source at: https://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/inqorg.htm

“System Cracks are Where the Light Gets In: Models and Measures of Services in the Benefit of Context”

Authors

David Hawk and Annaleena Parhankangas

Abstract

A paradox is emerging for those concerned about management theory and practice. The paradox lies with the activities and products of organizations becoming more fluid while organizational structure and management models remained fixed. Managerial emphasis favor the more “solid” aspects of organizations while their leading edges become more “fluid.” Management lore and principles continue to be taught, and practiced, as if what was remains timeless. Management continues to base its decision-making on information from statistical and reductionistic analysis. The result is a noteworthy mismatch between the rate of change in the environmental and the human desire for constancy. The mismatch is showing up on the surface of situations in what we herein called “cracks.” Cracks can also be seen in the surfaces of organizations, products and customer bases.

The theory behind the paper comes from the early 1940s. Cracks point to system forces that were not been reconciled within the limits of the system. “Crackage” may also be a sign of systems reaching their limits. Herein the systems of interest are social organizations and their management. The main interest thus becomes management theory, where cracks appear where a principle appears inadequate, even humorous, in the face of an organizational challenge. Such cracks are more obvious with time. Using command and control strategies to manage internet information access and use is one example. Such cracks can be seen as early indicators of larger problems looming for organizations. This point was at the center of a discussion held in the business systems interest group session of last year’s ISSS Conference. It was argued that radically different forms and norms of management were needed. One metaphor proposed from that discussion was to find more “fluid” methods of management for dealing with increasingly fluid entities and environments. This idea is used herein to describe one of the major events now taking place in economic and business systems, the transformation from goods to services. The shift from solid to fluid processes and products is clearly seen in the emergence of the importance of services. An alternative software operating system, called Linux, is presented as a leading example of why this change is different and fundamental. Linux provides a doorway into an alternative model of business management. Linux illustrating an interesting progression from problems in solids that are manageable, but tend to crack, to fluids that don’t crack but tend to be beyond understanding and management.

[click here for the Acrobat document]

Citation

David Hawk and Annaleena Parhankangas, “System Cracks are Where the Light Gets In: Models and Measures of Services in the Benefit of Context”, Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the System Sciences, Jennifer Wilby and Janet K. Allen, editors, at Asilomar, California, July 8-13, 2001.

[click here for the ISSS 2001 conference]

Source: Systemic Business Community — “System Cracks are Where the Light Gets In: Models and Measures of Services in the Benefit of Context”

A very short introduction o boundary critique, the methodological core idea of critical systems heuristics (CSH)

Source: CSH | W. Ulrich | Ulrich’s Home Page: A Mini-Primer of Boundary Critique

[oh, this is splendid! from the bloke who does Loopy, the wisdom and/or madness of clouds, etc – https://ncase.me/ ]

why things change, or don’t

an interactive introduction to

Volume 2018, Article ID 3421529, 44 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/3421529

Source: Resilience of Complex Systems: State of the Art and Directions for Future Research

I used to think of my body as nothing more than a machine. A series of components that function in predictable and purely mechanical ways to get a job done. To hold me, nourish me and keep me alive.

When something goes wrong, treat the component at fault as best we can and move on. Not dissimilar to the way in which we traditionally think about our organisations.

But then a few years ago, something changed for me. My health began to slip. One inconvenience after another. I bounced through a series of diagnosis, and to be frank, got mightily fed up of the body that was failing me in minutely inexhaustible ways. Mostly without reason. Intangible and tangible mechanical faults, that whether I liked it or not changed the way my body could look after me, and the ways in which I could lead my immediate life and my life for a life-time thereafter.

I treated the symptoms of each of my problems individually, logically, mechanically. Taking each condition separately, treating the symptom, applying its fix and then tackling the next. But the problem was that it just didn’t fix ‘me’. It relieved the symptoms, sometimes created new ones, but didn’t actually cure me of anything. I was in a downwards spiral.

I wasn’t yet 40. Still living in that age where I was yet considered young. It was madness. I didn’t drink or smoke, wasn’t overweight, and here I was floundering around in a body that felt old, with a mind devoid of spark. And for a time, I let that flow with me. Resigned to the way it was. ‘What could I do about it’?

And then something clicked. ‘What if’? I thought ‘Everything is connected’?

It’s a simple thought. To many of you, particularly our health care and holistic readers it’s perhaps an obvious connection, but for me, it was a revelation that changed the way I consider my body, my soul and ultimately my life.

It was with a wild leap of faith and not without some imagination that I began developing a picture of myself as a whole physical being. A machine that pulses.

And that machine needed something more than treatment of its malingering symptoms. It needed attention, care, love of its whole.

