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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

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.

 

 

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 have known Alexander Christakis since the late 80's when he was a professor at George Mason University Virginia working with another former ISSS President John Warfield. His life's work is seeking ways to emancipate people to be their best and work to address the world's problematique and to seek peace in areas of conflict. His life's commitment continues at 85. I joined him, Maria Kakoulaki and Jeff Dietrich as they delivered a training on Structured Dialogic Design and the supporting software Logosophia. Along with 6 other participants we gathered in Arhanes, Crete for the past week. Although I have known and read about SDD for all these years I finally, I think. get the Science behind the Systems Mapping outcomes of this human systems process. We were all being trained as facilitators. I look forward to doing more "CoLabs" using the SD process and the Logosophia software.

 

More information on SDD here https://www.coexplorer.org/structured-dialogic-design/.  and here https://www.isss.org/structured-deliberations/

and a presentation to ISSS by Aleco and Maria here https://vimeo.com/502853832

 

Dennis Finlayson, ISSS member, sent this to me to share with members and readers of ISSS. A blog post "Definition as a Coffin” – Cybernetics to Systems Thinking"

 

http://www.psybertron.org/archives/15807.   It is worth reading....

The SGSR was the name of this society before it was renamed the International Society for the Systems Sciences. Dr. James Grier Miller was at the beginning of the SGSR. He recounts factors that were influencing colleagues to form the SGSR. One factor stands out for me and it was the reaction of scientists who had been involved in creating atomic and hydrogen nuclear bombs who wanted science to serve mankind, not destroy it.

 

Dr. Miller recounts these conversations in his first lecture introducing Living Systems Theory. at the 11 minute mark he calls these scientists   "a very interesting group. They included, Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey, both of whom had been involved in the development of the plutonium bomb". And at minute 14 and 25 seconds he goes on "Certainly a feeling of of deep responsibility for being the father of the plutonium bomb and for the work he was doing at that time, on the development of the hydrogen bomb. I don't think, as far as I could tell from talking to him and his, some of his friends and, on one occasion to his wife and reading what his wife has written about him, and he ever talked much to people, generally to physicists about this inner sense of guilt that he had."  

 

Sense of guilt Miller implies is one of the factors that brought scientists together to form the SGSR.

 

Today Russia and Ukraine are at war and the prospect of a nuclear accident or nuclear war event is present I think reflection on one of the founding purposes of the now ISSS was to understand how humans get to this situation and how to prevent it. Some 68 years on we still have a lot to learn.

 

Watch the video here on Vimeo and read the transcript here 

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