2016/07/26-29 Live Sketches of Plenaries, ISSS 2016 Boulder

Plenary @ISSSMeeting Live Sketches of Plenaries by @playthink Patricia Kambitsch, #isss2016USA, 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress of ISSS, Boulder, Colorado, USA

Full size images are in the 20160726 ISSS Boulder Sketching album, with a lightbox show.

Plenary 03 Connecting Human And Natural Systems Research

Plenary 04 Crisis Science Anticipatory Real Time And Preventive

Plenary 05 Making Sense In Economics Ethics And Policy

Plenary 06 Multi Cultural Worldviews On Sustainability

Plenary 07 Engineering Sustainable Systems And Technology

Plenary 08 Prospects For Scientific Systemic Synthesis

Plenary 09 Human Capacity Communication And Student Research

Plenary 10 Ranulph Glanville Memorial Talk: Systems Literacy And Outreach

 

 

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#isss, #isss2016

2016/07/29 11:10 Peter Tuddenham, “Systems Literacy”, ISSS 2016 Boulder

Plenary @ISSSMeeting @peterdtuddenham, Keynote #isss2016USA, 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress of ISSS, Boulder, Colorado, USA

Day 5 theme:  Education, Communication, and Capacity

Plenary X: Systems Literacy Education and Outreach

• Description: Achieving sustainable and more synergistic futures requires education in systems thinking and connection with new modes of social communication. Our highest priority should be to legitimize whole systems research and to provide adequate guidance to student/expert collaborative learning within a program of Systems Literacy. How do we ‘train the trainers’ and launch this program?

Chair: Peter Tuddenham, College of Exploration

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker’s presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

Presentation by Peter Tuddenham

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[Peter Tuddenham]

Had a passion on Ocean Literacy, to get learning about oceans into schools

Systems literacy grounded in the natural sciences, and our own wholeness

A start on systems literacy

• An understanding of a system’s influence on you, and your influence on a system

Ocean literacy produced 7 principles

• Tells a story in itself

Essential principles of systems (sciences)

• 1. One … whole
• 2. Shape, form, whole
• 3. Major influence on …
• 4. Systems make our life … Patterns, flows, cycles
• 5. Systems are divse ..
• 6. Systems … humans
• 7. More to learn, explore, understand

Stumbled into this in Berlin, brought Ocean Literacy principles

U.S. next generation science standards, influenced by Ocean Literacy work

• Want NSF to know that systems sciences people have act together

Matrix of Crosscutting Concepts in NGSS

Started journey with Open University Systems Behaviour course

Living Systems Symbols from Ilan Riss (based on Living Systems work from James Grier Miller)

• System sensibilities and system sensitivities

Two videos on Vimeo

• Ocean Literacy video from U.S., signed with Canada and UK
• EU project on Ocean Literacy, now in action, funded with 6M EUR (Sea Change, Increasing Ocean Literacy)

Assignment of questions for a conversation

• At IFSR, had a session on systems literarcy

[Comments]

Problem is consciousness, experience.  Don’t appreciate that we aren’t separated from the whole.

Bridges

Literacy, metaphors, applications.  Ontology and literacy.  Responsible mapping beween us and ocean.

Brain science, natural ability to perceive in a systems way.

[… long dialogue …]

#isss, #isss2016

2016/07/29 10:35 “Graduate Course Student Report”, ISSS 2016 Boulder

Plenary @ISSSMeeting Graduate Student Teams, Keynote #isss2016USA, 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress of ISSS, Boulder, Colorado, USA

Day 5 theme:  Education, Communication, and Capacity

Plenary X: Systems Literacy Education and Outreach

• Description: Achieving sustainable and more synergistic futures requires education in systems thinking and connection with new modes of social communication. Our highest priority should be to legitimize whole systems research and to provide adequate guidance to student/expert collaborative learning within a program of Systems Literacy. How do we ‘train the trainers’ and launch this program?