Believe it or not, thinking in this way took a lot of courage. It required a change of mind-set not just about my body but about my inner self too. It was a little seed planted, that over the coming months and years took me through some of the toughest and the most valuable experiences of my entire life.

From thought to action wasn’t an immediate step. I needed time to process, to believe, to make the idea feel real, alive. But then one day, I decided, ‘enough now’ and I went for a swim. I was so scared. Terrified in fact. Not because of the swim, but because of what it represented. I knew that from that very first breath of chlorine that I would be changing my life. And I didn’t know what or where I was going.

I’d never swum for leisure before. Could only manage 2 lengths before I had to stop to rest. 12 lengths later I got out. Out of breath and hurting from the effort and the rather bad swim style.

But it was a defining moment. And it changed me forever. Here, in my life I had taken control.

That one swim turned into a swim membership, yoga, a new diet, a divorce, a new life and an almost new body along the way. Just over two years later, I don’t recognise that past me anymore. I’ve discovered, or re-found, or simply allowed to come into existence an inner me that I never knew was there.  That body that was failing me now holds me and holds me well. I haven’t cured myself. There are still some problems that are part of my biological make-up that no matter what I do I can’t undo or fix. But what I have done is change the way that these mechanical faults affect me. And some things I’ve wiped right off the map.

It’s a journey that never stops. As my physical being finds a balance within itself, developing its possibility, so does my mind. I’m finding the world anew. And it’s finding me. A shared journey exploring how my body and soul and mind, and the world are, in fact, one.

And perhaps I’m not a mechanistic being after all. I am a system. I. I am.

But here’s the thing, you and the world we are all in is a system too.

And should we treat our world as a mechanistic thing, made up of a series of separate components?

 This way of thinking is convenient. It gives us quick fix possibilities; address the faulty component, treat the symptoms and move on. But what if, just like me, everything in this world  is connected in minutely, infinitely, unfathomable, impossible ways? All of them beautiful.

Source: Discovering my system – Heart of the Art

Source: Ecology and Society: The dynamics of purposeful change: a model

[I wasn’t sure at first if this was actually new, since Cybersyn crops up so regularly – and has recently been debated in the Systems Thinking Network LinkedIn group, but is seems it is. Cybersyn did crop up with numerous links on model.report:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx26zpPg884

many links on this outdated Russian Stafford Beer tribute site: http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/beer_menu.html

links and discussion https://model.report/s/dvgunx/the_planning_machine_project_cybersyn_and_the_origins_of_the_big_data_nation

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCO3vXyR-c4]

22 AUGUST 2018

Project Cybersyn: the afterlife of Chile’s socialist internet

Through an electronic “nervous system”, Salvador Allende’s left-wing government anticipated the era of big data.

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Almost 45 years have passed since Salvador Allende’s government was overthrown in an armed coup on 11 September 1973. The late Chilean president and Marxist has long been revered by the left for his democratic credentials – he was elected freely in 1970 – and his tragic martyrdom (he shot himself with an AK-47 after refusing to surrender to Augusto Pinochet’s forces).

Yet until recently, one of his administration’s most remarkable innovations had received little attention. In its efforts to forge a socialist economy, Allende’s government pioneered a technology that anticipated both the internet and the era
of “big data”.

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-29/html/container.html

Project Cybersyn, as it was known in English (a portmanteau of “cybernetics” and “synergy”), sought to avoid the waste and inefficiency that characterised the Soviet Union and other communist states, by connecting hundreds of firms to the government through an electronic “nervous system”. A national network of 500 telex machines collected real-time data from factories, such as production output, energy use and labour levels, and transmitted it to two mainframe computers in the Santiago-based control room.

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Rather than empowering an overmighty state, the aim was to encourage the free exchange of information and worker participation in planning and management.

This largely forgotten model is now being heralded by a new generation of tech-savvy leftists. Next month The World Transformed, the festival held on the Labour conference fringe, will host a session on “cybernetic socialism” featuring Raúl Espejo, the original operations director of Project Cybersyn.

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-29/html/container.html

The programme was the creation of Stafford Beer, a British consultant and the founder of “management cybernetics” (which he defined as “the science of effective organisation”). Beer, who argued with acute prescience that “information is a national resource” and coined the term “data highway”, was approached in 1971 by Fernando Flores, Chile’s production development co-ordinator, who later became finance minister. By the end of that year, Allende’s government had nationalised more than 150 companies, including 12 of the 20 largest Chilean firms. Flores recognised that to defy free-market critics – who warned of the fallacy of disregarding price mechanisms – the fledgling administration would need help.

Beer, an imposing, gregarious man (who in his later years cultivated a beard of Tolstoyan length), agreed to assist in exchange for a daily fee of $500 and a regular flow of wine, cigars and chocolate. “He was at the top of his capabilities,” Espejo recalled when we spoke on the phone.

