Pathways to New Community Paradigms

We are, each of us, a system. We are, each of us, systems in multitudes

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 14:50:00 +0000

We are, each of us, a system. We are, each of us, systems in multitudes. We are both at the same time. We are ourselves, as systems, of the same nature as those systems manifested within the world to both our senses and mind continuing the discussion from the previous post and Still Learning to Understand Systems. Separated, from all that we are not without, and from what we are within, as well as between other systems by boundaries that are placed there by us.

The most determinative means, it seems to me, but with the least amount of information of assigning a boundary to a system is to give it a label. Buckminster Fuller’s definition of a system as “the first subdivision of universe into a conceivable entity” provides an important initial context without particularities.

Russell Ackoff, whose focus on systems was in addressing practical, real-world messes, the kind raised by uncertainty and complexity, said that any particular or specific system could be characterized by three essential conditions which I could also see as being able to assist in establishing the boundary of a system as defined by Fuller.

First, each simple element in a system has an effect on the behavior of the whole system. If it doesn’t have such an effect then it’s not part of the system and belongs outside the boundary. Second, within a system each element is affected by at least one other element in that system, and that none of the elements has an independent effect on the whole. Every element then has an effect on some other element or elements in the system and only has such an effect on the whole in conjunction with some other element or elements. Third, it is not possible to develop totally independent subsystems from a subgrouping of a system’s elements. Any subsystems within a system that can be made totally independent belong on the outside of the system. It will likely take some experimenting to determine which elements fulfill all three categories. This still leaves a potentially large portion of elements that can be placed on either side of a boundary depending upon how it or they are defined but it is then a matter of consensus or coercion, both of which, again in my view, can be detrimental to understanding a system.

Fuller’s definition, however, is not merely an esoteric abstraction but can provide an immediate, visual illustration of the boundaries of a three-tier hierarchy anchored in geometry.

The simplest possible three-dimensional configuration or minimum set of relations representing a stable structure (which can also be fractalized) within the “real world” is a tetrahedron, a four-sided, triangular-faced pyramid having four vertices, four faces, and six edges subdividing the world into all that is outside the system’s structure (environment), the structure of the system itself (system), and the system’s interior (bounded elements and connections) having profound, practical implications for all system designers.

Fuller’s definition of a system bears a particularly significant illustration of the aspect of verticality or nestability, the means of forming a hierarchy, series, or sequence wherein each member, element, or set is contained in and contains the next. From a systems thinking view of the world, this concept of hierarchy finds expression, in the natural world, as a stratified organization of increasing levels of complexity, which can be expressed as a sequence corresponding to levels of emergence distinguishing one level from the next by novel qualitative properties.

Starting with elementary particles, atoms, and molecules to become various forms of matter, to leap from inorganic to simple organic life-forms, to evolve into complex organisms, and in aggregate evolve into whole ecosystems, leaping again to consciousness to include humans and subsequently human society. Each level represents a cluster of interacting sub-components, consisting of elements of the previous level.

Each level can be distinguished by the relative strength of the respective interactions by which it is constrained. Each level being stronger within and weaker between other levels. It is the constrained internal bonds that allow for the individual integrity of a level to stand out against the background of its environment and provide for a definition of boundary conditions.

This is very different from a strictly reductionist based top-down complicated systems of command and control hierarchy, discussed in the last post, that feature little in the way of nested verticality. It again means that from a systems thinking perspective one needs to optimize on at least three levels, the system under consideration, its environment, and its internal components, as a coherent, harmonious integration of relevant aspects for any constructive, systemic intervention. The familiar and conventional organizational or governance structures of our typical commerce, political, or social affairs organizations are simply inadequate, in not being internally rich enough, to address the demands of an increasingly complex world.

Many examples of business and governance management perpetuate a model that imposes structures with grossly insufficient variety such as conventional concepts of leadership that violate the law of requisite variety by popularly entrusting power in a single person. Consider the complex interactions that increasingly characterize today’s society, concerning the typical, still-prevailing, hierarchical, command-and-control structure, and I would add afflicted by ”complicatedness”. Such low-variety models ultimately only impoverish the system that is supposedly “under control.”

Another cybernetic term due to Ross Ashby is ”Ultrastability”, the cybernetic concept of regulation relating to the ability of a system to restore homeostatic equilibrium after unexpected perturbations even when a trajectory for doing so has not been specially pre-specified or built-in. A more complex, dynamic form of adaptation is manifested in the typical homeostatic mechanism by which a fixed decision rule is applied to trigger an appropriate corrective action whenever equilibrium is disturbed.

In more interesting cases, read as more complex cases, such as brain-like systems, societies, or ecosystem, a sufficient amount of variety can be “built” into a system so that its internal reconfiguration can be made to match unpredictable changes in its environment even if a specific decision rule is not already embedded in its structure. The general rule then becomes “keep changing internal configurations,” or basically rewire the internal variety of the system in the search for a subset that matches new demands in real-time. The internal variety of a system, even if very high and ultrastable is, however, still finite as an entirely new environmental context condition may require new options that the system cannot generate.

This gives rise to Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety which states that “Only variety can absorb variety.” Effective regulation then can only be achieved when the regulating system contains at a minimum, the same amount of variety as the system being regulated. The requirement for requisite variety is applicable regardless of the type of system whether automated devices, technology processes, ecosystems, or social systems.

One means of enhancing requisite variety is redundancy. The term redundancy, commonly understood as unnecessary, in information theory refers to protecting information integrity from deterioration due to the effects of background noise by increasing information content or channel capacity.

At a state of maximum disorder or entropy, when no distinctions can be made or no information is discernible and activity ceases redundancy will be at zero. Redundancy then allows for more potential “possibilities.” If the rate of change of a system’s redundancy remains positive then it is self-organizing according to Heinz Von Foerster. This would logically seem to extend further to ”Redundancy of Potential Command”.

Internal complexity brought about by requisite variety allows for the emergence and re-emergence of different configurations in response to changing events. The important implication being that “’ living,’ self-organizing systems, including social systems of all types, depending on their internal complexity and inherent redundancy for resilience and long-term viability”.

Distributing and determining by function and relevant knowledge rather than by authority assigned by rank and seniority the processes of decision-making across a network-like organizational structure is termed ”Heterarchy” The potential for so-called “command” is thus distributed, or made redundant, over a large number of components and its location shifts constantly within the network. It is not permanently localized and no fixed vertical hierarchy of authority is discernible.

Fuller’s definition of a system can be said to transverse across the chasm between the solely conceptual and the countless entities with distinct and independent existence within our universe, laying between that which is conceivable but which is not an entity within our universe and that which may perhaps be an entity, but that is not conceivable. In total, what we call our reality. It brings systems, conceptually defined, to a state of reality within which Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics can be and by necessity needs to be applied.

The seemingly, abstract, remote, and perhaps even, esoteric concepts of variety, ultrastability, redundancy of potential command, synergy, and self-organization are all related or are constrained together describing and arguably determining the characteristics of regulating mechanisms that underlie external behavior of complex systems. The practical implications of which are far-reaching and significant not only in that they shape the conduct of human affairs but they could be crucial in resolving the many sustainability-related challenges we are facing. The challenge of all interventions in any socio-ecosystemic domain would be then to keep an open, dynamic stance, working in tandem with the self-organizing properties of the system, rather than inadvertently destroying them.

Finding Our Way Through Complexity and Uncertainty

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 16:20:00 +0000

The last post looked at Michael Ben-Eli’s paper, ”Understanding Systems”, a part of Sustainability Laboratory’s online course on Systems Thinking and Systems Modeling. This should have been said then, the Understanding Systems paper needs to be read, even more so than this blog post series. This is only my interpretation, far more likely subject to error, jumbled with alternative and added thoughts to tie it to New Community Paradigms. The paper by Ben-Eli has far more insights from Stafford Beer, Ross Ashby, and others not included here.

The previous post was able to fully define the concept of ”system”, based on the insights in ”Understanding Systems”, solely through mutually supporting abstract concepts without referring to anything physical. There wasn't any need for the particularity of specific instances. ”Organization” could be seen as a concept without the need for reference to a specific organization or particular type. Self-organization arose from the further internal interactions of mutually supporting concepts. There was an inference, with the mention of patterns, to our more immediate sensory world but that world is a veil behind which the concept of patterns lay.

That conceptual reality, however, is not the one that we have to survive, strive, and succeed in. Even if the interactions within such conceptual reality are constrained seamlessly, weaving together effortlessly, they are hidden from our own hard-knock reality by a veil of complexity, uncertainty, and randomness and must be divined from the clues made apparent when we look for them.

The key to piercing the veil, so as to glimpse at a system’s internal workings, is to see the same logic found in the circuitry in man-made, automatic, error-control mechanisms as being analogous to the homeostatic logic found in physiological structures that work to maintain specific physiological values such as body temperature, body fluid composition, blood pressure, blood sugar level, etc., by triggering an appropriate corrective action when deviations occur from a norm.

Cybernetics focuses specifically on understanding the often obscured dynamics of a systems’ internal structures and the mechanisms that maintain its dynamic organization invariant. The term “cybernetics” denotes the role of feedback mechanisms in processes of regulation and control. The number of possible distinctions related to a system’s internal states in cybernetics is termed “variety”.

Norbert Wiener, the first pioneer in the field, and his colleagues established I am going to say the immutable connection between the observable behavior of a system or its output and the internal structure of a system in a 1943 paper, Behavior Purpose, and Teleology.

First, by clarifying the question of purposive behavior by tying a system’s behavior to its specific internal structure which helped to remove the need for “vitalism,” or as in the last post ”vital force”, to explain the special qualities of living systems. Second, by making it clear that to modify a system’s behavior change must be made to the system’s core structure rather than being directed at the behavior of the system.

Wiener defined cybernetics as “the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine,” highlighting two key ideas. One is establishing the validity of the theory for both man-made devices and living systems. Two, classifying “control” and “communication” as one, signifying the role of information in processes of control and regulation.

What then are the structures and mechanisms of a system by which it mediates its operation, viability, performance, and by which it determines how the system can regulate itself? How it can self-organize and how it can adapt and evolve?

Regulatory processes mediate between the factors interacting for particular outcomes or behaviors binding a system together to preserve (constrain) its singular identity. ”Control” then is not meant to be considered as a restricting concept.

Regulation in the cybernetic model is expressed in the context of a system’s capacity to maintain equilibrium states in the face of disturbances from an environment with which it interacts. Regulation can then be regarded as the manifestation of a system’s adaptive capacity.

Cybernetics extents the concept of regulation to evolutionary processes, by which a system can actually transform into a new entity with a higher regulation potency. Amplifying potential variety by processes such as coalition formation, highlighting the importance of cooperation in evolution as has been demonstrated by anthropologists looking at the work of Elinor Ostrom.

The number of different states that a system in the real world can assume or its potential internal variety can be considered a measurement of complexity. Complexity then can be thought of as the number of possible distinctions by which information can be known or that can be determined about a given system, independent of its size. A human cell can be more complex than a large distribution warehouse.

The number of possible states or a variety of a system increases both rapidly and exponentially when the numbers of elements it contains get larger along with the number of interactions or connections between them, as well as the possibility for each interaction to assume more than a single value.

A quantity of variety, however, also produces a measure of uncertainty. Uncertainty or randomness relates to our perception of order or information about the different states of a system although contrariwise to the way order relates to the more deterministic regularities in a system’s behavior produced by a sequence of a system’s changing states which are detectable.

The concepts of information and uncertainty are closely related having similar mathematical expressions but opposite signs. If uncertainty is at a maximum then all events in a given universe can occur with equal probability which means that no information is available and variety is at zero. Uncertainty then is a measure of disorder in a system or the level of entropy.

The process of conveying an amount of information concerning one state out of the variety of all the possible states of a system removes some uncertainty but never all of it, some of it is irreducible as Donella Meadows has pointed out. Too much information can be as bad as too little, making distinguishing relevant information from background noise impossible.

The behavior of whole systems, presumably those of sufficient complexity to require multiple subcomponents to achieve a high degree of internal variety, cannot be predicted from the behavior of the system’s parts alone due to the emergence of new, often unexpected properties. This perspective of an entire or whole system is termed synergy in Cybernetics. This ought to be assumed in all cases of social systems design and addressed as they will find inevitable expression in social interactions.

The concept of variety, along with the concepts of organization, entropy, and order, and I would add synergy, are at the nexus of our ideas involving physics, information theory, and the philosophy of science. Such regularities that can be found within a system are produced by constraints imposed on that system’s potential variety or its internal structure as discussed in the last post. This the Understanding Systems paper asserts is profound.

The far more prevalent traditional reductionist analytical process, according to Ludwig von Bertalanffy, as cited by the Understanding Systems paper, sees interactions between elements being non-existent, or negligible in that they can supposedly be ignored for the purpose of analysis. According to a strictly reductionist perspective, understanding the world should be possible from constructing a picture of it by simply adding up detailed descriptions of its parts. There is no need but to precisely measure what is immediately before us and sum it up. Ignoring the internal state of systems is to our peril as we are assailed with a world of complexity, uncertainty, and randomness by which the reductionist perspective can be seen as myopic.

The gross deficiencies of currently prevailing top-down hierarchical command and control structures, including an inability to effectively address complexity, have been highlighted by many including Dee Hock, founder and CEO emeritus of VISA International, who advocated instead for a creative combination of “order” and “chaos” or what he termed “chaordic”. A more versatile and dynamic, but also more complex form of organization that allows for the ability to innovate and experiment.

Switching from a mechanistic, reductionistic perspective of the world to a system view of the world opens one up hopefully but also understandably hesitantly to a variable, dynamic and interdependent reality, which demonstrates not only the need for a transformative shift in values, attitude, and actions in the world but also to pathways able to achieve them.

Personally, I doubt that this would actually force acknowledgment of such a reality, as Ben-Eli asserts. We, humans, are far more resilient in our mental models than that, persuasion is still required. As he says elsewhere, individual observers can either keep or change their frame of reference. Even if they do change, they will likely have to come together with others in some manner to change their collective conclusions to change the system. Regardless, the implications of switching are still profound.

Still Learning to Understand Systems

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 22:32:00 +0000

Recently, I finished reading Michael Ben-Eli’s Module 1: ”Understanding Systems”, as the first part of the Sustainability Laboratory online course Systems Thinking and Systems Modeling presented in Kumu. My understanding of systems and what they are has been expanded with the newly discovered insight from Buckminster Fuller who defined a system as, “the first subdivision of universe into a conceivable entity,” as well as other concepts previously known of but now better integrated into my thinking.

This blog has in the past used Donella Meadows’ definition of “A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something…. a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.” Jay Forrester’s definition of a system, “a grouping of parts that operate together for a common purpose.” Jay Forrester and Donella Meadows are both proponents of System Dynamics as is Sustainability Laboratory, both are members of my NCP Fantasy Systems Thinking Team and both can be seen as being on the ontological side of Systems Thinking’s internal debates.

Those debates were addressed in the UK Systems Practice series and have also just finished reading Michael Jackson’s ”Systems Thinking, Creative Holism for Managers” one realizes now a bit better choosing which side to stand with isn't an either/or proposition. So I could also now add in Ross Ashby, a British Cyberneticist, taking what I see as a more epistemological perspective who said that “a system is a source of information,” which I can agree with but it is not just that.

However, most people for whom Systems Thinking is intended to help aren't going to care or be able to afford the time to pick a side that would likely do little to address the situation, mess or challenge, wicked or not, that they are facing. At the same time, it seems difficult to move ahead as an advocate for Systems Thinking, especially when applied to democratic community governance processes without having a firmer foundation.

The ideas expressed here are sourced primarily from the ”Understanding Systems” paper, though are solely my own interpretations based upon my readings. This series of blog posts is going to detour from consideration of more pragmatic applications of Systems Thinking to address some of the concepts raised in the paper.

One such concept is that of ”constraint” as a defining aspect of systems. A particular kind of outcome or behavior exhibited by a system is the result of a given pattern of interactions or reciprocal instances of cause and effect that are limited or constrained to that particular pattern. Since outcomes with systems are continuous we can refer to them as behaviors. Any given pattern of interactions representing a limiting or constraining factor, as an instance or set of circumstance, fact, or influence that produces only a particular kind of behavior and no other. A specific pattern of relations acts then as a constraint. Some specific set of relations defines their interaction in which a specific pattern of relations is being conserved. Similar to cause and effect with interactions, it is a reciprocal relationship.

The Information System Theory Project (ISTP) defines a system as “a set of mutually constrained events.” Events then can be seen as instances of interactions between factors or Meadows’ elements that over time are constrained into patterns. It may seem to become obvious but systems change dynamically over time through weaving patterns of interactions, constrained but not constricted, iterated but not identical, separated by time and space but that is actually hard to grasp conceptually except in a very general and limited sense.

The existence of patterns in systems has been addressed before through the Systems Thinking Iceberg and the perspective of seeing Causal Loop Diagrams as depicting patterns of persistent causality. This concept of constraint asserts those patterns are constrained to be what they are and not something else. This sounds very much to my mind like organized complexity which as Jane Jacobs taught us has application in the ”real” world.

Forrester’s definition of a system could then be changed to ”a grouping of parts constrained to operate for a common purpose,” adding in Fuller, as a conceivable entity in the universe or to put it on an ontological footing, a thing capable of being imagined or mentally grasped as having distinct and independent existence.

What we can’t know are all the interactions that make up such a pattern. It is impossible then to completely determine precisely how several different variables will act together when exposed at the same time to many different influences but we don't need to. The patterns generated by a system can produce a myriad of different behaviors separated over time and space but which can still be discernible as patterns.

Living systems depend on the integrity of the organism viewed as a whole to reveal essential qualities that add up to more than the sum of their parts. A living system is engaged in a constant metabolic exchange with its world importing substances and releasing by-products of its activity into an environment that is also populated by many other species of equally active self-organizing systems. This synergistic, non-linear effect of self-organization by a system is not confined to biology being also applicable to the physical sciences including those underlying biological processes.

Self-organization, or what is termed spontaneous order in the social sciences (though that spontaneous order would still need the means to continue), is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system according to Wikipedia. The process is spontaneous, not needing control by an external agent or arguably by a central or higher-level component of the system. My concern is that there can be a tendency to conflate self with ego or our own individual identities. Self-organizing is not organization by self (I) but of self (the thing-in-itself) with no (ego-based) self needed to be involved. The ego-based self then is another emergent level that would have a different impact on the further emergence of social systems.

This means then that a self-organizing system requires that observers, or other fellow self-organizing systems, continuously change their frame of reference and even, as can be necessary, their conclusions.

In biology, the idea of a separate “vital force” used to explain the special qualities of living systems has been replaced with a new principle of an integrated concept of organization. The notion of systemic wholeness and that would include the notion of self-organization of that systemic wholeness leads the ”Understanding Systems” article to assert the concept of “organization” as a basic unit of study.

The term "organization", however, it seems to me, is being used in a particular manner here, as a noun in and of itself rather than as a category of something other things. Businesses, governments, social clubs are examples that fit under the category organization but organization here can be defined as a noun without any reference to a specific example. It is not defining a thing but a state in which a system or complex or complicated entity exists similar to temperature or entropy.

An organization or a state of organization is created from a set of elements that form a specific pattern of relations acting as a constraint, limiting the number of conceivable configurations manifested as distinct when the field of possibilities is reduced to a unique one.

Groups of elements or factors interact among themselves and across different levels of organization, settling into stable configurations, though strictly only temporarily, as self-preserving forms that are adapted to the constraints of their specific context. Ben-Eli asserts that this is the inevitable consequence of the idea of “interaction” itself and that the significance of this essential dynamism cannot be overemphasized.

An ”organization” becomes a particular structure embodied in sets of relations when some specific relation defines the interaction of the elements or when a specific pattern of relations is being conserved. That is then manifested as a system structure or as a distinct organization as we normally understand the word.

Organisms, or living system entities, can be viewed as organizations and the invitation can then be made to regard organizations, seemingly referring to human-generated, socially defined examples as organisms. But this, in my view, can only be taken so far because the organizations built by humans are invariably complicated and not complex as arise in nature.

The concept of organization by general system theory was a new abstraction and paradigm shift that stressed the significance of underlying structures to the representation and understanding of a system’s behavior. A self-organizing system then is an “open” system which can continue exhibiting dynamic, self-organizing characteristics by maintaining or increasing what Ben-Eli termed its ”manifestation of organization and order”, which it can do as long as it has a sufficient level of redundancy, and the system’s internal complexity is preserved. It is internal complexity that allows for the emergence and re-emergence of different configurations in response to changing events. Self-organizing “living,” systems such as we are, including social systems of all types, depending on their internal complexity and inherent redundancy for resilience and long-term viability. More concepts to be examined in the next post.

