As a promoter of systems thinking, I’ve discovered a big missing piece.
Systems thinkers present their body of work as essential to building strong relationships, creating resilient systems, coordinating efforts across diverse stakeholders, and generally making the world a better place. But when it comes down to it, I haven’t seen examples of systems thinkers working together at the scale that I believe is warranted, and crucial. I haven’t seen a higher rate of co-promotion among systems thinking schools and luminaries than among other interest groups.
This is a cry for help from a little, local systems thinker (me) to the world of big, luminary systems thinkers. I would expect to see a high level of coordination among a global community of systems thinkers, which would help me in my work, but this is not happening, yet. (An alternative title to this blog entry might be, “Can we create an ecosystem of systems thinkers?”)
What Is Missing?
What is missing is a widespread, thoughtful organization of systems thinkers and proponents that successfully builds and develops relationships among people working from diverse models and frameworks, all for the purpose of bring systems thinking to a much wider audience. I believe it would include at least two elements:
1) Cross-promotion. For example, imagine if students who exit the Capra Course are offered an opportunity to enter a Theory U course; Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects alumni may send someone along to the Omidyar Network; you might leave a Peter Senge training with a list of local permaculturists and restorative justice groups (i.e., organizations that are inherently systems-type approaches to making the world a better place).
2) Co-promotion of systems thinking with the purpose of making the world a better place. As you can see in the image below, Google trends registered a spike in searches for the word “systemic” in June of 2020. I believe that this is related to the murder of George Floyd on May 25th, and the subsequent popular use of the term “systemic racism.” An organization such as the one I am proposing would be ideally situated to seize these moments in history and help make a positive difference by providing for the public in-depth, robust definitions of relevant terms and concepts. (Related: see this illuminating article in The Atlantic about complexity and COVID-19, “It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong.”)
There are currently some efforts to build and sustain networks and co-promotion of systems thinking. There are Facebook groups, a big LinkedIn group, consultant (or NGO-based) networks of practitioners, and many, many attempts at alumni and practitioner forums among those who have completed a given course or entire training. The International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) has numerous resources, if you’re already a deep insider and happy and comfortable in an academic context. The Systems Thinker catalogs dozens and dozens of useful articles.
But this is the gap:
There is no systems thinking equivalent of a chamber of commerce or trade group that brings us all together into a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum consortium of intelligent co-creation. (Ironic, I believe.) Systems thinking schools of thought on the whole act more like isolated islands rather than an archipelago.
Aren’t systems thinkers supposed to have the inside scoop on the power of working together? Is it possible for us to build strong, solid relationships among ourselves, and get along well over time? Can we go from “ego to eco-system awareness” (to quote Theory U), at least among ourselves? If the California Avocado Society (CAS) has existed since 1915, surely in 2020 systems thinkers can get together.
The Potential
Granted, the avocado people have a mission, “assuring long term profitability for the business of avocado growing” (Ref). A global system of systems thinkers would need to have a higher purpose than profit (though financial sustainability is certainly a necessary leg of the proverbial stool).
What do we as individuals and organizations really, actually need to succeed? For example, current off-the-shelf technology is largely not very systems thinking-friendly. What might be possible if we built something that is systems-friendly, together?
Lots of Attempts At Networks, Not Much Success
This need to know “who is doing what” and “coordinate efforts” is a theme across many disciplines, sectors, and interest areas. A separate blog entry will deal in-depth with the ongoing challenge of harnessing technology to (borrowing from Theory U again) “help the system to sense and see itself.” Suffice it to say that it does not appear to me that systems thinking communities have had any more luck than any other interest group in successfully building a database to track who is doing what. Nor have they successfully coordinated efforts.
Systems Thinking Marin
In the fall of 2017, I created an organization that would promote systems thinking in my community. Fortunately for me, a local philanthropist friend agreed to fund this experiment at a basic startup level, and Systems Thinking Marin was born. (My current fiscal sponsor is Inquiring Systems Inc., in Sonoma County.)
Over the past three years my attempts to promote systems thinking have merged with promoting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of 2030. Prior to COVID, this promotion work largely entailed driving around to lots (and lots) of meetings, developing relationships, and talking (and talking) about the really great, indispensable toolbox that is systems thinking.
But most people have never heard of systems thinking, and most people in the United States (including here in Marin County) have never heard of the UN Global Goals. My hope has been to get a small handful of passionate people hooked into both of these, and support them in further spreading the word and practices.
However, systems thinking often takes years to pick up. It took me years to pick up. I first heard about it in approximately 2006, and it wasn’t until starting on my dissertation in 2015 that I took the time to really get into it. Therefore, given that most people have never heard of systems thinking until I show up, mostly what I am doing is planting seeds and hoping they grow.
