Blog

VP of education Daniel Ari Friedman chairs weekly meetings, one week education, one week knowledge engineering in support of learning an education. Read more here https://www.isss.org/knowledge-engineering/ 

 

Initial work on a System Language based on the work of Past President and Trustee George Mobus is at https://github.com/system-language/SL  and is an emergent process from these meetings.

Is Critical Systems Practice the best way to evaluate complex interventions? Distinguished systems theorist Professor Michael C. Jackson of the University of Hull asserts that critical systems practice should replace systems concepts as widely used in evaluation (see the reference to his published article below). With over 50 years as an evaluator, Michael Quinn Patton, disagree. This video is his response to Jackson's critique of the use of systems concepts in evaluation. It is a lengthy response because Jackson's critique deserves an in-depth response covering both theory and practice. The video opens with an overview of the issues being debated and then goes into detail about the opposing points of view. 

 

 

Reference: Jackson, M.C. (2022) Critical systems practice 4: Check-Evaluating and reflecting on a multimethodological intervention, Systems Research and Behavioral Science · October. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...

I was asked recently by Ray Ison (ISSS President 2014-2015) to provide a bibliography of my work on systems literacy. One piece of work came to mind that I think needs to be resurfaced. I was challenged in 2018 by James Martin, then the Chair of the INCOSE Systems Science Working Group to develop a grand vision. To do that we organized a survey of ISSS and INCOSE. 113 people responded. I created a blog post on the results in February 2019. After 4 years I think it is worth a re look https://vimeo.com/317104695

ISSS is included as an organization reference in the Systems Thinking for Collective Leadership in Scotland publication.    Hopefully evidence of supporting Systems approaches in systems practice, conversations and actions beyond ISSS membership.

Rob Young (ISSS member) is creating a record of Systems under the framework of a new entity called the Systems Community Alliance.

He has been working with the records on this ISSS website under the Library tab to index all the Yearbooks. https://www.isss.org/yearbooks/

 

Here is his email to the ISSS working group on education and knowledge engineering:

 

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Please find attached, the promised second ISSS spreadsheet from the SCA. 
This second spreadsheet lists all of the articles in the thirty-two General System Yearbooks, giving: 
- Yearbook, Volume, Year 
- Article Title 
- Author/s 
- Pages: from-to (number of pages) 
- Article permissions 
- Errata 
  
588 Articles, in 32 volumes. File is in Read-only mode. 
  
As per my first email (copied below), these SCA Collections are snapshots of living repositories, with a process for continuous improvement. I would welcome any feedback on this deliverable, and the ISSS and SCA working together. 
I very much appreciate the discussions we have been having so far, and look forward to collaborating further in the forthcoming ISSS Knowledge Engineering Thursday meetings.

 

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The spreadsheet was taken by Daniel Ari Friedman and put on CODA as part of our work on ISSS Systems Knowledge Engineering and Management, Here is Daniel's work on CODA with respect to these archives. 

Some "Journeys" that people might want to take through the Archives. 
-- Visual summaries and word clouds of the data.
-- Views sorted by year, or detail view for zooming in.

 

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If you have ideas or contributions please be in contact with Daniel, Rob or myself.

I have just been made aware of the record of the Governing the Anthropocene Workshop organized in conjunction with the ISSS 2015 conference in Berlin. I post the link here as it contains a number of important presentations and outcomes.  Some of the slides are on this slideshare site

 

 

Systems: Transition to a Sustainable World 
  
System – A set of interconnected parts named and embodied within a boundary that, for us, forms a meaningful whole: something which, taken together has meaning for us
 
Transition – The action or process of passing or passage from one condition, action, or (occas.) place, to another (shorter Oxford dictionary)
 
Sustainable  – causing, or made in a way that causes, little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time (Cambridge dictionary)
 
World – Natural environment – a place of settlement
The need for a transition to a more sustainable world is widely accepted but it cannot be assumed that understanding what sustainability is, is a given. Isolated efforts to tackle what are perceived to be key issues do not always yield anticipated outcomes, they may even be counter-productive. What we should recognize is that what we have is a network of interconnected problems, described by Ackoff as systems of problems or ‘messes’. To make sense of these messes we need to adopt a holistic perspective. Systems thinking provides the intellectual framework and systems practice the lessons which enrich the theory. The conference is designed to promote and capitalise upon such thinking and will provide examples of how these ideas might contribute to sustainability.
 
Keynote Speakers 

Rodney Irwin, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and a member of the Senior Management Team (SMT) at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Ray Ison is a Professor of Systems at the Open University and President of the International Federation of Systems Research.

 

 

I gave a talk via Zoom for a conference in Bangalore about consciousness last month. It was presented as a pre-recorded video. I thought I would share it here because it gives examples of the holon theory. I decided that the best way to understand cyclical causality is by example. That was what the Vedic masters also decided when they produced the Vedas and Upanishads. The reason is that the elements of the holon are archetypes that can apply to any system. Thus they will take on different labels depending on what it is describing. That can be confusing for a lot of people, it seems undefined. But it is self-defining - that is one of the most intriguing aspects of it. Basically, it describes causal order - how events and their contextual meanings relate to each other as a whole. 

 

In this talk I focus on “Post-truth” and challenge the popular view that truth is only relative. Holon relations reach throughout nature, so “truth” can have an ultimate meaning while also being locally relative to different contexts. The immanent harmony with nature is the gauge for truth. I proposed in this talk that truthfulness can be evaluated by the degree of harmony any system has with other systems, with itself, and with the cosmos (as a reflection of the holon causal order).

 

Comments welcome.

 

John