ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University

Alexander Laszlo, "Social Systems Design", ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University, Thursday, July 13, 2006, 9:20 a.m.

Social systems design

These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the Systemic Business Community ( http://systemicbusiness.org ).

Idealized design, then panel to reflect back

Conferences as practicums

No answers, just questions and patterns

Todd Johnston, from Time, working on a magazine for 2056

[breakouts as 2006]

Statement as lead for the story, then people will connect to the story

Fast iterations of collaborative story telling

Oliver Wendell Holmes: I would not give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side.

Lens: science and technology

Could see a wonderful future, but couldn't see a path
Could see a rich ground for development: have the members of the ISSS to join groups or begin groups in communities
In addition, the ISSS provides web space and blog space to share resources
e.g. a computer model in one community to be used in another

Lens: business

The purpose of business
The seed: nourishment for life

Lens: business

Make sure that humanity is part of the goal
Want business to be ...
Collapse of the global community problems
Business must be part of a global compact

Lens: government and politics lens

Hierarchy and control in decline for some time
Some people resisted, and decelerated the decline, but more structures emerged from the primordial soup
More locally based, new patterns of social and political and business governance, characterized with a holarchy

Lens: human behaviour

Our work is our story
To play inside the rules
Human behaviour is at the bottom of any of social change
Change in the way that society ...
Population of prisons in the U.S. exceeded the number of gainfully employed

Lens: politics and government

Observing two trends
Out of the 50 biggest organiation, 35 were already global organization
Scales began to fail: Europe, Spain/Catalonia
Trend for more self-aware communities, finding out what is good for them and not
Global corporations realized that they already covered the whole globe, and began to think environmentally responsible
Infrastructure, power, food, etc.
Now a state where well-balanced
Local communities have taken responsibility

Lens: arts and media

Dissolution of nation states and imperialist capitalism
Ecological crisis
Cessation of means to have technology art product, and more experiences directly with life
As death become more important, people started using creativity
Localism became important again, in reconfiguring
As resources were reconsidered, the artistic processes, the skills and aptitudes of the artistics were seen as resources

Lens: spirtuality and culture

First decade of the 21st century, fundamentalisms were reaching a peak
Crisis point in the mid second century
Facilitated with the group of the ISSS, more dialogue
New world views, pluralistic ways
Manifestation in the emerging blogocracy, wielding more power

Lens: spirtuality

Changeover in the 2020s and 2030s, when people realized that science and spirtuality were linked
Present time hold strains and cracks of fundamentalism
Heartened by the situation
Movement from initial coherence to locomotion, differentiation, into oneness
Heartened because every school child could draw religious symbols in every language
Enormous progress in the heart of the world

Lens: learning and education

Discussed shifts
Where education had been about schools, and in 2050, now more integrated with community and doing
Implication: shift from education to learning
Recognition that learning is doing
Learning is living
Outcome: awareness
From education to learning, from teaching to communication
Bifurcation point that caused people to talk to each other
Not doing anything but having conversations
Learning not about content, but about context, and their responsibility for context

Lens: governments

The global mind will rule the planet
Connectivity will enable its thought processes, where ever we define our space to be
Greatest surprise, sometime in 20 years, the people will say I think, therefore I am

Lens: education and learning

Education has become a kaleidoscope of learning
Education for the young with a local and global perspective
More self knowledge and outer knowledge
We're interconnected

Lens: habitat and the environemnt

ISSS 2056, conference about recuperative processes
In the first decade, the systems scientists made a consensual coordination to coordinate
Systems were holding knowledge that material was erasing our context
For contextual understanding, governance asked to practice on environmental crises as it does with terrorists crises
Annually shut down, and have international see-what-happens week
All sorts of things emerged, moved from a caterpillar to a butterfly

Lens: transportation

In 2007, the conference designated this as the last meeting of the whole ISSS, because they wished to divert resources from large conferences to other uses
New platform of smaller meetings, with multi-user interaction and action focus
By 2009, had enrolled new stakeholders through a new platform of action
By 2012, had generalized this platform to community collaboration
Transportation wasn't linear, the 2020 vision
In 2025, formed the terrorism SIG to funnel off terrorists to talk with each
2030, large scale cultural swapping
2040, developed e-democracy, invented by ISSS, but thought we should participate
2055, planning for 100% conference participation through virtual means within the rings of Saturn
2056: now meeting to celebrate our victim, because the systems party in the world democracy won the election

Lens: science and technology

New simplicity from the old complexity facilitated by the e-democracy
New infrastructural changes
In the first decade, the cyber gaming infrastructure became a platform for modelling behaviour
2026: new language in a precise and invariant language on what we were noticing
Nature-based science, more decentralized funding
Communication through future implanted devices solar-powered under the skin

Lens: health

The accelerating speed was not sustainable
Doesn't make sense in energy, pollution or stress
2006-2016 tipping point
2012 collapse began, and put more stress on people
Material deprivation so that people questioned their own assumptions
Collapse benefited the earth, as it cleansed itself: putting less poison into atmosphere
A time for testing old assumptions, many recognized as obsolete
Old tested assumption, things that worked could not exist in the 21st century
People had to rely on themselves more
A few creatives started to have people listening to them
Heidegger: if you can find the centre of your knowledge, everything becomes effortless
2056: the wei wu wei, passivity took hold

Lens: habitat and environment

Cities?
Moving back to rivers, as the first teachers
Start from water-centric planning
Misunderstanding about thinking about habitat
Start from water, and work with ecosystems, and how people fit into those systems
Mega-growth of cities slowed down
Have to look at people in countryside engaged in soils
Today, these shifts happened, because the ISSS did shadow demonstrations, showing how it worked
Conference started to have success story discussions
Needed a whole generation of new leaders: many academics could go back to teaching, and talk about how it's modelled