ABCD Beyond The Neighbourhood for the Neighbourhood

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 01:31:00 +0000

Continuing from the last post on hydraulics and community, in which Mick Ward, Chief Officer, Transformation and Innovation, Adults and Health, Leeds City Council was introduced, in his second article on proliferating Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) throughout Leeds, England, Ward related a significant learning moment for him in a quote from the TimeBanks founder Edgar Cahn:

“No society has the money to buy, at market prices, what it takes to raise children, make a neighborhood safe, care for the elderly, make democracy work, or address systemic injustices….. The only way the world is going to address social problems is by enlisting the very people now classified as ‘clients’ and ‘consumers’ converting them into co-workers, partners, and rebuilders of the core economy”.

Ward could be seen as alluding to the purpose of moving towards an ABCD oriented community governance system. As Cormac Russell and John McKnight have discussed, an ABCD approach seeks to enlist so-called ‘clients’ and ‘consumers as co-workers, partners, and builders of their own community. ABCD emphasizes relationships as the primary means of exchange and of change in the community rather than data and money. The ABCD learning process then values what goes on between the people making up the community emerging as Jane Jacobs’ organized complexity. Government institutions and many Third Sector-based institutions work to accomplish stated goals and objectives and see the community as disaggregated individuals or closer to the concept of disorganized complexity. Community governance seems the best term here as it implies direct involvement of the community (as opposed to community building or community development which could be imposed) but, at least in my view, which may or may not include the existing political authority.

Following a Systems Thinking perspective from previous posts, ABCD is a system, a community is a system, and (a form of) governance is a system. Anything comprised of elements, factors, things, people that are in relationship to each other through some type of connections for a purpose or function is a system. My hypothesis is that a systemic pathway to ABCD oriented community governance would involve Chris Argyris’ Double Loop Learning, looked at before but at a public institutional level (Kumu Project revised July 2019) not community or ABCD, and Small World Networking.

This community transitioning can be opposed or subverted, intentionally or unintentionally. ABCD may be seen, or actually be based on past institutional practices, as yet another way for a jurisdiction to negate its responsibilities or as a threat to existing services and roles delivering cuts. Even those politicians or existing service providers (Third Sector) doing good work in other forms of community development or a community-based service might argue, that there is no need to make changes toward an ABCD approach but despite any good intentions, it is still not at the level of true ABCD.

As Ward says, it is essential not to underestimate the degree of change that would be required for any political jurisdiction, such as a Local Authority, or any health and wellbeing system operating within that political jurisdiction, transitioning towards ABCD based community governance. This would be hard enough with an institutional leadership that was accommodating. One established by an entrenched system would be far harder to change.

Moving a community as a whole toward ABCD with an existing political or community leadership and management is far more often than not a substantially very different place from where they start. It includes making a seismic shift away from what Ward termed ‘service land’ in how the needs of the community population are met.

Ward contends that the combined culture of ABCD, and of Strength-Based Social Care in the city of Leeds is positively influencing how other services work together and their relation to the individuals whom they support. There is evidence that ABCD/Strength-Based Social Care (both?) reduce demand for these services but other early intervention/prevention/self-management programs work as well. One question is how close is Strength Based Social Care to truly community-based ABCD? How do they intermediate? They seem obviously closer in accommodation but can’t be exact, one being from outside the community.

In Leeds, ABCD worked particularly well regarding people with mental health needs and to a certain extent with long-term conditions but less well with people with a Learning Disability or a significant physical or sensory impairment. This could be considered a direct first-order change.

Those people with a long-term condition or regular ill-health are, research indicates according to Ward, less likely to volunteer. Less known is the extent of informal community contributions which could be said are at the heart of ABCD.

This focus on feedback into the community is a second-order change which ABCD does encourage by having commissioners, service practitioners, and communities simply support, good neighborliness which seems a natural extension of an ABCD vision but there is a substantial second-order change needed in the structure of community governance to bring about the full level of first-order change desired (reinforcing feedback) which would be greater participation in the community and its affairs.

Making democracy work and addressing systemic injustices are at a second-order level, which I would argue is at a different level than first-order level community-based helping others with helping-ourselves-together programs. ”Community activism” might depend on how you define it. There is a deep potential relationship between the two levels that can be developed but that is not assured.

A strength of ABCD, Wards asserts, are communities themselves identifying issues and therefore solutions, arguably most acceptable to the particular community in question. There isn't necessarily a direct relationship though between identifying an issue and devising a viable solution, both effective and adequately efficient and which seeks to avoid or agilely respond to unintended consequences. Especially if civic-level decisions involve other communities, with possibly competing interests, within the same political jurisdiction.

Ward seems to recognize that even ABCD favorable communities may not always be fully inclusive for all, particularly for Adults and Health with care and support needs. This only gets worse with clique communities, especially those that have become entrenched systems.

Ward argues, along with Cormac Russell, that evaluating an ABCD process requires moving away from traditional top-down summative and formative evaluation processes and moving towards a developmental and emancipatory learning process. ABCD evaluation, therefore, is not about simply counting the numbers of people with which a program interacts. It is about nurturing and celebrating the participation and contributions that both strengthen community life and that provide those connections known to be so valuable. Despite much talk of focusing on ABCD based outcomes, as highlighted in part 1 of Ward’s articles, reporting is still focused to a large extent on more traditional outputs and numbers, looking at only a small part of the system. Getting past that point, however, all too often involves convincing those still using standard metrics unless other pathways are found.

Ward, seems to put the responsibility on the ABCD Pathfinders for addressing what could be considered a key element of a mid-term strategy to implement ABCD-based governance throughout all communities by asking them to ensure that they fully include and engage with people with care and support needs (especially people with a Learning Disability). At the same time asking them to continue to work with Third Sector and statutory specialist services providers which support specific and often segregated groups, be they Learning Disability, Mental Health, Physical and Sensory Impairment, Drugs & Alcohol or Homelessness to work in an Asset Based manner by helping them connect the people they work with to their local neighborhoods and connect their neighborhoods to them.

Ward acknowledges that ABCD is not an alternative to replace the direct provision of personal care, medical support, and other higher need interventions. What ABCD objects to is when those services usurp community asset-based functions. Recognizing the importance of the broad range of services in the world of health and wellbeing, and the importance of continuing to fund those services, he also acknowledges the current financial climate can be challenging as competition for funds becomes stringent. Asserting that funding for ABCD is relatively small compared to the cost of these core services and therefore justifies first call on what Ward refers to as ”a small top slice” on any available additional monies may not always be persuasive despite being critical to the proliferation of ABCD. Merely recognizing that they will need to continue to be funded alongside ABCD work may not be enough. Other means of leveraging the system of which ABCD is a part would then need to be devised.

There is a debate then which Ward suggests needs to continue to maintain a high profile of good ABCD practice but it's important then to understand other models or systems and how they fit into the larger system of which ABCD is a part.

Systems Problems vs Community Struggles - ABCD and Systems Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 00:40:00 +0000

This post will continue to attempt to understand differences between Systems Thinking and Asset Based Community Development while maintaining an appreciation that both have a desire to attain similar beneficial outcomes in mind, that both have their limitations, and that perhaps each can help the other in addressing those limitations. This is still at the explore and experiment stage.

In a system, all the elements, factors, or components making up that system are related to each other and, more importantly, to the purpose or function of that system. A system of civic governance consists of conjoined systems, related by the intended design of institutional resources, and of community assets. These cannot only have different purposes or functions, but they can also be constituted structurally different, complicated for a government institution, and complex for a community, in their means of addressing such purposes.

First, though, I have an issue with the way the term ”scale” in Mick Ward’s (introduced in the last post) and other ABCD articles is portrayed, but with the over-popularization of the term muddying the definition. The blog post, ABCD, and Scaling Carrying Capacity pt 2 proposed three types of applied or actualized scale - inherent, induced, and imposed to suggest a common basis for usage.

Proliferate is to my mind actually closer to what people often mean when they refer to ”scaling up” or ”industrialized”. Scaling in a mathematical sense involves some inherent relationship between relevant factors, not merely an exponential increase in arbitrary marketing metrics. Scaling then is best represented by inherent scaling or how Professor Geoffrey West uses it in comparing the infrastructure of cities or the metabolism of animals.

Scaling can be used by entities such as nonprofits, who seek to induce scale to achieve more bang for the budgeted buck, if they recognize that an increase in one aspect, say the number of malaria nets, may be able to be implemented with a relatively smaller increase or even decrease in another related aspect, say costs. However, they need to be wary, and this is especially applicable to situations of imposed scaling, where the increase or enhancement in one aspect of the system diminishes not only another aspect of that system but the entire system itself.

When one system, a government institution, imposes for their own purposes, an external solution on another system, a community, to scale some aspect, the positive feedback in one area can create negative feedback in others, including components of community self-organization, self-governance, and self-management. It very often detrimental impacts the entire complex community system which is made apparent in the continuing and increasing difficulties assailing the members of that community and a worsening inability to address those difficulties.

ABCD does scale, simply at an induced, linear, one-to-one ratio, necessary to maintain effectiveness. While any externally imposed efficiency by institutions can be seen as detrimental, my question or concern is whether ABCD can be expanded in such a manner beyond a certain limit, say set by Dunbar’s number? Does ABCD begin to naturally scale sub-linearly when extended beyond a certain limit diminishing impact? If so, are there means to extend that limit systemically? One possible means being through Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development Framework? ABCD is seen by NCP as a systemic means of support for Ostrom’s Commons.

When endeavoring to bridge Systems Thinking with Asset Based Community Development language, terms and words can become a hindrance. Specific terms may have operational definitions within a particular discipline that can be different from vernacular usage or at least more restricted, not to mention across disciplines. Precision in the application or at least agreed upon usage is important when it is necessary to differentiate to understand the unique aspects of each area or domain. One set of such words that will be used here for both domains includes - problems, difficulties, struggles, situations, and messes.

A problem is a matter or situation that is seen as unwelcome or harmful that needs to be dealt with and overcome. This determination is meant to be objective. A "difficulty" is "a trouble" for someone or a strain on them, subjectively requiring a struggle, which in some instances may be a better word choice than difficulty. A doctor has a medical problem when trying to determine what is wrong with a patient but the patient has difficulty with their health with which they are struggling. Systems thinking deals with problems and messes. ABCD deals with difficulties and struggles.

Managers often deal with other people’s problems either as groups and classes of people or with some professions as individuals. A doctor might have to deal with numerous medical problems in a community setting, or what Russell Ackoff called “Messes” when applied to management, making the situation increasingly complex and addressing the struggles of others all the harder. Change can occur over time in the combination of the mix of problems that a manager needs to deal with but for a particular person directly impacted the difficulty remains. Managers may take on a ”problem with problems” strategy thrown at them in bunches or as messes using metrics in achieving objectives rather than focusing on people’s specific difficulties.

This managerial approach can work to an extent with business or government institutions because the solutions devised are ”good enough” for a wide swath of customers or clients. Enough to hold on to market share or to be reelected. It is not however at the level of specific solutions or what in Disruptive Innovation is referred to as Job-To-Be-Done needed by a specific person or group. A specified creative solution though can often be fully utilized by many people because the commonality is based on common needs and not market-determined products or services.

People may find themselves to be dealing with their own “personal problems” as self-diminishing difficulties, not only is the difficulty persistent but its lack of resolution diminishes over time one’s ability to address it. Furthermore, difficulties like problems come in intertwined bunches but their cumulative effect is detrimental to the person (subject), not merely the situation.

ABCD focuses on people inspiring them to focus on their strengths collectively. This “what’s strong, not wrong” approach works both collectively and individually. For both those for whom it works individually and for communities it can be seen as an enhancement of Carrying Capacity. Both Cormac Russell and I have written about Carrying Capacity extending it to human communities. Carrying Capacity normally refers to populations, usually animal populations but each individual in that population contributes. Upon further reflection though, I believe Carrying Capacity needs to be better related and differentiated from Social Capital than I have done in the past.

Carrying capacity is systemic, the aggregated ability to gather food, build shelter, or protect family by members of a population within an environment. The Carrying Capacity for a population is the summation of individual members but unlike many animal populations, humans in a community can contribute to Carrying Capacity to a far greater extent individually to other members of the community.

The community as a whole has another means of extending overall Carrying Capacity or what could be considered a derivative and that is leveraging the collective Social Capital of its members. Humans can get other humans (and domesticated animals) to do things for them. Social Capital can leverage Carrying Capacity but to my mind is also likely based on Carrying Capacity in some manner so is there an overall limit?

This becomes more relevant if two or more communities are competing in the same civic realm for resources, especially if one is what has been termed a Clique Community and the other is a Colony Community but it is often not limited to only these two. Usually, within a particular civic space in this instance of the jurisdiction of a Local Government Authority in Leeds, there is a community laying, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, between the two.

Is it possible to become completely dependent upon systems of Social Capital and lose connection with any sense of Community-based Carrying Capacity, as might happen with a clique community? Is it possible for a colony community to transition from a restricted Carrying Capacity, due to imposed marginalization, to generate sufficient Social Capital leveraging to make changes to an institutional system outside of the community? As a colony community might perhaps be persuaded to attempt.

Systems thinking should still though be able to help the manager or doctor or caseworker deal with problems and messes so that they are better suited to help people deal with their own difficulties and struggles. Systems Thinking only approaches but do not, however, achieve the direct implementation of a solution or mitigation of a specific difficulty faced by a specific person or group of persons. It is the Knowing-Doing Gap that has been discussed before. Difficulties do get addressed all the time but it’s usually not Systems Thinking taking the final step. That invariably requires a different skillset be it a medical professional or somebody delivering hot meals to the housebound. How the community self-organizes around that and moves to self-determination is where ABCD comes in recognizing that self here is not personal but the community as a whole.

One strategy with the appearance of great potential is “Strategic Doing” but that will have to wait for further examination. For now, it is still necessary to find a means of creating a deeper link between Systems Thinking and ABCD. One might be suggested from the thoughts of two persons, Cormac Russell of Nurture Development and John Atkinson of Heart of the Art. Together, they challenge us to lead community as a living system in a manner that attains empathy, not merely sympathy. Cormac provides a model, an inspirational model that practically may never be achieved but nevertheless should still be continuously strived towards.

“Imagine a world where institutions did more to support interdependence at the centre of community life, especially with citizens most vulnerable to not having their gifts seen or received…"

Hydraulics and Community - A Systems Thinking Perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 02:47:00 +0000

In the last post, Cormac Russell and John McKnight used a hydraulic mechanism as a simple form of a closed system to serve as a simile explaining in a clear, understandable manner the asymmetry of the power dynamic between communities and institutions conjoined in a system of civic governance from an ABCD perspective. This post will look at that same system based on the Kumu Presentation Community Assets versus Institutional Resources using Causal Loop Diagrams which takes more of a Systems Thinking perspective and considers differences between the two.

ABCD and New Community Paradigms (NCP) are in agreement with most of the premises of the hydraulics and community assets system. Both see city leaders claiming to want their residents to see local government as trustworthy and reliable but relegating the role of a citizen to what happens after the city’s professionals’ work is completed. A perfect example of the hydraulic relationship, an inversion of democracy, the role of professionals goes up, the role of citizens goes down.

Both agree components of community function have been expropriated by institutions or appropriated by the acquiescence of communities so that now people think that more police equals more safety and that more hospitals equal more health. This is illogical from a Systems Thinking perspective as well. Institutional entities define themselves and justify ever increasing budgets by consistently saying they need more funds to deal with all the different problems that the very systems that they propagated helped to create. Their structural role and legacy in the system allow them to sustain that system and the system in turn to sustain them.

Cormac and John provided three successful examples of taking back collective responsibility for community functions though all were more project-based than systems based and all depended upon viable systems being in place to make them possible.

The manager of a Swedish housing development depended upon a system of support from community builders, connectors at the lunch, as well as welcomers and askers in the neighborhood. Cincinnati Starfire created enterprise space that could feedback to participants' own neighborhoods with resources and money effectively becoming community builders but it was filled with an existing economic and social system. Henry Moore believed that the community had all kinds of functions that could be performed without the city having to do the work. The community took up the challenge and they did the work themselves based on their own existing social system.

There is, however, an example of ABCD being applied on a more systemic basis that is told by Mick Ward, Chief Officer, Transformation and Innovation, Adults and Health, Leeds City Council. He sets out a history of community development and organizing that gave rise to ABCD in the City of Leeds, England but they started with a strong systemic foundation.

Leeds had been prioritizing tackling loneliness, for older people especially, for many years before adopting ABCD. They had already established Neighbourhood Networks before hearing about ABCD. They then came across Cormac Russell speaking and saw a means to support older people to be even more connected to where they lived.

According to Cormac, the growth of loneliness in modern societies has been increasing since leaving more rural areas for cities leading to the rise of programmatic (and yes, systematic) interventions as loneliness becomes the new pathology being targeted by institutions. More pertinent, can this be reversed by simply changing the direction of the closed system and how does one go about doing that?

This erosion follows the evolution of consumerism shifting to the idea of a consumer society in which one could simply buy what one wants to be produced even that which was formerly the responsibility of the community and put it into the marketplace. We handed over community functions at which we are best competent and capable to perform by employing face-to-face relationship with each other by outsourcing to the institutional realm.

Institutions are closer to being closed systems, similar to a hydraulic system, created as a means of control or applied top-down constraint. Communities, however, are open systems. Their processes are not only nonlinear, but they are also unseen and not understood

Leeds began using a ‘classic’ ABCD framework of establishing a Community Builder in the neighborhood, who identified, enthused, and supported community connectors. Additionally, some “small sparks” funding was provided and community-led asset maps were developed. Early successes demonstrated the approach was worth pursuing in three Neighborhood Networks in Leeds which were part of their previously established ‘Senior Network Support (SeNS) Project’.

This could have only been possible with a strong community and political support from the leadership of the Leeds City Council and the Health and Wellbeing Board approving funding increase the pathfinder sites, a dedicated post in LCC to commission and support the work, ABCD training both for the pathfinders and those wanting to develop ABCD approaches, supporting ABCD catalysts further supporting emerging ABCD sites to promote ABCD across the city. Still, 12 sites are a long way from covering all of Leeds with over 140 neighborhoods. While this can only be considered a success but can it, using Ward’s term, be successfully proliferated across the entirety of the City of Leeds on this same basis?

Ward wants to expand ABCD as an ‘approach, or ‘way of working’ across Third Sector organizations and services, seeing an opportunity to work with a large range of organizations in the city to move towards a more asset-based approach in their day to day work. This would put ABCD within the civic realm between community and institutions.

It is not expected though that these organizations, not being ‘pure ABCD’, would be able to use the full ABCD framework as they tend to be city wide-based, rather than neighborhood-based and therefore not as likely to really dive deep and nurture all the potential assets and functions in a community. This suggests then that there is still a need for a more pure ABCD to be established in civil society, perhaps becoming a means of defining civil society, but outside the civic realm, maintaining its independence. Can ABCD then become a significant part of the civil society’s foundation for the city’s civic realm and how does it do this across all sectors, economic, political, and demographic making up the City of Leeds or anywhere else?

I have to admit to being skeptical of Cormac and John’s answer as to how this could be addressed by the institutional realm lead by stepping back. It seems to assume that institutions, those in power within those institutions, and most importantly, the systems establishing and sustaining those institutions will locate some of that appropriated authority back into community life again voluntarily. Perhaps if you are lucky enough to live in Leeds but I have less hope for most places entrenched institutional power.

I have little faith in depending on the accountability and trustworthiness of institutional leaders. Getting even regular folk in our communities to see that people in our institutions, our schools, our police departments, our hospitals, are at their limits, in truth over their limits, and are becoming counterproductive because of all the functions we have given can be arduous. How a community could be resurrected by taking on functions that are the strength of the social contract of neighborhoods in our towns seems a better question but the answer will at least in part be systemic.

The means, Cormac and John say, is stepping forward into our own power, our collective cultural power with the agreement that through social contract there are certain things teachers, police officers, and healthcare professionals are not going to do. Responsibilities that we decide to take back as community. Those social contracts however need to be reestablished under the current systems which are firmly entrenched and will likely need some form of systemic disruption that must be innovative in nature rather than incremental but not lose sight of the purer ABCD vision.

What the Causal Loop Diagrams of the Kumu systems presentation reveals are four possible pathways.

In the first path, the system maintains its current configuration placing institutional power in a dominant position. Under the current configuration, institutional power has a decided, structural advantage which is made even more resilient through a variety of what Systems Thinking refers to a systems archetypes. Persistent patterns of causality arising from the interaction of causal loops that entrench the system in a manner that is exceedingly constrained but still resilient despite being seen as being detrimental.

Second, both community assets and institutional resources could be reconfigured so that each has a negative influence over the other.

Third, a more positive configuration initiated as suggested by Cormac and John and made real to a large extent by the City of Leeds. The reverse pushing the other way to increase community assets by outside forces against institutions also requires energy but the system isn't configured to work either effectively or efficiently in this manner.

