https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k75BnFppdYM&t=423s
From the ISSS Digital youtube channel
Recent Updates Page 4
Metaphorum upcoming webinars
I Figured Out How to Engineer Emergence – Hoel (2025)
Will Carey asked about this blog and two papers in the Permaculture Climate Action! group on Facebook, so I tried to understand it:
I am not certain if it’s revolutionary but it looks consistent to me amnd pretty interesting – and possibly something which better shows the links between strands of systems thinking and strands of ‘complexity’ thinking. As always with these papers, the argument is dependent on certain framings.
As I worked it out, there are seven key points:
1- A system can be modelled as states and transition probabilities (a Markov chain) [this seems to me to be a ‘yes if you frame it in a particular way and can gather appropriate data to support that framing – but this certainly speaks to Requisite Variety]
2. You can group states in every possible way to create higher-level ‘scales’
[Perhaps the neatest bit is how clustering=hierarchy – the hierarchy emerges when you recognise that some clusters are supersets of others, e.g.
Partition A: (1)(2)(3)(4) → each state separate (micro level).
Partition B: (12)(3)(4) → merges 1 and 2 (a bit coarser grained).
Partition C: (12)(34) → merges more (coarser still)]
3. Each scale has its own causal structure. You can score it, based on determinism and degeneracy (links of groupings to effects, and to effects which are meaningfully distinct) – Variety Engineering, in cybernetics
4- Most ‘scales’ are ‘redundant’ – most groupings do not show that grouping parts that way is meaningfully exaplantory. But a few scales provide genuinely new, irreducible causal power. Those few define the system’s emergent hierarchy. So some clusters of ways of seeing demonstrate that grouped features are determinative of outcomes.
5- That hierarchy has a shape, like a rock formation – bottom-heavy, middle bulge, top-heavy, balloon, etc (this is related to the way the concept came to him in a dream! which is fun)
6- You can now deliberately design / tune systems to get the hierarchy shape you want. This is ‘engineering emergence.’ [Again, in Viable System Model terms, that’s a ‘d’oh, yeah, that’s Variety Engineering!’]
7- When causal contribution is evenly distributed across many scales, you get something like scale-freeness, which lines up with ideas from complexity science and self-organising networks.
And the big ideas he floats at the end are that it’s computable to locate and apportion causation across levels – and that if macroscales can have irreducible causal power, this might have implications e.g. for free will.
It’s pretty neat and I can see why the original concept got so many references – this new paper essentially follows very logically but adds a lot of interesting implications! [In an earlier era it would have been used as proof of the existence of God, I think]
Blog [it’s a little… odd?]: Erik Hoel Oct 22, 2025
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/i-figured-out-how-to-engineer-emergence
Original paper:
Quantifying causal emergence shows that macro can beat micro
Erik P. Hoel, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi gtononi@wisc.eduAuthors Info & Affiliations
Edited by Michael S. Gazzaniga, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, and approved October 22, 2013 (received for review August 6, 2013)
November 18, 2013
110 (49) 19790-19795
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1314922110
Significance
Properly characterizing emergence requires a causal approach. Here, we construct causal models of simple systems at micro and macro spatiotemporal scales and measure their causal effectiveness using a general measure of causation [effective information (EI)]. EI is dependent on the size of the system’s state space and reflects key properties of causation (selectivity, determinism, and degeneracy). Although in the example systems the macro mechanisms are completely specified by their underlying micro mechanisms, EI can nevertheless peak at a macro spatiotemporal scale. This approach leads to a straightforward way of quantifying causal emergence as the supersedence of a macro causal model over a micro one.
Abstract
Causal interactions within complex systems can be analyzed at multiple spatial and temporal scales. For example, the brain can be analyzed at the level of neurons, neuronal groups, and areas, over tens, hundreds, or thousands of milliseconds. It is widely assumed that, once a micro level is fixed, macro levels are fixed too, a relation called supervenience. It is also assumed that, although macro descriptions may be convenient, only the micro level is causally complete, because it includes every detail, thus leaving no room for causation at the macro level. However, this assumption can only be evaluated under a proper measure of causation. Here, we use a measure [effective information (EI)] that depends on both the effectiveness of a system’s mechanisms and the size of its state space: EI is higher the more the mechanisms constrain the system’s possible past and future states. By measuring EI at micro and macro levels in simple systems whose micro mechanisms are fixed, we show that for certain causal architectures EI can peak at a macro level in space and/or time. This happens when coarse-grained macro mechanisms are more effective (more deterministic and/or less degenerate) than the underlying micro mechanisms, to an extent that overcomes the smaller state space. Thus, although the macro level supervenes upon the micro, it can supersede it causally, leading to genuine causal emergence—the gain in EI when moving from a micro to a macro level of analysis.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1314922110
New paper [preprint, I’m pretty sure?]:
Engineering Emergence
A defining property of complex systems is that they have multiscale structure. How does this multiscale structure come about? We argue that within systems there emerges a hierarchy of scales that contribute to a system’s causal workings. An intuitive example is how a computer can be described at the level of its hardware circuitry (its microscale) but also its machine code (a mesoscale) and all the way up at its operating system (its macroscale). Here we show that even simple systems possess this kind of emergent hierarchy, which usually forms over only a small subset of the super-exponentially many possible scales of description. To capture this formally, we extend the theory of causal emergence (version 2.0) so as to analyze how causal contributions span the full multiscale structure of a system. Our analysis reveals that systems can be classified along a taxonomy of emergence, such as being either top-heavy or bottom-heavy in their causal workings. From this new taxonomy of emergence, we derive a measure of complexity based on a literal notion of scale-freeness (here, when causation is spread equally across the scales of a system) and compare this to the standard network science definition of scale-freeness based on degree distribution, showing the two are closely related. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to engineer not just the degree of emergence in a system, but to control it with pinpoint precision.
The Future of Systems Thinking Through the Lens of Action Research and Critical Systems Practice – Jackson (2025)
First published: 13 September 2025
https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.3185
ABSTRACT
Systems Thinking has a good track record when applied to improve problem situations confronting decision-makers and other stakeholders. It has developed a range of well-formulated methodologies capable of garnering its various theoretical insights and translating them into successful practice. In some cases, these methodologies have evolved as part of explicit programmes of Action Research. Peter Checkland’s use of the FMA framework to perfect Soft Systems Methodology is the best example. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the FMA framework can be used to throw light on the development of a range of systems methodologies. A case can then be made for those wedded to other methodologies to explicitly adopt and utilize the FMA framework to further improve their own theories and competences. This is not enough, however, to ensure a healthy future for Systems Thinking as a whole. To unify the field and make the best use of the resources it has to offer, Action Research must also be conducted under the guidance of Critical Systems Practice and the EPIC framework.
Available at
Collated resources from the Collective Change Lab – Hudson (2023)
[Kindly shared by Alan on LinkedIn)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11tXTqKfYpsN3NUohIzfC52ETKtwQ7H6fy2QjyO1seCc/edit?usp=sharing
Pulled together by Alan Hudson, 23rd February 2023
Background
As noted in my recent piece on living, learning and loving systems, the work of the Collective Change Lab has been a big inspiration for me over recent years.
A couple of weeks ago, in response to a review of The Systems Work of Social Change, I offered to share my stash of Collective Change Lab resources. A few people expressed interest, so I’ve pulled together the various resources along with my notes on some of the Lab’s wonderful work.
There are other and better entry points to the work of the Collective Change Lab, for instance, here and here. And the September 2022 newsletter on “What does relational systems change mean?” is, I’d suggest, the best piece for someone new to the work of the lab to look at.
However, maybe my sharing will inspire someone else to dive deeper into the work of the lab and the relational work of systems change.
Table of contents
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11tXTqKfYpsN3NUohIzfC52ETKtwQ7H6fy2QjyO1seCc/edit?usp=sharing
The European Union for Systemics 2025 On-Line International Congress 22-24 October 2025
They say:
The European Union for Systemics 2025 On-Line International Congress 22-24 October 2025
https://www.ues-eus.org/2025/
Dear colleagues and friends
We invite you and we shall be pleased to attend on-Line our UES-EUS 2025 International Congress
You can consult the full program of the congress here:
https://www.ues-eus.org/2025/program.html
The Book of Abstracts can be accessed here:
http://www.ues-eus.org/2025/UES2025-Book-of-abstracts.pdf
We also warmly invite you to attend and participate in the sessions throughout the three days of the congress.
Your presence and insights will greatly enrich the discussions and exchanges.
With deep appreciation and warm regards,
Nikitas A. Assimakopoulos – President, Conference Chair
Damien Claeys – General Secretary, Conference Co-chair
Alejandra Acevedo-De-los-Ríos – Conference Co-chair
Email: congress-ues2025@uclouvain.be
https://www.ues-eus.org/2025/
last chance to join the outcomes in complexity version of the Level 7 Systems Thinking Practitioner Apprenticeship – levy funded in England
RIP Bill Torbert
I hear via a lovely tribute from John Watters of Bill Torbert’s death this week. I was introduce to Bill’s work by Peter Cooper, specifically the brilliant Action Inquiry, to which John also refers – a central book for those interested in ‘human development’ in the broadest sense.
He was a hell of a character and absolutely lived life to the full, from his learning direct from Argyris and key collaborations in adult development, to his personal life which he was both incredibly open and interestingly reflective about.
Personally, I was lucky enough to join several webinars of his reflections on his (developmental) autobiography, and some working sessions on application to organisations as a whole. He was very generous with me when I had some questions via LinkedIn.
