Calendar

We live in extraordinary times. In spite of more than 500 years of genocide, ethnocide, and myriad forms of slavery, repression, and subjugation, peoples across the Global South continue to resist their integration into the folds of the world marketplace and the homogenization imposed by the system of nation-states. In Mexico, our group has been collaborating with communities experimenting with strategies to assert their autonomy by strengthening their capacity for governing themselves and reorganizing their social and productive systems to better assure their quality of life while caring for their territory and defending it from destructive external forces. Like communities around the world, they are guided underlying cosmogonies whose origins can be traced back into the distant past, belief systems and traditions that contribute to a valuable font of knowledge and understandings that now place them at the forefront of the forces capable of offering pathways to confront the multiple economic, social, and environmental crises facing humanity.

 

 

   

 

 

David Barkin holds a PhD in Economics from Yale University and is Distinguished Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco Campus in Mexico City. He collaborated in the founding of the Ecodevelopment Center in 1974. He received the National Prize for Political Economy in 1979. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and an Emeritus member of the National Research Council. He collaborates with indigenous and peasant communities to promote the sustainable management of regional resources. Many of these communities are engaged in activities to develop new institutions, advancing towards the construction of post-capitalist societies by fostering new forms of coexistence and alternatives to development to move towards a world of 'good living'. He is recognized for his theory of Radical Ecological Economics, developed during the past 20 years. In 2016, he received an award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) for research related to climate change. His latest books (in Spanish) are: 'From Protest to Proposal: 50 years imagining and building the future' (Siglo XXI, 2018) and 'The Environmental Tragedy in Latin America and the Caribbean' (ECLAC, 2020, with 20 Latin American colleagues).

 

https://www.isss.org/members-mini-symposiums/ 

 

Saturday time zones for March  

San Francisco:    7 AM on a Saturday

Mexico City:        9 AM on a Saturday

New York:          10  AM on a Saturday

London, UK:        3  PM on a Saturday

Central Europe:   4  PM on a Saturday

South Africa:       5 PM on  a Saturday

Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) was a pioneer in the theory and practice of integration, both in the public realm (democracy) and in the organizational realm (management, leadership, and conflict resolution). She is credited as author of the concept of “win-win” solutions and emphasized mutual, on-going creativity as the essence of any modern society or organization that would thrive. The renowned management consultant Peter Drucker is said to have referred to Follett as his “guru.” While recognition of Follett’s remarkable insight has been growing in recent decades, she remains to a large extent a gem yet to be discovered. We will review Follett’s key ideas and how she sought to put them into practice, discuss the value of her ideas to today’s challenges, and explore how she exemplified systems thinking and systems practice before most others in the modern era.
 

 
Matthew Shapiro is an evolutionary activist, writer, educator, and entrepreneur. He has been involved with systems thinking and practice for nearly three decades, with a particular focus on General Evolution Theory, also known as Evolutionary Systems Theory. His grassroots work has focused on fostering the capacities for dialogue, democracy, and participatory design. The late systems pioneer Bela H. Banathy was a key influence and early collaborator in this endeavor. Matthew’s interests and activities have spanned diverse arenas, from neighborhood organization to educational transformation to metaphysics. He is the author of a variety of books and articles, and recently completed a work titled Early Voices of Conscious Evolution—an anthology comprising more than 120 passages from more than 100 thinkers and actors of the Industrial and Progressive Eras evidencing a major shift in consciousness and the beginning of a new evolutionary era on earth.
 
Matthew has a BA in Elementary Education and was “All-But-Dissertation” in the doctoral program in curriculum and instruction at Boise State University. He co-founded a progressive charter school and taught its middle school group for two years. A true polymath, in parallel with the above streams Matthew has been involved in renewable energy development since the 1990s. Since 2019 he has led the development of new pumped hydro energy storage projects in the US through his firm rPlus Hydro.
 
Apropos to the ISSS presentation, Matthew was founder of the online Mary Parker Follett Network and was instrumental in getting one of Follett’s key works re-published in 1998.
 
Matthew’s primary focus in systems practice today is the catalyzing of change through catalyzing the creation of locally-based “evolutionary cells,” an example of which is his group Boisevolve (www.boisevolve.org).

 

https://www.isss.org/members-mini-symposiums/  
 
Saturday time zones for March  
San Francisco:    7 AM on a Saturday
Mexico City:        9 AM on a Saturday
New York:          10  AM on a Saturday
London, UK:        3  PM on a Saturday
Central Europe:   4  PM on a Saturday
South Africa:       5 PM on  a Saturday

The purpose of the book club is to explore the systems science literature in depth, so books are read over several months, with monthly reading assignments of approximately 50-100 pages. Check the book club's webpage for the current reading assignments.