Finally, a fourth path based on changes to be initiated by the community itself with or without institutional cooperation. The energy though required to push up or down in either direction does not come from either of the pistons or external sources but must be found in the configuration or structure of the entire system. It is doubtful though, in my view, that either an ABCD approach alone or a systems approach alone could be successful.

Hydraulics and Community from an ABCD Perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 27 May 2019 03:29:00 +0000

The latest NCP effort wasn't a blog post, it was a Kumu presentation of a systems map based on this infographic.

There have been different versions.

The basic idea though is that if Community Assets are lowered then dependency on Institutions or Institutional Resources is elevated. The infographic was the creation of Cormac Russell, who has been featured in this blog and NCP Asset Based Community Development wiki-page several times.

Cormac discussed the infographic with John McKnight, who I feel safe in calling one of Cormac's mentors, in the video below, which is part of this Nurture Development Post, The Hydraulics of Community Power.

Their conversation is a little over half an hour long but the amount of information and insights contained would take far longer to fully unpack. This writing, to which I am not laying any claim, is what I found to be the important points. Hopefully, this synopsis correctly conveys the pertinent facts and authentically retains their expressed perspectives.

The basic idea as presented by Cormac and John is that a hydraulic mechanism in its simplest form is a closed system, pushing down on one part of the mechanism another part has to go up by necessity. Similarly, as a community is performing its functions and institutions are performing their functions, if you push down on one then the other will go up and if you push on the other the reverse happens through processes largely unseen and often not understood. The hydraulic relationship provides an important insight in terms of the power, asymmetry of power dynamics between communities and institutions.

The image is further meant to convey a concept to which should be easily attested, that people know that in most neighborhoods people are not as connected as they would have been 50 years ago and raises the question, why and what are the ramifications?

Cormac and John provide examples of components of community life, education, public safety, and health that have been expropriated by institutions or appropriated by them through the acquiescence of communities, invariably implicit as nobody votes for it. Bringing people to think that more police equals more safety or that more hospitals equal more health.

The state of the educational systems in the US can be explained to a great extent by the multiple community functions taken over by schools. Eighty-five functions since 1900 according to the book, ”Schools Can't Do it Alone.” The educational institutions have been expropriating community functions that have fallen mainly on the shoulders of teachers, a clearly crushing responsibility at which they are doomed to fail.

Police Departments are struggling with the problem of not having the members of the community involved, as though they had nothing to do with the issue of security and safety. More enlightened Police Departments have come to understand that the connection isn't simply about getting the community to call the police and report on their neighbors. There is a very clear community function around the production of safety. It is an association or function of community life itself. Neighborhood policing has become much more about community building and less about enforcement and informing.

At the same time, Police Departments and other institutional entities are still defining themselves and justifying ever increasing budgets by consistently saying we need more money to deal with all these different problems.

Medical practitioners cite similar relationships in health to those around education and safety with eighty-five percent or even higher of what determines well-being having nothing at all to do with clinical or pharmacological intervention or anything that a medical professional can do to us. Most of what counts for the healing of suffering happens outside the medical institutional realm. One primary care doctor, a public health practitioner who runs a primary care facility said that forty-five percent of the people who come into his surgery is not biomedically ill. They're lonely, disconnected in some way. A word for their condition is isolated, they are in a sense alone. Perhaps they have some moderate challenges in socializing but technically they're not sick. They need commune they don't need a doctor.

The growth of loneliness in modern societies has been increasing even though we see ourselves in cities as all collective. Our loneliness, according to Cormac has been growing as we left the more rural areas. In Vancouver, Canada a foundation gave a list of about 40 issues and asked residents to rate them and the number one issue was not crime or education but loneliness. What we're seeing now is the rise of programmatic interventions around loneliness. Loneliness has now become the new pathology that is being targeted with programs by institutions.

This erosion has come through the evolution of consumerism. It is a shift to an idea of a consumer society in which one could buy what one wants to be produced, being individuals who took that responsibility out of our community and put it into the marketplace. It's the consumer economy built on the assumption that we can outsource these at one-time community functions to the institutional realm so that we can get on with being consumers.

Marketing and media, over and over again, are trying to persuade us that it is better to buy a life than it is to live one. Advertising things that will be done for money that we would never have seen in the past done for money.

We now turn to institutions to buy through taxes and charitable donations solutions for the issues we face collectively but that shift in culture is problematic because so many of those functions are ones that only people in face-to-face relationships with each other can really perform effectively.

We have been handing over functions at which we are most competent and most capable to perform. The institutions are appropriating all of these new functions, yet they are overburdened and are less able to do their actual legitimate functions becoming a collective equivalence, as Cormac noted, of the Peter Principle where institutions are elevated to their own level of incompetence.

City leaders, responsible for dealing with these issues want their residents to see local government as trustworthy and know that it can be relied on but all too often in their minds the role of the citizen is defined as that which happens after the important work of the professionals is completed. This is a perfect example of a hydraulic relationship. The role of the professionals goes up, the role of the citizens goes down. This is an inversion of democracy for it needs to be the case that the role of the professional is what happens after the important work of the citizen is complete.

Cormac and John then asked how does the institutional realm lead by stepping back? How do we locate some of that appropriated authority back into community life again? How can we resurrect the community in taking on the functions that are the strength of the social contract of neighborhoods in our towns?

John thought of it as being almost forceful in nature on many institutional leaders because of their accountability and defining trustworthiness. That what they could do is get folks, people in our communities, to see that our institutional people, in our schools, at our police departments or hospitals, are at their limits, in truth over their limits, and are becoming counterproductive because of all the functions we have given them.

The alternative is stepping forward into our own power, our collective cultural power with the agreement that through social contract there are certain things teachers, police officers, and healthcare professionals are not going to do. Responsibilities that we decide to take back as community.

Cormac and John also provide three successful examples of taking back responsibility for collective functions of, by, and for the community.

The manager of a large housing development in Sweden sent out an invitation saying if are you lonely come next Tuesday to the dining room and we'll have lunch together had eighty-some people show up. The manager was able to succeed because he had support from community builders in the neighborhood in addition to connectors who were also at that lunch, as well as welcomers and askers in the neighborhood.

Another example Cincinnati Starfire, a workshop placement for people with intellectual disabilities that reimagined its role through its participants and became an enterprise space where local small businesses pay rent and establish small pop-up offices in which they operate. More importantly, participants are also out in their own neighborhoods with resources and money that they can spend effectively becoming community builders who are contributing to their neighborhoods. The professional staff is also out in the neighborhoods with them, supporting them, supporting relationship building so they too are core community builders.

Then there was Henry Moore, the assistant city manager of Savannah Georgia who sent a letter to the people in the lowest income neighborhood asking them to write a letter no more than one page saying what they would like to do to improve their block and have two other people sign it who will also do it with a maximum grant of $100. The first year he got eighty requests with very little money spent. From an institutional point of view, it was one of the most incredible ways of beginning the change of the hydraulics system. He was saying to the community, you have all kinds of functions that you can perform. How do we support you? He also said We (the City) are not going to do work, the community took up the challenge and they did they work. In the past, investment had been put in from the top through Community Block Grants. ”When I had the block grants that made almost no change but when I led by stepping back and provided the incentive for citizens to be producer things changed”.

Below is the Kumu presentation looking at the same subject from a Systems Thinking perspective.
The next post will examine some of the differences.

ABCD as a Systemic Means and Support to Ostrom’s Commons

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Sun, 05 May 2019 02:39:00 +0000

The previous series of three posts attempted to bridge Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) with Systems Thinking, the two sections of the New Community Paradigms (NCP) wiki seen as being among the furthermost separated. Bridging NCP wiki-sections is a basic feature of the wiki, especially with the NCP wiki-map but the differences in conceptual approaches between the two are especially distant. Both were discovered in this search for new community paradigms. There is a bias towards Systems Thinking, not due to longer exposure, 2015, 2016 in earnest for ABCD and 2013 for Systems Thinking but to a natural affinity. Still learning both. The bridging of the two was done across a presumption of complexity incorporating both. Complexity, to be clear from the start, is seen as actually a good thing and necessary though all too often incoherent if not problematic.

The recent blog post, Ostrom, the Commons, and the Green New Deal continued to explore the development of concepts involving dynamic complex systems previously raised in this blog. In addition to bridging concepts, there is a desire to establish a deeper and firmer foundation through biological constructs such as Carrying Capacity and an interest shown in Ostrom's work by anthropologists.

This post questions how far ABCD relational practices and Ostrom’s polycentric governance can be extended limited by the increasing complexity inherent in larger groups or wider circles of Dunbar's Number. The reach of ABCD, and more indirectly Ostrom's polycentric governance, is arguably restricted by Dunbar's Number.

There are four layers, or "Circles of Acquaintanceship," or implicit social contracts making up Dunbar’s number scaling relatively consistently to each other. The first circle is three to five of our very closest friends. The next layer or circle is twelve (the size of a jury) to fifteen persons whose death would devastate us. Next circle is made up of fifty persons, or “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southern Africa.”

Beyond the fourth level of one hundred and fifty persons, there are still further circles with an ideal democracy set at five thousand, three hundred. Larger circles though involve even greater degrees of complexity and far less emotional attachment, especially between non-familial relationships.

Though usually in agreement or sympathy, there are a few points with which I don't see the same as Cormac Russell, Managing Director of Nurture Development and faculty member of the ABCD Institute, leaning towards Dunbar’s empiricism but then I am a keeps-himself-to-himself in-his-own-head type introvert so biased in my perspective.

Cormac does not include family members (or professionals), only true associates, in his associational connections and Dunbar does with kin prioritized. He sees Dunbar’s fourth level at 150 persons as a minimum meaning most of us have a deficit of 99 persons, not including familial relationships, to make up for from our average base of 51 persons in our associational lives. He knows that Dunbar saw the fourth level of 150 as a maximum limit which I suspect few people truly reach. It is not just walking distance separating people but emotional distance as well. As the number of people in a circle increases the emotional connection between them decreases with each successive circle and there are physiologically set cognitive limits.

However, it is Cormac’s vision of community associational relationships that must be strived towards to create the needed systemic changes in the direct democracy governance of our communities which requires not only connections but diversity as well to deal with complex even wicked problems. ABCD then becomes a necessary and even a primary component of New Community Paradigms but not necessarily a sufficient one.

The question to be considered then is how Ostrom’s polycentric governance of community and the commons could help ABCD extend the network of implicit contracts and, as importantly, how ABCD could support Ostrom’s polycentric governance to develop the required trust essential to achieve the advantage of those implicit social contracts.

As has been asserted before, Asset Based Community Development seeks to help communities find solutions to community challenges upon the basis of a system of community-based associational relationships to develop community wealth or resources as opposed to economic wealth or money by a few.

Most larger geographically placed, politically defined by institutional government type communities such as cities or towns are usually composed of many diverse socially and often demographically defined place-based communities or neighborhoods of differing levels of influence.

There are other distinct types of community in addition to these that can extend beyond geographic boundaries but still not be necessarily separate. Communities, in the context of this post and ABCD, will refer to neighborhoods and smaller social-based communities. Larger entities such as cities are dealt with through their institutions.

The previous series went over questions that ABCD believes each community or anyone sincerely wishing to build better communities needs to ask. An issue for many communities then is whether they or anybody are even asking these essential questions? ABCD seeks to change this by committing to re-seeding associational life at a hyper-local level (i.e. street level). ABCD is about the strengthening of social capital or what could also be considered the Carrying Capacity within a community to save people from a life of institutionalization by creating community alternatives to the institutional (systems) world.

ABCD and Community, a Systemic Analysis pt 3 reminded us that the carrying capacity of a local community depends upon good stewardship of that community’s welfare ideally requiring the correct sequencing of nurturing at three levels. The first level is recognizing that there are things that communities do best on their own without institutional assistance. The second level is recognizing that there are things that communities can basically do themselves but with some help from outside agencies. The third level is recognizing that there are things that communities need to have done for them by outside agencies. Something institutions readily and often exclusively do.

At the third level, the system being generated likely becomes entrenched, leading to a form of top-down service delivery by command, being persistent and resilient even while failing to address the needs of its supposed beneficiaries while eroding social capital and creating high levels of dependence on external resources which are now disappearing.

Neighborhoods have experienced years of interacting with the different public and private institutional agencies which have provided services of one kind or another, under the auspices of governmentally defined agencies, but not at equal levels. Outside agencies, institutional or otherwise, ideally should seek to be in the right relationship with smaller social, demographic, cultural communities. However, it has been many of these very same agencies who have failed, are still failing, and are now looking for means to systematize their failure as a new normal.

Cormac sees this institutionalization causing further atomization or breaking up of relationships or people’s sense of community into individual elements in what I believe can be interpreted as being a system of disorganized complexity. This is not considered an oxymoron, even disorganized gas molecules can be made to react (behave) in certain ways through proper manipulation. ABCD though could also involve the atomization of a community but to the level of independent agents connecting potentially in a self-organizing fashion through a system of organized complexity as defined by Jane Jacobs, structured by Ostrom and systematized by Meadows.

Without proper investment in community building through the correct Agency interactions or better community conversations, institutional stewardship remains stuck at the third level while second level interactions can be commodified drifting towards the third level in the name of efficiencies and there is little incentive to make any extended investment. The first level carrying capacity then is relegated to fighting to retain whatever influence on to which the community may be holding on let alone endeavoring to increase its social capital.

What leverage then is afforded to local communities or even those working sincerely and earnestly in support of local communities to ensure that this is done properly? Even if attempted, providing the proportionate support that does not displace or diminish local community power is a difficult balancing act with the best of intentions. It isn't by the communities themselves, at least not initially, and it is doubtful that it is the institutional agencies so is there presumably a third sector or movement outside of these communities that are being appealed to beyond the already converted to the ABCD approach?

This post will also reveal the connection of ABCD back to the concept of the Commons and Ostrom’s work, a path already established in the blog post-ABCD, Social Networks and the Commons connecting Associational Life:

“A viable way to be collective and inclusive from the bottom up, according to Cormac and those with a similar mindset, is to work through the concept of the communal Commons to enable some type of Coalition of the Doing in determining the relationship between Capitalism and the Commons".

David Bollier, Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, starts off the article speaking of enclosures as the historical anthesis to the Commons.

“Enclosures eclipse the history and memory of the commons, rendering them invisible. The impersonal, individualistic, transaction-based ethic of the market economy becomes the new normal.”
An enclosure, as defined by Bollier, then can be seen as a form of imposed exclusion, a means of differentiating between clique or exclusive communities and colony or excluded communities.

A Commons, within an ABCD framework, can then be seen as both place-based with the resources of that place and people-based as an associational network overseeing those resource-based commons. The Social Network is both a people-based defined social system overseeing the Commons as a place-based resource so that the smallest associational successes of ABCD can not only reverberate through the entire community (system) but also give it history or legacy. It becomes a matter then, as Cormac has said, of not reforming (institutional) systems but reclaiming the Commons.

ABCD and Community, a Systemic Analysis pt 3

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 05:04:00 +0000

This post will continue with the development of concepts presented in the previous two posts of this series.I raised my own limitations regarding Systems Thinking and especially Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) in the first post. This post has an additional limitation for this series regarding the scope of this analysis. It only deals with ABCD from a limited perspective. ABCD is far richer than what is being presented here, similar to using the Logistic Equation to explain changes in population, hopefully, useful but only a sketch.

Asset Based Community Development or ABCD seeks to define an ideal relationship between institutions, including the agencies through which policies are implemented in pursuit of their mission, and communities, particularly what has been termed colony communities or marginalized or dependent or so-called hard-to-reach (HTR) communities.

As Cormac Russell has said, the carrying capacity of a local community depends upon good stewardship of that community’s welfare ideally requiring the correct sequencing of nurturing at three levels to discover the community’s underpinning capacities and in a way that does not function to harm the social capital of the community. The result of such good stewardship in times of crisis should be sufficiency and the potential for greater abundance, not scarcity and abandonment. These three relationship levels, however, presume a benign power relationship or better between community and institution.

The first level is recognizing that there are things that communities do best on their own without institutional assistance. This requires asking though, what are the things that only residents/citizens can do in response to an issue? These should be determined regarding the strengths of the community, not its deficits.

These are the things for which a community already has the adequate inherent carrying capacity to do best on their own though this may not yet be realized. The efforts are purposefully applied by the community and should not be supplemented by purposive institutional programs. Any involved agency is hopefully facilitating these efforts to help make the efforts more efficient and helping to remove barriers not creating them. This though cannot be assumed.

The second level is recognizing that there are things that communities can basically do themselves but with some help from outside agencies. This level is beyond the carrying capacity of what a community can do solely on their own but could perhaps do with some help from an outside agency.

The carrying capacity of the community is not fully adequate to the task either because the extra needed capacity to some extent remains external or is inherent but has not been fully realized. What then are the things that residents/citizens can lead on and achieve with the support of institutions and their agencies (governmental, non-governmental, for-profit) in response to that issue? As important, can those agencies be expected to provide support to the community in doing what it can’t do for itself?

If so, those outside agencies should then ideally facilitate such activities so that the carrying capacity of the community goes as far but no further than is sustainable. Outside agencies should seek to be in the right relationship with communities and provide proportionate support that does not displace or diminish community power.

The third level is recognizing that there are things that communities need to have done for them by outside agencies. The required carrying capacity is both external and unrealizable by the community. The questions for the community then are not only what are the things that only institutions can do for us (residents/citizens) but as important, what can the community do to induce the agency to do for the community what the community can’t do for itself.

The agencies should then seek to do those things in as transparent and accountable a manner as possible but the scaling required to address the issue may be imposed on the community rather than induced by the agency.

The Nurture Development post, What We’ve Tried (in isolation) Hasn’t Worked: The Politics of Community, raised questions that need to be answered by or for a community so that the locus of control over a community’s carrying capacity is by the community, not an outside institution. The factors defining the three levels of relationships between communities and institutions can be expanded to enlarge the overall community based social carrying capacity.

The community needs to develop the extended carrying capacity or social capital to be able to determine:

What are the things that institutions can stop doing which would create space for resident action, enlarging the community social carrying capacity?

How agencies can create space for the community to grow in that capacity, moving from dependence to self-sufficiency and independence.

How the agency can determine, what the agency can do to go beyond its current level of community support?

What can institutions start offering beyond the services that they currently offer to support resident/citizen action?

The institution examines its mission or purposive functions or better the community purposely examines and redefines the mission of the institution to provide unrealizable and external but needed or desired carrying capacity and enhances the previous three levels of relationships.

The community often either does not have the carrying capacity or social capital on its own without help which is either never offered or if given can be threatened so that the institution and those who benefit maintain control. This means purposefully enhancing the inherent but yet still unrealized carrying capacity of the community to add to its needed social capital. It is difficult seeing this done through the purposive actions of an institution. A call for an institution to unilaterally remove barriers that it put in place would seem to argue against that community having sufficient carrying capacity on is own to scale to the next level.

The institutions are expected be to either move the community to a greater sense of inherent and realizable carrying capacity or to accept responsibility for external and unrealizable but still desired carrying capacity as part of its mission.

This requires a purposeful systemic change for which whether at first internally realized or unrealized is likely initiated through external carrying capacity if only as a catalyst. A required a change in the power relationship between the community and institution, an enhancement in social capital or the type of carrying capacity utilized by the community from direct and independent with the community directly doing things on its own to more indirect but controlled, things are done through an agency but the community holds greater control.

Cormac has pointed out that the power relationships of communities with outside institutional agencies have changed over time with institutions claiming that service delivery is neither sustainable nor ironically empowering. Austerity, defined by these institutions and implemented by agencies, means the communities now have fewer outside resources available so have more of the responsibility for maintaining carrying capacity, including taking over care of those who are highly service dependent, which is again a form of harvesting of that community's carrying capacity.

A question then is who specifically is the "We" whom Cormac speaks of that needs to learn from communities what they can do and care enough about to do with or without outside help. Who is the “We” that not only helps communities determine what they can do with some support, and only then helps in determining what external resources are needed but also helps in negotiating with the government institutions or enhancing the carrying capacity of the community to do such on their own?

Now I know that the answer is us, being both the enemy we have met as well as being the ones that we have been waiting for. The devil though is in the details. Direct democracy, in some form, combining both participatory democracy, emphasizing ABCD and deliberative democracy, emphasizing Systems Thinking is one potential path to needed new community paradigms.

part 1
part 2

ABCD and Scaling Carrying Capacity pt 2

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 04:40:00 +0000

This post will continue with the development of concepts presented in the previous post of this series which included the reintroduction of carrying capacity. Any change in the level of community social carrying capacity involves scaling in some form. However, ABCD tends to prefer terms such as ”proliferate” being very wary of ‘industrializing’ or ‘going at scale’ by institutions.

Scaling can generally be defined, using Wikipedia, as changes to a system such as a community in terms of some capacity in one of two ways. One is uniform or isotropic scaling in a linear transformation. If a fishing community doubles in population then it needs to catch double the amount of fish or find substitutes.

