International Society for the Systems Sciences: Journals ISSS
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Leaders of Change: Social entrepreneurship and the creation of ecologies of solutions
No full textThe line of inquiry on evolutionary learning communities (ELCs) to promote evolutionary development (ED) seeks to identify the conditions by which people can self-organize to learn, design and implement actions that will improve their quality of life and their socio-ecological milieu. In the Fall of 2007, the Universal Forum of Cultures took place in the city of Monterrey, Mexico. This UNESCO sponsored world event offered an opportunity to implement an evolutionary learning community with local citizens to bridge the knowledge of the Forum with the sustainable development needs of the local community. Over two hundred citizens responded to the call to join the “Leaders of Change” initiative. The ELC was conceived as a group of potential social entrepreneurs who came together to learn, identify possibilities, and support each other in the development of projects to translate their vision into action. This article reports on the design, process, and outcomes of the 8 month action-research project as well as the outcomes, reflections from the experience and implications for future research
Satellite System Problems in Mexico
No full textThe Mexican government managed its satellite system from 1985 to 1996. After that Satmex, a private company was contracted. For financial and administrative problems it has not been possible to replace the satellites that go out of service in 2011 (Solidaridad II) and 2013 (Satmex 5) For this reason the Mexican government, at the end of 2011, announced through the Secretaria de Comunicaciones y transportes (SCT) that the Mexsat system would commence under the control of pubic administration. However is not possible in such a short time to solve this problem due to the risk that Mexico could lose a geo-stationary orbit. The goal of this work is to avoid situations like this, promote public and private investment, provide an efficient, fast, safe and cheap service that meets the demands of users. To achieve this, we need technology management, which allows making new proposals according to the needs of the country. This management involves: political, social and economic fields. A planning model will be proposed with a systemic approach based on planning models including those of George Stainer, Russell Ackoff in order to detect system problems, causes and propose strategies and solutions for the technological management of the Mexican Satellite System. This will be based on the standards, conventions and national regulations of international satellite communication systems, to rationalize the system of knowledge to make an impact on this country's technological developmen
Identifying Actors in Political Activism over Twitter
No full textRecently, internet social media has been championed as an important tool for political activism and democracy. Many models exist for various types of group action, with many inspired by Granovetter's threshold model of collective action, but these models don't distinguish between the effects of specific types of actions. I begin with a network model of collective action for Twitter and interpret it for cascades of retweets during recent political activism for various roles. Although identities are easiest to understand strictly by the labels we use to denote them, I will show how identities iterate over practice and labels in this community. By connecting characteristics of network models and previous analysis of retweets, I will show how a person's history influences his or her actions and how those actions dictate chosen identities
TEACHING LIVING SYSTEMS AWARENESS AS A CHANGE AGENT SKILL FOR A VIBRANT SUSTAINABLE WORLD
No full textHow can we design learning experiences so that they mimic an ecological, living system? How can learners fully experience the group as a living, vibrant, organic whole and unleash its creative? The process of stimulating “living systems awareness” and self-organizing creativity in learning communities, such as any courses, workshops, or conferences, is a truly integrative challenge that involves multiple dimensions of learning experience design: how we set up the visible and invisible learning space (structural-spatial dimension), how we pace and allow for flow according to nature’s rhythms (rhythmic-temporal dimension), how we allow for creative expression from the whole person (expressive-extrarational dimension), how we encourage the mind to understand and utilize systems analysis and systems design across disciplines (cognitive-rational dimension), and how we integrate this awareness in our practice (practical dimension). If all these aspects mimic and stimulate living systems dynamics, learners are more likely to co-create life-sustaining ideas, designs and structures. Particularly, there is value in nurturing autopoiesis in the classroom, which is a process of self-organizing, self-renewing development in living systems. When a system has a semi-permeable boundary, when there is rich information and resource exchange within that boundary, and when the system draws inspiration from its environment outside the boundary, something new arises that is greater than any participant could have come up with on their own. In order to revert the downward spiral of the industrial growth society, we urgently need to develop a multitude of life-sustaining innovations and regenerative design ideas in education. Because of the fragile state of the planet, an autopoietic approach to teaching is very timely. By integrating living systems awareness through multiple ways of knowing, learners can internalize the principles and processes that sustain all life on earth more fully and are therefore better prepared to take action in an increasingly unpredictable world. This paper explores how to utilize the principles of living systems as metapatterns to guide instructional design. It summarizes key insights from the author’s recently published dissertation Nature as Guide to Vibrant Learning. The author then introduces a series of guiding questions and instructional design examples that allow for the integration of living systems awareness in any project or group process, across multiple dimensions of learning experience design. Particular emphasis is placed on the structural-spatial, rhythmic-temporal, and expressive-extrarational dimension, which deserve much greater attention in education for a healthier world
Value driven approach for Services Design