“He had an extraordinary ability to work 20 hours a day and to produce reports for us at a speed that would take me a year. I was absolutely astounded.” (David Bowie would later include Beer’s Brain of the Firm on a list of his favourite books.)

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-29/html/container.html

As well as the telex network, Project Cybersyn also featured an economic simulator to model alternative policies. But its enduring face was the hexagonal, Star Trek-like operations room, which featured mounted screens and seven white fibreglass swivel chairs (regarded as optimal for creativity) with inbuilt push-buttons.

The programme was initially viewed with traditionalist scepticism by Allende’s Socialist Party. But Project Cybersyn’s hour arrived in October 1972 during a strike of 40,000 truck drivers led by the hard-right Confederación Nacional del Transporte. As Allende’s opponents sought to wreck the economy by preventing the transport of food and raw materials, Cybersyn was deployed to underwrite the resistance. Through the electronic network, the government was able to co-ordinate deliveries by active trucks and to evade blockades. “We felt that we were in the centre of the universe,” Espejo remarked.

After 24 days, the strike was defeated. Ministers then became “much more interested” in Cybersyn, Espejo told me. Allende even proposed transferring the operations room to La Moneda, the presidential palace.

On 10 September 1973, the government finally prepared to install an upgraded version of the system. But the following day, with the connivance of the CIA, Pinochet’s forces stormed the palace and bombed it from the air. In “Why Allende had to die”, a New Statesman essay published in March 1974, Gabriel García Márquez observed: “The most dramatic contradiction of [Allende’s] life was being at the same time the congenital foe of violence and a passionate revolutionary.”

The ascendance of Pinochet’s new military junta divided Cybersyn allies. Some urged the regime to maintain the system, while others feared the consequences of allowing it to be exploited. Yet the dilemma was swiftly resolved: Pinochet’s ultra-free-market government, inspired by the economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, crudely dismantled the project.

Espejo, who was warned by military officials to leave Chile, fled to England two months after the coup, where he later became a professor of systems and cybernetics at the University of Lincoln.

Project Cybersyn was far from an unqualified success. It was hindered by Chile’s technological limitations (worsened by a US boycott) and was prone to delays. But in its ambition, and its noble ideals, it provided a glimpse of a daringly alternative order: one in which humans are the masters, rather than the slaves, of machines.

George Eaton is political editor of the New Statesman.

Source: Project Cybersyn: the afterlife of Chile’s socialist internet

[via @kvistgaard – Ivo Velitchkov on Twitter]

THE SELF AND THE OTHER: THE PURPOSE OF DISTINCTION
RANULPH GLANVILLE

Programma OOC, University of Amsterdam,
Grote Bickersstraat 72, Amsterdam 1015 KS, The Netherlands
and
School of Architecture, Portsmouth Polytechnic,
King Henry I St, Portsmouth PO1 2DY, UK

“The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on.” Samuel Beckett, Endgame [0].

ABSTRACT
In this paper, the nature of distinction drawing, in the sense of George Spencer
Brown, is examined with special reference to the distinction between the self and the
other. It is noted that a distinction, which must draw its self, also requires an other and a
transfer distinction, both within a particular distinction and for that distinction to be part
of, and that these can generate the purpose of the distinction as becoming, of, by and for
itself.

(pdf) http://papers.cumincad.org/data/works/att/494c.content.pdf

[Not sure what to make of this – but that makes it interesting!]

MULTIPLE DATES

The System Transformation Masterclass: Systems Leadership at Scale

by Stanford ChangeLabs

$2,850 – $3,350

Mon, Sep 24 (9:00 AM)

Thu, Sep 27 (9:00 AM)

Why do some businesses, strategies, products and initiatives thrive while others never achieve scale?

The difference lies in understanding how to design for scale and being able to lead teams to influence system wide change.

The upcoming Masterclass “Systems Leadership at Scale” will expose you to the radical shift from traditional leadership models towards the new standard for leadership in the 21st Century. In this two-module set:

– “Designing the Scale Advantage” will give you insights and principles for imparting scale deep in your strategies and organizations.

– “Mastering Systems Leadership” brings you into a leadership model that is of critical importance in an era marked by complexity, change, and ambiguity. We will equip you with new leadership frameworks, tools, and mindsets that will give your organization the capacity to reduce critical risks and unlock massive business and impact opportunities.

Attending a single module will earn you a certificate of participation for that module issued by Stanford ChangeLabs. Attending all three modules in the Masterclass series (along with the System Acupuncture I module – offered again in early 2019) will earn you a System Transformation Leadership Certificate.

Seats are limited so make sure to secure a seat!