Scaling can also be defined as a power law, as a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies as a power of another. If that same fishing community builds better boats going out further at sea catching bigger fish, the carrying capacity increases superlinearly allowing for increased population or greater creation and consumption of resources per capita (ignoring the overall capacity of the resource).

Natural carrying capacity is always inherent, realized and purposive which through extraneous and environmental changes can alter and even lead to the collapse of a population.

Community social carrying capacity and its extension community social capital can be either inherent or external, realized or unrealized, and either purposeful or purposive. The scaling of social carrying capacity can be categorized in three ways - imposed, induced, or inherent.

A Nurture Development post asking, “Scale is Important but Who’s Scale Are We Talking About?” is more of a warning than a question. It advises against attempts to scale or grow beyond a community's own carrying capacity, usually for the benefit of outside agencies.

Imposed scaling would be what Nurture Development warned against but could be seen, at least in my view, not as scaling but a form of colonial harvesting or appropriation of the resources of a community by an institution. Communities are asked to scale their efforts to extend them beyond the community's geographical boundaries or spheres of influence. As a result, a community's own carrying capacity and its established known and predictable processes (the way it works) are likely to be diminished and won't work the same way elsewhere.

Induced scaling, or more bang for the buck, is what agencies such as Acumen endeavor to achieve with their programs such as providing malaria nets at a lower cost per net to provide even more nets. With induced scaling, the burden is not placed on the community being assisted until it develops the capacity to carry it themselves.

Inherent scaling refers to the natural scaling of complex systems whether biological, as in animal populations or sociological such as cities. Professor Geoffrey West has demonstrated that cities naturally scale at a rate of about 15% in savings in terms of economies at a sub-linear rate for infrastructure, having an analog to biology, but scaling at a superlinear fashion at 15% growth with socio-economic network factors.

Inherent scaling in the larger social environment is likely to put pressure on the need for increasing carrying capacity by communities. Inherent scaling though does not naturally result in the equitable distribution either of benefits or of detriments created by the system in the form of socio-economic entropy. A larger issue is that the entire system or collection of systems is likely destined to collapse from the stress being generated without major interventions or transformation of some type. These concepts are expanded upon here. In actuality, all three of the forms of scaling are likely to be ongoing at the same time.

An ABCD definition of community incorporates inclusion. Communities can be categorized whether they define themselves by inclusion or exclusion and by whether they are dependent upon institutions or instead they are either independent or have control over those institutions.

Inclusion could be seen as part of the community’s receptivity influencing the level of its carry capacity and social capital and significantly changing without it the nature of the community.

M. Scott Peck’s definition of an inclusive community is complex, open, and organic. Communities are living organisms.

“Community is and must be inclusive. The great enemy of community is exclusivity. Groups that exclude others because they are poor or doubters or divorced or sinners or of some different race or nationality are not communities; they are cliques – actually defensive bastions against community.”

Matthew Petrusek’s definition of inclusion and its supposed logical incompatibility within a community is complicated and restrictive. Communities are things.

”But we have every reason to advocate for coherence, as well. Many characteristics of a community certainly are negotiable and can be flexible, even to the point of breaking, in the name of inclusion. But some things, or at least something, must be non-negotiable.” He arguably could still have a point though in a community being allowed to maintain its identity at some level. Too often though this is used as a means of exclusion.

Communities with the power to define themselves by exclusion and still be economically self-sufficient both individually and collectively can be considered cliques. There are then those things that clique communities, through sufficient social capital, can have done for them by outside agencies either because of need and an inability to do so individually but also because of convenience, they want it and it is more efficient for the institution to do it for them and they can effectively negotiate the means of delivery.

Communities without the power to define themselves and that are dependent on agencies can be considered colonies and subject to harvesting by being restricted in the development of their own capacity, by the diversion of resources or by direct appropriation. Colonial communities are also defined by exclusion by the in-use purposive policies of institutions regardless of any espoused claims. Abundant communities, as the ideal alternative, are both self-sufficient and inclusive.

Colony communities do not have the extended social capital to address directly those issues it can through community carrying capacity and using social capital to successfully influence outside agencies to do for it what it can't on its own or to transition from one to the other.

The means of moving past being a colony community or being designated an HTR community (hard to reach community) starts with greater inclusion by both dependent and more self-sufficient communities. Part of the carrying capacity then has arguably come from outside the community but agencies, working sometimes on behalf of those responsible government institutions, maybe competing for resources that are instead being distributed to competing communities.

It becomes then a question of both motivations and of capacity for both the community, or more likely communities, and their associated institutions. Particularly if multiple communities are competing for institutional influence on a political basis and the relationship between a particular community and the controlling institutions may be a confrontational one.

There can be continued maintenance and even manipulation of institutional systems for the benefit of some at the cost of others. People can be redefined or commodified as service users or patients and thereby be defined out of community resulting in the consequent depletion of carrying capacity of that community that was supposedly being helped.

Outside agencies also have different pressures from budgetary committees requiring the imposition of scaling on their assigned efforts that achieve cost savings for the institution. These pressures not only can’t be discounted by agencies, but they also need to be optimized, under the best circumstances, to provide the best possible service with limited resources to the greatest number.

There is then an even greater need for increased social capital through social networking by bonding and bridging tied together in a manner that is both collective and inclusive but which ABCD would insist should be more people based than technology based.

This raises the question though whether ABCD simply focuses through relational consensus on the maximum carrying capacity of each community with special attention towards challenged ones or actually addresses issues between different competing communities through democratic principles?

The role of ABCD in working with communities is separate from the provision of institutional services through agencies and is not meant to save institutional systems money. It is to build community (verb) for the community (noun) to decide its own purpose. There seem to have been some successes in community and agency partnerships fostered by ABCD, particularly with healthcare but while empirically verifiable as to what works, establishing theoretically as to how they work remains less clear to me. The final post of this series will look at this more closely.

part 1
part 3

ABCD, Carrying Capacity and Communities pt 1

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 04:33:00 +0000

The last post dealing with Elinor Ostrom and the Commons cited previous inquiries into complexity, carrying capacity and Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) with an intention to return for further inquiries.

It was Cormac Russell’s post on Nurturing the Carrying Capacity of Communities that was the inspiration and a primary source for bridging ABCD with dynamic complexity on a premise that communities of all types are dynamic complex adaptive systems. Carrying capacity defined as the number of members of a population or in this case a community that can be supported based on resources and environment before it begins to degrade its equilibrium population or the system's receptivity and resilience. This post will add in System Thinking into the mix helping to serve as a connector from complexity and carrying capacity to ABCD.

Some of the concepts discussed back then are going to be amended or expanded in light of new information or insights. The term carrying capacity when applied to community should be expanded beyond simple numbers to include the attributes of that community and extended relationships that defines its existence. People don’t necessarily die, they can leave or have diminished lives but the community may cease to exist.

The first step, because some may consider the terms nearly synonymous, will be to first operationally define “institutionalization” seen negatively by ABCD, and by extension define “institutions” for which Nurture Development’s take will be used. Then define “systems” which will come from what has been learned through this NCP effort. Upfront there is agreement with Nurture Development’s take on institutions.

Institutionalization is logically brought about through institutions but while most definitions of institution are seemingly benignly ideal, “institutionalization” less so according to Nature Development articles like, Beyond Good Intentions; Towards A Good Life which raises real fears that include, “If I make people dependent on a system that cannot provide ongoing love and mutuality without the hidden cost of unintended institutionalization and loss of autonomy”. In Why Place Such A Strong And Focused Emphasis On Place-Based Community Building?, institutionalization is seen as a bad thing bringing forth a call for a “radical form of inclusion that seeks to grow interdependence in community life and reduce institutionalization among those who have become most marginalized”. The Nurture Development article Organizing Institutions To Support Family And Community Care further explains, “Recent responses to institutionalization around the world, especially in Europe, Oceania and North America have involved asking staff who work in human services institutions to alter their caring approaches to become more person-centred and less prescriptive.” Then adds, “But there’s the rub with person-centred care, it can’t simply be achieved by staff changing practice (though that will help), because the issue is largely the context. Therefore, change in human service institutions must also involve decommissioning services that have become too big; impersonal and congregated, and shifting the orientation back towards family and community.”

So what is meant by something being a system? One operational definition used by systems thinking is "A system is an entity that maintains its existence through the mutual interaction of its parts.", Ludwig Von Bertalanffy. I lean toward, Donella Meadows, featured in the last blog post and one of the authors of Limits to Growth, who has a similar definition, “A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something…. a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections and a function or purpose.”

Institutions, governments, communities, families and even ABCD are all systems, and although far from being identical in nature, all incorporate feedback.

Systems may be thought of as something that processes things systematically, without feeling, in a mechanical manner. The most salient point about systems I would argue though is that systems operate systemically and it is from that which systematic processes and outcomes arise of multiple and sometime complex varieties. For others, the term systems is colored by constant battle against “The System” which is but one instance of a system, undoubtedly egregiously entrenched but subject to all the principles of every other system.

The most crucial determinant of a system’s behavior is purpose or function despite often being the least obvious part of a system. A change in function or purpose can be drastic, changing a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection in the system remains the same. For myself, this means that if two systems have the exact same elements but a different set of interconnections between those elements and different purposes then they can be considered two distinct systems.

I see a difference between purpose and function, though the terms are often used interchangeably. There are, in my interpretation, two different types of purpose, “intentional” and “inherent” or what has been referred to as “purposeful” and “purposive” respectively. Peter Checkland, said that purposeful behavior is that which is willed, involving voluntary action particularly applicable to human activity systems. This is what I would label intentional purpose. Purposive, according to Checkland, is addressed through "What would I learn from attributing (externally) purpose to this situation?" An engineered or even a natural system can exhibit behavior to which purpose can be attributed. This is what I am referring to as inherent purpose or what Donella Meadows seems to have termed as function.

Both Meadows and, especially Stafford Beer advise us that the Purpose Of A System Is What It Does, not what we want (this is an arguable point, I have had the arguments).

As to my own thinking, ”The goal or better function (the purpose then is the goal) of a river is to flow into a lake or ocean. The river does not do this intentionally on purpose. Rather it is a step or function in a feedback loop of the world’s hydrology system and subsequently an element in many other systems, including ecological, fishing and shipping”.

I don’t consider myself an expert on Systems Thinking and have even less insight or knowledge about Asset Based Community Development but will still explicitly state some premises concerning ABCD. ABCD is based on the simple logic that communities can’t know what external supports they need (from institutions, agencies and other organizations) until they first know what are their internal capacities or extending to a perhaps more speculative proposition what is their carrying capacity and their social capital, or the “social networks, bonding similar people and bridging between diverse people, with norms of reciprocity”, seen as an extension of carrying capacity? This will involve relationships of communities with outside institutions and agencies whether governmental or private.

An NCP principle that should be raised is recognizing that there is a difference between government and governance, the former being the realm of institutions and the later the provenance of community. It is their disconnection that becomes detrimental to community welfare.

With this series institutions and agencies will be differentiated. Institutions use different agencies to implement policies. State and church are different types of institutions but each can have agencies working to alleviate poverty. Institutions and agencies or organizations, and the agents working within them can, even when connected, have differences in motivation and interactions with the community. Communities are purposeful though often at cross purposes. Institutions are purposive. Agents with agencies often strive to work purposefully but are constrained by efficiently functional or purposive institutions.

Institutions don’t have carrying capacity they have missions, goals and objectives. Communities invest their social capital into institutions delegating control and responsibility. As systems, institutions are invariably complicated in structure, sometimes exhibiting a level of extreme ”complicatedness” though inevitably complex in their interactions with communities. This resulting complexity though all to often restricts the adaptive complexity of communities.

Institutions have a function, to fulfill a purpose but that purpose although it may have been initially been determined by a community or components of that community as a system, a living, complex adaptive system that initial purpose can be lost.

Community, institutions and agencies are meant to be one system. These factors need to be maintained in alignment for the desired ideal outcomes to occur but this too often fails to happen. Instead, corrupting patterns of interaction lead the system, that defines the institution, to be calcified into entrenched patterns propagating the system into self-serving structures and producing mental models professing that things cannot be changed perpetrating its existence. A question that can be asked then is to what extent did the institution corrupt itself and to what extent was it the result of neglect on our part? What we seek is not institutions entrenched in the daily lives of our communities but agencies embedded through trust that, as Cormac Russell has said, are embedded properly by local residents who say this is a way we can live together and prevail here.

part 2
part 3

Ostrom, the Commons and the Green New Deal

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 04:04:00 +0000

In the course of this effort to find new community paradigms, there has been an ongoing, albeit unexpressed, tendency to gravitate towards what can be viewed as a cluster of three thought leaders, all of whom are women. All three are seen as being clustered around the concept of positively addressing and engaging complexity.

They are Donella Meadows, who has an NCP wiki page, Jane Jacobs, for whom though I haven’t yet built a wiki page, is foundational to Placemaking and the work of Project for Public Spaces particularly her ideas on organized complexity and, although until now neglected despite growing awareness and appreciation, Elinor (Lin) Ostrom.

The initial resource for this post, through Marginal Revolution University, was Elinor Ostrom | Women in Economics. The reason for the current focus, in addition to an understanding that the environmental resources introduced in the last post are not enough on their own to face the wicked challenge of climate change, is due to a question asked on both Twitter and the Facebook group The Ecology of Systems Thinking, “Wondering how Elinor Ostrom's ideas could be applied to the Green New Deal and scaled up to be applied not only nationally but globally?” The result of which was several additional useful resources and an enlightened, educational discussion.

With the world’s climate being considered as the ultimate commons, Ostrom’s Eight Principles for Managing a Commons can be seen as a counter to Garrett Hardin’s more pessimistic perspective on the Tragedy of the Commons problem, which is a systems thinking archetype (number 2 in the list). ”Unnecessary tragedies, like ozone holes and national debts, greenhouse effects and urban air pollution are examples of the Tragedy of the Commons”. In these examples provided by Daniel Kim, two different Causal Loop Diagrams display how the archetype works. As he points out, “Perhaps the trickiest part of identifying a 'Tragedy of the Commons' archetype at work is coming to some agreement on exactly what is the commons that is being overburdened.”

Upon closer examination, Hardin’s approach seems less a top-down means of command and control to the benefit of greedy landlords and more an understandable concern regarding how to address unsustainable population growth. The primary point of disagreement is that Ostrom ”challenged the presumption that rational individuals were helplessly trapped in dilemmas.” 16:04

The above quote is taken from the primary resource for this post, Ostrom’s 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences lecture at Indiana University in which she goes over her basic ideas discussed more fully in her Nobel Prize Lecture paper, on polycentric governance complex economic systems, and the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (24:14) and of particular note, ”Demonstrated that complexity is not the same as chaos in regard to metropolitan governance” (21:13 & 22:13).

A number of her other ideas expressed in the lecture were found especially noteworthy.

“The rules that we use to govern a university, a private firm, a water resource, or any kind of problem need to fit the socio-ecological area or field that they are supposed to control. Having one kind of rule that will work everywhere is a ridiculous kind of thinking.” (17:05)

“The second is that polycentric systems with multiple scales enable a fit between human action situations day to day situations and nested ecological systems.” (17:34). Ostrom seems to use the term situations and the complex environments in which they occur in a manner similar to Russell Ackoff’s idea of messes and others in systems thinking.

So likely any top-down systems, even those well-intentioned such as the Green New Deal, at least in its present form without far more bottom-up policy and technical input, could be suspect.

“Panaceas are dysfunctional” 17:52 I have no doubt that she would have included any specific instance of her own systemic approach and any derivatives, directing attention to the first principle listed above.

“The internal would be actors who are in positions that can take action in light of information that they have and how much control they can take and their net benefits and outcomes and then choose outcomes.” (26:35)

“And when they made decisions anomalously and there was no communication, they did what the theory predicted Just as we found in the field that when it was very big and they couldn’t communicate they over-harvested. All we had to do was introduce the possibility of face to face communication, which is referred to in-game theory as cheap talk, doesn’t make any difference, that enabled them to increase cooperation greatly, and then we allowed them to design their own sanctioning system and they went up to 90% of optimal, a fantastically positive result…” (36:42)

What has to change then is the framework in which these complex interactions occur making the transformation into new paradigms for communities possible. The most important requirement, trust.

“We find that learning to trust others is central. You cannot have a small, medium or large or very large governance mechanism that works over time when people do not trust one another.“ (41:17) This point was also emphasized within the Ecology of Systems Thinking group. The issue considered by the participants is whether the networks of trust could be expanded or scaled up to be effectual against wicked challenges such as climate change.

“But the important thing was if it didn't work you could exit and exit turns out to be a very important, powerful, possibility for citizens and if you have only big units, how do you exit?” (19:52)

Ostrom finishes with the “idea of reform” (43:55) and in particular for me the idea “We must learn how to deal with complexity, not just reject it”. (45:01).

The Ecology of Systems Thinking discussion extended the political and economic perspective of the Tragedy of the Commons problem to a more biologically based orientation. A recommended article by Dr. David Sloan Wilson connects Ostrom’s work with evolutionary biology and in doing so establishes cooperation as a viable evolutionary strategy and points out major transitions becoming higher-level organisms in their own right, such as the rise of the first bacterial cells, multicellular organisms, eusocial insect colonies, and human evolution.

Part of the debate, delineated by the disciplines of physics and biology, was on the initial starting point and slope of the trend between population, population density, and food that brought us to our current predicament and applying that to predict a future course of either potential transformation or inevitable destruction. Having only cursory knowledge, I did not take a side. Another topic was on the increasing complexity inherent in wider circles, larger groups, or higher levels of polycentric governance which from my perspective I saw as similar to Dunbar's Number. Here is an RSA video of Dunbar explaining his theory.

Past NCP posts looked at the scaling of networks based on Dunbar's Number applied to Asset Based Community Development, as well as the concept of carrying capacity being applied to communities. These will be returned to for closer examination and likely some revision in future posts already begun raising new questions and some simmering old ones.

According to Cormac Russell, Managing Director of Nurture Development, the average person has fifty-one other persons in their associational lives but he argues that we each need one hundred fifty persons citing Robin Dunbar, the originator of Dunbar's Number.

The number of 150, according to Dunbar "refers to those people with whom you have a personalized relationship, one that is reciprocal and based around general obligations of trust and reciprocity." Cormac asserts that these need to be friends and neighbors, not other service users, professionals, or even family. “It comes down to how many unforced and unpaid for relationships of acceptance we have in door knocking distance.” Including ”family” in the latter group should have been questioned back then more closely as kinship is a primary basis for Dunbar’s number.

There is not, however, a single Dunbar Number but rather a scale of numbers, of ever-widening circles of connection constrained by a cognitive limit because this limit is a direct function of neocortex size, and this, in turn, limits group size where stable interpersonal relationships can be maintained. This cognitive constraint or gap needs to be overcome, logically to my mind, by some systemic means. The working hypothesis is that Asset Based Community Development can contribute to this but doesn't seem to solve it on its own.

Elinor Ostrom’s work cannot in my view be said to be mainstream which is actually part of the reason she appeals to New Community Paradigms. Her work continues through the Ostrom Workshop now the cornerstone of the beginning of a new NCP wiki-page.

Environment and Community Ecology Remade as Part of New Community Paradigms

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 16:30:00 +0000

The previous post of this blog revisited and updated the New Community Paradigms (NCP) wiki page Community Arts. The next wiki page to be updated is Environment. Admittedly, Climate Change has not been a primary focus until recently. The focus has been more on democratic community governance. Recently though issues such as the #GreenNewDeal has clearly shown that Climate Change is a manifestation of governance.

As with most of the NCP wiki pages, Environment is a collection of resources gathered over time. It is by no means comprehensive nor is there any assertion of personal expertise in their selection. The sites selected are only a sampling of useful sites that could be applied in creating new community paradigms.

There have been a number of changes since the last time Environment was featured. In addition to the loss of some sites, there has also been a change from the Brain to Kumu as a primary systems mapping tool for NCP. A meta-oriented change made early was moving from a concept of Community Environment to Community Ecology. The word ecology being judged as providing a greater biological orientation to the concept of community than the word environment. For better comprehension, the Environment wiki page has been organized into three sections. The first of which is Community Science / Education / Systems Thinking and Practice.

The latest new resource is the Home of Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) which seeks to improve environmental data stewardship and to promote environmental health and Environmental Justice through the analysis, through Digital Justice, of federal environmental data, websites, institutions, and policy. Towards an Environmental Data Justice Statement: Initial Thoughts - EDGI provides a good introduction of their efforts.

Public Lab, is a DIY environmental science community with a strong democratic ethos as reflected by their Public Comment section. Public Lab injects community knowledge into civic decision-making about local environmental concerns, listing scores of DIY citizen projects on its extensive community populated Wiki website. The Science of Collective Discovery provides Open Source Stories, featuring organizations like Public Lab and others on how citizens are using open hardware to make groundbreaking discoveries.

