by our experience and the questions we are each holding.

More specifically

  • Virtual 1.5 hour gathering on zoom. This will including provocations from 2 leading experts and intimate conversations in small groups.

  • Homework – A curated list of articles, books and videos to watch in advance of and after each call to further your thinking.

  • Buddy call one-to-one conversation with two other participants.

  • Curated personal reflection practice

  • Virtual 1.5 hour gathering on zoom. This will include small group and larger group conversations. We will surface learnings and themes from the program.

  • A designated slack channel for you to continue the conversation during and after the program has ended.

The value

These are topics that we know show up in your life. You talk to your friends and family about them, they niggle at you, but you find it hard to find the time to delve into them in any meaningful detail and to develop the clarity of thought to set new boundaries and develop new practice.

This is an opportunity to put one of these topics at the center of your thoughts for a month. Taking part in these programs is an investment in building your network of systems leaders who will validate your experience with their own and could become trusted colleagues in the future.

Our special guests

We will share more details of our special guests closer to the time.

Price

There is a sliding scale for different types of organization. Our sliding scale ensure’s we are able to have a diversity of participants and takes into account the financial risk people work independently take.

Early Bird price counts before August 31 2019.

Price is in USD

  • Corporate and Foundation $1,000, Early Bird $800 (You qualify even if you subsidize this yourself)

  • NGO & Government: $500 and Early Bird $400 (You qualify even if you subsidize this yourself)

  • Independent: $350 Early Bird $280

Subsidy

The System Sanctuary is committed to ensuring participation of system leaders from diverse backgrounds and contexts.  We recognize that system leaders are working in various ways that may impact economic security. If the proposed fees are a barrier to your participation, we offer a sliding scale.

Please fill out this form to apply for a sliding scale.

You must also have filled out the full Registration form, in order for us to process your sliding scale application. We will get back to you within 2 weeks.

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:12 am on July 23, 2019  

We See You Too – women of systems change amid a life transition, document from the Systems Studio

 

We See You Too – Women of systems change who are amid a life transition. A summary of the key themes and patterns that emerged during our first 7 month peer learning program for women systems leaders.

 

pdf:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a0b2bbb80bd5e8ae706c73c/t/5d0a806abc8cbc0001f19699/1560969325159/The+Systems+Sisterhood+-+We+See+You+Too+-.pdf?ct=t(The_Systems_Studio_Newsletter_7_11_2017_COPY_01)

 

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:05 pm on July 21, 2019  

New world of active wisdom | Mary Catherine Bateson | TEDxCapeMay – YouTube

this showed up on facebook and is very nice

New world of active wisdom | Mary Catherine Bateson | TEDxCapeMay

TEDx Talks
Published on 12 Jan 2015
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson finds happiness in the capacity to make a contribution during the unanticipated years of healthy longevity, and she believes that these contributions of active wisdom from seniors may very well save the world. Dr. Bateson is a writer and cultural anthropologist who has written and co-authored many books and articles, lectures across the country and abroad, and has taught at Harvard, Northeastern University, Amherst College, Spelman College and abroad in the Philippines and in Iran. During the past few years Mary Catherine Bateson has completed two projects: a book titled Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom, published by Knopf in September, 2010, on the contributions and improvisations of engaged older adults, written to raise consciousness of the changing life cycle and to encourage older adults to claim a voice for the future. She was a founder in 2004 of GrannyVoter, now a program of Generations United, where she is developing ongoing efforts to involve seniors in efforts on behalf of children and future generations, as national co-chair of Seniors4kids. About TEDx, x = independently organized event In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

 

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:42 pm on July 19, 2019  

What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is – Weick, 1995

When I saw Venkatesh Rao cite this in https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/07/19/weirding-diary-9-venkatesh-rao-on-a-possibly-dangerous-but-probably-mostly-harmless-resurgence-in-interest-in-classical-system-theory/, I was sure I had posted it here before – but apparently not, so here it is. Important article.

