Blog

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...

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:

 

.............................

 

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.

 

............................

 

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.

 

.............................
 

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

 

 

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

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

To add a comment to any blog post you must log in. Then you can go to the blog post and click the "Add Comment" link.

 

 

 

The details for the Saturday and Wednesday sessions for 2021-22 are on the calendar .https://www.isss.org/calendar/

 

 

Dear members of ISSS,

 

Using the.model of the Saturday SIG Conversations started at the US by Deeanna Burleson last year we tried to establish a similar conversations from Australia to have similar gatherings at a time zone more convenient ot people in the Southern Hemisphere. Since we did not have many ISSS members in this part of the world we invited members of ANZSys Group that was established in 1999 who had been having annual conferences in Australia and New Zealand until 2012. In 2009 ISSS and ANZSys organised a conference together when Ockie Bosch was our President.

 

We were nio sure of numbers so we organized fortnightly conversations following the same protocol as the Saturday SIG group in October last year. The conversations have been popular and we have and about 12 to 13 participants each week and recently we had 19. The participants so far hacve been from Australia, New Zealand, US, South Africa and India. We had speakers from SSIW (Jamie Rose) and India (Raghav Rajagopalan). The conversations are continuing this year and last week we had ISSS President Delia MacNamara engage in a very interesting conversation about Artificial Intelligence.

 

 

Please visit the ANZsys website of theANZSys group (which has several ISSS members) at https://anzsys.org/index.php for recordings of our conversations and calendar of future presentations. We are thankful to ISSS's outreach to enable small groups like ANZSys have more  conversations about systems science, thinking and practice. Join us at the conversations.  They are free. Please send me an email if you want to register your name for announcements shankar.sankarna@uts.edu.au

 

Shankar Sankaran

Past President ISSS