Bill published in cybernetics explicitly – this excellent piece https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/08/09/learning-for-timely-action-an-introduction-to-the-cybernetics-of-collaborative-developmental-action-inquiry-cdai-torbert-and-erfan-2019-cybernetics-human-knowing/ (see comments if main link doesn’t work). And he directed me to https://stream.syscoi.com/2022/01/21/learning-from-experience-toward-consciousness-torbert-1972-full-book/
As John said, his ethos could be summed up as ‘learning as if life depended on it’. If you want to hear him in action, and I recommend it, try
https://amielhandelsman.com/amiel-show-004-bill-torbert/ on power, framing, and action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVEbAlDaiq0 on ‘a fuller contact with reality’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QECUbokVLEE on the developmental action logics
Global Leadership Associates promise to share details soon about plans to honour Bill.
Nick Kimber on LinkedIn: “Hello. Can anybody point me to a decent accessible history of relational practice/thinking/ leadership (ideally short form)?”
[On LinkedIn, Nick Kimber asked:
Hello. Can anybody point me to a decent accessible history of relational practice/thinking/ leadership (ideally short form)? I’m writing something on test and learn and have a good sense of the background to the emergence of ‘digital’ approaches, but relationalisms history over the last 30/40 years is a bit fuzzier to me. Paging those who know a lot more about this subject than me: Becca Dove Jessica Studdert Simon Parker Anna Randle James Plunkett Dan Honig Osian Jones
There are loads of good responses from people I deeply admire in this space. And as I say below, I was utterly nerdsniped and did a long response – reproduced below.]
I was utterly nerdsiped by this – a seemingly impossible question which seems to bring together everything I’m interested in. So this is a LONG answer to a short question, mostly for my own processing, but it might be of some use to some others….
I love that you want an accesible history and you got a Friday night nerd pile-on. There’s no neat history here because – appropriately – it’s not a ‘thing’, its a weaving of relationships. So this thread’s a live attempt by public service people to reconstruct an intellectual and practical tradition that we’ve all been using, defending, and in some cases selling for 30–70 years – but which, unlike ‘digital’, never wrote itself down in one place. Digital had its origin myths written for it: agile manifesto, lean startup, user-centred design, GDS, service standards, multidisciplinary teams, test-and-learn. There’s a canon and a creation story.
Relational practice never got a canon. It has practitioners, and it’s more about the constellations of individual practitioners than the multivarious origins and developments.
You might get good answers from the folks at Murmurations Journal of Systemic Practice – I think this is really their field.
Others I don’t see tagged include Nairy McMahon – ORSC should be more referenced here – a great bunch of techniques.
Nora Bateson who has things to say about the ‘use’ of this label in this space, her own work, and her heritage.
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations as a core of this work.
June Holley‘ Network Weaving
Obviously deep threads in asset-based community development Cormac Russell
And I’ll tag Anne Bennett Jon Harvey Munira Thobani Stephen Moss Penny Shapland-Chew Lynne Wardle Ed Straw Emma Harewood Roger Duck Jane Searles Nour Sidawi Centre for Relational Care Jane Graham Ray Ison Gerald Midgley Francis Heylighen who all may have things to say. I am missing so many others too!
There’s also relational OD and a whole line of work from Berne’s Transactional Analysis
Not to mention Co-ordinated Management of Meaning which Christine Oliver might say something about (and the ‘conversational’ and design strands of cybernetics, from Pask and Maturana etc – Paul Pangaro)
Constellations work which Ty Francis PhD and Penny might speak on,
And as Pierre E. NEIS points out, in Germany it’s often considered a requirement to be a manager to have training in systemic coaching, roughly from the Bateson/family therapy school.
Dialogic Organization Development Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak
Techno-social systems – Merrelyn Emery, Barry Oshry and human system dynamics (cc John Watters and Jeff Boudro) – both based on observation of familiar disempowering patterns of relationship, and potentially better alternatives.
Bioss and the whole post-Jacques Requisite Organisation and Systems Leadership Theory – an attempted to put hierarchies in service of good relationship.
And the Future Search Network lineage – Sandra Janoff and Michael Donnelly – bringing the whole system into the room to make the relationships central to development.
And then, of course, there’s ethnography which Robin Pharoah has done deep work in and with, which Prof Donna Hall, CBE advocates as centrally important to the Wigan Deal.
Michael Garfield is diving deep into this in a big picture way with his Humans On The Loop project.
So I think that’s why you don’t get one neat PDF, you get 73 comments, 6 reposts, and 40 people tagging each other across social work, care, Cabinet Office, community development, systems convening, complexity leadership, First Nations practice, restorative justice, asset-based community development, trauma-informed work, neighbourhood health, and digital ethics. Which is basically the point: relational practice is sort of lingua franca across public service reform, but its lineage is braided, oral, embodied, and contested.
To declare ‘the history’ would be dishonest, western, and slightly colonial, as Becca Dove correctly points out. But here’s my attempt at a workable map – where, believe it or not, I’ve tried to keep the scope focused 🙂
>> First, what’re we even talking about?
Relational thinking says that what matters is what happens between people, not just what sits inside them or what’s done to them. Problems are not primarily individual pathologies or system failures; they’re patterns of relationship. If you want a change in outcomes, you change the relationships in which those outcomes are produced.
Relational practice is doing work on that basis. It means working with, not doing to. It means recognising that relationships are not just the delivery mechanism for outcomes, they are themselves the outcome – Toby Lowe has been banging that drum effectively for years. You haven’t ‘delivered’ a service because you processed a transaction. You’ve delivered something when trust, capability, safety, agency and connection increased in the actual lives of the people involved.
Relational leadership says leadership is not a heroic individual property, it’s a quality of connection in a system. Mary Uhl-Bien‘s work on relational leadership makes this very explicit: leadership lives in the social glue, not in the org chart. The leader is the person (or team, or network) able to hold the space where people can make sense together and act together across boundaries.
Where did it all come from?
I think you can tell this story in at least three different ways, and the thread surfaces all three at once:
(1) indigenous and restorative traditions that pre-date the bureaucratic state
(2) professional practice inside the welfare state, especially social work and health, and
(3) organisational learning / systems / complexity work on how humans collaborate, especially under pressure.
They overlap, but they’re not the same root.
And, by the way, they’re deeply bound up in many forms of radicalism – communitarianism, socialism, Marxim-Leninism, Maoism, anarchism, Methodism, Ludditism, Trade Unionism/syndicalism, Cooperativism, the whole Human Potential Movement (National Teaching Laboratories, Tavistock and Brunel), post-war therapy and social reconstruction, Shambala, Club of Rome, Esalen, Findhorn, Saul Alinsky, I could go on… forms Judaism, Christianity, I assume very much Islam and the other major religions too.. in any case, the radicalism is what holds so much potential – can also become a barrier to success – and is the flip side of instrumentalised quietism which the ‘tamer’ forms offer (Personally I think both sides of The Big Society – and the work Danny Kruger did on the Civil Society Strategy compared to Covenant and current political positioning (along with his actual work in life) show some of the range and the risk).
And most of the things I link here have what I consider good and bad sides – and are probably *weakest* when they’re acting as a reaction *against* something, even thought that’s the go-to positioning and strongest marketing position!
>>1 The deep root: relationality existed before the state
Multiple people in the thread point out that ‘relational practice’ is not a shiny 2010s innovation. It goes back to First Nations and indigenous practices of community care, repair, accountability and decision making. Restorative practice – now seen in schools, probation, youth justice, even some prisons – comes straight from those traditions. The core moves there are: build and sustain relationship, address harm in the relationship, and repair relationship, with equality of voice and fairness of process. Lesley Parkinson describes this as a workplace philosophy now, but it’s of course older than ‘workplace’ language.
This is important politically. It stops us making the classic arrogant move of pretending white post-war public administration invented “relational”. It didn’t. In fact, you could argue (and several do) that one thing the bureaucratic welfare state did was sever relationships and replace them with transactions; and relational practice is, in part, a later attempt to heal that damage.
>>2 The professional/practice root inside welfare institutions (1950s onwards)
If you look inside health, social work, and community practice, you start to see a more documented strand.
General practice in the NHS used to be deeply relational: cradle-to-grave continuity, actual knowledge of family context, long-term trust. That’s what Anne Marie Cunningham calls out. The shift to ‘access’, often digitally mediated, is experienced by many as a loss of that continuity. The stakes, by the way, are not fluffy. Continuity of care correlates with lower mortality.
Social work (children’s and adults) formalised relationship-based practice early. People like Felix Biestek, Carl Rogers, Gregory Bateson, later Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto on ethics of care – this is 1950s through 1980s – all centring the dignity of the person in context, not the compliance of the case to procedure.
Becca Dove gives a sketch timeline here: Bateson, Rogers and Biestek in the 50s/60s; Miller’s relational-cultural theory and Gilligan/Tronto’s ethics of care in the 70s/80s; then Mary Uhl-Bien on relational leadership in the 2000s; then Geoff Mulgan and Marc Stears’ work in the 2010s on the ‘relational state’. That already looks pretty chronological.
By the 1980s/90s you also get systemic family therapy and social constructionism coming into practice (Shotter, McNamee). The shift here is radical: stop treating ‘the problem’ as located in the individual. See it as a property of interaction in the family, the team, the service environment. That gives you ideas like ‘relational responsibility’ – we are responsible for how we coordinate meaning together, not just for our private intentions.
From there, social work, youth offending teams, trauma-informed work, strengths-based practice, Early Help, Think Family, and asset-based community development (ABCD) all grow as variations. The language differs, the funding streams differ, and the logos on the slide decks differ, but the underlying claim is the same: you get better, fairer, cheaper outcomes when you stay with people in context, build on strengths, and grow capability in relationship instead of passing people between services like radioactive parcels.