 

 

pdf link – http://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Doctoral_Resources/Weick_What_theory_is_not_theorizing_is.pdf

 

JOURNAL ARTICLE

What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is

Karl E. Weick
Administrative Science Quarterly
Vol. 40, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 385-390 (6 pages)
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University
DOI: 10.2307/2393789
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393789

JSTOR link, read online and citation etc : What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is on JSTOR

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:40 pm on July 19, 2019  

Weirding Diary: 9 – Venkatesh Rao on a possibly dangerous but probably Mostly Harmless resurgence in interest in classical system theory

I’d really welcome others commenting on the original piece at ribbonfarm….

 

Source: Weirding Diary: 9

Weirding Diary: 9

July 17, 2019 By 
This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series Weirding Diary

I’m noticing a resurgence of interest in classical systems theory that mildly worries me. I suspect it is being driven by an infectious desire to theorize the Great Weirding systematically. It is an impulse that is in some ways a natural complement to the parallel resurgence of interest in traditional religion as a mode of meaning-making (which worries me much more). Both are driven by the anomie and anxiety induced by the weirding (classical systems theory, like Singularitarianism, is a religion for people who understand compound interest).

I have a dog in this fight, which I call spooky systems theorizing (note the conjugation), occupying pride of place in the top right quadrant in my handy 2×2 of the clash of ideas here. Classical systems theory is in the doghouse at the bottom left, where I always put ideas with which I have beefs (my beefs tend to be with ideas rather than people).

A new generation of curious people is once again asking the same sorts of unreconstructed high-modernist questions that have been tempting ambitious thinkers since the 1960s. It is a disease peculiar to postmodernity, with Von Bertanfly, Forrester, Wiener, and the rest emerging as patients zero precisely at the historical moment when high modernism began to systematically fail, inviting attempts to save it through baroque mathematization.

The new generation is being seduced by the same sorts of systematic intellectual responses to systematic failures (as I myself was, circa 1998, when I was just starting graduate school in control theory, before I developed my present discordian conviction that ironically and paradoxically, systems thinking cannot afford to be systematic, and particularly not systematically mathematical).

I am convinced classical systems theory approaches don’t work and are just legibility-seeking authoritarian high modernism with extra steps. In recent years these theories have acquired an updated user experience built out of Santa Fe chaoplexity woo (terms like butterfly effects, bullwhip effects, Braess paradox, and “sensitive dependence” are bandied about), and a tendency to gesture at concerns raised by anarchist theorists of both broadly socialist (such as Jane Jacobs or James Scott) and broadly libertarian (such as Nassim Taleb) persuasions, without actually addressing them (“Yay antifragility and illegibility, now back to stocks and flows!”).

My worry is only mild though, because I suspect this time around, the fad will be Mostly Harmless™ due to antibodies still present in the body politic since the last serious flirtation with these ideas. So at worst, some creative attention and talent will be lost to other, more promising tacks, which is a pity. Unless you’re in China of course, where I hear these ideas are a great deal more ascendant. But then, China has bigger problems.

I don’t yet have an answer to what could work, but I’ve been searching for one for 20 years now, since my own disillusionment, and I do have desiderata for a usable approach to theorizing the weirding, captured and contextualized in my 2×2 in the “spooky” quadrant.

The two footnotes reference this Karl Weick paper (which is sort of the Ur document for my consulting work) and this classic Bruce Sterling talk which introduced the concepts of Favela Chic and Gothic High Tech concepts.

My criticism of the classical systems theories (the hedgehog in the doghouse quadrant) is not the usual strawman one that the models don’t make accurate predictions. Those are the wrong expectations to have of such models, and it is intellectually unfair to judge those kinds of models on those grounds.

My discontent is with philosophical foundations: classical systems theory tends to uncritically reproduce institutional patterns of knowledge and structural assumptions within its models. The default ontologies are inherited from governance systems (units of modeling tend to be things like cities, nations, corporations, or economic sectors) and the modeling parameters they favor tend to be the ones that institutions use to manage their own realities (GDP, employment, resource bases).

