International Society for the Systems Sciences: Journals ISSS
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Systems Thinking Courses in the Master's Programme in Creative Sustainability at Aalto University: Reflections on Design and Delivery of the 2010-2011 Sessions
No full textIn fall 2010 and winter 2011, two new courses in systems thinking were initiated as core curriculum in the master’s programme in Creative Sustainability at Aalto University in Finland. As intensive courses, each was to be conducted as three full days of lectures over eight days, with students fulfilling credit hour requirements both independently and in group activities over a two-to-three month period. To complement the teaching staff at the university, a researcher active in the systems science community was brought in from abroad as a subject matter expert for the two courses. In the summer preceding the first session, a reading list for the courses was drawn from current leading sources in the systems sciences, starting from 2010 and linking back to prior references of relevance. Lectures were prepared as minimal critical specifications, with concepts mapped into clusters of references, with the majority of sources available electronically over the Internet. On each set of the three lecture days, the courses were delivered in a face-to-face classroom setting, coupled with group activities designed in the style of Singerian inquiring systems. Coordinating artifacts from the instructors evolved and were incrementally updated on a publicly-accessible web site, and students followed the social media style of posting their reflections on publicly-visible weblogs linked with notifications on an activity stream at a systems community hub. Supplementing the chronological recollections of development and learning during the courses sessions, theoretical reflections constructed in hindsight may serve to inform the form and content of similar educational opportunities in other contexts. Preparations are underway as the courses are being naturally evolved for a second cohort of students in fall 2011. The completion of one cycle of two courses presents an opportunity for reflections on the approach employed in the innovation/startup cycle, with considerations for improvements and/or replication for similar programs in the future
The Causal SWOT Analysis Using Systems Thinking As A Tool for Situational Analysis Workshop
No full textSWOT analysis is a tool for current situational analysis on organizational activities. It was developed as a framework to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of internal environment as well as opportunities and threats of external environment. Each quadrant in the framework explains its corresponding factors. On the other hand, the TOWS Matrix is developed as a tool for developing alternative strategies based on current situational analysis. The characteristic of the TOWS matrix is developing strategies that matches external environment according to the cross-tabulation table called Interaction matrix. Previous studies on both tools show that they have something in common, that is, with regards to the subject, they sort out factors in its corresponding quadrant and spot the problem present with the permutation analysis method. Also, with the TOWS matrix, alternative strategies are developed based on current situational analysis. The Causal SWOT analysis is a workshop technique that aims to share the perception about the present state and makes use of the concept of Causal loop and Leverage Point in Systems Thinking. In The Causal SWOT analysis, internal variables related to subject and cause-and-effect-relationship of external variables is tied together with an arrow. The arrows showing the cause-and-effect relationship between variables are saved for the decision making process. While viewing the causal relation chart that has many arrows, participants discover independent variable that has multiple dependent variables. According to the leverage point specified, verification is done with regards to holding the workshop a few times so as to convince participants
R-THEORY: A FURTHER COMMENTARY ON THE SYNTHESIS OF RELATIONAL SCIENCE
No full textA plain language description of the author's 2010 synthesis of the late Dr. Robert Rosen's relational complexity theory is provided to explain some of the implications of that theory for current and future science. Priority directions for research are also discussed
Systems Thinking: Common Ground or Untapped Territory?
No full textAt gatherings of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, the term “systems thinking” elicits understanding nods and smiles. Such thinking, it would appear, is a way this largely academic community works “all together now,” thinking in a systemic way about our varied areas of inquiry. But how common is this understanding among us? And are its benefits commonly understood? Assessing the degree to which we work “all together now” requires recognizing the different assumptions we make about what systems thinking means. So powerful is systems thinking’s capacity to holistically address 21st-century problems that much has been written about it for laypeople. This article presents a content analysis of 14 popular books on systems thinking, revealing that ISSS members’ understanding nods and smiles belie a plurality of meanings assigned to systems thinking and claims about what it means to be a systems thinker.
What is held in common within the ISSS community is the conviction that the health of human systems can be supported by systems thinking. We argue that the benefits go further: that the psychological health of humanity itself depends upon helping people learn how to be systems-intelligent thinkers. At present, the community of systems thinkers has made only a start at this important endeavour
A HOLISTIC SOCIOECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS APPROACH AT THE REGIONAL LEVEL – THE EMPI (EMMI).