Chair: Peter Tuddenham, College of Exploration

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker’s presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

Introduction by Peter Tuddenham

• Graduate program on systemic inquiry running this week
• Initiated in Berlin last year
• Gave feedback at the end of the week

Students will give feedback in any way they want

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Conference is part of the systems inquiry

• Asked questions

Two presentations

Team 1:  A Critical Social learning Systems in Practice, using a Soft Systems Methodology

Diagram:  Process Overview

Investigate the future of the systems scientists

• 3 interview questions

Themes:

1. What works well is using systems sciences as a universal device for apprehension

2. Systems literacy

3. Deficiency and both basic and expanded systems literacy

Conflicting priorities of variety and constraints

• Self-organization criticality

Tried to come up with higher orders

Worked out goals, decided would be easier if created a structure, facilitation and questions

Reintroduced ways to think about system boundaries

What are the forces that bring variety; what brings constraint?

We can refine our potential

Journey: diversity, trying to come together

• Argued about different ways
• Problems that we don’t have time, etc.
• Agreed that had a goal in common
• Until we focused on what we needed to accomplish, did we let go of ego
• Saw relationship on what was going on in ISSS
• Focus on solutions rather than problems, saw different ways of implementing systems literacy
• Critical social learning system was like challenges faced in ISSS

Team 2:  Bridge to the Future of ISSS

Focused on action research at ISSS

• Observe –> Interpret –> Act
• Bridging as the theme

Went to sessions individually

• Came together on Tuesday to discuss

Observations of bridging at ISSS

• Disciplines
• Languages
• Cultures
• Communities
• Generations
• Species
• Economic systems
• Ideologies
• Methodologies
• Socio-ecological systems

Interpretation of rich pictures

• Need for systems literacy

An creative interpretation

• Join in direction of systems literacy

Rock of Ages

Bows

[Ray Ison]

Where does this program fit in?

• Not a traditional educational model

Duality (rather than dualism) being and acting systemically, and being and acting systematically

• Systematically has been dominating systemically
• Juggling balls, performance

Critical social learning system (Bawden 2010)

• Collectively work through na issue that they all agree is problematique

This is how we build critical reflexivity through what we do

• Have to do this with othres

Chris Blackmore:  Why systemic inquiry?

• Schon, Vickers, Churchman

Double loop inquiry process

• As a group
• As an individual

Conferences are rarely reflective, and rarely could be described as a learning system

• A device to become a learning system

#isss, #isss2016

2016/07/29 09:40 Delia Pembrey MacNamara, “Connection and Collaboration in the Networked World (for Systemic Purpose/Action)”, ISSS 2016 Boulder

Plenary @ISSSMeeting Delia Pembrey MacNamara @DConstructed01, Keynote #isss2016USA, 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress of ISSS, Boulder, Colorado, USA

Day 5 theme:  Education, Communication, and Capacity

Plenary IX: Human Capacity, Communication, and Student Research

• Description: Systemic Sustainability and Systems Literacy ultimately involve transformative changes at the personal and social level. What individual competencies are needed and how will student researchers navigate the treacherous waters ahead for ‘out-of-the-box’ thinkers? We emphasize the importance of integrated personal skills and effective collaborative and innovative networking to build transformative communities.

Chair: Pamela Buckle Henning, Adelphi University

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker’s presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted by David Ing.

Delia Pembrey MacNamara, University of Hull, presenting for the Ranulph Glanville Memorial Lecture

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[Delia Pembrey MacNamara]

Several people in the room who knew Ranulph Glanville

• Cybernetician
• Designer
• Orator

Put science, cybernetics and design together

Wasn’t big into slides, so this presentation will mainly do pictures

The importance of collaboration and connection for student research

What is a student?

• Student group at last year’s meeting, we all want to be a part, we’re all students

How to collaborate, if you haven’t connected first

In 2014, put first abstract into ISSS and ASC

• Once abstract was accepted, put on web site, everyone could read and comment
• Ranulph was the only one who commented

Hadn’t come across the laws of form, George Spencer Brown

• Was looking at critical systems thinking, stuck in own bubble
• Ranulph, connected and opened up the world

Thanked for comments, connected to say would keep in touch

What’s a network?

• Looks static

LinkedIn Network connections of Kris Hoet, coloured by expertise

• Looks static

Systems thinking says must establish a boundary.  Where’s the boundary?