In other words, classical systems theory models are models derived from institutional maps, not civilizational territories. Their inaccuracies and blindspots are not a problem if you have the right expectations and aesthetics, and operate within the broad program of institutional self-perpetuation. Their metaphysical assumptions though, are crippling and likely fatal if you want to navigate eras of institutional creative destruction and ontological churn like the Great Weirding. As I noted in my post Prolegomena to any Dark-Age Psychohistory:

While there is no shortage of “wave” theories of varying degrees of believability (Elliot/Kondratriev wave theories, Carlota Perez’s models, Turchin’s cliodynamics, and so on), and quixotically hedgehogish systems theory models (Limits to Growthis the poster child for overpromising and underdelivering in this vein), there is nothing that quite rises to the level of Asimovian psychohistory.

Of course, Asimov and the fictional concept of psychohistory were also products of the high-modernist era, but the crucial difference is that psychohistory being fictional means it can now be used to refer to ideas that are better than the ones doing the rounds in the 50s.

The 2×2 of systems theories above is a generalization of the fox/hedgehog dichotomy of systems theories I developed in my 2013 talk on foxy systems theory (slides here, the video is unfortunately not public). I added a classical-to-non-classical axis, and labeled the hedgehog-to-fox range endpoints theory andtheorizing, following Weick.

Products of the theorizing process seldom emerge as full-blown theories, which means that most of what passes for theory in organizational studies consists of approximations. Although these approximations vary in their generality, few of them take the form of strong theory, and most of them can be read as texts created “in lieu of” strong theories. These substitutes for theory may result from lazy theorizing in which people try to graft theory onto stark sets of data. But they may also represent interim struggles in which people intentionally inch towards stronger theories. The products of laziness and intense struggles may look the same and consist of references, data, lists, diagrams, and hypotheses. To label these five as “not theory” makes sense if the problem is laziness and incompetence. But ruling out those same five may slow inquiry if the problem is theoretical development still in its early stages.

I also labeled the two axes imagination and boldness respectively, (following Clarke’s famous line about hazards of prophecy “..debacles fall into two classes, which I will call failures of nerve and failures of imagination. The failure of nerve seems to be the more common…”). So what we have here is:

  • Low imagination, low boldness: classical hedgehog systems theory.
  • High imagination, low boldness: Weickian foxy systems theorizing.
  • High boldness, low imagination: crackpot systems theories (“ancient aliens” looks more imaginative than it is, but takes boldness to actually believe).
  • High imagination, high boldness: what spooky systems theorizing works towards. Here’s where I began laying out initial sketches.

My project, so to speak, is to start from “classical” foxy systems theorizing (basically a low-ambition Favela Chic Weickian toolkit that solves for insight porn) and somehow make the bold leap to a praxis of non-classical systems theorizing that addresses the desiderata in the top right via an indefinitely extensible theorizing mode, without ever quite landing on an actual theory or crashing through to crackpottery.

If it can be made to work, spooky systems theorizing of the Great Weirding would constitute an effective infinite game posture for our times. If it doesn’t at least I’ll have produced some good 2x2s along the way.

Source: Weirding Diary: 9

 

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 1:39 pm on July 17, 2019  

The Architecture of Complexity – Herbert A. Simon (1962)

 

The Architecture of Complexity

  • Herbert A. Simon

Part of the International Federation for Systems Research International Series on Systems Science and Engineeringbook series (IFSR, volume 7)

Abstract

A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of “general systems theory” which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.

With introduction by Paul Cilliers in 2005 (pdf)

Click to access Thearchitectureofcomplexity.pdf

 

Alternative pdfs:

Click to access architectureofcomplexity.pdf

Click to access garud-001.pdf

Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 1:35 pm on July 17, 2019  

Autopoiesis, Structural Coupling and Cognition: A history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition – Maturana, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 2002

pdf: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f67a/d15db33679c5fa69f15294cf176c0b7e9f10.pdf?_ga=2.139316657.300497662.1563355095-1219760354.1559644806

abstract: Autopoiesis, Structural Coupling and Cognition: A history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition – Semantic Scholar

Autopoeisis, structural coupling and cognition: a history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition

 

Ugly full text: http://www.isss.org/maturana.htm

 

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