Lens: health

Most of the people live with a deep sense of unity and harmony
Systems theory and systems practice in medicine was largely known
Discovered neurosciences and neurotransmitters that we were dopamine-centered at the beginning of the century (e.g. sports, stock market)
Should be sertatonin and melatonin-centered
Changed the way we education
No need for police, just doctors and hospitals
Some new technologies: nanotechnology cured cancers
Herbs modified by nanotechnology: overheat the cancer cells, treat them in 5 minutes

Lens: culture and spirtuality

For 2056 to 2006, found a major breakthrough in the awareness in the subtle systems science
From unipolar fundamental to a multipolar spiritual path
Discovered in 2006, we were like empty vessels waiting for the input from others
Radiate out, rather than being vessels
Collapse of currencies, cost and value weren't measured in terms of values and possessions
Cultural communities were using mindfulness

Lens: food

2006 dependency on petrochemical monocultural
Had alternate agricultural
Petroleum crash, monetary collapse
2056 have reorganized societies around local foods
Better awareness, seasonal foods
Developed systems with new technologies
Nanotechnologies

Lens: business

Success of the back to village movement, and sustainable local communities
Tipping point when business recognized that they had the power, as much as government
Around the time of the Gates-Buffett Foundation formation
A lot of this moved on when a change of reporting was required
Demand by the media, after Rupert Murdoch died, was for more transparency
Transparency made businesses more responsive to consumers

[back to 2006]

Four panelists reflecting what we have heard and seen, in a conversation amongst ourselves in a fishbowl environment

Alexander Laszlo
Kathia Laszlo
Gail Taylor
John Broadbent

Love the energy of the group

Magic from people coming together
Interested in the bridge between knowledge and practice
Even though, feeling as though running out of time
Put self into possibility that we know more than we know, and we should interconnect and energize ourselves
Heard a lot of brilliant ideas
I don't have to understand it all, we're part of a community

Social systems design, mentored with Bela Banathy

The power is in our collective intelligence

Possibility and reality are not disconnected, they're one and the same thing

What piece of that preferred state can I do today?
As I hunt, the future changes
Possible to bring it back to reality
Not possible when too impatient
Reinvigorated today

In 1954, the ISSS was born, with a quest for a unity of science: a movement, as well as a program

In 2056, there is energy and passion, and the movement has grown.
Not only about the unity of science, but the unity of science and humanity and Gaia
Not just a separate quest by scholars, but includes practitioners and engaged people
Engaged not just in systems thinking, but systems feeling
Embodied and internalized, not studied and memorized
Systems feeling can help us move into systems being
Not just about being, but also becoming

Focused on science and technology groups

Heard so much about sensitivities, sensibilities for technologies with a human face
Awareness of humans with a technological face
Much more about unity of science and humanity
Self-celebratory utopian projections? It's up to us
If ISSS can engage in processes, then the systems movement is alive and well

When outsiders thinking of California, they think of unrealistic optimists

Significant number of participants were pragmatic and realist
Re-establishes faith in California
Like the acknowledgement of turbulent times in the future, and they went beyond that
May be an arrow for ISSS, and that's what we should focus on
Theory should stay a main focus for ISSS, in conjunction with practice
Should also consider how we're going to practice in the next decade

Unusual of this society

Privileged in knowledge
In our own work, we've expanded social system design to evolutionary systems design
Original social systems design were human centered in human construction of reality, and leaving out natural
Thus, bring back in complexity and systems dynamics
Also an emphasis on the learning dimension
Generative dialogue
Need to also have learning dialogues, not from what we already know, but also from knowledge-creating
Other types of conversations
These are types of conversations that can change the world
Unfolding complexity, increases levels of learning

Like the definition of business as nourishing life

Could expand this to all social systems

Social systems design: empowering or enabling groups of people to create their future

Bela thought unethical to design for others
Are we thinking of the role of experts?
Possibilities of the ISSS for the future

Theme for the conference: sustainability, complexity and democracy

These are at the foundation of social systems design
Sustainability, complexity and democracy as why we exist

Turbulence that we're going to go through

Feeling that our effort is lost
Prigogine: when a systems reorganizes, it makes multiple tries over time, until it escapes to a new order.
Emergence can't be seen the moment before it emerges
Yet, the old is still embedded in that
Tipping points and leverages are just under the surface
Discouraged, in dreams and visions, is that they're real and great
In fighting the systems, we don't see that we're already past the tipping points
Take the time to think about these new patterns
It's easy to get a stable system; it's difficult to get the stable system you want.

Today's topic is not a session where we're sharing research with you

Yet, there is a balance at the conference
We're also seeking to engender this balance in the conference
Come to share knowledge, and the create new knowledge, and engage in processes
This is the spirit of engagement

Evolutionary systems design needs a capacity to listen, to each other and the earth, and the patterns of which we're a part

That listening isn't just being quiet, it's a new literacy, seeing the patterns of change
To live and expand the conversations is one step
If this is part of our way, in the systems movement, we can have the conversations not just with each other, but with ourselves, as we reflect with nature
Developing systems ears and eyes, towards systems feeling
Part of this involves play: serious fun
Engagement allows the emergence
This is a time when we have to dance with change, otherwise we don't allow for emergence
Playful dancing the path, knowing that this play is serious

Bela Banathy was excited by science fiction stories: Star Deck holodecks where you could play with the future

We are our own evolutionary guidance systems
Be part of the process consciously, purposively
Take serious fun with passion

We can't be part of the future, if we don't have the stories

Question: What are we going to do with the privilege of our knowledge and relations?

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