There’s also a live line from David Robinson and the Relationships Project through to contemporary relationship-centred practice. This keeps the focus ruthlessly practical: how do you design services so that relationship, not throughput, is the first design principle?
You can see this strand starting to get codified around public sector reform in the UK in the 2000s and 2010s: Hilary Cottam and Charles Leadbeater (flagged by Simon Parker), the work at Demos and Participle, then the ‘relational state’ work at IPPR that Thea Snow points to. That IPPR piece is basically saying: the state should explicitly see meaningful human relationships as both the route to outcomes and an outcome in themselves. That’s not far off Toby Lowe’s current articulation in Human Learning Systems, and Dawn Plimmer is explicit about this in the thread: you need relationships, you need learning, and you need systems. All three.
So by the 2010s, in UK public services, ‘relational’ is no longer only a social work ethic. It’s also an efficiency argument and a governance argument. The claim is: transactional systems generate terrible outcomes at great cost because they are blind to relationship. A relational state would reverse that.
>>3 The organisational / leadership / systems root (1960s onwards)
Alongside that practice lineage, there’s an organisational lineage. This is where OD (organisational development), systems thinking, complexity, and later network leadership live.
In the 1950s–70s you get the first cracks in the way Taylorism (scientific management) and Fordism (assembly-line bureaucracy) were being applied – (both of them, in fact, had another side which we should acknowledge). People like Kurt Lewin, Douglas McGregor (Theory X and Theory Y), Rensis Likert, Edgar Schein, Chris Argyris are all saying, in slightly different ways: you cannot run human systems as if they are machines and expect health. You need participation, psychological safety, inquiry, trust, and the ability to reflect on how we’re working together. Louise Patmore lays this out very clearly in her multi-decade timeline in the thread. All this draws from post-war therapeutic work and the human potential movement as a whole (along with cybernetics, systems, complexity).
By the 1970s–90s you start to get explicit systems and ecological thinking applied to organisations: Miller and Rice on the primary task of the organisation, Bronfenbrenner on ecological systems, Argyris on organisational learning and defensive routines. This is where practice shifts from diagnosis (‘I will fix you’) to dialogue (‘we will learn together what matters’). The move from diagnostic OD to dialogic OD is not cosmetic. It’s a civilisational pivot: from control to conversation.
Then in the 1990s and 2000s complexity science lands in management. Margaret Wheatley, Karl Weick, Patricia Shaw, Mary Uhl-Bien and others start saying publicly what practitioners have muttered privately for decades: organisations are living systems in turbulent environments, not controllable machines. You can’t centrally design the right answer and roll it out. You have to create the conditions for learning, adaptation, and connection across silos. Leadership becomes less ‘I set the vision and cascade it,’ and more ‘I convene the people, hold the tensions, and help the system notice itself.’ That’s where systems convening comes in – Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Etienne Wenger-Trayner et al. – and why people now talk about ‘network weavers’, ‘adaptive space’ (Michael Arena), ‘relational coordination’ (Jody Hoffer Gittell), and so on.
In parallel, self-managed organisations, TEAL, liberated structures, appreciative inquiry, human learning systems, communities of practice, ABCD, and neighbourhood teams are all doing the same basic move in different dialects: stop treating people as units in a programme and start treating them as nodes in a living network.
By the 2010s and 2020s, this strand meets the public service strand. That fusion has names now: Human Learning Systems (Toby Lowe, Dawn Plimmer in this thread, obviously many others), systems convening, adaptive space, collaborative leadership, neighbourhood health models, multiple complex needs teams, serious youth violence collaborations, etc. Gian Durán, PhD is right: the pattern that’s emerging is that the most durable reform work is relational, reflective, and trust-based, not just data-driven.
>>Digital, test-and-learn, and the convergence problem
Now fold in digital.
Test-and-learn in the digital world (alpha/beta, iterate, improve the service, measure the user journey, ship again) gave government permission to experiment in public. That is not nothing. But digital’s ‘user-centred’ move was mostly about the interface between the individual user and the service. (Worthy of note how much of socio-technical systems was about ‘human-computer interfaces’ – originally a BIG picture item, less so later). It optimised the transaction. It smoothed the journey. It made the thing usable.
Relational practice is more ambitious and more unsettling. It says the main unit of change is not the transaction at all. The main unit of change is the relationship between people, in context, over time. Between practitioner and resident. Between resident and their own network. Between frontline workers across organisational borders. Between teams across systems that don’t naturally talk.
That’s why digital alone can’t do this job. You cannot ‘portal’ your way to trust. You need continuity, presence, ethical commitment, emotional labour, mutual accountability, a willingness to sit with someone when they’re chaotic or frightened or angry or ashamed, and a mandate to act across organisational boundaries in response to what emerges in that relationship.
And this is where Human Learning Systems explicitly welds together the relational with the systemic with the experimental. The argument there is: if you want adaptive public services that can face complexity, you need three things working together.
- You need relationships (because that’s where value is created).
- You need learning (because reality is changing faster than your plan).
- You need systems thinking (because what matters crosses organisational boundaries and nobody ‘owns’ it).
So rather than pretending we can design the perfect service model and roll it out, you cultivate places and teams that can notice, learn, adapt, and act together in context. That’s ‘test and learn’, but for whole systems, not just for digital products.
>> Why this matters now
There’s a reason this conversation is catching fire across Cabinet Office, local government, health, social care, community development, evaluation, complexity science, and neighbourhood practice all at once. We’re in a legitimacy crisis. The late 20th century model of public service – cut to the bone, command, control, transact, budget, audit – is visibly failing under the weight of complexity, trauma, inequality, environmental stress, and financial collapse. and “Brexit” and war in Europe and Covid, of course.
We can’t fund, scale, or spreadsheet our way out. We have to regrow civic capacity in place, in relationship, with people, across institutional boundaries. That’s the work on co-production, multiple complex needs, neighbourhood health, Team Around the Child, violence reduction, restorative schools, strengths-based adult social care, place-based partnerships, systems convening. It all smells the same because it all is the same move – that doesn’t mean it all works or is consistent…
>> So, a working summary
Relational practice is not a technique. It’s the rediscovery that the core currency of public value is relationship, not transaction.
Relational thinking says outcomes are generated by networks of relationship, not delivered by programmes acting on individuals.
Relational leadership says leadership is an emergent property of trust, shared purpose, and mutual commitment, not a job title.
Historically, you can trace it (at least in UK public service terms) through:
- Indigenous and restorative traditions of care, repair and accountability.
- 1950s–80s social work (not to mention Community Librarians (John Vincent) etc etc), therapeutic practice, ethics of care, and community health.
- 1980s–2000s attempts inside services to resist and outlive New Public Management and transactional bureaucracy, from Camden to Lambeth to the GLC to Demos to Participle.
- 1990s–2020s organisational learning, systems thinking and complexity leadership, which reframed leadership as convening, holding adaptive space, and enabling distributed intelligence.
- 2010s–2020s fusion work: relational welfare, relationship-centred practice, neighbourhood health, Human Learning Systems, systems convening, adaptive space, relational coordination, trauma-informed and strengths-based practice, and all the place-based stuff people are doing in reality while the paperwork still pretends services are linear.
There’s clearly no single authoritative ‘history of relationalism’. The closest we have in public policy language is probably the IPPR’s ‘relational state’, Hilary Cottam’s Radical Help and earlier Demos/Participle work, plus the social work chronologies people like Becca are pointing to. In organisational practice you get Patricia Shaw’s Changing Conversations in Organizations, Argyris and Schön on organisational learning, Uhl-Bien on relational leadership, Wenger-Trayner on systems convening, and so on. In health you get Mol’s The Logic of Care, the continuity-of-care evidence base, relational coordination, and the relationships-first practice led by people like Robinson.
The fact that no one body ‘owns’ this is not a weakness. It’s the signature. Relational practice spreads the way culture spreads, not the way policy spreads. People learn it, live it, and defend it, often in defiance of the system they nominally work for. BUT the absence of boundaries and controls naturally also means it can veer into unproductive radicalism or be harnessed to dominant interests, it can be charlatanised for control and power or simplified for convenience, it can be done badly.
Which is why, to steal a line from the thread, the real history might now be the thread itself. The system is self-aware enough to say out loud that the work is relational. The next step is whether we’re brave enough to act as if we believe it – and *argue* through what it actually should mean in practice. That would mean – in my opinion – working through what we count as extremes and why they are problematic, defining the ‘golden mean’, identifying the bear pits. The popularity of this thread sort of seems to underline that there isn’t actually enough relationality amongst the people trying to bring this to fruition… it needs and deserves real work at this overview level.
And I now realise I haven’t actually mentioned ‘systems change’, ‘systems leadership’, *actual* systems approaches, Power to Change, A Better Way, Community Catalysts CIC, and so on and so on.
Original thread
SysPrac25 – Reflections on Professionalising Systems Practice
Benjamin Taylor, with support from ChatGPT looking across links to #Syspac24 on LinkedIn
Materials from the conference at www.systemspractice.org/resources-from-sysprac25
Introduction
In September, systems thinkers from around the world gathered at Milton Keynes for SysPrac25 – a two-day Systems Thinking Practitioner Conference co-hosted by SCiO (Systems and Complexity in Organisation), the Open University’s STiP program, and the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR) A household emergency kept me away on day one, so I arrived on day two with equal parts relief and regret – relieved to finally join colleagues, but regretful about the rich sessions I’d followed only through excited hashtags and reported hallway chatter the day before.