NAAEE | North American Association for Environmental Education is a force multiplier for environmental education, promoting excellence in the field and expanding the reach and impact of their collective work.

The Climate Leader Climate Interactive tool provides an introductory training series in systems thinking to help fuel the global response to climate change. En-ROADS is a fast, powerful simulation tool for understanding how we can achieve our energy transition and climate goals through changes in our energy use, consumption, and policies.

The next section us Climate Change for the Better. The Citizens' Climate Lobby is a non-profit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change by taking action on climate change solutions.

The Post Carbon Institute is intent on leading the transition to a resilient world providing individuals, communities, businesses, and governments with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated economic, energy, environmental, and equity crises that defines the twenty-first century by envisioning a world of resilient communities and re-localized economies thriving within ecological bounds. The closely related Homepage of Resilience provides not only a community library with space to read and think, but also a vibrant café to support building community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these.

The Project Drawdown lists one hundred potential solutions to reverse global warming from retrofitting to refrigerant management. While the Solutions Project seeks to accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy by championing a movement that is more inclusive, more collaborative, and more celebratory through storytelling, grant making, and capacity building and by honoring clean energy leaders, investing in promising solutions, and building relationships between unlikely allies.

Global Green USA works in partnership with local governments and other public agencies that are ready to “do” sustainability. They help create innovative and replicable policies, programs, and procedures so that sustainable practices become standard in the planning, design, construction, and operation of the built environment.

C40 Cities Live - Blog is a network of large and engaged cities from around the world committed to implementing meaningful and sustainable climate-related actions locally that will help address climate change globally.

Taking a more business-oriented perspective is the Portland State College of Urban & Public Affairs | The Initiative on Triple Bottom Line Development. Their Triple Bottom Line Tool is unfortunately on hiatus.

The final section consists of sites seen as addressing Energy & Climate Data. Climate Change being recognized as a Wicked Problem, the data being presented can be particularly complex. This is especially true with USA Energy Data which presents an interactive map detailing America’s daily energy use by Saul Griffith, co-founder and CEO of Otherlab.

The EJSCREEN: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool is a US EPA developed environmental justice (EJ) mapping and screening tool purportedly based on nationally consistent data and an approach that combines environmental and demographic indicators in maps and reports. Unfortunately, certainty doesn't seem as possible with the current federal administration.

Taking a more expansive approach to the issue and recognize the potential contribution business and perhaps more conservative perspectives, the Carbon Tracker Initiative seeks to align the capital markets with efforts to tackle climate change. The Carbon Disclosure Project - Global climate change reporting system provides a transformative global system for thousands of companies and cities to measure, disclose, manage and share environmental information with the view that market forces can, hopefully, be seen as a major cause of change when provided with the necessary information.

The Greenhouse Gas Data Publication Tool is another EPA tool that explores Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions from Large Facilities. The Home for Environmental software tools for accounting, carbon footprinting & sustainability performance, although located in the United Kingdom, is intended to bring together people needing to do some form of environmental assessment (and particularly quantification) with people that have developed tools to do these assessments and calculations. Their tools vary in format, including documents, spreadsheets, websites, and other software programs.

The Challenge is research published in Nature Sustainability with the vision of, ”A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries” (summarized in The Conversation) that is the first to quantify the national resource use associated with achieving a good life for over 150 countries. Recognizing that no country in the world currently meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. The Climate Wizard enables technical and non-technical audiences alike to access leading climate change information and visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth.

The site Bombs in Your Backyard - ProPublica provides a full map of sites contaminated with military toxic waste and explosives some of which are located near schools, residential neighborhoods, rivers, and lakes.

Environment was placed under the Community Ecology map of the New Community Paradigms Wiki map project which can assist in both discovering and communicating unrealized connections and redefining connections. One can get from an element narrative (Environment) to the underlying map (Community Ecology) by clicking the white space of the map. One can highlight and select an element (Environment) in the Community Ecology map by selecting the text in the narrative section and mousing over and clicking or by selecting the element’s colored circle within the map. One can get back to the relevant New Community

Paradigms wiki page using the URL, e.g., newcommunityparadigms.pbworks.com/w/page/44793688/Environment in the particular narrative section of the element.

What the Kumu Community Ecology wiki map graphically reveals is that the concept consists of Sustainability and Environment, as well as Streets and Transportation, each of which can connect back to the NCP wiki map through an On Kumu Wiki Map link. Community Ecology bridges back through Planning the Urban Landscape (formerly Built Environment) to Places and then on to the concept of Livable Communities and beyond.

All of this though only provides resources not answers or solutions which must still be developed by those searching for ways of creating new community paradigms.

Revisiting Community Arts as Connector to New Community Paradigms

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 17:28:00 +0000

The last six months have been spent on Systems Practice, which was finally determined to be a potentially viable component of Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking and seen as lending credence to the Victor Havel quote:

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out,”

through additional interactions with the And? It’s All Connected and the Ecology of Systems Thinking Facebook groups.

Systems Practice was also recognized as requiring substantially involved effort yet still only being one aspect of creating new community paradigms, important even essential but not sufficient.

This post returns to the initial purpose of this effort of discovering pathways to new community paradigms by updating the New Community Paradigms Wiki which has been neglected for some time. The first revision to the wiki is the inclusion of a disclaimer concerning intention. It is a learning site that is being shared, there is no claim to authority and regarding security, there isn’t any but then it doesn’t require anyone to provide information, private or otherwise. While a disclaimer to not having any definitive answers only shared explorations may be true that is not made as explicitly.

The work on the Systems Practice series was largely interiorly focused involving introspective contemplation. The change in direction now is to a more exteriorly focused perspective, for at least a while, resulting in more ideas being gathered and added to the pathways to new community paradigms. One of the goals of this effort being to demonstrate how ideas are connected to a far greater extent and far more extensively than may be commonly realized.

A number of new resources have been made available since the last update with new connections and pathways to be explored which means potentially that new insights are possible. This means looking more outward to determine how to apply these insights.

One new area of interest that will be explored is the currently rising idea of a #GreenNewDeal. Despite being popular in circles for which I have an affinity, it is still in the exploration stages. At this point, it seems hopefully aspirational and pragmatically problematic but a good deal of time has just been spent demonstrating through Systems Practice that the pragmatically problematic can begin to be overcome. Recognizing at the same time, other pathways need to be added.

The first of these pathways to be revisited is Community Arts. A number of changes have occurred since the last update with, Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms. One of the organizations, Cultural Strategies Initiative, is gone but a number of new resources have been discovered.

One of the more recent is Smoke Signals Studio, the subject of a TED Talk, who believe that “a practice for truth-telling and rooted in assembly is powerful”. Some notable quotes from their talk seemed particularly relevant in perhaps providing some of the depth required to bring about something like the #GreenNewDeal.

"See, laws never change culture, but culture always changes laws."

"They understood what many of us are just now realizing -- that to get people to build the ship, you've got to get them to long for the sea; that data rarely moves people, but great art always does."

Among other resources that have been added but not previously acknowledged are What's Happening - A Blade of Grass which provides resources to artists who demonstrate artistic excellence and serve as innovative conduits for social change by fostering an inclusive, practical discourse about the aesthetics, function, ethics and meaning of socially engaged art that resonates within and outside the contemporary art dialogue. One of their projects was by Chinatown Art Brigade, who dealt with gentrification in New York.

The Laundromat Project believes art, culture, and engaged imaginations can change the way people see their world, open them up to new ideas, and connect them with their neighbors providing invaluable assets in furthering community wellbeing.

A number of the new resources have to do with storytelling seen from both sides, telling and listening. Storytelling and Social Change: A Strategy Guide | Working Narrative works with communities to tell great stories that inspire, activate and enliven our democracy. Their work is located at the intersection of arts, technology, and social change. Hidden Voices seeks to empower underrepresented populations to effectively tell their stories by engaging communities in dialogue and positive action to strengthen community cohesion and provides pathways for increased communication, cooperation, and respect.

A guide to Listening Matters | Community Organisers, while perhaps technically not arts-based organ, is by the Company of Community Organisers, the national body established to support the training and development of community organizing in England. It provides an important aspect to effectively completing a feedback loop in the creation of a community’s story about itself.

“Listening to people is the foundation of community organising because it builds trust and relationships, uncovers issues and is an essential starting point for bringing people together to share stories, ideas and action.”

YOUNG LISTENERS SUPPORT PEERS WITH MENTAL WELLBEING

The site A S . I F | ART + SCIENCE IN THE FIELD works at rebuilding cross-disciplinary connections while keeping a balance between the two cultures of art and science, following their own creative paths while maintaining accuracy and critical thinking when conducting, and communicating about, science.

ArtsFwd.org has also been added, which though a creation of the EmcArts and featured in the last update, was not included in the NCP wiki through an oversight.

The mission of Imagining America | Artists & Scholars in Public Life is to publicly engage artists, designers, scholars, and community activists working toward the democratic transformation of higher education and civic life by creating democratic spaces to foster and advance publicly engaged scholarship that draws on arts, humanities, and design.

Animating Democracy places a high value on learning from and building capacity and visibility for practitioners’ work on the ground by bringing to bear Americans for the Arts’ strengths in research, policy, professional development, visibility, and advocacy specifically to advance and elevate arts for change work on field, cross-sector, and national levels. The group was also featured in the post The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 2 of 3 as advancing the role of the arts in fostering citizen participation and social change, along with Art VULUPS doing the same with geography, environmental science, land use planning, sustainability, art and creativity concepts.

Other added resources deal directly with finding and establishing artists for the community. Easle is supposed to make it easy to find and commission independent creators for a project. Street I Am - highlights street culture, street fest, busker street art, and graffiti street entertainment. Art Prof provides a unique opportunity for a global community to have equal access to a free visual arts education by removing barriers to art education that exist due to the high cost of higher education & private classes while providing easy-to-follow content for people of all ages and means. The site Dance/USA — The national service organization for professional dance looks to establishing legacy by the preservation of art form for future generations. Their Artist's Legacy Toolkit helps organize and preserve materials in ways that are practical but neither time-intensive nor expensive.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of resources, merely suggestions for possible ways to incorporate artistic thinking, along with design and systems thinking into the civic dialogue.

Community Arts is seen as a means of expressing what has been termed the Soul of a Community. The most significant change to the Community Arts wiki page is seeing it as being not only a component of Community Design but also more as a means of Advocacy By and For Community.

In regard to its place in the still being developed NCP Wiki Map on Kumu, Community Arts is a component of Places and a part of Art and Health Communities, which has been recently updated (read corrected) which in turn is related to Pathways to Healthy Communities.

Perhaps additional new pathways can be found incorporating Community Arts more deeply into Advocacy By and For Community and then extending into Community Ecology based on the concept that the community basis to address the health of the populace and community basis to address the health of the environment as in the #GreenNewDeal being the same.

A Systems Practice Perspective of Radicalism and a Jerusalem Vision

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 16:36:00 +0000

In the last post, the idea of more directly addressing the challenges of living with the complex, wicked challenge of Palestinian/Jewish relationships in the City of Jerusalem using a Systems Practice approach was put forward. The last post focused more on the Systems Practice methodology itself rather than any particular complex issue it was meant to address. This post will focus that methodology back on the topic of Palestinian/Jewish relations in Jerusalem with the perhaps arguably idealistic goal of finding a new Jerusalem Vision. That lens though will still be abstract and conceptual in nature looking to the underlying forces that contribute to the detrimental impacts on those living within that shared system.

The focus is also still going to be limited. Beyond the Acumen/Omidyar Group Systems Practice projects being academic exercises, they are also in their short time span inadequate in reflecting the full complexity of the system or situations arising within that system. While this can be actually true of all systems and the system models which we create to help understand them, repeating yet again, "All models are wrong, some models are useful", it is especially true in this instance as we did not include a Palestinian perspective. This has been recognized as a missing piece of the story.

Furthermore, while complications and the often stochastic nature of the real world have hampered efforts to implement any of the different Systems Practice projects in that real world, it was also true that complications and the often stochastic nature of the real world prevented the unhampered implementation of the Systems Practice methodology itself.

Even if Systems Practice is seen, at least by me, as a playbook more than a philosophy, I would assert that it is a playbook navigating non-linear processes. In the first project, I threw a wrench into the process by mapping too early though it should be noted that the process dictated by the methodology did recover. The Systems Practice process, however, has never unfolded precisely as described by the manual. Not that Systems Practice doesn't recognize this, it is not a strictly paint-by-numbers process and such detours may provide helpful insights.

The third assignment in the Acumen Systems Practice course is on Upstream Downstream SAT Analysis on different Themes. As mentioned in the last post, our individual internal maps were disaggregated and the factors making them up were collected without any of the connecting relationships unique to each then categorized as enabling or inhibiting and upstream or downstream. For the most part, our individual mental models were largely abandoned in terms of the process.

The exception was our team leader, Yoel Ben-Avraham. After going through the process of categorizing factors and applying a S.A.T. analysis to them, Yoel felt that something fundamental to our understanding was still missing, something that the Systems Practice methodology had not brought forward. A theme of Radicalism as perceived from a Jewish perspective was seen as missing. As far as I understood, Yoel created his theme first and then populate it with factors which were then categorized instead of starting with factors.

It has been recognized from the start that I and everybody else except for Yoel were outside of the story and that while Yoel and I had discussed or debated different issues having different mindsets I determined to assist him in fleshing out this perspective by mapping out his text-based analysis shown below which was more in line with assignment four. Finally, I got to map.

The Kumu systems map revealed by this link focuses on the Radicalism theme fully populated when opened. The map is formatted in such a manner that one can mouse over the listed loops, R1 through R11, making up the map to reveal their location. This approach of mapping out somebody else's differing perspective of an issue has been undertaken before. The intention is to have the process of mapping reveal how the factors could be related to each other resulting in unforeseen emergent outcomes. This depends though on honestly and correctly mapping them without bias. In this case, as with others done before, the attempt was seen as successful by the other involved party.

What might be first noticed about the mapped out version of the Assignment 3 above is that the terms Upstream Causes and Downstream Effects become somewhat moot. All of the factors have been integrated into causal loops which are linked together so every factor serves as both upstream cause and downstream effect.

The Radicalism theme, as presented, is also self-contained. As it consists of factors related, interdependently with each other for a purpose or function, Radicalism can be seen as a system in its own right. There is required neither a significant source of input from outside of the system or significant output from the system allowing for meaningful feedback permitting change. The system by the interaction of its parts is self-sustaining and resilient. It is what has been referred to as an entrenched system except that it is in conflict with its larger environment rather than being an entrenched institutionalized you-can’t-fight-city-hall type system usually considered.

With the Radicalism theme systems map, one can also start with the loop R1 Alienation, click on the "Focus on" link at the top of the narrative section and "walk around" the loop through the narrative. The loop is seen as reinforcing in a "vicious" manner or functioning to make matters worse in terms of reaching the project's Guiding Star. The factors are all seen as inhibiting and from the S.A.T. perspective as attitudinal except for Arab Educational Indoctrination which is seen as transactional. The narrative for the individual factors comes primarily from Yoel's S.A.T. analysis but interpretations were made. Indoctrination was seen as referring to the transactions between teachers and students rather than the structural aspects of an Arab educational system.

Both the factors Alienation of Palestinians and Alienation of Jews are seen as being attitudinal and as being stocks despite them being of a non-physical nature as defined by Donella Meadows. The level of alienation in either populace can increase or decrease and cannot change instantaneously.

The connections can then be considered as flows. The flow out of the stock Alienation of Palestinians into the stock Alienation of Jews raises that stock though it does not decrease the Palestinian stock, as it is raised by the outflow from Alienation of Jews stock. External factors also influence the flow into and out of the two stocks acting as catalysts to enhance the maintaining of higher stock levels. There is not a systemic means of diminishing either of the stocks or relieving pressure from the flows, which if were made to exist could be seen as being contrary to the perceived function of the theme.

Going back to the R1 Alienation narrative, if necessary by clicking on the text in the middle of the loop within the map section, one can go to the bottom of the narrative and click on "Go to: R2" and add on the second loop, R2 Economic Slowdown. While Alienation of Palestinians is not seen as the sole causal factor of an Economic Slowdown and Economic Slowdown is not seen as the sole causal factor of Palestinian Alienation, their mutual relationship is seen as being highly correlated enough to be considered causal in nature for the purposes of the map.

Repeating the process to reveal the R3 loop Destruction of Palestinian Homes. This ties directly into the R1 Alienation loop. The factor in question is seen as transactional. There is a structural factor on the Israeli side involved but it is arguably outside of the theme based Radicalism system being considered.

More loops can be added using the same process. The loop R5 (Palestinian) Religious and Secular Leadership asserts that after three causal steps, (factor - connection - factor or what Kumu terms degrees) the loop R3 Destruction of Palestinian Homes is shown actually increasing overall alienation and entrenching what could be considered detrimental policies from the Jewish perspective. Continuation of loops into pattern of persistent causality further asserts the means by which the institutionalized system of Religious and Secular Leadership maintains control without the potential for adequate input to bring about change or to provide a platform for a different perspective.

Once the theme Radicalism is fully populated by the causal loops making it up, one can return to Start Page and add either one of two additional themes or both. The two themes are Extremist Violence and Transition and Accommodation of Values. While neither of the themes contains feedback loops, not all systems have feedback loops according to Donella Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems, A Primer (page 27), both integrate seamlessly into the Radicalism theme extending it.

The Extremist Violence theme exacerbates the vicious aspects of the Radicalism theme, while the theme of Transition and Accommodation of Values is shown to be inadequate to positively change the direction of the Radicalism theme.

This will be the last post for a while on Systems Practice in general and specifically on the Jerusalem Vision project. The Systems Practice methodology has been demonstrated to be a useful contribution to Systems Thinking and Direct Democracy. However, a review of Haaretz articles revealed the deep, inherent political complications assailing any efforts toward change. The Systems Practice process on its own would not be enough. Other steps would be required by the people who live within that system to implement new community paradigms.

NCP Inquiries into Systems Practice - 10th post of 3rd Project

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 16:13:00 +0000

This is the tenth blog post in a series on the Jerusalem Vision Project, which is the third Systems Practice project undertaken through the Acumen course using the Omidyar Group’s approach to pragmatically applying Systems Thinking.

The project took my rudimentary knowledge of Systems Thinking as a basis for obtaining a better understanding of Systems Practice and applied it to a complex challenge - Israeli/Palestinian relationships in the City of Jerusalem of which I admittedly knew relatively nothing.

This specific blog post is going to again review this endeavor, not of achieving better relations between Palestinians and Jews in the City of Jerusalem but in the utilization of Systems Practice to address such complex challenges. These points have been made before but across disparate posts making their assertion somewhat disjointed.

These continuing endeavors seem to have worked well in attaining a better understanding of the Systems Practice methodology having initially made a late start in properly applying the methodology the first time with an inquiry into food trucks for homeless camps but still having concerns about the process afterward nonetheless. The second time, looking at plastic pollution of the ocean in Bangkok, Thailand, gaining a better understanding and a somewhat more successful application but still having questions that remained or continued to be needed to be tested to confirm certain aspects in terms of how Systems Practice could be utilized in developing new community paradigms.

The difference then between this Systems Practice project and the previous two projects is first, a better understanding of how a Systems Practice approach works and second, instead of focusing on each project step by step this project waited until completion to get a better overall view of the process. Both to determine how the Systems Practice process unfolded and to assess how Systems Practice might be integrated with Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.

However, endeavoring to absorb the entire process after its completion raised a number of complications particularly when attempting to communicate the worthwhileness of the effort with anyone who has had little to no experience with Systems Thinking or Systems Practice. It is not a difficult challenge to get those interested in Systems Thinking or Systems Practice to take a look at another example of the methodology to either agree with or disagree and critique. You can simply ask them, the community is especially helpful.

It is more of a challenge to get those neck deep in dealing with real-world messes to consider Systems Thinking and Systems Practice as viable approaches to finding solutions. This takes us back to the first paragraph. Any contribution I made to specific projects was not based on my first-hand knowledge of the particular challenge under consideration but my relatively better understanding of applying Systems Thinking and increasingly, a Systems Practice approach to these challenges, in cooperation with others who had committed to trying to apply the approach with their enrollment in the course.

The Jerusalem Vision Project had its own particular challenges being based on both more complicated and conflictual issues, in addition to its complex nature. Complicated and conflictual because of political and historical reasons but also somewhat internally conflictual, though collegiately so, because of distinctions between different mental models used by the project participants. The complex nature of the challenge though may not be as readily apparent because of the confusion arising from the complications and inherent conflict.

While I feel confident that those with whom I went through the three Systems Practice projects found it beneficial, this is harder to convey to those who weren't brought to such efforts for their own reasons. All the harder as both Systems Thinking and Systems Practice can be conceptually abstract when people are often anxious for so-called concrete solutions.

