Business family members face challenges related to exposure to diverse role expectations and systems logics, the management of which often results in situations of high complexity, dilemmas, and paradoxes. To address these issues, in this paper we combine key insights from social systems theory with systemic family coaching tools such as “internal maps,” the “expectation carrousel,” and the “tetralemma.” In drawing on an illustrative example from a family business succession planning context, we demonstrate how systemic approaches may help business family members to (a) creatively reflect on both the personal and interpersonal expectations they are confronted with and (b) manage issues of decision-making in dilemmatic or paradoxical situations.
Why is humanity heading for self-destruction and planetary devastation? Why are so many problems –climate crisis, hunger, migrations, organized crime, inequality, desertification, pollution, etc.– out of control and getting worse? These high-complexity problems involve large numbers of actors, conflicts, issues, interpretations and cultures, and require pulling together knowledge from widely different sources to be possibly governed. Yet the master paradigm that has ruled humanity over the last four centuries –i.e., Cartesian, analytical or simplifying thinking– makes this practically impossible because of its principles of separation, reduction and abstraction that are embodied in today’s scientific disciplines. The Participatory Innovation (PI) Praxis offers a viable alternative, within the emerging post-Cartesian paradigm of systems thinking or complex thinking. PI’s theory comes from key systems thinkers: Ackoff, Ashby, Beer, Ozbekhan, Morin and Schein; its empirical grounds, from experiences in many fields and places, including hundreds of innovations. PI makes high-complexity challenges understandable and governable through methodical design and implementation of consensus social-cultural transformations, by using the astounding capacities of human minds and natural language to process complex meanings. This article illustrates the method with 25-year impacts of two cases in Chile. It closes by discussing implications for policy and for cultural and civilizational matters.
Probably not. The economist Kelly Shue argues that E.S.G. investing just gives more money to firms that are already green while depriving polluting firms of the financing they need to get greener. But she has a solution.
Keep in mind this is from Stephen J Dubner, the man who published Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (in multiple parts) on the same channel – https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-hate-the-koch-brothers-part-1/
However, this is worthy of consideration as an example of system thinking, I believe…
A murmuration of starlings in southern Israel. Photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters
Jamie Daviesis professor of experimental anatomy at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself (2014).
Jim talks with Alicia Juarrero about her new book Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. They discuss Aristotle’s four causes, applying them to complex dynamical systems, the overfocus on efficient cause, naive Newtonianism, nothing-but-ism, reconceptualizing causality in terms of constraints, mereology, constraint regimes, ascribing causal powers to emergent properties, the roots of panpsychism, Searle’s comparison of consciousness with digestion, kinds of constraints, the Dysons’ notion of analog control, why analog is more efficient, identity as a set of interdependent constraints, surface vs deep dyslexia & early neural nets, the work of Geoffrey Hinton, the species competitive exclusion principle, cardinality vs ordinality, the social evolution of cassava, Rayleigh-Benard convection, dissipative systems, Alicia’s disagreement with Michael Polanyi, the architecture of the circulatory system, scaffolding, top-down causality, many-to-one transitions, degeneracy, pluripotentiality, the ship of Theseus, 4E cognitive science, and much more.
Alicia Juarrero, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College (MD), is the author of Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT 1999) and co-editor of Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South (ISCE Publishing, 2007), and Emergence, Self-Organization and Complexity: Precursors and Prototypes (ISCE Publishing, 2008).
My comment:
A very good episode, once again underlining the continuity across systems | cybernetics | complexity – but/and also sometimes lacunae of referencing. No references to Maturana and Varela‽ I was kinda shouting 'structural coupling! structural coupling!' in my head at times!
— Benjamin Taylor (cis) @antlerboy@mastodon.social (@antlerboy) July 17, 2023
A very good episode, once again underlining the continuity across systems | cybernetics | complexity – but/and also sometimes lacunae of referencing. No references to Maturana and Varela‽ I was kinda shouting ‘structural coupling! structural coupling!’ in my head at times!
And you literally talked about ‘circular causality’ without a reference to cybernetics at all? It strikes me as really odd – a loss of connection across the field. In any case, it’s clear that Juarrero is a great systems thinker and cybernetician ‘as well as’ complexity thinker.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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