That is where this much larger, co-supportive and promotional platform should come in. I imagine that an organization such as a global consortium of systems thinkers would be the people who water the seeds and foster growth over time. Their work would pop up in a person’s Facebook news feed, in a newsletter of an organization they support, at a conference, referenced in a report, etc.
Perhaps most of all, it would be very helpful to my local promotion work to point toward a guiding light organization and say, “Systems thinkers don’t just espouse how important it is to work together, they are really good at working together to make the world a better place. Just look at this global cooperative organization…”
A Dramatic Need for Systems Thinking NOW
I am publishing this blog entry in December of 2020, more than three years after initiating Systems Thinking Marin. A global COVID pandemic shut down a good portion of the economy. If millions of workers were enjoying being at home and spending time outdoors, here in California that enjoyment was spoiled by wildfires burning up 4 million acres (so far this year). If you live in the United States, a nightmarish circus at the federal level of government has distracted most people from critically important local issues, though a centrist democrat was just elected to replace the Trump administration.
As a systems thinker, I don’t need to tell you that now is the time when millions of people are dying for an alternative worldview. Not only do we need systems thinking, but we need to learn to think. In the U.S. at least, most people aren’t explicitly taught how to think. Most people absorb the default worldview without much thought, and don’t even realize they have a worldview. Critical thinking as much as systems thinking is not well known, though people like to talk about thinking critically and talk about getting out of silos.
So I am asking systems thinkers, can we get out of our silos? Can we arrange our islands into a chain of islands rather than our largely isolated websites and missions and programs? Do we have the imagination to see the possibilities of becoming a robust, living system community? Can we be a community?
This is the part where the blogger says, “If so, act now! Contact me.” But the first question I have for you is, do you know of any efforts to actually really do just this? Efforts with funding? Efforts with vision? With systems thinking luminaries already behind the project? I’ll provide a link below to a list I’ve been building, but maybe you have a better one? And yes, please contact me.
Note: Many thanks to Gerald Midgley, Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull for his thoughtful comments during my investigation into this topic.
Link to List of Systems Thinking Entities
Thank you to Fritjof Capra’s office for sending me a list of systems thinking-related university programs to add to the big list linked above.
Nice post. Seeking a, or the thought worthy of speech? It is a struggle to connect intuitive approaches. Advocating my own silo, my impression is that all our various islands poke up through the water, but below sea level reach down to the same underlying general principle. In my storyline that commonality holds reality as nested structured~duality (NSD) — roughly, all things have some structure and also have or exhibit one or more dualities or differences. So, each of us are working with and from our own instances of nested structured~duality. We have our favorite instances of nested structural coding, and fashion together various nested fields within nested fields — as you prose and do in your networking and listings. Want to build a paradigm? Pick a structure and pick one or more dualities, then build outward to the limits of your procedural choices. Thus getting the various instances of NSD. On the scientific paradigm change front, one can shift from the cube/subjective-objective instance to the magnetic tetrahedron instance and explore the five ways to align four rod magnets along the radii of a tetrahedron (n4,n3s,n2s2,ns3,s4) and rather immediately acquire physical intuition on variable mass-density multiple states, but without the decades of xyz-cubic-founded abstract math pre-requisites. The ‘same’ pattern is present in the sp^3-hybridized molecular bonding of our water- and carbon-based ontology, echoing from R. Buckminster Fuller’s prior “systems thinking”. This information comppression comes about just be changing from one instance of NSD to another, slightly more naturally occurring instance of NSD.
Ralph: As in my email back to you, I haven’t spent enough time with your comment to fully understand it. However, I like your point about the commonality under the surface of the water.
I see.
I’ve also realized that every “system” – I use it as a word for something I don’t understand, without having to explain I don’t understand, hardly ever someone asks me “what do you mean by ‘system’? – structures itself. I like to call this it-self-organizing (as an addition to “self-organizing”; I could have called it organically organized organisations too).
Based on “A map is not the territory; if correct, a map has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” (usually one stops reading before the ; Korzybski) it follows that all systems – if useful – must have the same structure.
This connects nicely with Maturana and Varela’s “structural coupling”: “We speak of structural coupling whenever there is a history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems.”
With Ashby’s Law of the Requisite Variety, this leads me to induce that the structure of all systems, from domain (the part of reality you inhabit) to the (human) body, the (human) organs, including the (human) brain, through their uses in that domain, have to been structurally coupled and “the same”. (And also, strangely enough, that these system seem to try to predict the future)
“Our perceptual AND conceptual system, are metaphorical in nature”, states Kim Hermanson PhD,
As Lakoff notices: we construct conceptual (or “abstract) metaphors on the structure of the concrete experiences of our (human) body, so our perceptual, conceptual and metaphorical systems have to be structurally coupled too. Niklass Luhman was kind enough to extend this to social systems and communicational systems. The structure of a radio and its network accounts for its usefulness.