Systems Thinking provides a logical construction in finding solutions but is not always explicitly empirically evident. Further complicating the matter is that Systems Thinking, though it has certain foundational aspects, can be categorized by different approaches and underlying philosophies that seemingly conflict. Conceptual conflicts by Systems Thinkers, seeking a solution to be imposed, that may sometimes be made too readily the crux of the matter rather than the detrimental impacts of the challenges themselves.

This can obscure the viability of System Thinking’s fundamental principles but it isn't the primary hurdle to convincing the uninitiated to make the commitment to a Systems Thinking or more specifically a Systems Practice approach which can be substantial.

The primary hurdle is an essential change to a mental model that is linear, analytical, reductionistic to one that incorporates a perspective that is also non-linear, holistic, synthetic. The basis and need for the change and resulting implications can be easily underappreciated while the siren call to grasp at an immediate concrete solution can be addictive. The basis for this distinction and requirement for convergence is explained, more succinctly than I can, by this video from Complexity Labs.

The Acumen/Omidyar Systems Practice approach overcomes this hurdle by having its implementation be dependent upon the convergence but not explicitly so. It follows the logic of some Systems Thinkers that like Fight Club, Systems Thinking shouldn't be talked about. It does lead those who habitually follow a path by reductionistic, analytical, linear thinking so often used by command and control top-down management to the alternative of thinking defined by synthesis, holism and non-linearity without making the transition too obvious.

The Omidyar Group’s approach to Systems Practice though does not only steer most participants, whose primary experience has been following that habitual path to an alternative one but also navigating those supposedly versed in Systems Thinking away from too quickly determining a final path to a solution to whatever complex challenge is being faced. This was my error with the first Systems Practice project, to immediately begin mapping towards a solution.

While the course does present the case for synthesis and Systems Thinking in a general sense early on by examples, it instead takes participants through a number of steps that unless used and tested can seem contrary to how we usually approach such challenges even when using Systems Thinking as individuals. While their purpose may be explained with each step taken, their cumulative effect cannot be fully appreciated until more fully implemented. Until that occurs participants are encouraged by the course to have trust in the process.

What the Omidyar approach does is take the internal, and usually implicit mental maps of each of the individual participants regarding the system in which the mess or complex situation occurs and asks them to hold it in abeyance then work to first create a common goal through the Guiding Star, Near Star and Framing Question. More importantly, though, is a process of disaggregating those individual maps by collecting the factors making them up without any of the connecting relationships unique to each.

This collective set of factors is then jointly categorized as being either enabling or inhibiting and then rearranged into new collections defined by common traits or themes. This process helps not only to open up pathways to the internal mental maps of individual’s that may have been previously closed but also sets the basis for finding a set of new and collectively determined relationships. This arguably has a far stronger basis for democratic deliberations. At no point in the process so far has a systems map or map of any type been started. This took some personal adjustment.

The next steps in the Systems Practice process, upstream and downstream relationship configuration and S.A.T. (structural, attitudinal, transactional) Analysis were touched upon for the third time in recent posts. Despite having my own ideas on S.A.T analysis and its implications, I have come to appreciate its viability in contributing to the process, having been able to anchor it to basic Systems Thinking concepts such as the Systems Thinking Iceberg model and integrating it into basic Causal Loop Diagrams.

However, it needs to be admitted openly that Systems Practice does not provide a panacea. Surely no surprise on its own but it is important to be clear on why. The first goes back to the beginning of this post. I may have made an abstract, conceptual argument for the viability of Systems Practice but in the meantime, I completely abandoned the challenge it was supposed to address - Palestinian/Jewish relations in the City of Jerusalem.

The individual embedded in the system of concern, be they Palestinian or Jew, needs to be convinced of the viability of the process. That has not been accomplished except perhaps for a few individuals. To be even more honest, none of the projects undertaken so far came up with a final answer to their challenge. These were, to be fair time restricted, limited, basically academic projects taken on by groups of strangers globally separated by different time zones. In those cases were doing more was sought out, the complications and often stochastic nature of the real world hampered such efforts. On a broader and long term basis the challenge though is one of implementation and the problem is a Knowing-Doing Gap discussed in previous posts.

Despite these limitations, I have become convinced that Systems Practice can make a valuable contribution to creating new community paradigms. I recognize though that my rationale as presented will have little potential to influence those living with complex, wicked challenges without at least addressing those challenges more directly. I will attempt that in the next post.

Every Systems Puzzle Tells a Story

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 15:42:00 +0000

In Systems Thinking, things or factors are dependent upon what is around them and can change over time.

Yoel Ben-Avraham, the team leader for our Jerusalem Vision Systems Practice project, provided the viewpoint of a 67-year-old Jewish man with a good sense of historical perspective. Yoel brought up the idea of ”targeting” and asked, ”Who's ’forces’ are we going to explore?” Though I initially agreed with the idea of ”targeting,” I came to realize that our use of the term was being misapplied.

People can sail to different ports by “targeting” their destination and using the existing knowledge of wind and currents to get them there. It is a matter of performance. However, somebody had to first study those winds and currents to understand how they would influence ships and write that down for others. It is then a matter of exploration and learning. Our mission at this point in the process was not to paint targets on the wall but rather examine the forces that lead to those “targets”. Systems Thinking, especially the early stages of Systems Practice is set in the explorer stage. The questions of "how to" would be dealt with separately, later in the course and would need to be even more so, after it.

We started to express some of the factors and influences or as the Systems Practice course termed it forces that affect the system. Not in an attempt to reconfigure the system, in this case, Jerusalem, into a desired state, or target certain factors to change into a shape we believed to be better but endeavoring to understand the forces that constitute the system in its present form purposely avoiding coming up with hypothetical enablers. We were seeking to understand what creates the forces which maintain the system in its current configuration without passing judgment on either side.

One should then, from an overall perspective, take a system in its totality so one side isn’t predetermined as being more important than another in the maintaining of that system. At the same time, both sides, all sides need to be understood from their own perspectives.

We would do this partially through the S.A.T. (Structural Attitudinal Transactional) analysis of factors which provides another lens on understanding the system, and its component causal loops, under inquiry. Examples and explanations of a general nature were provided in the previous post. We also needed, among others, the perspective of a 24-year-old Palestinian man trying to raise a family and recognize what he sees as reality or truth. Not to prove it right on its own but to recognize it as a force perhaps Attitudinal in nature and perhaps arising from Structural forces or influencing or causing Transactional forces. Unfortunately, we had to attempt to imagine it rather than actually obtaining it.

Within a current system, each factor would play the role of cause or effect and usually both but that was not being determined at this point. What was initially attempted was to determine whether a factor could be seen as enabling the system or inhibiting the system.

One of the primary issues though, in my experience, that Systems Thinking seeks to address is the tendency of people to only look at factors in immediate or near-immediate approximation. The Systems Practice course does not seem to emphasize this enough, at least in my opinion.

The cause-effect or causal links between factors then can be repeated in extended upstream-downstream relationships. Systems Practice seems to want to establish this prior to actual mapping which I have admitted is not something that I am adept at. Each upstream factor identified has to have at least one and perhaps more downstream factors related to it, it has to be upstream to something. It is the upstream cause to some downstream effect.

One could ask the question the other way. The test of downstream is whether it is the effect or result of something upstream. Choose a downstream effect and ask what are the upstream causes of it but don't stop there, ask what are the upstream causes of that, then again ask ”And?”.

In many instances, if one goes out far enough, one discovers that the connections circle back onto their origin. So factor A connects to factor B which connects to factor C which then connects back to factor A. People may be paying attention to A and B but not to C and therefore not understand why things are not improving since A increases B, not realizing that while B may also increase C, C decreases A. What we have then visually under Kumu is a loop, in this particular case a balancing loop as discussed in the Donella Meadows “Thinking in Systems” series.

There is now a causal loop that is persistent which means that every factor in the loop could be considered both an upstream cause and a downstream effect depending upon the designated state of the system.

Kumu refers to these causal linked factors as degrees and defaults to being able to extend three degrees or three causal steps though one can go out further connecting factors within different loops together. It is by getting past immediate or near-immediate causal relationships by which Systems Thinking can provide greater insight. Systems Practice does this through a collaboratively constructed vision.

Both upstream and downstream factors involve change through causal steps that are either positive in that it results in an increase or negative in that it results in a decrease of something. Whether that change is positive in a good sense or negative in a bad sense depends upon context. Loops are, however, more than just their factors, including their connections can result in emergent aspects within themselves and within the system overall.

This configures into what I think of as patterns of persistent causality. These loops or patterns of persistent causality can be thought of, to my mind, as system entities the same as factors also having an influence on the rest of the system in their own right beyond their component factors.

We want to then label factors with names that are neutral in terms of increase or decrease so that we can determine a direction based on the factors influencing them, so as to be able to discover emergent forces and what the course calls the deep structure of the system which is highly unlikely if one is stuck with a particular perspective from the start.

What then may be an enabling force in one loop may become an inhibiting force in another related loop. In this aspect, Systems Practice may be somewhat weaker for those with less experience in Systems Thinking because they don't extend their inquiries far enough or openly enough.

A philosophical argument can be made whether connections need to truly be a causal relationship with 100% correlated mathematical certainty or it if they could be highly but still qualitatively correlated. Systems Dynamics would lean, heavily, to the former, Systems Thinking would arguably allow for the later being more open to qualitative inquiry. The question is how strictly does one define causality. Is it only 100% proven correlation or do we explore first with less rigid criteria and then endeavor to prove with more stringent?

The course also organizes these factors into Themes, another partial lens. A theme is a collection of commonly related factors and forces. Themes do not necessarily have a causal connection between the factors making them up, they are part of a group for other reasons thought relevant to the system. They are often not quite yet Causal Loops. To be a loop, those forces and themes need to be organized into persistent feedback configurations. Causal steps, however, according to Donella Meadows, “Thinking in Systems” do not have to feedback to be a system. Causally linked thematic pathways then can connect different causal loops together in my view.

Kumu does not have a direct translation for Themes but it can visually represent Themes by classifying factors (and connections) by type or tags and assigning a particular color or size when defining the view for that systems map.

In the Systems Thinking Certification course, factors, from a more social perspective needed to persuade others, could be thought of like characters in a novel interacting with other characters with arrows showing causal connections and forming sub-plots through loops. The themes and causal loops together can form subplots which will form a plot and eventually a rich story when put together through a dynamic system map. Yeu Wen, the course catalyst for the Plastic Pollution Thailand project, suggested thinking of factors themes and as nouns and verbs in a sentence (well maybe adjectives, adverbs and nouns with connections as verbs). Rob Ricigliano, the course instructor, in one of the course’s videos, also said that we can think of the process in some ways as building a story, a deeper story that is inclusive of all.

We cannot fully tell the significance of a specific factor or idea until we see how it plays in the entire system map (story). I doubt that we can fully do it for all factors as individuals with, especially complex systems. From a Systems Thinking point of view though, the supposed facts on the ground, especially if they can be continuously debated, are not necessarily the most important factors. The different mental models held by different groups can be of even greater importance. Overcoming those mental models is perhaps the most significant impact Systems Practice can have.

The Systems Thinking Iceberg Model helps with Understanding Systems Practice S.A.T. Analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 17:55:00 +0000

So far we have dealt with Guiding Stars, Near Stars and Framing Questions as well as dealing with factors as either enabling or inhibiting in upstream/downstream patterns into different Themes of the system being explored. During this Jerusalem Vision project, a S.A.T. analysis, unique to Systems Practice was again conducted. Factors involved in cause/effect or upstream/downstream relationships can, according to the Systems Practice course be categorized as Structural, Transactional or Attitudinal.

It is a way of looking at a system so as to avoid focusing on only what is obvious and allowing for a deeper understanding of the system overall. By rigorously looking at all the cause and effect relationships, within a system, according to this set of categories, one has a better chance of illuminating the most important causal drivers in the system. This will be only a cursory explanation though, for a more complete one it will be necessary to take the course.

The course provides examples of the three categories of S.A.T. - Structural, Attitudinal or Transactional rather than definitions. The three, as presented by the course, can be seen as being distinct from each other.

There is though arguably an interrelationship between them that can be explored. This is based on a hypothesis that the Structural components or factors of a system help to determine Transactional factor patterns upon which both together Attitudinal factor perspectives are based which in turn support, oppose or acquiesce to those Structural components, which in turn, influence Transactional patterns.

This proposed interrelationship between the S.A.T. categories also suggests correspondence with another Systems Thinking meta-model, the Systems Thinking Iceberg Model. I explored the potential for these ideas with the Kumu project Implications 101 of Systems Iceberg and Systems Practice S.A.T. (Forked).

The Kumu project is based on fundamental Systems Thinking principles in the construction of Causal Loop Diagrams. More specifically, on five examples, of a more general and abstract nature, developed by Gene Bellinger for use in his still-developing interactive learning platform And! It's All Connected. Gene conducted the Systems Thinking Certification course I took. The ”Forked” in the title means that I had permission to make a duplicate of his work and modify it for my own purposes. As I told the And! It's All Connected Facebook group, ”Without a firm foundation through Gene's original maps, I would not have the same degree of confidence”.

Using Gene’s work as a basis, I first extended upon his ideas by adding new loops and then created new perspective (view) on the issues using S.A.T. categorizations. Gene, it should be noted created an advanced Kumu view to define his design. Mine created for the S.A.T. analysis was far more simple but it did, it can be asserted, support and expand upon the ideas below.

According to the course, the Structural category of S.A.T. includes the physical, whether natural such as air quality or drought or the built environment, say housing stock or the transportation system but it also includes the non-physical such as the social environment in which people live; including political, social and economic institutions.

Different types of institutional infrastructure could be considered either physical or non-physical e.g., legal system, economic policy, labor unions, church associations. In many cases, there will be a combination of both physical and non-physical aspects. The physical court building in which the non-physical legal system is practiced. The examples provided by the course could be considered as formal structures, some significant. Systems can give rise to factors that can serve as the structural components within that system helping to define it despite a lack of formal recognition.

The structural category of S.A.T. can be related to the structural level in the Iceberg Model. Structures are built and or are maintained by individuals that they are established by, working transactionally in concert but they are something more than individuals and are capable of persisting beyond individuals.

There is a structural component arising from the interaction of factors and forces which if changed could potentially change the system but to be adequately effective would likely need to be seen as a structural replacement.

Factors, at the Structural level of either the S.A.T. model or Iceberg model, can be considered as stocks both physical, whether natural or built environment and non-physical following Donella Meadows’ definitions.

The Principle of Accumulation states that all dynamic behavior in the world occurs when flows accumulate in stocks. Stocks can be increased or decreased but not instantaneously,

“a stock takes time to change, because flows take time to flow”.

”A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within a system”.

Donella Meadows

Transactional factors of the S.A.T. can be seen as combining into the events and patterns of the Systems Thinking Iceberg Model. Events become patterns when they are repeated in a systematic enough manner that allows them to be forecasted or their cumulative effect influences the larger system. Transactional factors are set within the Structural framework(s) of a system and are constrained by it.

Transactional is the process of interactions but for me has a slightly different definition from that used by the Systems Practice course. The course seems to limit the definition to key people or the leaders at all levels as they deal with important social, political and economic issues whether they be essential negotiations, violence, problem-solving, influence, or leadership. Examples of key Transactional factors provided by the course include lobbying by human rights activists, the influence of a community elder, mediation by a member of Parliament, or extreme political rhetoric by a religious leader. I don’t see a reason to limit the definition to Grass-tops and not include Grass-root efforts even if they must often occur at a more aggregated level to make a noticeable impact.

What is implied but not made explicit, or at least I will assert that it should be, is that transactional factors involve at least a two-sided interaction though not always apparent. That the interaction must be iterated to become a pattern and that will invariably occur within, through or be supported by some Structural factor or factors.

Those Transactional factors unsupported by Structural factors will be far less sustainable than those that are and far less likely to reach a persistent pattern. It should be noted that an iterated persistent pattern does not mean repeated exact copies, patterns of transactional factors can be modified and systems can evolve.

A Transactional example of extreme political rhetoric could be effective not because it directly changed the structure of a system but because it influenced Attitudinal concerns of the populous which in turn brought changes to the Structural factors of the system though that would have to be through Transactional factors.

Transactional factors do not accumulate as stocks but can define the inflows into and outflows out of stocks. Transactions cannot be a stock. Subsequent transactions may reinforce a pattern of transactions but they replace the previous transaction. Transactions can only influence flows into or out of a stock.

Attitudinal factors are akin to the Mental Model level of the Iceberg, encompassing the attitudes, beliefs, morals, expectations, and values, which are often subconscious or unconscious. They are set by means by which people adapt or acquiesce to the patterns of transactions which if unchecked or unquestioned then allow those established structures to continue functioning through the same continuing pattern of transactions.

The category Attitudinal within S.A.T. relates to widely held beliefs, values, norms, and intergroup relations that affect how large groups of people think and behave e.g., ethnic tensions, social capital, fears, group trauma, religious beliefs, and attitudes like trust in government or a belief in “rugged individualism” and can be non-physical stocks. However, these invariably arise from the Structural and Transactional factors and can be in turn applied to them as well.

If Attitudinal shifts cannot bring changes to Structural factors through a shift in Transactional patterns or vice-versa then that Structural factor may make the system, to use a term used before, entrenched requiring far greater leverage from factors that may not exist as of yet. This can be true even if the Structural factor is not formal or even apparent.

There is a difference between individual social beliefs or what the course calls Attitudinal and what might be termed structural norms of institutions which are not human. All belief is human and although individually based can be aggregated. The later structural norms are not as dependent upon individuals in regard to short, mid-term or sometimes even long-term existence of the system. This is part of the reason why many institutional systems can become entrenched.

Systems Practice Factors and Themes As Pieces of a Systems Puzzle

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 17:05:00 +0000

Systems Practice introduces certain operational terms such as factors, forces, enablers, inhibitors, and themes as components of their approach to Systems Thinking. These are in addition to the basic Systems Thinking terms and concepts introduced in the series on Donella Meadows’ “Thinking in Systems” which although not necessarily essential for application is part of providing a deeper foundational understanding.

The Systems Practice course defines these operational terms for the creation of a system map or in the early stages perhaps more like creating pieces of a puzzle. Unfortunately, these operational terms are not defined as adequately or precisely as they might be so what follows is my interpretation of them. The understanding of each concept can be dependent upon the understanding of other concepts, often introduced later in the course, ideally creating a holistic perspective by the end.

In Systems Practice a factor, according to Rob Ricigliano the course instructor, is "something, a person, an environmental condition, an attitude, an institution, a phenomenon, etc., that makes other things happen or has agency."

The first step then in the Systems Practice mapping process is brainstorming as many factors as possible related to the system under review, based on the previously established mission focus through the Guiding Star, Near Star and Framing Question created prior by the group.

A Google spreadsheet, such as Factors Themes Grouped used with the Plastic Pollution in Thailand project can be provided to collect the team member’s suggested factors for the system. The Google sheet created for the Plastic Pollution project consisted of six columns. Who suggested the factor, the factor itself and the four different forms of categorization that could be applied to those factors.

Author
Factors
Inhibitor/Enabler
Themes
Upstream or Downstream
S.A.T.

The Google Sheet for the Jerusalem Vision project was modified both during and after brainstorming for factors and was more of a deliberative process than with Plastic Pollution. The Google Sheets then become the source of content for the relevant Kumu systems maps to be made.

What the Systems Practice course calls factors Kumu systems mapping calls elements and they are by default the filled circles on a map which can be sized and colored as desired (or even made different shapes or images). Kumu elements are the visual graphic representation of Systems Practice factors. This involves another transition in thinking, moving from text-based linear, what I have labeled longitudinal thinking to graphics based latitudinal thinking which can be more holistic but still requires certain rules to be followed based on Systems Thinking concepts.

Our Jerusalem Vision team began expressing some of the factors, or influences or as the course termed it "forces" that affect the system. The collected factors are also considered as “drivers” by the Systems Practice course. A driver is the idea of one factor or thing changing or causing an effect to another thing.

Our approach was endeavoring to understand the forces that constitute the system in its present form, in this case, Jerusalem, not to try to reconfigure the system or targeting certain factors to change into the shape we believed to be better though at times we had to again remind ourselves of this.

In saying that we should be endeavoring to understand the forces that constitute the entire system in its present form I should explain my understanding of the Systems Practice concept of force. It is the dynamic causal relationships between two factors. One factor, the cause, has an effect on another factor. It is the Kumu connections forming relationships between elements that represent forces. Similar to gravity as a force only occurring when two or more bodies are in relation to each other. These can then be categorized according to the course as different types of forces, either as enabling or inhibiting within the system under question.

At this stage then, prior to actual mapping, there is only a collection of separate factors presumed to be part of a system but with no real understanding as of yet of their relationships, like cutting up pictures for pieces of a puzzle and putting them in a box. A collection though is not a system, it requires dynamic and purposeful assembly.

