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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

 

Yesterday, Friday 30 September 2022, I was in Portland and met with Professor Wayne Wakeland, Chair of the Systems Science program at Portland State University. He told me the program began in 1969 and has been going ever since. The program offers PhD's, Masters and also a Systems Minor at the Undergraduate level. We discussed how we might work together to do more to promote the value of a systems science education. Read about the program here https://www.pdx.edu/systems-science/

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

Interesting to see this "promotion" of systems thinking from the United Kingdom Government in a You Tube video dated April 2022.

 

Tamara Finkelstein, Permanent Secretary for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Sir Patrick Vallance, Government Chief Scientific Adviser, set out what Systems Thinking is and the advantages it offers for good policy making. They also offer advice to those getting started with a systems thinking approach.

 

 

And you can get copies of the documents here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/systems-thinking-for-civil-servants

 

The British Government published a previous reference to Systems Thinking in 2012 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/285442/12-1043-introduction-to-systems-thinking-gse-seminar.pdf

 

Systems Thinking was the title of a book by F.E. Emery published in 1970

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 

As part of the launch of the Open University Systems Hub I was interviewed for one of there podcasts.  The interview was in August 2021 and lasted for over 30 minutes, but the resulting edited podcast is 12 minutes, with mixed results...   The podcast was published in the 16th Feb 2022.