This conference mattered a great deal to me. SysPrac25 wasn’t just another academic meet-up; it was a milestone in the evolution and institutionalisation of systems practice. With a world in ‘accelerating, interlocking crises’ (as one attendee noted), the need for systemic thinking in action has never been greater. Yet bridging the gap between knowing and doing systems thinking – between theory and practice, academia and the ‘real world’ – remains a central challenge. The SysPrac25 event squarely addressed this challenge, bringing together 160 participants across sectors to share practical approaches for tackling complexity. In this personal reflection, I’ll recount the experience and insights from day two (with a nod to day one and other highlights shared by others, in quotes), exploring what the conference revealed about our community’s journey toward professionalising systems practice.
(And – sorry – I’d like to report that my house is fine now, but still waiting on the roofers!)
Vibes
Walking into the Open University’s conference centre on day two, I immediately felt the buzz. People were animatedly recounting yesterday’s sessions over coffee. The atmosphere was ‘buzzing’ with energy – a kind of ‘rich, generative space’ that the organisers had intentionally cultivated. Despite missing the first day, I was warmly folded into conversations as if I’d been there all along. It struck me that this was a safe place to think out loud – practitioners and academics openly wrestling with big questions, challenging each other yet offering support. The vibe was one of curiosity and camaraderie in equal measure, with productive dispute very evident too.
Attendees spanned a remarkable diversity of backgrounds. There were veteran luminaries like Professor Ray Ison (IFSR’s president) – and pretty much the entire OU faculty, including Martin Reynolds, who’s contribution and retirement was celebrated in the closing plenary – and Dr. Mike C. Jackson OBE, all chatting casually with early-career professionals and the ‘systems curious’. I met government policy advisors, corporate consultants, NGO workers, academics, and many current Systems Thinking Practitioner apprentices. As one participant observed, ‘the diversity of voices and approaches’ was a highlight – ‘from Patterns of Strategy with Mike Jones & Carla Owens to Humanising Systems with Jan De Visch, and from student case studies to practitioners grappling with real-world challenges.’ It felt like a microcosm of the whole systems community (a healthy version thereof!): all ages, multiple nationalities, and domains from health to climate to business.
Crucially, the mood was positive and practice-focused. Rather than hand-wringing over the state of the world, people here were doing something – swapping tools, stories, and tactics. The event was structured for interaction: two days, four parallel tracks, 48 sessions in total, including hands-on workshops and roundtables. This wasn’t a conference where you just sit and listen; every corner of the venue had impromptu breakout discussions and scribbled flipcharts. As one key organiser (Mike Jones) posted afterward, ‘from workshops and keynotes to practical conversations in every corner — this is what celebrating systems practice looks like.’ The celebratory aspect was real – there was joy in connecting with kindred spirits. People repeatedly described feeling ‘energised and full of ideas’, even ‘inspired’ and ‘excited to keep building this movement.’ For a community often working on complex, even daunting issues, it was heartening to see so much hope and motivation under one roof.
Personally, I felt a strong sense of community at SysPrac25. Perhaps because I missed the first day, I especially appreciated how welcoming everyone was on day two. It’s not easy to craft an environment where newbies and veterans both feel at home, but this conference nailed it. As one attendee put it, ‘the conversations were rich, the challenges real and the connections…are where the magic happens.’ There was a palpable ethos of ‘generous sharing, collaboration and learning’, which is ‘much needed in these challenging times.’ I left with new connections and a sense that our systems practice community is growing – and growing closer.
Key themes/insights
Despite my missing the first half, I managed to catch up on many of the key themes that emerged across SysPrac25. In conversations, plenaries, and tweets about Day 1, and through my full participation on Day 2, a number of common threads became clear:
Professionalising systems practice
A recurring theme was the ongoing quest to professionalise systems practice – to make what we do a recognized, supported profession in its own right. In his keynote, Dr. Ray Ison explicitly ‘challenged us to reflect on professionalising systems practice’. What does it mean to be a ‘systems practitioner’ as a profession, not just a mindset? Part of the answer lies in institutional support. Ray emphasized that the ‘first job of all institutions is to reproduce themselves’ – meaning organisations (universities, governments, companies) often prioritise preserving their own structures and habits. This can make them resistant to new ways of working. In fact, as keynote speaker Alison Guthrie-Wrenn wryly observed, ‘government needs systems thinking…but it is set up to repel it at every turn.’ In other words, we practitioners are trying to bring systemic approaches into institutions whose default is to maintain the status quo. Overcoming that inertia is a professional challenge – but one that wasn’t bemoaned here, just tackled.
But the level 7 (masters-level) Systems Thinking Practitioner apprenticeship is a sign of progress. One international delegate noted ‘I envy UK professionals. Some can now even pursue apprenticeships in systems practice, sponsored by their employers.’ This kind of official pathway is still ‘quite new’ – and now unfunded – but it signals momentum. Indeed, a fellow attendee told me over lunch that he was about to finish his Level 7 Systems Thinking Practitioner qualification, and the conference was a chance to celebrate that milestone. (And several speakers and award-winners were all recent graduates – both Mike Jones and Gavin Roberts had officially qualified as Advanced Systems Thinking Practitioners – with distinction during the week, underscoring how training and practice now go hand-in-hand.)
Ray Ison’s message went beyond just training individual practitioners – he urged the community to push for systemic support for systemic practice. He made an ‘appeal to systemically institutionalise the…design and realisation of context-appropriate learning systems’ – an appropriately fractal challenge, and a vital one given the state of the higher education sector in the UK (traditionally a big source of training and academics), and the UK government’s withdrawal of level 7 apprenticeship funding for new starts from January 2026, meaning that all the positive energy from the apprenticeship now needs to be refocused and find new resources.
In plain terms, we need to embed systems learning into how institutions work, so that cultivating systems practitioners becomes part of the system itself. Professionalising our field isn’t only about certifications or apprenticeships; it’s about creating learning systems that continually develop people with systemic skills. This theme resonated strongly with many of us. It reinforced the idea that being a ‘professional’ systems practitioner means engaging at two levels: improving our personal competencies and working to change the broader structures (policies, job frameworks, funding) that either enable or stifle systemic practice as a career – and as a daily, normal, organisational practice for all.
This is all very well, but I suspect we are in the middle of a liminal period of identity shift. I felt the symbolism of Martin Reynolds’ retirement and the very real challenges facing UK higher education; will higher education and academia continue to be the ‘pump’ for systems capabilities that it once was? And then there was the quality of thinking and depth of shared reference in methods, practice, and theory in the room (without, I hope, being exclusive) – systems thinking can be accessible and practical without being ‘dumbed down’, professional without being codified and stultified. And the need to move to embedded systems practice (even over systems practitioners), action inquiry, networked learning – well, there must be something in the air because this echoes themes from Reimagining Systems Thinking as Cybersystemic Researching: An Invitation to a Cyber-Systemic Co-Inquiry, Ison et al (2025, indeed this week). There was a feeling at the conference, if not of ‘passing the torch’, but of the flame catching on to something.
But we at SCiO know from hard experience that such transitions – which are, after all, transitions of, or threatening to, deeply embedded identities – can come with all the challenges that changing or moving beyond identities brings. We need to be alert to this (which is distinct from ‘finding practitioner identity’ below) and be able to combine single-mindedness of purpose as we cross the ‘marketing chasm’ with the kind of networked support that allows people to renegotiate their identities or identify themselves as remaining on one side of a boundary without rancour. We will, no doubt, return to this topic!
Systemic consulting and practitioner identity
Another rich discussion thread centered on what it means to practice systemic consulting and how we see our identity as practitioners. I ran a session on the role of the systems consultant – often a delicate balancing act. We talked about some provocative dualities describing what systemic consultants might do. We might ‘discuss the undiscussable’ in an organisation, yet also ‘create new possible conversations.’ We might ‘mirror back’ a client’s reality, yet sometimes ‘distort [it] productively’ to help them see fresh perspectives. We can ‘make boundaries explicit’ or deliberately ‘blur [the] boundaries’ – depending on what the situation needs. This list and an exercise looking at a spectrum of systemic consulting practice both elicited knowing chuckles in the room; it rang true to anyone who has juggled the many hats of a systems change agent. The takeaway was that systemic consulting is full of tensions – we operate in paradox, always mindful of when to intervene and when to step back.
The practitioner identity question also came up in an open fishbowl discussion. Are we facilitators? Experts? ‘Connectors’? One attendee’s reflection after the conference really hit home: perhaps our community needs to ‘rethink itself: from frameworks to ways of thinking…from experts to connectors…from theory to story.’ In other words, rather than identifying solely as ‘experts’ wielding specialized methods, effective systems practitioners might better see themselves as bridge-builders – people who can translate between the world of systemic ideas and the everyday world of budgets, targets, and common-sense language. This means being fluent in both, and embracing roles like educator, translator, convenor. It also means using narrative and metaphor (story) to complement models and diagrams, so that our insights become understandable and relatable. I found this perspective both reflective and challenging: it asks us to check our egos (the goal is not to be the smartest person in the room with a fancy framework) and instead focus on creating spaces where systemic insight can emerge for everyone.
Throughout SysPrac25, I sensed a healthy critical eye toward our own practice. In a fireside chat on ‘The Future of Systems Thinking,’ Dr. Mike C. Jackson and Patrick Hoverstadt debated where the discipline is heading. One theme was avoiding insularity – ensuring we don’t become a closed guild speaking jargon to ourselves. As one participant quipped, the world ‘doesn’t need systems thinking to be clever’; it needs it to be useful, usable, and alive in practice. For me, this was a timely reminder that the identity we craft as systems practitioners should be one of humility and service – we succeed when more people can engage with systemic approaches, not when we guard them as elite knowledge.