No full textA service is a time-perishable, intangible experience performed for a customer acting in the role of a co-producer. It involves application of specialized competences (knowledge and skills) through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself in real world. In economics, service is an intangible and insubstantial commodity and the value of service is expected to be self-evident. We can see that as providers of services, there is difficulty in understanding value experienced by consumers and as consumers of services we need to bank on our experience; use trial and errors to find a high quality service provider. There is even lesser clarity on service delivery process that assures value and various aspects of service that creates value to users. We propose a value driven approach for services design based on value creation system that exists amongst service providers and customers as a way to address this situation. We propose a theoretical framework based on value co-creation by cluster of stakeholders who are involved in the service delivery and consumption process as an approach to design services. We illustrate our approach and theoretical framework that we adopt in this paper  
THE VISIBLE HAND: FROM STRUGGLING SURVIVAL TO VIABLE SUSTAINABILITY
No full textBuilding an economy based on Family Sustainability through Community Information: Most of the global economy is hidden, and in a lot of trouble. This is a mechanism to turn the global economy inside out, so that most of it is transparent, and manageable. This is a model for a computer grid of a person's local economy. It should be user friendly and provide linkage of the information structure between an individual and the larger economy: decentralization in a global context. This is about re-conceptualizing our information world - so that the social systems work. About turning the economic information system inside out, so that instead of it being difficult for everyone, make it so intuitively useful that it is commonly practical and easy to obtain whatever information you need. Anatomically, a fig fruit is surrounded by its skin, all covered; if you invert it, and expose the fruit with the skin at the bottom, it is a strawberry. This idea is to invert the global economic information system so that it is easy to use. For everybody. Turn the global economic information system from a mystery that you spend your life losing out to (the "fig" that you cannot see into) into a transparent information structure that is designed for the user (the "strawberry" that you can see all the good parts whenever you need them).The main purpose of this model is for the INDIVIDUAL to be able to have a standard grid for her to put all of the important information in her life in an organized way. It needs to be supportive of different scales of data, for unique people, to help her organize her way out of her problems and challenges, social, organizational, and economic - both as a consumer and as a producer.Most current policy emphasizes nation, then state, maybe region. This model shifts the focus to the village and the community, so that neighborhoods and families get their needs met. The idea is that the model should be useful to individuals and families, and all business people as well as municipal bureaucrats and citizens investigating the government. The Power of Eudemony: Eudemony is an idea that Aristotle talked about. It means something like well-being. At its most human root, it is about a sense of self, in balance with the social and all around, in tune with the Universe. Pretty tough nut to crack, and the reason why most people need to seek religion or some other strategy to cope with the slings and arrows of the human condition.The power equation in eudemony is to balance the material, the technical, the physical, with the social, the nutritional, the cognitive, the spiritual and the natural environment. That equation is different for each person. Money emerged as the medium of exchange to balance all those values, but it was always seen as a way to have power over other people, or compared to other people.In Stafford Beer's introduction of eudemony in Platform for Change, he says "Money is terribly important, both to those paying and to those paid. But money is nonetheless an epiphenomenon of a system which actually runs on eudemony. It is for this reason that I have come to see money as a constraint on the behavior of eudemonic systems, rather than to see eudemony as a by-product of monetary systems."The new metric must be dynamic, and include money and technology in it, but it also must factor in how damaging a bias towards money and technology has been in the 20th century in terms of social, natural and cognitive costs for the 99%. It should be useful for families and communities to be self-sufficient.Notes on Education and Working Together as Art; The Power of Eudemony; Evolving Contemporary Thought; American Social Evolution; Ernest Callenbach's last public words; The Visible Hand: From Struggling Survival to Viable Sustainability; Do your own Viable System Model analysis; Housing Laws of Supply and Demand; Reference
Research on Fourth Grade Classroom RoundTables: Steps to a Tool for Systemic School Renewal and Advances in Service Science
No full textWeekly “30/30 RoundTables” (30 minutes, 30 students) were implemented in two Fourth Grade classrooms year-long to determine their potential as tools for systemic school renewal--whether RoundTables were 1- sustainable: engaging and ongoing; 2- inclusive: democratically participatory; and 3- emancipatory: accelerating positive learning. These three criteria are proposed as necessary and sufficient conditions of an innovation within in an educational service system, in order to best enhance development of school participants as natural systems. Students took turns leading using a one-page RoundTable script which allots five minutes for the leader’s guide, readings/reviews, and teacher-suggested topic and 25 minutes for student responses--time distributed equally among all. Time-and-task analyses and questionnaire/interviews yielded promising results. RoundTables increased learning opportunities in reliable, measurable ways. Students liked equal turns, being leader, and hearing classmates’ comments. Future studies will: 1- add Faculty-, PTA-, and District-RoundTables to investigate systemic school renewal; and 2- correlate 30+ random RoundTable-using classrooms with STAR scores, predicting measurable group quality and statistical significance
Competition in the Darwin Economy and Living Systems
No full textIn his recent book The Darwin Economy Robert Frank predicted that Charles Darwin would replace Adam Smith as the father of modern economic theory. Darwin observed that natural selection tends to favor traits that make individual organisms successful even if those traits inhibit the success of the species. Darwin also noted that what counts is success relative to one's competitors rather than absolute numbers of progeny. Frank showed that these insights apply equally well to problems of economic competition. In making this argument, however, Frank ignored the fact that such competition often involves interaction among multiple levels of living systems and that the loyalty of deciders can become quite compromised in these interactions. On the other hand living systems theory has ignored Darwin's insights, perhaps because it is unclear how they apply to upper levels of living systems. This paper attempts to bring together modern economic theory, living systems theory and evolution theory to see how each might contribute to an improved understanding of competition in monetary systems.  