No full textIn this paper the EMPI [EMMI] approach is described together with its use and intended use in the Mid Sweden region, the counties of Jämtland and Västernorrland. EMPI is an abbreviation of the Swedish words “Energi, Materia, Pengar och Information”, which in English gives EMMI: Energy, Matter, Money, and Information. The EMPI [EMMI] approach has to some extent so far been used in a project assessing the ecosystem services in the five northern counties of Sweden, “Norrland”, and later in a strategic document regarding energy and climate on the county level. The emergy methodology (by H.T. Odum) has been the inspiration for the EMPI [EMMI] approach. But since the emergy concept is not yet fully accepted by the scientific community, the EMPI [EMMI] approach does not use the controversial parts of the emergy approach, but rather has the aim to work as a general background material for any regional analysis, may it be emergy, ecological footprint, material flow or substance flow assessements, regional monetary accountings or other types. Finally future plans for the EMPI [EMMI] approach is presented, as application on the watershed level connected to the EU Water Framework Directive, and further development of the ecosystem services concept. Maybe most interesting is that the work with the EMPI [EMMI] and emergy approaches have revealed a lack of measure for quality aspects of information. The scientific community seem today only use the quantitative measure of information, the bit, while the general public definition of information includes a large qualitative aspect
Leadership Theories and Stories: An Open-Space Exploration
No full textMembers of ISSS are being invited to participate in an interactive workshop to be held at the 55th ISSS Meeting being held at the University of Hull, UK in August 2011 to explore four emerging Western leadership theories – authentic leadership, servant leadership, spiritual leadership and relational leadership with stories and narratives from non-Western cultures to build connections between these traditions. The workshop will be facilitated using an Open Space Technology Meeting format to initiate dialogue between participants to explore these connections and move from passion to action. The theme for the open space meeting is leadership research in not-for-profit charitable or church-based organizations in which the facilitator is deeply involved. The facilitator will briefly introduce the four leadership theories being discussed. He will then describe the Open Space Technology process and its four principles and one law. Participants will then announce discussion topics at the village marketplace that will be created during the workshop where storytelling is encouraged. Reflection and dialogue will take place in the open space (a circle of chairs with a space within) after these discussions. Summaries of discussions held at the marketplace will be collected and posted to all participants after the workshop. This is the first of a series of similar workshops that are being planned. The workshop at Hull will be followed by a similar workshop at an action research conference in Brisbane, Australia in September 2011 and a workshop being planned in the US in October 2011. The themes captured from these workshops will form the basis of a paper to be published in the Proceeding of the 55th ISSS meeting in 2012
Post Globalization: Economy, Systems Science & Academy
No full text1. The global Internet means turning everything around so that you are the center of the universe, and it does revolve around you. The future poses many questions about our sustainability. Now what do you do? 2. Post Globalization, chaotic unpredictable economy, with escalating data pollution. 3. Pre-Globalization businesses and institutions are structured as rigid bureaucracies that focus on retaining the status quo over adapting to a changing environment. 4. A scientific tool, called the Viable System Model, lays out an empirically derived map of the communication/information/decision flows that are necessary and sufficient for sustainability, whether a person, a machine, a work group, an organization, or an economy. The closest similarity in the history of science is what the “cell” became as the basic unit for biology (Robert Hooke, 1665), VSM is for social science. The VSM was invented by Stafford Beer in England in the 1950s to identify communication problems in a steel mill. The VSM model of ONE single layer of a bureaucracy allows you to identify distinctions in relation to that layer’s metasystem and its subsystems. Several different layers’ communication conflicts can then be identified, and the structure redesigned so that some of the communication conflicts can be dissolved. We can now turn to a concept of management that has the power to manage, that is to say, it may do something now so that the future will be different from the future that would otherwise have been. 5. To be sustainable in the 21st century, organizations must become more flexible and adaptive in new ways that the global internet encourages to the point of necessity not only for sustainability, but increasingly for survival at all. The word that dominated the 20th century was “growth”, and it has brought us to the point of global concern about the future. The word that encapsulates that concern for the future is “sustainability” which is broadly defined as the capacity to endure - elastic in the short run, resilient over time; in ecology, how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time; for humans, improving the quality of life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting eco-systems; human organizational sustainability is defined in terms of viability. In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking how we make things architect William McDonough advocates changing how we design and build everything so that it is either biodegradable or technically recycleable – redesign how we make EVERYTHING. In too many areas, the only solution is to do a much better quality job with a much smaller quantity of resources and effort. Old Standards are Crumbling: The global economy suffered a meltdown September 