The Viable System Model and AI/human collaboration
Cybernetics made a strong showing at the conference, especially the classic Viable System Model (VSM) of Stafford Beer. It seems VSM is experiencing a renaissance in current practice, in part due to its relevance for complex organisational and technological challenges. Day one featured a popular workshop by Patrick Hoverstadt on using VSM to ‘balance complexity’ in organisations. Several talks on day two built on this theme. In one, Carola Ritzinger-Roll –proudly giving her first-ever conference presentation – shared her doctoral research applying VSM to cybernetic control in a manufacturing company. She examined how a medium-sized enterprise can structure itself to remain viable and adaptive, using VSM as a framework for its KPI systems. In Carola’s words, she was ‘exploring how the Viable System Model can serve as a framework for cybernetic organisational control’, and was thrilled that her findings ‘sparked valuable interest among participants.’ For a first-time presenter, Carola’s enthusiasm was infectious – and it underscored how VSM offers a practical lens for real-world management challenges.
Another compelling application came from Dr. Matvei Tobman, who focused on AI and human collaboration in healthcare. Matvei proposed that VSM, which ‘does not represent [organisational] structure, but rather the functions of a healthy (viable) system’, can serve as a diagnostic tool to integrate various AI applications within a hospital or clinic. Essentially, because VSM is an abstraction of the human nervous system, it resonates with how a medical organisation might coordinate its ‘organs’ and information flows. Matvei’s talk highlighted concrete issues: deploying AI without a holistic view can create imbalances, bottlenecks, and overloads, potentially destabilising processes. Using VSM helps identify where an AI might fit, or where it could cause a pathology in the organisational body. His memorable quote – ‘Systemic problems require systemic solutions.’ – became a bit of a conference mantra. Indeed, the intersection of VSM and AI emerged as a hot topic: how to ensure that as we add intelligent systems into human organisations, we maintain viability and augment human capacity rather than undermine it.
Beyond VSM specifically, the theme of human/AI collaboration surfaced repeatedly. A couple of talks (by Ollie Bream McIntosh and Dr. Xavier Matieni) sparked conversations about treating AI not just as a tool but as a new kind of actor in our systems. One discussion I joined considered the idea: If we design an organisation’s operating model by defining roles, capabilities, workflows… why not design AI’s ‘role’ with similar clarity? Rather than view AI as a black box, we could specify its decision rights, its boundaries, and how it interfaces with human roles. This practical re-framing – essentially, managing AI like we manage a team member – was thought-provoking. It raises tough questions, of course: Will the existing organisational paradigms suffice, or does AI force us to rethink structures completely? And on a societal level, ‘who is defining AI’s role in society? Do we trust those in power… are they designing for the future we want?’ as one participant poignantly asked. These questions lingered in coffee-break chats. I felt both excitement at the ingenuity of my peers in tackling AI systemically, and a sober recognition that the human choices around AI’s adoption are as critical as the tech itself. If SysPrac25 is any indicator, systems practitioners will be key voices in ensuring AI is integrated in a way that keeps systems humane and viable.
First- and second-order systems literacy
A major conceptual theme – one that got my intellectual synapses firing – was the emphasis on systems literacy, both first-order and second-order. This came through strongly in Ray Ison’s and Mike Jackson’s contributions, and was beautifully articulated by one conference attendee, Yu-Jieh Lin. She reflected: ‘If I had to sum it up in one idea, it is the importance of systems literacy. Both first-order, treating systems as if they exist ‘out there’ and intervening in them; and second-order, recognising that systems are always as if – constructs we bring forth – while also reflecting on our own process of engaging with them.’ In simpler terms, first-order literacy is about understanding systems out in the world (ecosystems, organisations, supply chains, etc.), whereas second-order literacy is about understanding how we understand those systems (recognising our perspectives, biases, and the fact that any system model is our human construct). This dual literacy came up again and again.
Why stress this? One reason is humility. As Yu-Jieh further noted, complexity and uncertainty will ‘always outrun us’ – we can never fully control or predict a living system. But without systems thinking, ‘our attempts at problem-solving would be so much worse’. So first-order literacy helps us do better in complex situations, and second-order literacy keeps us humble and open to learning when our interventions have unintended effects. In one session, Martin Reynolds and other Open University scholars emphasised the idea that there is no observation without an observer – whenever we map a system, we must remember we are in the picture too.
For me, this clicked with my own experience of the conference. The format itself encouraged second-order reflection. In a meta-move, one workshop had us reflect on our learning process during the conference, not just the content. We practiced being aware of how we frame problems and how that framing could shift. This emphasis on learning how to learn systemically is what second-order literacy is all about. It’s almost a form of mindfulness in systems practice – being aware of how we are thinking, not just what we are thinking about. I left SysPrac25 convinced that promoting systems literacy (first and second order) at a broad scale – in education, in organisations – is one of the most impactful things we can do. It equips people not just to use systems tools, but to continuously learn and adapt in complex environments, which may be the ultimate systemic competency.
Institutionalising learning systems
To return to the phrase that stuck with me from Ray Ison’s keynote, ‘institutionalising learning systems,’ Ray challenged us to think about how learning (and failing, and adapting) can be built into the fabric of our organisations and communities. He argued that all boundaries we deal with (between departments, disciplines, etc.) are essentially imaginary – social constructs – but that doesn’t make them meaningless. It means we have the agency to redefine boundaries in service of learning. Ray’s call to ‘design and realise context-appropriate learning systems’ within institutions is a call to action: rather than simply deliver one-off ‘systems interventions,’ we should help create ongoing processes for learning and reflection that persist after we consultants or facilitators depart.
A concrete example discussed was the idea of ‘learning in the flow of work.’ Instead of separating learning from doing (e.g. annual training workshops divorced from daily practice), forward-thinking organisations are trying to embed reflective practices into everyday workflows. One government attendee mentioned their department’s attempt to hold regular ‘systems clinics’ where project teams pause and reflect systemically on active challenges, treating it as part of project work, not an extra. This echoes approaches in agile software and safety management – think of it as systemic retrospectives as a routine. Ray Ison’s perspective, with his background in systemic governance, gave philosophical weight to this: to institutionalise learning systems is to make systemic reflection part of the institution’s DNA.
Another facet is how institutions themselves evolve. I thought about how institutions may need ‘fungal reproduction’ – spreading via spores and mycelium – as opposed to just copying their existing structure. In practice this might mean creating spin-off communities of practice, or ‘infecting’ other departments with systems thinking ideas in an organic way.
The conference itself felt a bit like that fungal spread in action: IFSR, the Open University, and SCiO collaborating to germinate new learning networks. As an attendee deeply involved in SciO and in IFSR, I felt proud that we were not only talking about learning systems but modeling one: the event was a temporary learning system, bringing together a community to reflect on its own practice. The challenge ahead is making sure this doesn’t remain a one-time mushroom bloom, but that it feeds back into our home institutions – that we create lasting systems learning ecosystems wherever we have influence.
Practical methods and tools
True to its promise of systems thinking in practice, SysPrac25 was packed with practical methods and tools. Several sessions were essentially mini-trainings, introducing or honing techniques that we can use in our work. For instance, Carolina Cullington’s workshop on Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) – in just 45 minutes, she managed to give us usable tools to ‘interrogate assumptions and power dynamics’ in problem situations. She walked through defining who the stakeholders and decision-makers are in a scenario, what norms and metrics are in play, and what boundary judgments we might be unconsciously making. Even those familiar with CSH, found the refresher incredibly practical and left with ideas on how to incorporate those probing questions (‘Who ought to be the beneficiary of this system?’ etc.) into their work.
Likewise, classic systems mapping tools got hands-on treatment. In one room, a group was drawing Rich Pictures; elsewhere, someone ran a demo on causal loop diagramming a policy issue. A public sector manager later commented that he ‘came away with fresh insights into how…Rich Pictures, Causal Loop Diagrams and the Viable System Model can help me visualise interdependencies, and the people at the heart of them.’ The emphasis was not on theory but on using the tools – sketching, modeling, debating what the maps revealed about our mental models. Importantly, these techniques were presented not as ends in themselves, but as conversational devices. As Kevin Collins (OU) reminded us in a diagramming session: a systems map is not just a pretty output – it’s a way to surface different perceptions of the system before jumping to solutions.
One of the more novel methods introduced was ‘The 55 Minutes.’ This turned out not to be a time constraint, but the name of a new framework (and book) aimed at bridging the knowledge–practice divide. A team from Canada (George Constantinescu, James Stauch, Daniela Papi-Thornton, Anna Johnson) shared The 55 Minutes as an ‘atlas’ of systems tools and approaches for busy practitioners. They even gamified their talk by quizzing us on Canadian trivia and handing out copies of their book to winners! The core idea is to encourage people to take 55 minutes of focused time to map a problem systemically – essentially a structured zooming-out exercise to reveal patterns and invite deeper questions. The approach pulls from many sources (some attendees recognized elements of soft systems methodology, design thinking, etc.), but it’s packaged in a very accessible way. As James Stauch noted, their aim is to help practitioners and decision-makers take time to zoom out and see the bigger system. This got a lot of positive buzz, because it directly addresses a common issue: how to introduce systemic reflection in organisations that feel they ‘don’t have time’ for it. By the end of their session, the phrase ‘let’s do a 55’ was already entering the conference lexicon as shorthand for a quick systemic inquiry. I suspect many of us will be downloading the free PDF of The 55 Minutes resource (graciously shared by the authors) and trying it out back home.
Between these and other methods (we also saw bits of Soft Systems Methodology, System Dynamics modeling, and the Patterns of Strategy toolkit in action), I was impressed by how tangible and actionable the conference content was. This was not just talk about systems thinking; it was live demonstration. The format – lots of breakouts, short interactive sessions – meant we could actually practice using the tools. For the systems community, which sometimes gets caricatured as all talk and no do, SysPrac25 was a rebuttal: here was ‘systems thinking’ with markers on flipcharts, Post-its on wall charts, and sketches on napkins – messy, real, and applied.