Boundary may be key, Gerald Midgley, Systemic Intervention and Practice 2000

• What happens when you create that boundary?
• How to boundaries come to life?  (Boundary triage)

We are bounded in so many different ways

• Not just bounded by thinking
• We’re bounded by our physiological boundary
• Time bounded

Also, emotional system

• Cybernetics helps to look beyond, to the purpose and the action

Australia Digital Explorers:  Love as sea

• Emotions can change how you value, how you think, how you relate, how you are

Dilbert:  I have uncontrollable urges to show people better ways of doing things

• Stop to listen, stop to ask questions

Phil Gough:  if systems thinking is about reducing boundaries, why do they put them up in the first place?

Love is a great thing.  How do I do love?  How do you show love?

• Embracing the world
• Being open, dissolving the boundaries that we hold within ourselves

What happens when we’re scared?  Can we show love?

When not feeling safe, what do we tend to do?

• Boundaries

We are a system.  We put up boundaries.  We fight or flight.  We stop understanding, valuing what others have to say.  Need to talk to myself.  Not just a network, a system, helping me to become a person.

If we’re going to do love, we need to listen to other people without judgement, without an agenda.  Be quiet, ask questions.  Create dialogue, which is something that Ranulph really did.

Perception is reality?

1. As a systems thinker, how does physiology connect to …

Sketch by Ranulph Glanville by Patricia Kambitsch

• A way of being in the world
• Having a self-awareness, being part of the system
• The model is not the road itself

With action, we become an us

• An us-ness is more powerful than a we-ness

Serieis of GIFs:  dots of light that get brighter

[Questions]

How you do a network graph?  LinkedIn password, forgot.  Own boundary of forgetting passwords.  Love.  How about terrorists, who are determined to destroy the civilization.  How do we build up the boundary?

• Need to look at other perspective
• At Hull, have people from Libya
• Practical way of doing love is to ask questions, and listen
• What we see on tv, and what is reported, is not real, it’s only partial
• CIA agent on interviewing terrorists, it’s like an empire bombing, they’re rebels trying to save their freedom
• In the network world, we have more responsibilities to find out, and perspectives

Networks being static.  Visualize as journeys.  Where I go in the future may be the result of talking, relationships.

Fuller:  all systems are parallelograms. Find something that works for everyone.  Terrorism, the world isn’t working for everyone.

Lines, meshwork in Bateson extension.  Tim Ingold.

Endocrine system.  Thoughts are energy.  Words are energy.  With energy, we can create love.

#isss, #isss2016

2016/07/29 09:10 Pamela Buckle Henning, “The Challenge of Graduate Research in Systems Science and Practice”, ISSS 2016 Boulder

Plenary @ISSSMeeting Pamela Buckle Henning, Keynote #isss2016USA, 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress of ISSS, Boulder, Colorado, USA

Day 5 theme:  Education, Communication, and Capacity

Plenary IX: Human Capacity, Communication, and Student Research

• Description: Systemic Sustainability and Systems Literacy ultimately involve transformative changes at the personal and social level. What individualcompetencies are needed and how will student researchers navigate the treacherous waters ahead for ‘out-of-the-box’ thinkers? We emphasize theimportance of integrated personal skills and effective collaborative and innovative networking to build transformative communities.

Chair: Pamela Buckle Henning, Adelphi University

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker’s presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted by David Ing.

Pamela Buckle presentation

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[Pamela Buckle]

Shift attention to interiority

Student journey

• Was taking course in Calgary in organization theory
• Wanted to fix things

Robert E. Quinn, Deep Change

• Book influenced life
• Professor from U. Michigan
• You are a system, based on systems of internal and external ….  Routine patterns will lead you towards decay.  Decline …  Deep change, to take the road to slow death.
• Change in major in scope
• Surrendering control
• Walking into uncertainty
• External alignment can be lost … only if you’re willing to take big risks.
• Push or pull into unknown territory
• Systems lined with today, not yesterday