2008 that has been masked by the US TARP bailout. All of the major countries in the Euro are running an accumulating deficit, ranging from Greece’s 130% of the country’s annual gross domestic product, and Italy’s 130%, to Spain’s 72%, France’s 92%, and Germany’s 80%, and all are growing worse. The Euro depends on Germany, but support is fading: according to a recent German poll, 20% thought the Greek rescue was right, and 47% opposed it. When Germany shifts back to the Mark, the Euro will disappear. The US dollar has been growing trade deficit since 1993, and is held up with debt to the Chinese. The Chinese economy focuses on quantity at the expense of quality. China is poisoned by political repression and environmental tragedy: Of China's 1.3 billion people, at least 400 million breathe heavily polluted air, and over 300 million have no safe water supply. According to official statistics, about 30% of China's rivers are so dirty they aren't fit for even industrial or agricultural uses, let alone human consumption. More than 75% of the water in rivers flowing through China's urban areas is unsuitable for drinking or fishing. Sixty million people have difficulty getting access to water, and almost three times that number drink contaminated water daily. The modern Chinese economic miracle of sustained growth, at per capita GDP increase of 7% per year for the entire 1978-2005, is the most sustained period of rapid economic growth in human history. But “Growth must be sustainable to deliver its benefits” and China has not figured that one out at all. According to a 2000 report by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, pollution costs the Chinese economy anywhere from 3 to 8 percent of GDP each year. In addition, ecological damage potentially costs another 5 to 14 percent. Even at the low end of these estimates, environmental damage is roughly equivalent to annual economic growth, meaning that the economy is producing no net national wealth at tremendous long term social and ecological expense. The Viable System Model is a lens for looking at effective communication, especially between humans. At this time in history, most human organizations have poor communication channels, especially about adapting to the future. The VSM is a filter to help identify what would be useful, from now on. The mission of VSM is to identify an improved state of well-being, what Aristotle labeled “eudemony” and Thomas Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness”. As important as political democracy is, it is meaningless if we don't have economic democracy as well. As a working definition, “economic democracy” is a structured information environment where economic resource decisions are publicly transparent, so that a decision reflects who benefits as well as who pays, and individuals are held accountable for the consequences of group actions. This is a discussion 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). WikiLife/WikiEconomy: a computer information idea for creating a global grassroots economy. Basically it is a dynamic information catalogue for all the parts of a woman's life: income, food, housing, health care, transportation, clothing, education, media, entertainment, taxes, managing the economy, public services, infrastructure, utilities. That information matrix has components that scale up physically/geographically: family, 10; neighborhood, 100; village, 1,000; community, 10,000; district, 100,000; and region, 1,000,000. Matrilineal? Let’s face it: 3000+ years of patriarchy has failed. Socially, ecologically and evolutionarily. 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 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. WikiLife/WikiEconomy is like the strawberry: you can see everything you want to look for. It is an information structure that allows many people to fill in the beginning of cells of a decentralized economy at the neighborhood, village & community levels locally, while other people will discover what is actually happening in the larger economy at the regional, state, national, continental and global levels. It would need to focus on the local community that makes up the environment of an individual and their extended family. Recognize tribal connections without allowing cultural traditions to prevent self-determination by every woman and her children. And it would need to be able to take into account the national/international economy. Praxis: Consolidate California State Master Plan for Higher Education: One board/administration/budget: University of California (10 campuses), California State University (19 campuses), Community Colleges (108 campuses); coordinate regionally, cut administration in half. Praxis: The University of California at Davis is the premier agricultural research institution with a recognized mission of global responsibility. This is a proposal to apply the Viable System Model to bring the campus of 30,000 students, 1900 faculty and 15,000 staff to a real time information system in two weeks, Design and Implementation. Outcomes: build a Viable System Model of the Planet for multi-species sustainability as the campus mission (“external”); build a Viable System Model of the University of California at Davis decision flow (“internal”); be able to measure 12 indicators daily (each made up of 10 indices) for both mission and decision process; total of 264 daily measures. Subexperiences: the first VSM models of the Planet and of UCD will be like black and white Polaroid pictures from the 1950s, probably a dozen layers - that is what it looks like on the web site at the beginning of Design Week. By the end of Design Week, the web model is like Polaroids that have been painted over with water colors. Monday 8 am Implementation Week, part of it is iMovies, and part of it is Garage Band. By the end of Implementation Week, most UCD administrative staff should experience the web site as the coolest thing that Steve Jobs and James Cameron (“Avatar”) didn't think of first. Faculty, students, researchers, prospective students and their parents, the public and elected officials should feel like they are inside. Praxis: Every community on the planet is now in an