The conference format as a participatory space
It’s worth noting how the conference design itself contributed to these themes. The organisers consciously set up SysPrac25 as a participatory, practice-focused space, and it drew praise from many attendees (myself included). The mix of session types – from keynotes to hands-on workshops to informal ‘open space’ slots – kept energy high and accommodated different learning styles. Plenaries gave us inspiration and big-picture provocations, then the breakouts let us engage directly with ideas and with each other. People remarked that it felt ‘safe to think’ differently and to ask naive questions, which is not always the case at professional conferences. Credit to SCiO and the OU team for this; they intentionally fostered an atmosphere of openness and experimentation.
One novel element was the strong integration of social media and real-time reflection. The conference hashtag #SysPrac25 was actively used by participants to share ‘aha’ moments, quotes, and even photos of flipcharts. Those of us who missed day one benefited from this Twitter/LinkedIn backchannel – I certainly did, scrolling through posts on the train to Milton Keynes. It created a distributed conversation beyond the physical venue, and it also now serves as an archive of insights. During breaks, I saw folks checking the hashtag to catch snippets from sessions they couldn’t attend (with four tracks, we all had FOMO!). In a way, the event lives on as a learning resource through these online reflections. Even IFSR’s official account chimed in to amplify an attendee’s summary that ‘systems problems demand systems approaches’ – a simple message that encapsulated the spirit of SysPrac25.
Lastly, I have to commend the culture of inclusivity, as I experienced it. The organisers set the tone that whether you’re a big-name author or a newcomer ‘currently only systems curious’, your participation was welcome and valued. I spoke with a few first-time conference-goers who were relieved that the space didn’t feel cliquish or overly academic. As one LinkedIn user posted after day one: ‘Sold out. Great energy. And filled with a fantastic community of systems thinkers…this is what celebrating systems practice looks like.’ That pretty much sums it up. It felt like a celebration – not in a superficial way, but a genuine acknowledgement that our field is evolving, maybe even ‘coming of age,’ and that we were all part of that story.
Quotes and visuals
Throughout the conference I jotted down quotes that struck me – pithy insights or provocations from speakers that capture the essence of SysPrac25. Here I’ll share a few that still ring in my ears, alongside some visual mental images from their talks:
- ‘Choose dualities, not dualism.’ – Ray Ison, urging us to avoid either/or thinking and embrace the power of both/and in complexity. Ray gave the example that effective strategy needs both long-term vision and short-term action. His slide contrasting systemic practice (soft) vs systematic practice (hard) as a complementary duality is a classic.
- ‘The machinery, the mindset and the mission.’ – Alison Guthrie-Wrenn titled her opening keynote with this triad, encapsulating why embedding systems thinking in government is so powerful when we get it right, and how challenging it is when we don’t. Her passionate call for systemic change in the public sector – even as she acknowledged the institutional barriers – left a strong impression. She shared a diagram of a government process with feedback loops, which visibly clashed with the linear org-chart lines – a visual gut-check of why new mindsets are needed.
- ‘Systemic problems require systemic solutions.’ – Dr. Matvei Tobman, concluding his talk on AI in healthcare with this straightforward truth. On screen was a VSM diagram of a hospital, highlighting where various AI tools fit. The quote became a kind of refrain for the conference; I saw it tweeted and scribbled on whiteboards more than once. It’s the kind of simple reminder I plan to put on my office wall.
- ‘Such dialogue is what makes events like SysPrac so enriching.’ – Carola Ritzinger-Roll, reflecting on her first conference presentation and the exchanges it sparked. This quote warms my heart because it speaks to the human side of these gatherings – the encouragement, curiosity, and constructive critique among peers. I picture Carola standing by her poster during a break, engaged in animated discussion with a small group – exactly the kind of peer learning that defines SysPrac25.
- (On government and systems thinking) ‘Many people in government value systems thinking, but the institution is set up to repel it at every turn.’ – Alison Guthrie-Wrenn, as recounted by James Stauch. This candid observation brought a knowing laugh from the audience. The accompanying visual was a tongue-in-cheek ‘immune system’ graphic of a bureaucracy fighting off a ‘systems thinking virus.’ It perfectly encapsulated the challenge of institutional change.
- ‘From experts to connectors…from theory to story.’ – Andy Wilkins, on the shift the systems community needs. This wasn’t a slide but part of a reflection he shared but is a quote I keep chewing on: how do I personally act more as a connector and storyteller in my practice? It’s almost a manifesto line for making systems thinking mainstream.
Each of these quotes, in its own way, reflects the ethos of SysPrac25 – provocative, pragmatic, and people-centered.
Many of the slides and recordings of the keynotes are www.systemspractice.org/resources-from-sysprac25
Next steps and reflections
As I step back from the immediacy of SysPrac25 and consider the road ahead, I find myself asking: what’s next for the systems practice community, and how can IFSR help? After all, the IFSR (International Federation for Systems Research) not only co-sponsored the event but also has a mission to advance systems science and practice globally. Here are a few reflections and ideas spurred by the conference:
- Bridging academia and practice: SysPrac25 demonstrated the value of bringing academics and practitioners into the same room (literally and figuratively). IFSR is uniquely positioned to be a bridge here – its very federation includes scholarly societies (like ISSS) and, increasingly, practitioner networks (like SCiO). There was lively conversation on a comment from Patrick Hoverstadt that ‘practice is often ahead of academia’, which was not denied. In any case, both sides benefit from the engagement of the other. As one attendee put it, we need a ‘translation layer…that connects leaders’ everyday challenges with deeper systemic dynamics’.
- IFSR could champion development of this translation layer – maybe through guides or training that help practitioners articulate systemic ideas in boardroom language, or help academics distill their findings into practitioner-friendly tools. In short, IFSR can help make sure the brilliant ideas from systems research actually find traction in practice, and vice versa.
- Supporting working groups and communities of practice: the energy at SysPrac25 shouldn’t dissipate. One idea floated during the closing session was to create ongoing working groups around key themes – e.g. a community of practice on Systems Thinking in Government, another on AI and Systems, another on Education for Systems Literacy. These could operate virtually, continuing the conversations and sharing experiments throughout the year. IFSR, with its global reach, could incubate or endorse such groups, providing a platform (and perhaps modest resources) for them to collaborate – including on Ray’s ‘Institutionalising Learning Systems’ challenge.
- Similarly, a ‘Professionalisation of Systems Practice’ task force could connect folks involved in apprenticeship programs, certification efforts, and competency frameworks across different countries, to learn from each other and harmonize efforts where possible. These initiatives would show IFSR’s commitment to fostering practitioner networks, not just theoretical discourse.
- Advancing systems literacy Initiatives: several voices at SysPrac25, especially from the Open University contingent, underscored the need for broader systems literacy in society. First- and second-order literacy, as discussed, is like a foundational competency for the 21st century. IFSR could play a convening role in bringing together educators, government trainers, and community leaders to strategise on spreading systems literacy. Could there be a global ‘Systems Literacy for All’ initiative, analogous to STEM literacy campaigns? Also, IFSR’s member organisations might partner with schools and professional bodies to integrate systems concepts into their curricula or professional development. The conference gave us success stories (like the UK apprenticeship) but also warnings – e.g. funding for some programs is ending, as one attendee lamented. IFSR might advocate to policymakers about the importance of sustaining support for systems education. In sum, if we believe, as many at SysPrac25 did, that ‘systems thinking [is] one of the things the world needs most right now’, then scaling up basic literacy is a critical mission.
- Institutionalising systems learning (Inside IFSR and Beyond): At the meta-level, IFSR can take a page from Ray Ison’s book and examine its own role as an enabler of learning systems. The federation could facilitate more cross-pollination among its member groups so that learning about successful (and failed) systemic interventions is shared widely. Perhaps the next IFSR Conversation series could explicitly focus on learning from practice: bringing practitioners and researchers to jointly reflect on cases where systemic change efforts succeeded or floundered, extracting lessons about institutional factors. IFSR might also help develop evaluation frameworks for systemic interventions – something practitioners sometimes struggle with – by leveraging academic expertise. This would help institutionalise learning by creating feedback loops: after a project, reflect and evaluate systemically, then feed that knowledge into improved practice. As a federation, IFSR can encourage each member institution to become a learning system in its own right, modeling what we preach.
- Future conferences and collaboration: the enthusiastic response to SysPrac25 suggests it shouldn’t be a one-off. The next planned event:
𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰e, 𝟮𝟰-𝟮𝟲 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝘂𝗹𝗹, 𝗨𝗞
Hosted by the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀, 𝗦𝗖𝗶𝗢, and the 𝗢𝗥 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆, with input from a broad conference committee including members of the UK government’s Systems Thinking Interest Group (STIG), and the IFSR, this event promises to be a unique opportunity to connect across communities, share diverse perspectives, and explore both the foundations and future frontiers of systems practice.
You can expect:
• Engaging conversations across methodologies and approaches
• New insights on emerging trends and global challenges
• Opportunities for learning, sharing, and professional networking
• A vibrant mix of practitioners, academics, and systems leaders
Whether you’re systems curious, deeply embedded in systems practice or just beginning your journey, this is a moment to come together, learn from each other, and help shape the future of the field.
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
This conference aims to do things differently, bringing together in lively debate systems academics and public and private sector systems practitioners. We’re looking for 250-word proposals for:
• Introductory training sessions for the systems curious
• Interactive workshops using systems thinking to address real-life predicaments
• Case studies showing systems thinking in practice
• Papers advancing systems theory and systems methodologies
• Poster presentations demonstrating systems thinking in practice
Preference will be given to proposals that bring together theory and practice in innovative and engaging ways suitable for a conference that combines researchers and practitioners of varying levels of experience.