Prof. Droste from the university of Leuven (Belgium) also states, that the meaning of language is being conveyed (or “translated”) through its grammar, which is another word for structure. And now comes my point:
We have conditioned ourselves – it’s it-self-organizing, remember – to structure communication through a language of “command and control”, or the “conduit metaphor of communication”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduit_metaphor . This metaphor of communication induces a control structure in our thinking, tends to suppress the existence of metaphorical meaning and ambiguity and has also seem to have invaded “systems thinking”.
In my view, this command and control structure only makes sense, when working with machines and – later – computers. All scientific theories have been infused by this idea of “control”. Even the most brilliant Darwin, who had to trade in his “natural selection” – or it-self-organizing – to “survival of the fittest”.
Peter Senge introduced me to his kind of “systems thinking” (I had developed another one, one that’s more self-organizing) of “Learning organizations”, metabolizing Chris Argyris’ “Organizational Learning”. The latter states that learning by human beings organizes itself (or should I say, themselves); the first assumes the existence of organisation prior to to learning.
Only (human) beings can learn to think (and are doing so, by making mistakes in predicting the world, just like any other it-self-organizing system) through structural coupling.
It might come as a surprise to you, that a (human) brain hasn’t designed nor evolved itself for thinking with (written, spoken) language. Brains – pars pro toto, I have to add – have been concerned with moving their body for the last few billion years.
I’m sure, “systems thinking” – what ever this system will become – is organizing itself organically.
Jan: I did not fully follow your comments. However, I will say that I appreciate your point about our challenged capacity for metaphor. As a student of mythology (including spiritual and religious traditions) I have certainly noted this. As for the mind and evolution, I take a page from the zoologists who point to community and socialization as the cornerstone of increased neural complexity. But this is not remotely my field of specialty.
I’m impressed with your work through the Capra Course. I’m interested in finding some areas for collaboration. I believe you have identified some key issues that need some dialogue (e.g. Bohm). With social systems, there is some sort of energy that moves the system to a place far from equilibrium and aliveness.
Bruce: Thank you for your comment. I will send you an email. (And I’ve meant to spend more time with Bohm’s work myself.)
The label of “systems sciences” comes from deliberation (before my time) in the ISSS, after an original label of “Society for General Systems Research” was perceived as being inadequate.
It is important that both systems and sciences are plural. Compare to System Dynamics (for which there is another Society), and Systems Science (which is used by the systems engineering community at INCOSE, who make fun of ISSS having multiple sciences).
The change in title to ISSS came around the time when Russell Ackoff and West Churchman were active in the society. The Ackoff program at U. Pennsylvania was called “Social Systems Sciences”. http://coevolving.com/blogs/?s=“social+systems+sciences”
In longer history, philosophy predates science. Jack Ring made the point that applied science (engineering) precedes science, because human beings often have systems working before we understand why they work.
It’s worth noting that Ackoff might refer to the Art and Science of Systems.
I can’t speak for others, but I come to systems first as a science, to which an art is applied.
(Reposted from https://www.facebook.com/groups/ecologyofsystemsthinking/permalink/3553593111386474/?comment_id=3557152717697180&reply_comment_id=3557435657668886 )
In the systems community, I have been engaged in both international (ISSS) and local (e.g. https://wiki.st-on.org/ ) activities.
The organization of activities relates to distinctions made by Timothy F.H. Allen on complicated c.f. complex, and low gain c.f. high gain.
I recently have been focused on a small group in Toronto with http://systemschanges.com/online/ , because we need more depth, and bandwidth is broader with a small, local group. We have portrayed a 10-year journey, and have a record of meeting every 3 weeks since the beginning of 2019. We acknowledge that we don’t really know how to scale the group up, although there is much to learn from the research into cellular form organizations by Miles and Snow.
Stewart Brand said “fast gets all of the attention, slow has all of the power”. We need both, and should recognize multiple systems operating at a variety of scales, scopes and speeds.
(Reposted from https://www.facebook.com/groups/ecologyofsystemsthinking/permalink/3553593111386474/?comment_id=3557506210995164 )
Hi, and it is welcome that you publish a post like this. I have often found systems thinking very confusing when you look at it as a subject, and what it must be like for those who are new to this and wish to learn? I was lucky enough to learn from those who were already engaged in working with it practically, and I learned what was needed for my work. Since then I have read much and delved into the subject, only to find it both helpful and exasperating.