The Systems Practice approach, as it will be shown, disaggregates factors and then seeks to develop fresh connections between them to provide new insights. This also enhances complexity, unrealized at this point and potentially to be made more coherent by the Systems Practice process.

The course then speaks of forces between the factors, basically connoting causality or correlation. As I explained above, it takes two factors to create a force. Kumu represents these forces graphically as connections between the elements. In the course, the format used is + and - signs. This is where categorization of factors as either upstream or downstream and very often both.

A connection originates with either a plus sign meaning an increase in that factor (cause/upstream) or a minus sign meaning a decrease in that factor and ends in either a plus or minus sign to the connecting factor (effect/downstream). So an increase/decrease in A can lead to an increase/decrease in B and all the combinations possible. It can also mean moves in the same or opposite direction as in when A moves in a certain direction B moves either in the same direction or the opposite direction.

Again, any actual connections between factors representing causal relationships or forces have not been established at this point. Factors are grouped together first as either enablers or inhibitors and then categorized under a set of common characteristics or what the course called “themes”.

Taking a step back with the benefit of some hindsight, themes are part of the dynamic assembly mentioned above occurring after factor collection, separating enabling forces from inhibiting forces and then subsequently combining such forces into various themes or collections of common ideas. Themes illuminate the related forces at work within the system.

My own Systems Practice approach avoids lumping factors or blending them together by a common label to make them more homogeneous even though based on different aspects or perspectives, instead emphasizing a diversity of ideas across themes.

Factors under Systems Practice hopefully then retain a certain independence or isolation from being made to specifically serve solely one side of the system conflict or the other until their influences within the larger system are determined. They are often shown to have counterparts that they were either influenced by or that they influenced or as said above more likely both.

So a collection of related enabling factors should become a cluster of enabling or an enabling theme and the same is done then with inhibiting factors. Similar, it would seem, to the practice of separating outside, edge puzzle pieces from inside ones or sky pieces from the ground pieces.

It is presumed to be less confusing for a group if the clusters are made up of either all enablers or all inhibitors. There can be enabling factors that drive the cost of living down alongside inhibitors that drive that same cost of living up. It will be suggested then doing two different types of loops based on a particular thematic cluster, one for the dynamics that drive the cost of living down and then another one on the dynamics that drive the cost of living up when creating systems maps with Kumu.

Another reason for separating forces into two groups of enablers and inhibitors is to ensure that the group is putting sufficient attention on those factors that make things better in the current system configuration before merging them into loops and not only focusing on those that were making things worse.

The tendency had been for past groups doing the mapping to focus on what was not working, what was making things worse, giving too little attention to the things that stabilized the system or that could have even made things better. It is hoped that focusing on enablers and inhibitors separately gets groups to put significant attention looking for those "forces" or phenomena that aren't thought about in the first place, particularly on the enabler side of the equation. Sometimes this might require taking a second look.

So the group has various collections of factors organized into different themes bringing up again the image of a puzzle party, though a closer analogy would be if instead of puzzle pieces each person brought their own photos of their particular perspective to create one common photo collage. What is being sought is moving from talking about things to creating a story.

Framing the Systems Practice Framing Question

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 16:55:00 +0000

The last blog post dealt with the Systems Practice Guiding Star and Near Star, both of which are future-oriented. This post will deal with the related Systems Practice idea of a Framing Question. A Framing Question focuses on understanding the system to be analyzed in its current configuration and to be ultimately affected to bring about the Guiding Star.

At this point, we are beginning to seek to understand what creates the forces which maintain the system in its current configuration, without passing judgment on either side. By understanding these forces we may then hope to leverage some of them to move the system towards our Guiding Star. How we do that will be based in part on how we format the Framing Question:

1. One way is to ask what are the forces that affect the ability to improve the system for everyone?

2. Another way is to propose you can’t understand how something enables or inhibits a healthy system unless you understand fill in the blank.

However, as one objective is to potentially incorporate Systems Thinking and Practice into democratic processes this post will also deal with framing from the perspective of democratic deliberation though more through Governance through Community rather than elected representatives. This takes the Framing Question a further step as well as expanding its inclusion.

The Kettering Foundation, as part of Governance through Community, recognizes that one of the biggest challenges facing communities is developing the capacity of Working thru Difficult Decisions. Because ostensibly, "Deliberation seems like neurosurgery or something only an outsider can do” this can make some fearful of attempting it.

”The Kettering Foundation has found that sound decisions are more likely to be made when people weigh—carefully and fairly—all of their options for acting on problems against what they consider most valuable for their collective well-being. This is deliberative decision making. It not only takes into consideration facts but also recognizes the less tangible things that people value, such as their safety and their freedom to act.”

Their suggested approach is Naming Framing Difficult Issues for Sound Decisions

”The obvious question is, what would motivate citizens to invest their limited time and other resources in grappling with problems brimming with conflict-laden, emotionally charged disagreements? Generally speaking, people avoid conflict, and they don’t usually invest their energy unless they see that something deeply important to them, their families, and their neighbors is at stake. And they won’t get involved unless they believe there is something they, themselves, must do.”

”These differences don’t necessarily become divisive, however, especially when people recognize that although they don’t share the same circumstances, they share the same basic concerns. In deliberative decision making, people can see that they both agree and disagree. This encourages them to agree to disagree and lessens the likelihood of polarization."

The National Coalition for Dialog and Deliberation (NCDD) asked the question “How might we make our D&D work more equitable, inclusive and empowering?” One of their objectives involved Framing which for them meant ensuring that the community is the key framer of the issue(s).

This was seen, however, while a civic issue, not a priority one. It was connected by systems maps through (Kumu) clustering to similar concerns from the categories of access, trust, and barriers.

The priority NCDD issue to which it was connected was “Celebrate individuals who have opposing views rather than attempting to marginalize them”. Taking their concerns of equity, inclusion, and empowerment to an individual human level.

Another resource, the Community Tool Box, by the Center for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas, featured in Community Tech Tools and Healthy Cities pages of the NCP wiki discusses framing and reframing more in terms of initial implementation, having the idea accepted.

”Frame a powerful question”, a Deloitte Insights article, has us ask questions that focus on the learning opportunity and that can provoke and inspire others to change the game for longer-term results.

The following are the Framing Questions for the last three Systems Practice projects. Each is uniquely associated with its particular project but they also differ in their scope and boundaries as well as whether they focus on institutional factors or are more people focused.

For the “Last Mile Food Truck Feeding the Unsheltered Homeless” project the Framing Question was:

“What are the factors and their relationships in the "Access to Food(Healthy) system" and in the environment that are lacking for the homeless population and that would determine the real impact of the food truck on getting people back into the community once introduced?

As part of this question we will also be asking:

1. What prevents those struggling with homelessness from accessing available Food(Healthy) resources?

2. What prevents Food service providers from accessing their target demographic (homeless, or those who are unstable and threatened with homelessness)?”

For the Plastic Pollution project, the team leader came up with the more succinct final version of the Framing Question.

”What forces account for the current levels of plastic pollution in Bangkok?”

Our course catalyst for the project, Yeu advised us:

“The framing question can be more targeted towards discovering the forces at the bottom of the iceberg, i.e. the beliefs and perceptions of stakeholders. Here in also lies the crux of the direction that your guiding star can provide”.

Tying it back to the Guiding Star and potentially expanding the inclusion of a greater number and diversity of stakeholders. If this can't be accomplished in the initial stages of the Systems Practice project, it could be at later stages even after completion of the course.

How you frame a system and how others see you framing it influences how those others will interpret it, even if you didn’t use either Systems Thinking or Systems Practice to build it.

In the blog post A Second Look at Neoliberalism with a Community Face and Asset Based Community Development, a particular Scottish perspective saw ABCD efforts as framing notions of civil society and citizenship as being separate and independent of any notion of state responsibility (though not removed from as the article’s authors state), thereby promoting privatization of public life. A position totally at odds with ABCD’s own perspective of itself.

Although NCP wrote in opposition to the Scottish perspective, it still demonstrates the importance of the Framing Question being asked of the system you are investigating, even after the Systems Practice course is completed.

Our Framing Question for Jerusalem Vision is:

“What forces encourage or discourage interaction, trust, and understanding between members of the different communities?”

Some of the factors involved in the system were framed as “Tribalism," which could be seen as controversial though it could be pointed out that tribalism exists in American politics and other areas of the world. As for framing the question within the current geopolitical situation our team leader Yoel, the only one of us to actually live within the system in question advised us to avoid pie-in-the-sky thinking as what we are addressing is a different model of rights/privileges/collaboration than found in the Western democracies.

“The West cannot come into the Middle East (e.g., Iraq) and expect a millennium of entrenched religious and social conventions to change overnight to mirror its Western cultural values and beliefs. There has to be a middle ground where the West's positive values meet the East's traditions, customs, and mores and find a synthesis that embodies the best of both worlds without relinquishing the benefit of either!”

"Dana" Meadows Helps Set Course for Systems Practice Guiding Star

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 22:41:00 +0000

The last three blog posts were a detour from the current look at the Systems Practice Jerusalem Vision project to review underlying Systems Thinking principles through Donella Meadows’ book “Thinking in Systems, A Primer”. Addressing the two new levels of inquiry that we are asking others to adopt to address wicked problems, the first being the controversial events that describe but don't really define such problems.

Arguably, for many for whom the course is a one-off to address some specific issue, this may not be important but if Systems Practice were to be adopted as a standard means of addressing a host of issues over the long term then a better understanding of Systems Thinking becomes basically essential in my view.

Meadow tells us that all systems are composed of elements, connections and, most importantly, a purpose or function. The fulfillment of that purpose or function is a goal of that system, perhaps subsidiary, perhaps primary. Both she and, especially Stafford Beer advise us that the Purpose Of A System Is What It Does.

With each System Practice course project, we decide that a system, with which we are involved, should have different goals and therefore different purposes and functions. We don't actually know fully the goals, purposes or functions of the system in its current configuration, except perhaps for some that may be espoused, but we are first going to decide what is it, what new state, that we are trying to attain. The Systems Practice course does this by establishing a Guiding Star.

In each of the Systems Practice projects we did not have a common vision when first thrown together. It slowly came together beginning with either the creation of a Complexity Spectrum or online brainstorming or both to determine whether we were dealing with a complicated (clock) problem or a complex (cloud) one.

At first, our ideas were often directed at finding silver bullet solutions to the problem rather than developing a better understanding of the system under question. Reacting to the current situation rather than proactively planning to navigate to a desired future states by a Guiding Star.

The concept of developing a Guiding Star was previously considered in New Community Paradigms with setting superordinate goals as part of the series Exploring with the Dialogue, Deliberation and Systemic Transformation Community to Discover New Possibilities.

The formal description for that effort was, "What superordinate goal could replicate across the collective set of value systems, and act as a 'guiding star' for systemic transformation?”, which our facilitator paraphrased as, "What everyone wants, but no one entity can do themselves."

The Guiding Star, according to the Acumen Systems Practice course, is an aspirational state or desired future.

A mistake in the first Systems Practice course, by me, was skimping over the Guiding Star, as well as the Near Star and Framing Question, which were created in large part by the group I was leading. I had a working systems map by that time and thought that I already had the needed insights. My approach saw our role as providing answers for consumption by a community, dismissing any concern for democratic deliberation or diversity.

Our collective vision of what that purpose or goal should be still needed to be developed. It was, and I had some input, but it was the conglomeration of about nine different perspectives. For the group dealing with food trucks for homeless campsites the Guiding Star was:

"A societal structure in which, when a person’s community support system fails, he receives appropriate, sufficient and timely support to prevent him from falling into homelessness through a community system that produces minimally decent shelter, sustenance and healthcare for those who become homeless working to integrate them fully back into the community."

During the Thailand Plastic Pollution project it was as decided by those defining the project:

"We are trying to move the City of Bangkok and the entire country of Thailand from both being blighted by and blighting oceans with plastic pollution to being plastic pollution-free."

Our course catalyst for the project, Yeu advised us that:

"Guiding stars are best described as a vivid future state that provides a direction rather than measured goals. In that respect, do every member of your team share a common understanding of the difference between a system state that is healthier than a previous state? In your case, a less plastic-polluted state than another? Counting plastic items is not a good idea. So what is?”

The point is that there is more to being healthy than merely not being sick. He recommended, which I have also, the use of the "Systems Thinking Iceberg" Another potentially useful resource "Donella Meadows 12 places to leverage systems", emphasizes paradigm shifts in the beliefs and perceptions of stakeholders. It became the basis for the blog post "Dana" Meadows Helps Find Purpose and the Plastic in a System of Plastic Pollution.”

Based on these insights, I advised the Jerusalem Vision team that the Guiding Star should not be a blueprint of an ideal system. It is more giving reason for you wanting to create the ideal system or what it will be to drive you to want to create it, what you hope to achieve to drive you forward through times of hardship and struggle. Being an ideal, it isn't merely delivering the basics but it also won’t attain a level of finality either.

Our Guiding Star for Jerusalem Vision became:

"We are trying to move towards a social system that always strives to achieve win-win solutions for all involved."

"We aspire to a Jerusalem where every resident has equal access to health services, education, employment opportunities, cultural services and regardless of race, culture, gender, socioeconomic background, or other human difference by fostering mutual trust and respect between all of Jerusalem’s inhabitants."

"We aspire to a Jerusalem where all communities have a basic trust in the system and bear a mutual respect for the rights of all other communities in Jerusalem and uphold the value of mutual collaboration."

"We aspire to achieve a social reality in Jerusalem where all communities feel secure in their identity while respecting the identities of other communities."

The Near Star is a more near-term goal of a 5-10 year timeframe, a desired but provisional outcome towards the Guiding Star.

The Near Star, I suggested to the team, is not the most basic or least viable result or one that meets minimum requirements of the system that we have in mind. The Near Star, at least in my view, should be the system that we need to put in place to begin to move towards the Guiding Star, not a lesser version of the Guiding Star. While still being expansive enough that it isn't a clockwork objective.

Our first Near Star for Thailand Plastic Pollution was:

“Bangkok City actors are able to work effectively toward reducing plastic pollution.”

The term “city actors" sounded too institutional or government oriented. It could include community actors but too often from the perspective of those in power. The more community-based term “stakeholders” with the definition being an entity that can affect or is affected by the wicked problem was used contingent with it being as inclusive as possible which would mean expanding outreach and increasing the complexity of overall interactions.

"Stakeholders, who can affect and are affected by plastic pollution in Thailand are able to work effectively toward the elimination of plastic waste."

Our officially submitted Near Star for Jerusalem Vision is:

"Creating contexts and environments where members of different communities learn and work together encouraging the growth of mutual respect between them as individuals."

Unofficially, for the Jerusalem Vision project we decided that instead of looking at the Near Star as a stepping stone (milestone) toward the larger target (Guiding Star) we would embrace it as a "sandbox" where we could test our understanding of the system to see if we understood it enough to take even more daring steps to influence it.

"Dana" Meadows Provides a Primary Systems Thinking Review pt 3

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 03:12:00 +0000

It is about time for the usual reminder given with posts on Systems Practice and other courses. This blog post series on Donella Meadows’ book “Thinking in Systems - A Primer” is not a substitute for reading the book. Read the book. This is only my perspective on what I have learned from Donella Meadows’ lessons in particular and Systems Thinking in general.

The last post discussed what was important to discern about systems (purpose or function), the constrained roles of leaders, and feedback loops, particularly balancing loops used to regulate. Balancing feedback loops though don’t work only through human or programmed decisions, they also work through physical laws.

“Whatever the initial value of the system stock (coffee temperature in this case), whether it is above or below the “goal” (room temperature), the feedback loop brings it toward the goal. The change is faster at first, and then slower, as the discrepancy between the stock and the goal decreases”.

It is based on a function as discussed in the blog posts on the Complexity Explorer course.

We are used to (I am) thinking of goals as being tied to a purpose (the purpose of this activity is to attain that goal), so something is imposed to change the current situation from what it is to what we want. Which may be part of the reason we often have difficulty discerning purpose or function, if it’s a matter of maintaining the system’s own integrity rather than what we want.

The goal or better function (the purpose is the goal) of a river is to flow into a lake or ocean. The river does not do this intentionally on purpose. Rather it is a step or function in a feedback loop of the world’s hydrology system and subsequently an element in many other systems, including ecological, fishing and shipping.

Meadows makes another important point, That balancing feedback mechanisms don’t always work, at least not as we want. They may not be capable of bringing the stock to the desired level, interconnections, especially the information part of the system may fail, arrive too late or at the wrong place or be unclear or incomplete or hard to interpret. Actions triggered may be too weak or delayed or be resource-constrained or simply ineffective. Breakdowns in a system should be differentiated though from poor system design.

Goal-seeking or stabilizing balancing loops are not the only type of feedback loops. Reinforcing loops, the second type of the two, exist when an element (or stock) within a system has the ability to reproduce itself growing at a constant fraction of itself as with populations and economies.

They are amplifying, reinforcing, self-multiplying. They can either cause healthy growth in a virtuous circle or runaway destruction in a vicious one enhancing the direction of change that is imposed upon on it with the capacity of snowballing. Generating more input to a stock the more it has and less input the less it has with each iteration.

This is not simple linear growth at a constant rate over time. It is exponential growth. Again, following the path of functions like the logistic equation discussed in the Complexity Explorer series.

I believe that another point can be derived from what Meadows has said about feedback loops and the connections or flows through which they operate. They invariably require energy. Reinforcing loops always require energy, as with life sustained through energy from the sun for populations. A balancing loop may simply be turned on or off based on attaining a goal (information feedback) but often can also require additional energy to act as a countervailing force.

Think of Meadows’ example of a coffee cup cooling but replace it with an unplugged refrigerator being defrosted. The function remains the same. The change from the initial value to goal follows the same functional path. It can also be considered a balancing loop. Plugging the refrigerator back in involves applying energy. Electric energy is converted to mechanical energy which is used to cool again the food inside. A decision is made as to where to set the desired temperature and another balancing loop is put into effect.

The first balancing loop used the second law of thermodynamics allowing the refrigerator to go naturally from a lower state of entropy to a higher one. The second balancing loop, still following the second law, forced the closed system through the input of energy into a lower state of entropy although it increased overall (higher) entropy in the environment.

Reinforcing loops in this scenario could be the increasing use of energy to power the refrigerators because of increasing population and decreasing resources. More people means more refrigerators bought especially if economic circumstances improve for some and that means more energy consumed depended upon dwindling fuel supplies. Real world, physical systems will involve entropy. This could be considered a source for so-called unintended consequences of systems.

A stock then can have several reinforcing and balancing loops of differing strengths pulling it in several directions. A system’s different feedback loops can make the systems stocks grow, decrease until eliminated or coming into balance with other flows in the system. A flow may be adjusted by the contents of a number of different stocks, filling one stock while draining another while feeding (via information) into decisions affecting yet another one.

Feedback loops are easier to understand as graphics such as systems maps than as written words. ”Pictures work for this language better than words, because you can see all the parts of a picture at once”. This means though learning, as was said in the first post of this series, a new way of doing things, a new way of thinking, a new cognitive grammar capable of inquiring into and understanding systems. There are online programs and communities attached to them that can help with this. My go-to choice is Kumu.

However, anyone somewhat familiar with this New Community Paradigms effort in general and more specifically with the approach to Systems Thinking and of Systems Practice will know that neither the Acumen course nor usually I, use Stock and Flow models. (When I do, I use Insight Maker) The Systems Practice course and I instead use Kumu to create Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs).

CLDs include (conceptually) elements and connections as do Stock and Flow Models but they don’t have explicit quantifiable stocks, and while flows can be quantified, connections in CLDs are not. The preference for CLDs is that they are conceptually easier to work with and more intuitive for others to understand. However, Meadows (and others) has convinced me that we should at least be thinking of what the stocks would be, whether physical or intangible and what paths the connected flows would take to ascertain that the system in question is having a manifested and not an imaginary impact on the world.

Meadow speaks of challenging her students (and readers) to think of human decisions that occur without a feedback loop, a decision made without regard to information about the level of the stock being influenced with “falling in love” and “committing suicide” being the most common supposed “non-feedback” decisions. The motivations for both are intangible so we can have difficulty with thinking in terms of stocks and flows but our world is materially different when the state of the world exists either with them or without them and if it does with either that it can quickly snowball in that particular direction upon reaching a tipping point.

In real systems, feedback flows are linked together, often in fantastically complex patterns going beyond being limited to only one of three basic states of being steady or approaching goals smoothly or exploding exponentially.

”Watch out! If you see feedback loops everywhere, you’re already in danger of becoming a systems thinker! Instead of seeing only how A causes B, you’ll begin to wonder how B may also influence A—and how A might reinforce or reverse itself”. When you hear in the nightly news that the Federal Reserve Bank has done something to control the economy, you’ll also see that the economy must have done something to affect the Federal Reserve Bank. When someone tells you that population growth causes poverty, you’ll ask yourself how poverty may cause population growth."