𝗗𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗘 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗦𝗨𝗕𝗠𝗜𝗦𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡: 𝟭𝟮𝗧𝗛 𝗗𝗘𝗖𝗘𝗠𝗕𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱
Please send your name, organisation, and summary with any queries to: Systems.Conference@hull.ac.uk
On a personal note, as someone who is involved in the worlds of practice and teaching, and learning from action, SysPrac25 left me with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. Yes, we have a long way to go to fully professionalise this field and embed systemic thinking in our institutions (see my LinkedIn post). But the conference showed we’re on our way – we have champions at high levels and grassroots alike, and a hunger for more connection and shared learning. The IFSR, in my view, can be part of the connective tissue that holds this burgeoning community together and helps it grow. By continuing to nurture spaces like SysPrac25 and the initiatives that spin out of it, the IFSR will be doing exactly what its president, Ray Ison, urged: ‘reproducing’ the conditions for systemic learning, again and again, in ever wider circles.
In closing, I’ll echo a sentiment expressed during the conference wrap-up: we are not alone in this work. One attendee said, ‘I am grateful for the conversations, inspired by the people, and excited to keep building this movement.’ That pretty much sums up my feeling. The SysPrac25 gathering affirmed that around the world, a community of systemic doers and thinkers is emerging, ready to tackle complexity with both head and heart. The challenge and opportunity now is to support each other – through networks like IFSR – so that systems practice not only evolves, but truly institutionalises as a mainstream approach for making a better world. After these two intense days (and yes, even with missing one!), I am more convinced than ever that we’re on the right trajectory. There’s so much more to do, as Mike Jones said, but we have momentum and we have each other. And that gives me great hope for the future of systems practice.
Reimagining Systems Thinking as Cybersystemic Researching: An Invitation to a Cyber-Systemic Co-Inquiry – Ison et al (2025)
Ray Ison, Pamela Buckle, Nam Nguyen, Rika Preiser, Philippe Vandenbroeck, Louis Klein
First published: 13 October 2025
https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.3189
ABSTRACT
This paper reimagines the future of systems research as an enacted cybersystemic praxis that moves beyond traditional notions of systems thinking. We argue that systems research is best understood as a reflexive, embodied and situated practice that integrates systemic sensibilities, systems literacy and capabilities in (cyber)systemic co-inquiry. Drawing on insights from systems theory, cybernetics, complexity science and process philosophy, we critique the limitations of goal-seeking behaviours and advocate for a shift towards purposeful, co-inquiry-driven approaches to systems research. Our analysis foregrounds the role of conversation, relational agency and ethical responsibility in systems thinking, highlighting how systems research can be institutionalised as a dynamic practice that fosters transformative change within ongoing, conducive governance arrangements. Written from the perspective of the current executive committee (EC) members of the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR), an invitation is extended via this paper to join a cybersystemic co-inquiry into the future of systems research, encouraging practitioners to engage with a meta-level praxis that enables bridging of new modes of knowing, governing and society transforming. Through this paper, we call for a renewed commitment to cybersystemic thinking that enables new forms of knowing and acting in the Anthropocene, positioning systems research as a vital practice for navigating complex global challenges.
Pacing Changes, Appreciating Approaches to Systems and Designing | RSD14 – David Ing
October 13, 2025 daviding
Refreshing a Curriculum in Systems Thinking and Social Systems Designing for Learners in a Graduate Program – David Ing
October 11, 2025 daviding
Is there someone who writes about systems thinking and disability I should read? (Skeet from Yvonne Lam on Bluesky)
On Bluesky ( https://bsky.app/profile/yvonnezlam.bsky.social/post/3m2z53e3ee226 ), Yvonne Lam @yvonnezlam.bsky.social asks:
Is there someone who writes about systems thinking and disability that you’d recommend I read? Consider this a wide net; I don’t know quite what I’m looking for, so I can’t ask a more focused question…
If you have any answers, respond to her direct here: https://bsky.app/profile/yvonnezlam.bsky.social/post/3m2z53e3ee226
I said
It’s a good question! I was seized when I heard https://stream.syscoi.com/2024/04/01/history-of-philosophy-without-any-gaps-442-scott-williams-on-disability-and-the-new-world/ that there is a strong overlap but I don’t know and can’t find a ‘canonical thinker’ in this space. Perhaps because much disabilty work is inherently systems related?
I fought with ChatGPT to get the below but I think my quote holds!
—
## Recommended thinkers & links
**M. Battle-Fisher**
Uses systems science, complexity, public health and ethics to frame health, inequality and structural forces as entangled systems.
- Personal / professional homepage: [https://www.mbattlefisher.com/](https://www.mbattlefisher.com/) ([Battle-Fisher][1])
- Google Scholar / publications: [https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=F41BXiYAAAAJ](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=F41BXiYAAAAJ) ([Google Scholar][2])
- Key article: *“Complex Health Inequality”* — frames health disparities as structurally complex systems. [https://aquila.usm.edu/ojhe/vol17/iss1/3/](https://aquila.usm.edu/ojhe/vol17/iss1/3/) ([aquila.usm.edu][3])
- TEDx talk: *“Can a systems thinking curriculum improve health outcomes?”* → [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mULhx22mjjM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mULhx22mjjM) ([YouTube][4])
**Dan Goodley**
A central figure in critical disability studies. His work helps supply the language of exclusion, normativity, relationality, and social justice that any rigorous system must absorb.
- University of Sheffield profile: [https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/education/people/academic/edu/dan-goodley](https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/education/people/academic/edu/dan-goodley) ([University of Sheffield][5])
- *Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction* (survey / foundational text): [https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/disability-studies/book286769](https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/disability-studies/book286769) ([SAGE Publications][6])
- *Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism*: [https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203366974/dis-ability-studies-dan-goodley](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203366974/dis-ability-studies-dan-goodley) ([Taylor & Francis][7])
- Podcast interview (“Disability, Social Models, Technology”): [https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2021/11/1/dan-goodley-disability-social-models-technology-interdependece-on-being-human-podcast](https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2021/11/1/dan-goodley-disability-social-models-technology-interdependece-on-being-human-podcast) ([Then Do Better][8])
**Rod Michalko**
Writes from lived experience (blindness) and offers philosophical, narrative, sensory, ontological insight. Less about system equations, more about internal / relational systems.
- Wikipedia / overview: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Michalko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Michalko) ([Wikipedia][9])
**Tanya Titchkosky**
Focuses on space, access, meaning, embodiment, and how environments / infrastructures become exclusionary.
- Wikipedia summary: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Titchkosky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Titchkosky) ([Wikipedia][10])
- *The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning* (PDF / excerpt): [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tanya-Titchkosky/publication/303419533_The_Question_of_Access_Disability_Space_Meaning/links/5b9a694245851574f7c3d216/The-Question-of-Access-Disability-Space-Meaning.pdf](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tanya-Titchkosky/publication/303419533_The_Question_of_Access_Disability_Space_Meaning/links/5b9a694245851574f7c3d216/The-Question-of-Access-Disability-Space-Meaning.pdf) ([ResearchGate][11])
**Fiona Kumari Campbell, Shelley Lynn Tremain**
They don’t always work in explicit systems thinking, but their structural, normative and critical work is essential for quality modelling of disability systems.
- Campbell’s *Contours of Ableism* is often cited in disability theory bibliographies (see disability studies bibliographies) ([Academia][12])
- These names appear frequently in disability studies bibliographies linking power, normativity, technology and exclusion. ([Academia][12])
—
## How to use this set
- Start with **Battle-Fisher** if you want someone closest to systems thinking and equity in the health / institutional domain.
- Use **Goodley** to ensure your systems approach includes critical theory: power, exclusion, relationality etc.
- Use **Michalko**, **Titchkosky**, **Campbell**, **Tremain** to ground models in lived experience, space, embodiment, and normative critique.
- When you build a systems map (agents, feedback loops, flows) overlay the language from disability studies (ableism, exclusion, voice) so your model doesn’t flatten those dimensions.
- Always check whose voice is excluded by your model (e.g. marginalized populations, minoritized groups) and iterate.
If you like, I can format this into a polished one-page PDF with clickable links. Do you want me to produce that now?
[1]: https://www.mbattlefisher.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Battle-Fisher”
[2]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=F41BXiYAAAAJ&utm_source=chatgpt.com “Michele Battle-Fisher”
[3]: https://aquila.usm.edu/ojhe/vol17/iss1/3/?utm_source=chatgpt.com “\”Complex Health Inequality\” by Michele Battle-Fisher”
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mULhx22mjjM&utm_source=chatgpt.com “Can a systems thinking curriculum improve health outcomes …”
[5]: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/education/people/academic/edu/dan-goodley?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Professor Dan Goodley | Education | The University of Sheffield”
[6]: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/disability-studies/book286769?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Disability Studies: An interdisciplinary introduction. – Sage Publishing”
[7]: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203366974/dis-ability-studies-dan-goodley?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Dis/ability Studies | Theorising disablism and ableism | Dan Goodley |”
[8]: https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2021/11/1/dan-goodley-disability-social-models-technology-interdependece-on-being-human-podcast?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Dan Goodley: disability, social models, technology … – Then Do Better”
[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Michalko?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Rod Michalko”
[10]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Titchkosky?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Tanya Titchkosky”
[11]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tanya-Titchkosky/publication/303419533_The_Question_of_Access_Disability_Space_Meaning/links/5b9a694245851574f7c3d216/The-Question-of-Access-Disability-Space-Meaning.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com “The QuesTion of Access: DisAbiliTy, spAce, MeAning”
[12]: https://www.academia.edu/70507458/Disability_Studies_A_Bibliography?utm_source=chatgpt.com “(PDF) Disability Studies: A Bibliography”
International Systems Sciences Society – Mini Symposia 2025-2026
https://www.isss.org/mini-symposia-2025-2026/
The speaker schedule is posted below so please check back regularly. We always send out email reminders to current and past ISSS members with an alert for the upcoming sessions.