This is a summary of what I have found and learned:
1. Systems thinking is an actual way of seeing and conceptualising. However, most systems thinking that is published is actually systems theory.
2. Systems thinking is not the same as systems theory, and learning one does not mean you can do the other. Nor does it mean that you have to become a great theorist.
3. Systems thinking changes depending on the application or area you are interested in. My area is re-designing services and organisations, and therefore the systems thinking principles, theory, and techniques I need are a sub-set of what others need. Therefore systems thinking to me will appear very different to someone else.
4. There is almost no practical and applicable route that I have found, except working with others, to get to truly know systems thinking quickly and effectively.
5. Take 10 ‘systems thinkers’ into a room, they will have 11 different ways to express systems thinking, and most of them will blindly disagree with the other to the point of violence! Ridiculous state of affairs.
6. Systems thinking, in its application, is almost always mixed up with a host of other disciplines. This makes it even harder to extract the systems thinking bit. And actually there may not be a need to do that.
7. If someone says they know systems thinking and they try to correct you in a way that belittles your and forces their concepts onto you, they probably are dogmatic and narrow minded. I personally keep away from those who cannot learn and accept others.
8. Systems thinking can appear very different depending on the level of intervention. It does not mean that one is right or wrong.
We are desperate to have ways and means of really perceiving and applying systems thinking in the world, and I feel your frustration. Your attempt to change that is great, keep going.
My exact thought.ms. In the comment thread below I offer an implementation path with a doable starting point (look for several of my comments in this thread). 100% serious. I’ll be in touch.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6734577438807982080?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6734577438807982080%2C6734698345140490241%29
It’s kind of hard. Speaking as a Systems Engineer & Architect – mostly for large planning & operations support systems – it seems like the nature of systems/architectural work is somewhat solitary. Teams sometimes work – with the right people – particularly when doing things like integrating multiple systems, each with their own architects (Internet standards work comes to mind). But, generally, one is stuck with the “too many cooks” problem.
Timing…I just completed the Zoom gathering of the FLOH Commons. We are Florida and Ohio leaders who’ve taken the Capra Courses since Spring 2020, when systems were collapsing around us. I’m taken by the synchronicity of seeing this blog, which may be dormant, based upon the last entry date.
I completely agree! Not enough practicing systems theory. However, I’ve been ‘tinkering’ with theory and practice in a place since 1994. It MAY be working to shift consciousness. We’ve been partnering from the beginning, starting with becoming a community group of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Inspired by Willis Harman and his book ‘Global Mind Change’, it’s been one adventure after another. Partnering and networking are how nature learns. We are nature. Align, synergize, and leverage. Check http://www.theconnectionpartners.com for some of the trails and networks. We are too busy practicing biomimicry to keep it up to date.
In Jan 2020, I approached the Capra Course team with a proposed ‘experiment’ to discover what might happen with 40 Florida activists came together to study systems theory together and to awaken to themselves as living systems becoming conscious of ourselves as a system. The FL40 met Monday evenings during the course and have continued, adding others from the Cleveland and then FL and OH leaders last fall.
An earlier experiment was with the Presencing Institute when we were among 300 groups enrolled in their curriculum in “Societal Transformation”. Our group was a diverse group, selected to represent the 7 petals of the Permaculture flower, along with race, gender, age and background. Whole systems becoming conscious of themselves, as they learn more about the system that they ARE.
There are lots of learnings. Many stories. Today, another mix of individuals, representing the Florida Council of Churches, University of South Florida, the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay and The Connection Partners, learned we have received another grant to foster a ‘culture of conversational leadership’ in 3 neighborhoods of St Petersburg, Florida. Another collaboration is with the Black Health Equity Alliance, supported by the Foundation for a Healthy St Petersburg and the Morehouse School of Medicine on the Political Determinants of Health. In both examples, we are using the World Cafe model of engagement, which we’ve used for over 20 years to awaken innate fields of connection, caring and love. Fields begin to cohere with fields, networks network with networks. Emerging consciousness offers its own agenda, as we experience synchronicities.
In case data is needed, we have a proven qualitative/quantitative research team, sharing their gifts, resources and skills. Today’s grant from the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay funds and supports our upcoming adventure in St Petersburg’s neighborhoods. On Friday, we will propose to the Capra team that the City of St Petersburg be our 4th ‘experiment’ to track what happens when living systems become conscious of themselves as a living system. This time it is a city of 260,000 people which has declared itself to be a City of Equity, Compassion and Peace.
Open to learn, explore and share how systems thinkers can work together.