The world then becomes dynamic, not static and the essential question becomes “what is the system?”, rather than who or which side is to blame.

The concept that a system can cause its own behavior through feedback is not an intuitive idea, though living with it in the real world sometimes seems it may be We ourselves are complex entities displaying emergent properties of life, consciousness (and I would assert free will), creating through our interactions with others the emergent existence of societies, cities and nations. We seem to live with the inherent complexity already underlying our lives and learning more about it doesn't need to impair our ability to live our lives. It is rapid, new and non-coherent complexity which makes us afraid of dealing with wicked problems, deferring them instead. More problems then arise because our decisions can be based on an assumed unchanging state of affairs and our own biases.

This is the end for now of the look at Donella Meadows’ “Thinking in Systems - A Primer”. Again, read the book. Up to this point, she has covered the basics and has provided enough material to return to the Jerusalem Vision Systems Practice project in the next post.

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"Dana" Meadows Provides a Primary Systems Thinking Review pt 2

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 02:19:00 +0000

Continuing the look at Donella Meadows’ book “Thinking in Systems - A Primer”, the previous post described systems as consisting of elements, interconnections, and, most importantly, function or purpose.

Elements are the most noticeable parts of systems and usually the least important in defining the unique characteristics of the system unless they can change relationships or purpose. Changing relationships usually change system behavior. A system may be dramatically altered if its interconnections are changed.

The most crucial determinant though of a system’s behavior is often its function or purpose despite being the least obvious part of a system. A change in function or purpose can be drastic, changing a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection in the system remains the same. For myself, this means that if two systems have the same elements but a different set of interconnections between those elements and different purposes then they can be considered distinct systems.

These are, however, all abstract concepts. To deal with changes physically manifested in the world Systems Thinking uses the more ”concrete” concept of stocks. A stock is an accumulation of material or information built up over time and, according to Meadows, is the foundation of any system. Stocks are the elements of the system that can be seen, felt, counted, or measured at any given point in time. A stock, like elements of which stocks are comprised, does not have to be physical.

A system makes a manifested change in the world, whether through physical means, a river turning turbines or intangible, economic uncertainty leading to the election of a right-wing government.

”If you understand the dynamics of stocks and flows—their behavior over time—you understand a good deal about the behavior of complex systems”.

Stocks change over time through the actions of flows, both in and out. “A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within a system”. Stocks are therefore not static. Even if in a state of dynamic equilibrium in which the level of a stock does not change, there is a continuous flow through it. This may give the appearance of unchanging permanence.

It is much more difficult to change the level of the stock abruptly than it is to adjust a flow. Stocks, especially large ones, respond only gradually to change, even sudden change. A vital, key point to understanding why systems behave as they do is that “a stock takes time to change, because flows take time to flow”. Stocks usually change slowly, acting as delays, lags, buffers, ballast, making them sources of momentum in a system.

”People often underestimate the inherent momentum of a stock. It takes a long time for populations to grow or stop growing, for wood to accumulate in a forest, for a reservoir to fill up, for a mine to be depleted”.

The presence of stocks allows inflows and outflows to be independent of each other and, moreover, to be temporarily out of balance with each other.

We seem to be more capable of focusing on stocks than on flows and on inflows more than on outflows. Often failing to see that a stock can be increased by decreasing its outflow rate as well as by increasing its inflow rate.

Humans have invented hundreds of stock-maintaining mechanisms through individual and institutional decisions designed to regulate the levels in stocks and to make inflows and outflows both independent and stable. Monitoring stocks constantly, making decisions to take actions designed to raise or lower stocks or to keep them within acceptable ranges. Those decisions, along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows, add to a collection of “feedback processes.

"Systems of information-feedback control are fundamental to all life and human endeavor, from the slow pace of biological evolution to the launching of the latest space satellite. . . . Everything we do as individuals, as an industry, or as a society is done in the context of an information-feedback system".

—Jay W. Forrester

Feedback mechanisms are then a mechanism that operates through a feedback loop to create consistent behavior that persists over time. Feedback loops can cause stocks to maintain their level within a range or grow or decline. Flows into or out of a stock are adjusted based on changes in the size of the stock itself. Whoever or whatever is monitoring the stock’s level begins a corrective process, adjusting rates of inflow or outflow (or both) and so changes the stock’s level. The stock level feeds back through a chain of signals (information) and actions (physical changes) to control itself.

A feedback loop is then formed when changes in a stock affect the flows into or out of that same stock. A bank interest-bearing savings account is a simple and direct feedback loop. The total amount of money in the account (the stock) affects the amount of money coming into the account as interest (the flow) based on earning a certain percent interest each year. The total amount of interest paid into the account each year (the flow in) is not a fixed amount, but varies depending on the size of the total amount in the account (stock) and increases the stock amount by that much for the next iteration.

The stock is adjusted by the flows into or out because of changes in the size of the stock itself. A corrective process is taken then by whoever or whatever is monitoring the stock’s level, adjusting rates of inflow or outflow (or both) and thereby changing the stock’s level. The stock level feeds back through a chain of signals (information) and actions to control itself.

As long as the sum of all outflows exceeds the sum of all inflows, the level of the stock will fall.
As long as the sum of all inflows exceeds the sum of all outflows, the level of the stock will rise.
If the sum of all outflows equals the sum of all inflows, the stock level will not change; it will be held in dynamic equilibrium at whatever level it happened to be when the two sets of flows became equal.

Not all systems have feedback loops. Some systems are relatively simple open-ended chains of stocks and flows. They still have elements, interconnections and function or purpose and might be affected by outside factors, but the levels of the systems own stocks wouldn't affect its own flows.

If the feedback mechanism tries to keep a stock at a given value or within a range of values through a stabilizing, goal-seeking, regulating loop it is called a balancing feedback loop.

”A balancing feedback loop opposes whatever direction of change is imposed on the system. If you push a stock too far up, a balancing loop will try to pull it back down. If you shove it too far down, a balancing loop will try to bring it back up”.

The idea being that if one knows all the dynamic possibilities of say a simple bathtub model one could deduce several important principles that can be usefully extended to more complicated systems.

Systems can also have an appropriate time horizon to the system question or problem being investigated allowing one to question what came before, and what might happen next. This helps to understand trends of system behavior over time instead of focusing too much attention on individual, (and all too often immediate) events. Behavior-over-time graphs can help with determining if a system is approaching a goal or a limit, and how quickly.

Whether elements or stocks, they are still models that we create of the real world. All models, whether mental models or mathematical models are still simplifications of that real world, subject t0 the often quoted George Box aphorism, “All models are wrong, some models are useful”.

Meadow also speaks of leaders in control of a system being able to, “play a different game with new rules, or can direct the play toward a new purpose”. However, she also says that (because stocks can be), “long-lived, slowly changing, physical elements of the system, there is a limit to the rate at which any leader can turn the direction of a nation”. So they too often make empty promises, changes that fail and blame the other side.

“Changes in stocks (by a country) set the pace of the dynamics of systems. Industrialization cannot proceed faster than the rate at which factories and machines can be constructed and the rate at which human beings can be educated to run and maintain them”.

While time lags coming from slowly changing stocks can cause problems in systems, they also can be sources of stability. “If you have a sense of the rates of change of stocks, you don’t expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don’t give up too soon”.

This sense cannot, however, be held by only a few. Our existing entrenched systems make it too easy to choose leaders that really don’t have our best interests in mind even if well-meaning in their hearts. In this use “our” is meant to be applied as expansively and inclusively as possible. The question then is can democratic processes be applied in using Systems Thinking? The answer suggested by Systems Practice and from New Community Paradigms so far seems to be yes.

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"Dana" Meadows Provides a Primary Systems Thinking Review pt 1

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 06:07:00 +0000

During my recent trip to China, I took the opportunity to read Donella Meadows’ book “Thinking in Systems - A Primer”. Despite being featured in an NCP wiki-page, I had procrastinated about reading it. Part of the motivation to finally read it was dealing with the complex and controversial issue of Jewish Palestinian relations in Jerusalem using the still being tested methodology of Systems Practice based on principles of Systems Thinking. Three different levels of involved interaction utilized to deal with a wicked problem. The book reminded me or helped me to better understand or made me realize the importance and relevance behind the logic of a number of Systems Thinking principles and in many ways tie them into other New Community Paradigms efforts. It is what I wish I had known better and for others to know before taking the Systems Practice courses by Acumen.

This is, however, my own summary of her work and my interpretation which has changed the order of the presentation of ideas, adding others (sometimes in parenthesis) derived from prior inquiries. Meadows provides far more examples. Direct and notable quotes by her are in italics.

The book, as Meadows informs us, is about a different way of seeing and thinking. People are often wary of the word “systems” and, if they have heard of it, the field of systems analysis, despite having been arguably doing some form of systems thinking all their lives. There is both a recognition of and a resistance to systems principles and especially to new ways of thinking. I suspect that it is still more of the later, resistance for most people than the former despite the Editor’s Note suggesting it is widely accepted (certainly not mainstream) making the remainder of the quote all the more frustrating:

”Today, it is widely accepted that systems thinking is a critical tool in addressing the many environmental, political, social, and economic challenges we face around the world. Systems, big or small, can behave in similar ways, and understanding those ways is perhaps our best hope for making lasting change on many levels.”

At the first page of the main body of the book, Meadows starts off with a quote, a previously cited observation that managers confront dynamic situations consisting of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. Russell Ackoff called such situations messes, ”Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes”.

”It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away”. Yet they persist in spite of any analytical ability and technical insights that have been directed toward solving them. They are intrinsically systems problems— characteristic of system structures that produce undesirable behaviors. Except that we too often don't recognize them as such.

Part of the problem is that Western society has so greatly benefited from science, logic, and reductive analysis over intuition and holism solving some serious problems by focusing on external agents and what I would refer to as complicated processes usually involving top-down command management. Past solutions are now though are either not working or are now becoming problems. A systems approach is not meant to be seen as being better though than a reductionist approach in thinking. They're complementary and as a result all the more revealing combined. The problem is that we are not close to being balanced and certainly not erring on the side of systems and holism.

Limiting discussion of systems to only words and sentences, which are restricted to only one at a time in a linear and (set) logical order, can also be a problem. Systems in the real world happen all at once being connected in many directions (along with multiple dimensions) simultaneously making it necessary to use a language (e.g. graphics systems mapping) that shares some of the same properties as the phenomena being examined. This also requires new thinking, a new cognitive grammar capable of inquiring into and understanding systems.

Meadows’ book defines a system as an interconnected set of elements coherently organized to achieve some function or purpose consisting of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and, most importantly, its particular function or purpose. Without the interconnections structured to produce behavior that results in a function or a purpose, it is not a system. It is more than the sum of its parts. Water is more than the sum of oxygen and hydrogen. Life is more than the separate inorganic chemical elements of which it consists.

There is an integrity or wholeness about a system and an active set of mechanisms (based on interconnections between elements) to maintain that integrity. Systems can be self-organizing, and often are self-repairing within some range of disruptions. Systems can change, adapt, respond to events, seek goals, mend injuries. They are resilient. A system can exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and even evolutionary behavior. Even if consisting of nonliving elements, it can still attend to its own survival in ways that mimic life.

Using a slinky, Meadows demonstrates this inherent vitality of a system that some external ”thing” (her hands) manipulates (held or taken away) so as to suppress or release some behavior (bouncing up and down) that is latent within the structure (of the spring of the slinky). It was not some external force within the hands holding the slinky that caused the slinky to bounce up and down. The hand merely acts as a valve to inherent forces (kinetic energy) within the slinky. There is a relationship between the structure and behavior of the slinky, understood here to be an instance of a system.

”The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.” The dynamic force of change comes from within the system itself, not externally. We don't impose solutions onto systems we reveal them.

Elements are not only physical entities. Intangibles can also be part of a system. While some interconnections in systems are actual physical flows, many are flows of information —signals sent to decision points or action points within a system which are often harder to determine. ”The interconnections in the tree system are the physical flows and chemical reactions that govern the tree’s metabolic processes—the signals that allow one part to respond to what is happening in another part.” It can be much easier to learn about a system’s elements than about its interconnections. With human-based systems, the information flows can be both formal and informal.

Systems, as a set applicable across numerous categories, biological, sociological, political, ecological, etc., can consist of common structures that repeatedly produce characteristic behaviors referred to as “archetypes”. They are responsible for some of the most intransigent and potentially dangerous problems but could be transformed, with a little systems understanding, to produce much more desirable behaviors by looking for leverage points for change. The problem is that we all too often not only fail to find them, but we also fail to look.

Meadows tells the story of The Blind Men and the Matter of the Elephant. ”This ancient Sufi story was told to teach a simple lesson but one that we often ignore: The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made”.

While Meadows states that arbitrarily adding or taking away certain elements of a system can mean that you quickly no longer have the same system, she later explains can have limited applicability, ”Changing elements usually has the least effect on the system". It can be like someone changing their hair color and losing weight, often superficial in reality. They are still the same person. A system can generally remain to be itself, so long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact changing only slowly if at all, even with a complete substitution of its elements.

”Some people say that an old city neighborhood where people know each other and communicate regularly is a social system, and that a new apartment block full of strangers is not—not until new relationships (interconnections) arise and a system forms”.

System functions or purposes can be even harder to determine as they may not be explicitly spoken, written, or expressed. They can be best deduced through watching the operation of the system to see how the system behaves over time. This is similar to Stafford Beer’s POSIWID. Purposes should be deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals or as Chris Argyris put it, espoused goals.

Systems can be nested within systems, so there can then be purposes within purposes. However, they don't have to be in alignment with each other, Sub-purposes can come into conflict with each other and the overall purpose of the system, invariably when created by humans. Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems. Something nature is better at than are humans.

This means that humans can create systems that despite being seen as detrimental manage to maintain their existence regardless of how many times the elements (i.e. people) making up the system are changed. All the more difficult when a small portion of the human population benefits while controlling the inflows and outflows of the system. From the early days of the New Community Paradigms effort, I have labeled these entrenched systems.

My worry is that there is insufficient appreciation as to how difficult it can be to change such systems, all the more so if they are not even recognized as systems or our approach to them is not holistic but remains limited to reductive analysis through imposed top-down control management processes.

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Systems Practice - Practice Can Mean Making Mistakes and Repeating to Learn from Them

noreply@blogger.com (Briandrpm) — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 03:23:00 +0000

The latest Systems Practice project ”Jerusalem Vision” dealing with Jewish Palestinian relationships has been approached from around the edges in the last post and the two preceding. With this post we will begin zeroing in. As always, this blog is not intended as a substitute for the course. Instead, it takes more of a bird's eye view to see how it might relate to other aspects of new community paradigms.

For me, Systems Practice is basically applied Systems Thinking, thought experiments with pictures (graphic systems maps) using alternative forms of cognitive navigation to steer through challenges, especially wicked challenges. This again needs to be recognized as a sizable cognitive shift for many. Though it can be far more intuitive than might be expected. A favorite metaphor of mine for this new thinking is navigation during the Age of Discovery, a paradigm shift as notable as modern man’s mission to the moon as told in How We Got To Now with Steven Johnson / Time (Emmy Winner). We still need all of our existing “sailor skills” but we are adding a new layer of mapping skills based on a new way of looking at the world.

I still consider myself as having a limited background in Systems Thinking. Many if not most people taking the course though were even less familiar with Systems Thinking and far more familiar with the usual linear reductionist approach to understanding which means breaking things up into smaller pieces for ostensibly better control. The challenge then is developing a means of helping others to cross over to a more holistic, Systems Thinking approach or in the case of a systems practice approach through a group process. I still don’t believe that there is a strong enough foundation in Systems Thinking provided at the beginning of the Systems Practice course and introducing the systems mapping tool Kumu at the very start could help with that. Those with less experience in Systems Thinking may have problems with Systems Practice but those with that do have that experience will still need to be open to taking different perspectives.

Despite any issues raised in the last post with the article A Systemic View of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and its related systems map, its author David Peter Stroh is also recognized as the author of ”Leveraging Grantmaking: Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Social Systems”, concerning the Calhoun County, Michigan study, which used Systems Thinking to address homelessness. The report was cited in the blog post Learning to Apply a Systems Practice to the Wicked Problem of Homelessness and has also been cited in the past when discussing Collective Impact and other times since then.

The Calhoun study looked at the “whole system," not one system for funders, one for providers and another for everybody else. The community’s incentives structure existed to provide quick fixes to address the immediate problem, rather than creating sustained change. One study observation was “The most ironic obstacle to implementing the fundamental solution was the community’s very success in providing temporary shelters and supports.” Systems Thinking was used to determine where intervening with higher level approaches such as housing first could effectively occur. This approach worked even with rising unemployment in the area. Stroh also wrote an insightful article on “Exposing the Hidden Benefits of Business as Usual: Why the Status Quo is So Difficult to Change,” which can also be seen as being applicable to a Systems Practice effort.

This is the third completed Systems Practice project. Waiting this time until the end of the Systems Practice course before blogging allows for a bird’s eye view of the entire Systems Practice process. It also allows inclusion of the other past Systems Practice projects found in the New Community Paradigms Systems Practice wiki-page, which include “Addressing Homelessness in Portland, Oregon” and “Addressing Plastic Pollution in Thailand” as well as looking at Systems Practice from a more philosophical perspective categorized as ”Systems Practice UK”.

The SP UK course’s more philosophical indoctrination did help to realize some important insights more fully. One is appreciating the difference between people finding themselves in a complex system and those finding themselves in complex situations, recognizing that these aren’t mutually exclusive. People in the actual applicable problem situation will have different perspectives from those considering the relevant more abstract system in which those situations arise.

The project Plastic Pollution in Thailand and the UK Systems Practice more philosophical perspective gave rise to my own perspective that Systems Practice (SP USA) is not a philosophy. It is a playbook. They actually have a playbook, Systems Practice Workbook Omidyar Group that describes the process undertaken in implementing a Systems Practice approach to deal with wicked problems (the impossible of the course’s title). It has no issues with taking from any of the different Systems Thinking approaches, whether ontological, epistemological, soft or hard explored in the Systems Practice UK series that suits its pragmatic purposes.

The “Addressing Homelessness in Portland, Oregon” project was an extension of the ”Financial Modeling and Last Mile Homeless Food Truck” project and I was the team leader. With ”Plastic Pollution in Thailand, I joined a group, with an already established focus, which unfortunately broke up before the end of the course though I still brought the project to a conclusion. The most recently completed project was the one most in line with the ideas behind ”Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.” The topic Palestinian and Jewish relationships in the City of Jerusalem was chosen democratically among the eight members of the group out of nine possible topics.

The greatest value the previous two Systems Practice projects brought to the Jerusalem Vision project is what was done wrong or went wrong in those projects. Before the first Systems Practice course, I had worked solo and still tend to do that. Systems Practice though significantly informed and induced me to substantially change the approach I took when working with a group.

My first mistake with Systems Practice was creating a systems map using Kumu far too early in the process before the course had barely started. I came with my cup perhaps too full, putting me out of alignment with the course and with being able to collaborate with the others on the team I was supposedly leading. It took a while to realize that the differences were due to Systems Practice's attempt to focus on group interactions in coming up with solutions.

A primary issue that Systems Thinking seeks to address, because of a tendency of a reductionist approach of breaking systems into smaller components, is to only look at factors in immediate or near-immediate approximation instead of following causal pathways further out to discover hidden relationships. What may be a positive causal force at one point of the system may then become a negative causal force at another point. Systems Practice does address this though perhaps not explicitly allowing its process to reveal any Systems insight.

This doesn’t mean the analysis by reductionism is completely abandoned. The first assignment of the SP course, USA Plastic Pollution in Thailand had us present our system challenge through a Complexity Spectrum, consisting of selecting within spectrums of polar choices.

Level of Understanding: Well understood vs Not Understood
Engagement: Consensus vs Diversity of Opinion
Environment: Stable vs Dynamic
Environment: Self-contained vs Interconnected
Goals: Small Scale vs Broad Change
Goals: Short-term vs Sustainable

Although any relational mapping with Kumu was delayed, using a different mapping program, Plectica allowed for the creation of a map which reflected the Complexity Spectrum’s hierarchical nature and that provided spaces for each of the members of the team to provide their individual input. It fitted rather well with the course assignment proving in this instance, more helpful than Kumu.

The latest “Jerusalem Vision” project didn’t repeat this Complexity Spectrum but we still had an analytical perspective brought to the team through our team leader Yoel Ben-Avraham who has a background as a Systems Analyst. With the latest Jerusalem Vision project, we used RealTime Board as suggested by our team leader Yoel. It had some features similar to Plectica and despite being spread across the globe, we were able to witness the movement of the different factors we had gathered into common themes while collaborating together in real time.

Factors and themes, as well as forces, enablers, and inhibitors, are among specialized terms Systems Practice introduces to help define their group-oriented approach to Systems Thinking. Before, however, getting into that the course first had us establish some common visions of the challenge we were about to address.