Sessions, until Dec 31, 2025, will be held each Thursday at 17.00 UTC.
Please use a timezone converter such as the one below to convert this time to your location.
Timezone Converter
The Zoom link will remain the same until December 31
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89582961108
| Date | UTC Time | Presenter | Title | Abstract |
| 9 Oct | 17:00 | Paul Pangaro | Cybernetics Escapes the Laboratory: Cybernetics as Anti-Wicked Praxis | When members of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University were invited to initiate a “laboratory” to situate their research, many probative questions arose for today’s presenter: If Cybernetics is a discipline that forefronts effective action in the world rather than pursuit of verifiable knowledge—then what is a “Laboratory for Cybernetics”? That puzzle loomed larger than the School’s requirements for launching any new lab: Could its mission be defined in connection to the School’s 21st-century pedagogy of climate change, social justice, and artificial intelligence? Yes—bring it on. Can there be at least three research projects consistent with its mission? Not a problem. Can it identify future funding to support the lab? Will do.Launched in January 2025, the Laboratory for Cybernetics (Lab4C) opened its virtual doors with a semester-long studio course, an ecosystem of documents, and a dose of audacity. Engaging Wicked Challenges is its studio course, serving as an on-ramp to its digital resources and scaffolding student-scholars to collaborate with its human resources, that of in-world practitioners, all to support addressing “wicked challenges.” Lab4C’s 2025 Cybernetics Prize has awarded $5000 for the best design proposal that embraces Heinz von Foerster’s “Ethical Imperative”, that is, increasing human agency and human potential through design. The most ambitious project of Lab4C may be Re-Braiding Cybernetics & AI, intent on bringing the two fields into conversation and even cooperation, catalyzed by a book exhibit, a symposium, and a publication, all occurring in 2027.Today’s mini-symposium begins with glimpses into the intentions and projects of Lab4C and segues to the proposal of “praxis-sourcing”, an evolutionary model for impact that is not confined to a single laboratory. Can a cybernetic approach to “designing design” across a collective of organizations—academic design programs yet also NGOs and corporations—better untangle our 21st-century’s wicked challenges? How might we define the necessities for 21st-century design education? What advantages would come from bridging the boundaries of disciplines, geographies, and generations?While much neglected, Cybernetics has recently been called out as something to revive, to teach, to practice, to help a world gone wild. What degree of practicality, in balance with an appropriate scale of audacity, forms an energetic tension for an open-source, anti-wicked praxis of Cybernetics, to respond to the wicked pandemics of our time? |
| 16 Oct | 17.00 | John Ingram | The Food System and Food Systems ThinkingSystemic innovation for food system transformation | The 45 minute presentation will introduce how adopting a systems approach helps to identify how to transform food system outcomes related to health and other social and economic interests, and the environment. This draws on an understanding of the wide range of food system activities from primary production through to consuming food, the actors involved, and the drivers that influence their decisions. In addition to considering the consequences of these activities on the range of outcomes, the presentation will highlight how, in turn, these outcomes need to be better balanced given the inherent trade-offs within the ‘diets-health-climate’ discourse. To this end, the presentation will unpack the notions of ‘food system’, ‘food system thinking’ and ‘transforming the food system’. Using the BeanMeals project as an example, it will stress the need for ‘systemic innovation’ involving the food system actors and public and private policy makers, and the food system challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. It will close with asking the questions of how the food system approach can contribute to systems thinking and how systems science can enrich food system thinking. |
| 23 Oct | 17.00 | Abel Mavura | Resilience and Participatory Urban Futures: Systems Approaches to Migration and Informal Housing | This presentation examines how displaced populations build resilient communities within informal urban housing, focusing on the adaptive strategies migrants develop in restrictive environments. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in Paris for a PhD in Development Studies specialising in Migration, the researcher traced the lived experiences of young male migrants, revealing how agency and resilience emerge under precarious conditions. Part of this work received the 2025 Margaret Mead Memorial Award from the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) for advancing systems thinking and social justice in migration studies.Building on this foundation, ongoing research at the University of Cambridge investigates how spatial design, community planning, and social networks foster a sense of “home” for displaced populations. The study applies systems science to conceptualise resilience as a dynamic property emerging from the interplay of individual agency, collective solidarity, and systemic exclusion (Holling, 2001; Masten, 2014). It also integrates Lefebvre’s (1996) Right to the City and Harvey’s (2012) Urban Commons to examine how migrants exercise spatial agency, collective governance, and resistance to exclusionary urban policies.Using mixed methods including spatial mapping, co-creation workshops, and scenario planning, the study evaluates informal housing models such as Fender Squat, Canal Saint-Denis, and La Kunda. Informed by Turner’s (1976) community-driven design and contemporary work by UN-Habitat (2020) and Awuor (2019), it positions migrants as co-producers of urban commons rather than passive recipients of aid.Amid rising global migration and urbanisation, the project offers practical insights for policymakers, planners, and architects seeking inclusive, adaptable urban spaces. The presentation shares findings from Paris, introduces emerging Cambridge research on participatory urbanism, and proposes a “systemic inclusivity” framework integrating built-environment design, social networks, and equitable governance. Visual case study materials will enrich dialogue and invite attendees to explore how systems science can shape more just, adaptable urban futures for displaced populations. |
| 30 Oct | 17.00 | Roelien Goede | Introducing Critical Systems Heuristics 2.0: A Third Boundary Extending CSH From Reflections on Critical Realism in Information Systems Research | Poorly designed information systems compel employees to find workarounds for the system in order to do their work properly. However, such workarounds compromise the enforcement of organisational governance. In our sense-making of this specific phenomenon, we considered critical realism as a framework for understanding based on its adoption in the information systems research community. Traditionally, critical systems heuristics considers two boundaries: resources versus environment and involved versus affected. For a third boundary, we propose reflecting on the potential causal structures in organisations and possible feedback loops with a view to uncover more conditioned realities and to better understand the unintended consequences of activities of a system. We advocate complementarism at the methodological level, where all methods are applied from a critical ontological perspective, focusing on the totality of conditioned realities and giving a voice to the affected. We hope that our extension, CSH 2.0, can achieve even greater recognition and acceptance of the core tenets of critical systems heuristics, namely, the totality of conditioned realities, and the impact of unintended consequences on those affected but not involved in the planning of a system. |
| 6 Nov | 17.00 | |||
| 13 Nov | 17.00 | |||
| 20 Nov | 17.00 | |||
| 27 Nov | 17.00 | |||
| 4 Dec | 17.00 | |||
| 11 Dec | 17.00 | |||
| 18 Dec | 17.00 | |||
| JAN | ||||
| Feb | Mark Enzer | |||
| Mar | Andreas Nicolaides | Speciation through Genomic Reorganisation: The Phylogenetic Meta-Programme Hypothesis | Darwin’s On the Origin of Species left unresolved the problem named in its title: how new species arise. The Modern Synthesis, though uniting Mendelian genetics with natural selection, has produced no coherent theory of speciation. Instead, evolutionary biology has accumulated a patchwork of mechanisms, often treating anomalies—such as long periods of evolutionary stasis, apparently sudden transformations, reticulated phylogenies (branching complicated by cross-lineage gene flow), and recurrent hybridisation (interbreeding between distinct lineages)—as exceptions rather than signals of a deeper order.This presentation introduces the Phylogenetic Meta-Programme Hypothesis: the claim that speciation is not the incidental by-product of auxiliary processes linked to natural selection, but is structured by higher-order regulatory systems, encoded in the germline, that govern the mode and tempo of evolution. These are not fixed typological essences but dynamic, multi-scale architectures intrinsic to life’s organisation. Framed within the broader perspective of Genomic Essentialism, the hypothesis advances the view that biological organisation is driven by genomic programmes that are constitutive of life itself, rather than by emergent properties alone.Four systemic functions illustrate this architecture:1. Initiators: timers and triggers that delimit and precipitate transformation, including tandem-repeat turnover, germline resets, hybridisation, duplication, and viral invasion.2. Generators: mechanisms that expand and rewire genomic material, such as bursts of transposons, endogenous retroviruses, segmental duplications, retrocopying, and 3-D architectural change.3. Coordinators: processes that synchronise transformations across populations, including viral and symbiotic dynamics and germline programmes that align thresholds.4. Stabilisers: systems that preserve lineage coherence, such as centromeric divergence with drive suppression, piRNA surveillance, inversions, supergenes, imprinting, and incompatibility complexes. These functions do not direct development itself but transform the regulatory logic that structures it. In this sense, the system constitutes a meta-programme: a higher-order genomic architecture that converts existing developmental programmes into novel ones, linking organisms across space and time. Crucially, they also resolve the anomalies: stasis reflects stability maintained by stabilisers, sudden transformations occur when initiators cross thresholds, reticulated histories arise from coordinating processes across lineages, and hybrid dysfunction stems from divergence in stabilising systems. On this basis, the hypothesis yields distinctive predictions: genomic turnover should track clade-specific tempos of speciation; bursts of mobile elements and duplications should cluster around radiation events; shared viral or symbiotic agents should generate concordant genomic change; and hybrid dysfunction should correlate with divergence in coherence-preserving systems. Evolutionary anomalies, on this view, are not noise but signatures of a genomic meta-programme in action. |
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