economic survival mode. This is a proposal to build a model of our (Davis's) economy, and the Tahrir Square Egyptian economy, and for a different set of challenging reasons, the economy/ecology of Northern Japan, with the idea being to build out of the rubble of the current information chaos towards a more sustainable future. The better you can understand the reality of the current situation, the more likely you can have a useful discussion about improvements and a course of mutually agreed future action. Too much of current decision taking is based on long obsolete data being presented as useful information. Since the first of the year, a lot has changed in the world as the Middle East has taken on new meaning. Tahrir Square was an anonymous car roadway and parking lot that squatters turned into many things: - foremost, it is a real world symbol for the aspirations of the Egyptian people; - Tahrir means freedom, so it is also a state of mind; - History was earned there with courageous people sacrificing for the future; - It can become a metaphor - for a respected place, in the tradition of the Greek Agora, a place where community is manifest; - A safe area within a school, sometimes the whole school grounds, defined by the users. To the question of quality, Stafford Beer’s answer is discovery, personal and social
SYSTEMS PRACTICE IN ENGINEERING: REFLECTIONS ON DOCTORAL LEVEL SYSTEMS SUPERVISION
No full textThe Industrial Doctorate Centre (IDC) in Systems, a collaboration between the University of Bristol and the University of Bath, offers an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in Systems Programme which is aimed at high-calibre engineers from graduate level to early/mid-career stage with the purpose of developing the systems-thinking capabilities of future leaders in industry. Research Engineers on this programme are based ~75% of their time in industry and focussed on a research project defined by their sponsoring company. This paper presents a personal reflection on the role of the systems supervisor on this programme with a focus on four areas of particular interest to the author i) alignment of industry needs and academic research, ii) developing an appreciation for the need for systems thinking, iii) navigating the systems literature, and iv) teaching research methods for doctoral research in systems. The purpose is to encourage and engage in debate on the development of systems practice in engineering
The Great East Japan Earthquake
No full textThe frequency of natural disasters has increased sharply in the last 50 years and their impact - in terms of societies disrupted, the destruction of the productive capacity of land and waters and of public and private property, and beyond - grows faster with increasing densification and globalization of our societies. The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 exemplifies all of these problems. How do we put society back together after an event of this kind in the age of information and globalization? Japan’s culture strongly emphasizes inclusiveness, debate, and consensus and today we see the nation moving onward from disaster response and restoration and toward the planning of the reconstruction.
This work is based on personal experience, beginning on March 11, 2011, of the opinions, challenges and approaches across Japanese society, which are compounded by a long period of economic stagnation. The paper will describe and illustrate the major impacts of the March 11th event and the methods employed during the response and restoration phases to secure the refugees and later to move them to more stable environments. Japan is now beginning a long and complex debate from the level of villages up to the central government about how to reconstruct the society and indeed what kind of society to reconstruct. Opinions vary from “re-build it as it was” to “a chance to re-invent Japan”. Cities and citizens are beginning the deliberative dialogues and the complexity of the decision-making begins to appear.
The March 11th earthquake and tsunami heavily damaged a region that takes part in both global industrial and food supply chains and the event serves to underline the global inclusiveness that will be an increasing characteristic of major disasters. From radiation hazards, to food safety and GDP impacts, nations around the world feel that they are stakeholders in this event. We also see that information technologies can serve to increase the resilience of society but also introduce new risks. The notion of “Design for Resilience” emerges. Perhaps too we need some supra-national processes – akin to the roles played by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in stabilizing the global financial systems – to stabilize public safety, health, and industry
RELATIONAL SCIENCE: A SYNTHESIS
No full textThis paper proposes a synthesis of two avenues of development of relational complexity theory that have followed the work of Robert Rosen (1934-1998). These avenues are: (1) further development of Rosen’s causal entailment in category theory (Rosen 1978 Rosen 1985 Rosen 1991 Rosen 1999 Louie 2009); and (2) contextual entailment based on Rosen’s modeling relation (Rosen 1985 Rosen 1991 Rosen 1999 Kineman 2007 Kineman 2008 Kineman Banathy and Rosen 2007 Kineman and Kumar 2007). These two tracks represent different theory structures that have not been fully integrated to date. Category theory describes causes in terms of entailments expressed as mappings between sets of a domain and co-domain. Modeling relations describe a complementarity between descriptive and, as argued here, prescriptive potentials of a system and their natural realizations; mediated by information relations. The synthesis presented here combines these two theory tracks to bring their mathematical and graphical systems of analysis into correspondence with each other and with a natural interpretation of causality. Such a synthesis requires asking if the current causal mapping algebra is sufficiently comprehensive to describe natural modeling relations, or alternatively, if the application of modeling relations as a fundamental analysis of nature requires additional algebraic elements.