From Gunter Pauli, learned about turning point making him a distrurber

Working on the edge

Conference in big ideas

• Not just big ideas, navigating treacherous waters ahead

Deep change agent, will feel intimidating

We are students, living at this earth, at this time

• Treachery, betrayal
• Being handed over to a messy situation

We’re in the business in the science of wholeness

• Experience this, feeling small, feeling awe, feeling overwhelmed

Messy situations is what systems researchers are in business to address

• Schooled to be exceptional thinkers
• But problem won’t be met by parts

Bring wholeness

• Wholeness is your shadow:  part that you’ve repressed
• We need resources that transcend

Capacity-building

• It’s about what you perceive that others can’t
• Not everyone can perceive that

Need some competencies

Competency #1:  Perceiving order

Competency #2:  Engaging with the unknown, being in the present

Focusing on the interiority

Buy the book:  A Guide to Systems Research

Cultivating skills in skilfully handling unknowns

• Polychronicity (Haase Lee and Banks 1979)
• Tolerance of ambiguity (Frekel-Brunswik 1949)

Competency #3:  Rigourous reflexivity

• Get acquainted with your own perceptual apparatus

Human capacity for the road ahead

• Meet the world’s challenge
• Commit with group

90% of the world’s scientists that ever lived are alive today

Started with interiority, ended to do this together

[Questions]

New students trying to align philosophical views are overwhelmed.

• People who have been working on this for decades are also overwhelmed.

Necessity of finding strengths in ourselves.  What constitutes students.  Etymology of school from Greek leisure.  In order to be a student, can’t continue to be with what’s happening in the U.S., where students have to work and can’t have leisure.  Students are distracted by how to make a living, by at the same time going to school.

• Greatest moment of despair when I don’t have enough time.  Trying to compartmentalize life is breaking apart the wholeness.

We don’t design for others, we design with others.  We design for ourselves, we shift back and forth.

Challenge for this society, to focus on the sustainability of the human system.  To make a whole, we have to accept what we are, and what we are not.  If the key is to understand all of the wisdom and knowledge, ….

Shift between San Jose conference and this one.  Systems thinker out there, isolated.  Difficult to get the support.  If all of our intelligence has to be brought out, it’s a piece of work.  Requires family, community.

• In Calgary, studying.  Allan Combs said should go to a systems conference.  Went to Asilomar 2001.
• Live out loud.

How to deal with context to enable.  There’s another form of feedback.  The inadequacy of the architecture for enabling reflexivity.

Teach mostly postgraduate students.  Teach mostly practitioner.  Leisure is important, but for these students, work is important.  I learn more from them.  Trying to teach a practice that they’re practicising.  Used to take students away for leisure, now everything is on the Internet

• Need to shift from compartmentalizing life, for more clear and direct presence.

#isss, #isss2016

2016/07/29 08:50 Jackwin Simbolon, “Critical Systems Thinking Review on Decentralised Drinking Water Management in Nauli City, Indonesia”, ISSS 2016 Boulder

Plenary @ISSSMeeting @jackwinsimbolon, Keynote #isss2016USA, 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress of ISSS, Boulder, Colorado, USA

Day 5 theme:  Education, Communication, and Capacity

Plenary IX: Human Capacity, Communication, and Student Research

• Description: Systemic Sustainability and Systems Literacy ultimately involve transformative changes at the personal and social level. What individual competencies are needed and how will student researchers navigate the treacherous waters ahead for ‘out-of-the-box’ thinkers? We emphasize the importance of integrated personal skills and effective collaborative and innovative networking to build transformative communities.

Chair: Pamela Buckle Henning, Adelphi University

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker’s presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted by David Ing.

Pamela Buckle introducing Jackwin Simbolon, Flinders University, as the Margaret Mead Award winner

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[Jackwin Simbolon]

Part of Ph.D. project, coming from Indonesia, studying at Flinders University in Australia

• Nauli is a disguised name

Indonesian 1945 constitution says water and natural resources should be under state

In 1999, water management systems in Indonesia decentralized in regional autonomy

• Public water companies privatized, then operating under profit motive

Samsoir province is the driest region in Indonesia

• Poorest, and most corrupt

Only one local government in district of Nauli

• Then 1996, city of Nauli proliferated

Conflict between province, district and city

4 months without rain

Government budget second lowest amongst 32 capital cities in Indonesia

How effective is decentralized water management?