Designing the Scale Advantage:
September Mon 24 – Tue 25

Why do some businesses, strategies, products, and initiatives, never achieve scale? 
In most cases, it is because they were not designed with scale in their DNA. Rather than leaving scale to a downstream phase, our approach creates the pre-conditions for scale, and then bakes in the propensity for scale early in the strategy phase.
Designing the Scale Advantage covers frameworks, principles, and mindsets for designing the scale advantage into your organizations, leadership teams, strategies, and initiatives with ready tools to maximize your organization’s ability to make impact and unlock scaled opportunities. This 2-day hands-on module focuses on topics that help you develop scaling strategies for your initiatives, products, and organization.

Mastering Systems Leadership:
September Thu 27 – Fri 28

What are the key capacities that a leader needs so that their organization can thrive in the 21st century? 
Systems Leadership is a leadership capacity that circumvents the profound limitations of the current leadership models that are simply not suited for the increasing complexity and change of our era. Leaders of the 21st century need to have the confidence and capacity to navigate their organizations and teams through increasingly dynamic, complex, and rapidly changing challenges. Not playing the systems game creates a massive risk on two fronts (a) a risk of being disrupted or made irrelevant, and (b) the risk of not spotting massive opportunities for system change and market creation. Thus, two key capacities that leaders of the 21st century need are:

1. to respond to rapidly change
2. to envision a desired future and innovate practical yet transformative pathways towards achieving it.

Mastering Systems Leadership covers key mindsets and tools that an avant-garde leader need to navigate complex systems to arrive at leveraged intervention designs while building an ecosystem that fosters agility and innovation.

Comments about the System Transformation Masterclass from past participants:

“In my 30 years as an institutional leader, I have attended numerous workshops – this is by far the most outstanding and transformative one”

“The most frame-changing and transformative experience – it changes how I am going to consider my work”

“I realize now that what I have been doing and teaching in the past is completely wrong, and might explain why we get the outcomes that we do”

The experience

Each System Transformation Masterclass module is an intense interactive two-day workshop that will give you deep insights, theoretical principles, powerful frameworks, and hands-on tools that will immediately set you on a pathway to transform your personal and organizational impact.

Who should attend

This is a course for decision makers, strategists, and change-makers who are on a leadership track, who find themselves in dynamic, multi-dimensional, ambiguous, scaled, and complex challenges. This is for leaders who are willing to reframe the game they have been playing, transcend the “Business As Usual”, and build capacity for scaled value creation, resilience, and impact capacity in their teams and organizations.

Prices

We encourage you to take the two modules as a set, but they can be taken as single modules.
Single module price: $3350
Two module bundled price: $5700 (enter the code: TWOMODULE to access the two module bundled price)

Not-for-profit single module price: $2500
Not-for-profit two module bundled price: $4250
(please contact Annette Zou: azou@stanford.edu to access the not-for-profit ticket prices)

Format of the module

Each module is a two-day in-person workshop at Stanford University with a “gap day” between the two for internalizing the big wave of new insights, networking, hatching new plots, or enjoying the Bay Area. Going by our past experiences, your peers in the Masterclass will be as much of a source of information as the instructors are and you are encouraged to join our growing international Systems Leadership community.

The System Transformation Masterclass Series

The System Transformation Masterclass Series is designed to equip leaders and decision makers with a holistic set of techniques, perspectives, and mindsets to play in the systems arena, when change, uncertainty, and scale are important factors. They are System Acupuncture: Rethinking Innovation and Leadership, Designing the Scale Advantage, and Mastering Systems Leadership. Upon completion of all three Modules of the System Transformation Masterclass Series, you will receive a System Transformation Leadership Certificate issued by Stanford ChangeLabs. System Transformation is a deep and extensive field that takes time and practice to develop expertise. The completion of the Masterclass series marks the start of your journey towards System Transformation mastery.

Your Instructor

Banny Banerjee – Director of Stanford ChangeLabs

Banny Banerjee is the Director of Stanford ChangeLabs, which advances innovation methodologies for complex, and scaled challenges. He is well known for his pioneering work in design thinking and more recently his advanced systems based innovation methodology and Systems Leadership models for large-scale transformations in multi-dimensional challenges. The trans-disciplinary nature of his work, which combines design thinking, technology strategy, business innovation, applied social psychology, behavioral economics, diffusion theory, and resilience theory, is pioneering the formation of a new type of innovation: “System Acupuncture”.

At Stanford Banny teaches system transformation, business innovation, design thinking, and leadership. His class on “Innovating large scale system transformations” at the d.school has led students to develop scaled initiatives and set them on leadership tracks. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future’s Council on Systems and Platforms and works with industry leaders in fostering cultures of innovation and Systems Leadership.

A blast from the 90s 🙂