The Integration Challenge for the Systems Sciences: Highlighting Internal and External Interconnections
No full textSystems science is concerned, among other things, with functional wholes, interactive parts and exchange with the systems environment. What does it mean to observe systems science itself with respect to these aspects? What function does systems science have within the landscape of sciences? What do the various systemic sub-disciplines contribute to a united systems science? In this paper the following will be attempted: - Indicating a set of interrelated system principles. Using this set to clarify the special characteristics and contributions of the sub-disciplines of systems science. - Localizing systems science within the landscape of sciences and indicating relevant connections
Developing Resilience in Project Teams: A Path to Enabling Organizations for Thrivability
No full textABSTRACT This paper relates to an ongoing systems research conversation, “Enabling organizations for thrivability: New perspectives on form, structure, and process in favor of human and societal prosperity.” It focuses on the question, “What could we possibly achieve if we co-create radical innovative patterns together, learning from other practitioners who are experienced in biology, technology, sociology, management, development, design, and ...?” Based on project team research viewed through a lens of complex adaptive systems and an adaptive model used in ecology, I will address “thrivability” in terms of collaboration, innovation, and learning. Specifically, my objective is to explore how project teams collaborate to co-create value as complex adaptive social systems in a multidisciplinary environment. In addition, innovation is explored as the impetus of creative destruction and its outcomes. Further, organizational resilience, specifically through development of adaptive capacity, is revealed as an outcome of learning through leveraging multidisciplinary experience.When one “thrives”, it means one is “to grow vigorously (flourish), to gain in wealth or possessions (prosper), and to progress toward or realize a goal (succeed). It may be understood as a step beyond sustaining, which implies nourishment, support, preservation, and maintenance. Organizationally, thriving can mean expanding resources, expertise, productivity, and profitability. Beyond maintaining an operational model, our organizational objective, in this discussion, is not to merely sustain but thrive. In other words, humanistic values are not only the baseline for ethical decision making, but inform how an organization operates in time and space (i.e. daily, locally, and globally).When goals are not specifically defined, but are questions of “what could we possibly achieve,” there is inherent risk in not knowing what to expect. A systems perspective can be valuable in defining systems boundaries - context, stakeholders, and impacts, through useful tools such as feedback. For example, the mission set out in the question of “what is possible” can be framed within a context of ethical and social responsibility, given the nature of the mission’s objectives. Such an open-ended mission is challenging, especially to project managers, who often have an aversion to committing to amorphous goals, much less in terms of co-creation of radical innovative patterns across disciplines. As a former project manager, I take a practical approach to most issues with which I am confronted. As a result, my question is, “In practical terms, how can we achieve this mission?”One reason this mission is challenging per se, is that the introduction of “radical” ideas provokes resistance in most organizations, especially those that are change adverse. It also requires dialogue across disciplines for exploration of models that may provide insight into issues that have not traditionally embraced concepts outside the confines of one discipline. This requires impartiality to a practical application of theoretical pluralism for the purposes of learning different approaches to problem solving. It also requires establishment of trust in the process of emergence of new ideas, concepts, and models of design, problem solving, and delivery.Research exploring the dynamics of group development and ecological adaptation has shown that resilient organizations encourage development of adaptive capacity. Practically, adaptive capacity is operational flexibility that allows for risk taking, questioning standard operating processes, and learning from experience. The lessons learned are then incorporated into future projects and reorganization of resources. Project leadership plays an essential role in shifting group norms and processes to promote adaptive capacity. Embracing change (incremental and transformational) and trust in the emergence of innovation are hallmarks of organizational resilience. Project teams that have developed adaptive capacity become leverage points as sources for organizational resilience and, subsequently, a path toward thrivability