Dimensions of Well-Being, Janet McIntyre; Wicked Problems, Rittel

1986 District company, 26515 connections

2005 City company

Then provincial company

All three are selling water

A lot of people can’t have access to water

• Spent RP21 billion from companies
• Real cost RP2 billion
• So RP19 billion opportunity loss

Authorities fighting each other

Health problems, highest e-coli in water

Exploiting water table

People then go get water from unprotected sources (e.g. rain)

Sources of motivation

Sources of power

Sources of knowledge

Sources of legitimation

[Questions]

Janet McIntyre has extended pragmatism.  Could this shift the thinking of people in authority?

Water is a public good. Is ethos is different from the general feeling, with devolving to local government authorities.

• Yes, absolutely
• Governments have forgotten constitution
• In fieldwork, interviewed officials at all three levels of government, they said, yes we need money to invest; so where is subsidy?
• Compare Indonesia to Brasil with centralized water system
• Electricity is owned by government, so why not do the same for water?
• Phillippines, owned by government

Work in Latin America, where deprivatized water system, and had scandal.

Dilemma:  one perspective not such a good idea for people to be living in such a place that is hard to provide water; vs. since people live there, that government has responsibility to provide for people there.  Lean one way or the other?  Better to ensure essential services, or from a longer term sustainability perspective, shouldn’t have people living there.

• This is a new idea.  Will think about this.

#isss, #isss2016

2016/07/29 08:35 Skyler K. Perkins, “Bringing Forth the Ecological Economy: Learning to be Eco-logical”, ISSS 2016 Boulder

Plenary @ISSSMeeting Skyler Perkins, Keynote #isss2016USA, 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress of ISSS, Boulder, Colorado, USA

Day 5 theme:  Education, Communication, and Capacity

Plenary IX: Human Capacity, Communication, and Student Research

• Description: Systemic Sustainability and Systems Literacy ultimately involve transformative changes at the personal and social level. What individual competencies are needed and how will student researchers navigate the treacherous waters ahead for ‘out-of-the-box’ thinkers? We emphasize the importance of integrated personal skills and effective collaborative and innovative networking to build transformative communities.

Chair: Pamela Buckle Henning, Adelphi University

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker’s presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted by David Ing.

Pamela Buckle introducing Skyler Perkins, University of Vermont, as the Vickers Award winner

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[Skyler Perkins]

My downward spiral into Cybernetic

• Vickers education interrupted by war

Laws of Form, George Spencer Brown

• I am myself with the world
• Bringing myself forth with a mutual recursion

The holy trinity of cybernetics

• Same
• Difference
• Same difference

See recursion in fractals

Interface theory

Heinz von Foerster

Autopoesis

Where can this be applied?

• Autopoesis to social systems
• Inherence with observer, two states of the world

Challenge in formalizing this

• Second order cybernetics fist into ecological economics

Ecological economics

• Integrating ecology and economics
• One world, another world, interaction

Constanza:  economy can’t grow indefinintely

Malgan (2010)

Economists saying the ecosystem is part of the economy; ecologists saying economy is part of the ecology

• Recursion

Considering distinctions:

• Putting value on the ecosystem, changes putting the value on the economy

Who is responsible for drawing these boundaries?

Deepak Malgahan, On the Relationship between Scale, Distribution and Allocation

• In pursuit of optimal scale … but it’s recursive

Daly and Farley (2011) redefine the boundaries of the economy –> rdefines relative value of economy –> redefines …

How can you have sociological systems with defined boundaries, which can be combined with a another system

• Embodying

Participatory action research, with agroecology in Brazil

• 1600 Portuguese arrived
• Now 90% of resources gone
• Rio and Sao Paolo draw on ecosystem services, no longer functioning
• Our task to come into context
• Found pieces couldn’t work on their own
• Ecosystem services have perverse effects, e.g. funding structure, value the farmers could provide to the forest
• Socio-ecological actors

Farms:  Silvio grazing systems

[Question]

Daly book.  Look at Panda methodology

Look at Howard Odum’s work

• Man optimizes for growth production, nature optimizes for …

Why interest in cybernetics?

• Second order understanding
• How we can define objects
• Dealing with different layers of description

#isss, #isss2016