The Gallup organization has calculated that the lack of employee engagement worldwide costs employers $7 Trillion annually. Or nearly the combined economies of Germany and Japan. In the U.S., 67% of all employees are either nonengaged or actively sabotaging their employers. Worldwide, this number is 87%. While the economic cost of this disengagement is extraordinary, its impact on human flourishing through meaningful work is staggering.    In contrast, high-impact organizations reverse these numbers and 1) create a transformative workplace experience for employees and 2) deliver extraordinary customer value. This presentation will demonstrate that these high-impact organizations approach the practice of leadership systemically, frequently without understanding the value of systems thinking. In doing so, they abandon the traditional approach to leadership as the action of an individual exerting personal influence downward into the lower reaches of the organization (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). In its place, they design a value-creating leadership system. The result is that they can harness the power of a system to create a sustainable leadership culture and transformative organizations.    A case study: Virginia Mason Medical Center, frequently recognized as one of the safest hospitals in America. 

   

Daniel B Edds, MBA is the author of, Leveraging the Genetics of Leadership, cracking the code of sustainable team performance. This is the first book that documents through case studies and interviews with key leaders in healthcare, manufacturing, education, small business, and the U.S. Military on how to build high-impact organizations with systems design and thinking. Beginning with a systemic approach to leadership, these unique organizations are generating value greater than their size would indicate is possible. By removing personality from leadership and replacing it with an integrated leadership system, organizations of any size can transform their workplace and deliver unparalleled customer value. 

 

https://www.isss.org/members-mini-symposiums/    Saturday time zones for March
 
San Francisco:    7 AM on a Saturday
Mexico:              9 AM on a Saturday
New York:          10  AM on a Saturday
London, UK:        2  PM on a Saturday
Central Europe:   3  PM on a Saturday
South Africa:       4  PM on  a Saturday

In this talk Gary will be reflecting on new insights that have arisen during his engagement with the system science community over the last 10 years, undertaking a trip of discovery.   We will be exploring the nature of health and disease, cancer, pathogens, inflammation, and the immune response. From this context we will be making explicit the architectural parallels between biosystem and human organisational pathology, health, defence, and security.   We will reflect on the COVID pandemic and how a systems approach explains how the COVID-19 virus took advantage of a chink in our defence and security processes (in our biochemistry, biosystems and in our societies).As we progress through the journey, we will be reflecting on the systems thinking necessary in the discovery process and those aspects of systemness revealed under study. In applying a systems approach and the power of analogy and paradox, new understandings and opportunities arise for enhancing the health and vitality of organisations.   Building upon previous material in the ISSS futures report, an elaboration of recommendations will be suggested for discussion based on these insights.      Gary Smith is a Senior Expert Systems Engineer at Airbus Defence and Space. He is their overall architect for engineering processes and provides technical leadership in the digital transformation of the division. He is an INCOSE certified Expert Systems Engineering Professional and a senior editor of the Systems Engineering Body Of Knowledge. Since 2019 he has been the VP for Systems Practice at the ISSS and their relationship manager with INCOSE.   Systems practice has been a continuous theme through Gary’s life experience. He began his career as a lab technician in industrial chemistry at the age of 16, he taught himself how to write software applications in the early 80s, and then after his chemistry degree moved on to relational database systems, software development and project management. As a Project Manager, he was responsible for the delivery of telecommunications infrastructures across Europe before taking on the corporate leadership of the PM discipline. Later, Gary was recruited by Airbus to develop the discipline of technical management and worked to bridge the SE and PM disciplines. During this time with Airbus, he has had several roles as Chief Engineer and Architect of System of Systems Solutions.    Gary is a system junky, his passion extends beyond his professional work and into areas of personal interest to understand the nature of things, to appreciate complexity and to address the big ‘why’ questions. Since the early 2000s Gary has been applying systems thinking to topics such as cancer, inflammation, sepsis, pre-eclampsia and presented to the ISSS on this topic at their Washington conference – “Understanding disease with Systems Thinking”.  Working across and with several organisations and contributors, Gary has been applying systems approaches and processes to integrate system science, systems thinking and systems practice.

 

https://www.isss.org/members-mini-symposiums/     

Saturday time zones for March   San Francisco:    7 AM on a Saturday Mexico:              9 AM on a Saturday New York:          10  AM on a Saturday London, UK:        2  PM on a Saturday Central Europe:   3  PM on a Saturday South Africa:       4  PM on  a Saturday