Systems Community of Inquiry

Hello from Montreal! I’m starting another thread for post comments and questions related to reference clusters 5 and 6.

I’ve been spending Canadian Thanksgiving weekend with my family, and am extremely jet lagged. I will post the map of inquiry from the last lecture on Friday, but it will take me a few days to get there. Monday, we’ll be driving from Montreal to Toronto. Tuesday, I’ll be on a one-day business trip. Since I’m now 7 hours behind Helsinki time, it may take some time for the lecture to show up.

In the meantime, please rely directly on the list from reference cluster 6. The map for the last lecture was incomplete compared to the earlier lectures, so you’ll miss less.

I really enjoyed the class time that we had together, and hope that we’re successful in keeping the dialogue going online.

@jannesalovaara Your statement that “To me it seems like no system could ever be sustainable – for good.”> is profound. You’ve reached the conclusion that @davidhawk describes about people who think that they can invent perpetual motion machines. An open system always has inputs from (and outputs to) its environment, so there’s always an external source from which the system must draw resources.

As a detail, the system doesn’t necessarily have to collapse — as a sudden event — but it could go into a slow decline. Biological systems are defined by mortality, with some lives longer than others.

I hadn’t heard about the Future by Design movie, or of Jacque Fresco, who I had to look up on Wikipedia. I would have to do more in-depth research to be really critical of such a life’s work, but I will admit to be skeptical on my superficial read.

Your reading of the panarchy literature leads you to a reasoned conclusion that “Only total collapse would allow us to change every system at once”. I look forward to the class in February when we should get to discuss this further. (In the scope of this October course, focused on community, you would have to convince all stakeholders that collapse might be a good thing).

Hey David!
Thank you for the course, it was really enlightening and I am looking forward to the second seminar/course.

http://systemic-thinking.blogspot.com/2010/10/day-3-are-we-that-blind.html

@jannesalovaara In your reflections on teleology and sustainability, you’re using “crayons to colour outside the lines” of the scope of the reading list of the course. This is good for me as an instruction, because you’re using an inquiring system that sweeps in new content, and somewhat edgy for you as a student (particularly if you’re going to include it into the final research report) because you can’t assume that all of the readers (i.e. graders) will have read all of that material, so you’ll have to expand on your explanations in the writing.

So you led me over to take a look at Andrew Woodfield’s book on Telelogy, as well as a brief peek at a 1984 discussion of the book. You’re definitely in the philosophy of ends. While I had opened up the discussion with the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1735(199603)13:13.0.CO;2-O“>Ackoff and Gharajedaghi 1996 article on Systems and their Models as teleology, we really didn’t have time in class to discuss whether animals and plants can have purposes of their own. In talks where I saw Russ Ackoff speak, he spoke about animated systems, as systems that can move. Thus a tree isn’t animate, but a bird is. From a systems perspective, this means that a bird can change its environment by leaving a hostile or inhospitable place. A tree can’t change its environment, although it can adapt to change itself. This is more fully fleshed out in Ackoff’s On Purposeful Systems, which I only suggest to the most hardcore readers.

You also led me to look up Max Neef on the Word Future Council site, as well as noticing that his thinking seems to be compatible with the Natural Step’s view on planetary sustainbility, placing him in good company. You also led me to look up Matthieu Richard on TED, describing his leaving science (biochemistry) behind in favour of Buddhism.

If I may make a suggestion as you think about your final research report … The title of the course is “Systemic Thinking of Sustainable Communities”, which means (i) sustainability, (ii) communities, and (iii) systems thinking. You’re covering the philosophical foundations of (i) sustanability, but it’s unclear how you’re going to link that with (ii) communities — the thrust of the course was on considering dialogues and conversations to do that — and it would help to bring the (iii) systems thinking more explicitly into the writing. You could do (ii) and (iii) by referencing more articles from the reading list, or similar articles from researchers within the community. If you were to publish in a research journal, the editors would ask you to cite at least some references that tie back into the audience who are reading. The farther you wander from the known authors, the more work you’ll have to do in the writing, and the longer the resulting paper. If you were looking to keep within the guideline of 15 pages for the final research report, you might consider how you’re going to be able to fit that content within those limits. I don’t really mind reading longer papers, but they should be longer because of significant contributions to knowledge, rather than educating the reader so they he or she can appreciate the direction that you’re taking.

@niamh Your description of going beyond the stories in the lectures into reading the references is encouraging to me as an instructor. I’m happy that you found the topics sufficiently interesting to look into Holling, Leonard and Odum. In addition, linking those readings to Brand and to Gharajedaghi demonstrate that you’re making the cross-connections across the systems community.

I look forward to your writing on the rintamamiestalo, for which I had to look for an example, and see that people are renovating them for their own purposes. While Stewart Brand tends to focus more on the layers inside the structure, Buzz Holling’s view might suggest that you look at the context outside the house — not just the site, but potentially also the environmental and socio-political contexts around the building.

@jennisarma Your drawing of the idea of complexity versus complicatedness based on Timothy F. H. Allen’s research is a start … and the easier part. Explaining the drawing is the hard part, and isn’t easy. If you don’t fully understand the material on the first (or second) time around, don’t be discouraged. I’ve been reading (and had to just re-read again) the research to deepen my understanding.

My suggestion is not to work from the theory to the practice, but from the practice to the theory. Pick a subject where you have some interest in your own studies or life, and relate the readings to those situations or circumstances. You could expand on the the exercises with the cells and dilemma groups in class, if you’re fresh out of ideas.

The community in Philadelphia will be glad to hear that you’re finding Russell Ackoff’s writing helpful. Try to apply the ideas to something concrete. Russ was master story teller.

@jannesalovaara Seeing several ways to think about the world, citing Parrish on inquiring systems, has brought you back into the systems literature.

Systems thinking does include analysis as well as synthesis, it’s just the order that gets changed (because our school may overweight us towards reductionism). Your comments on simplifying, piecemeal or incremental all raise the question of the boundary of the system that you define. We haven’t covered creativity, intuition or empathy specifically in this course, and should have more content on that in the February course.

I think that when you wrote about second world order, you might have meant second order world. There seems to be a lot of criticism (or societal self-criticism) in your writing about humanity’s impact on sustinability. Are we really so much better today than people in the past, or will we be considered naive by future generations? In Timothy F.H. Allen’s view of supply side sustainability, I see some logic in our decision making … which may not be optimal, but perhaps is the only way, as we’re human.

Hi, here is my blogpost for day 3

http://malinbackman.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/day-3/

Concerning the final researchpaper, is it possible to write several shorter texts, taking up different themes, instead of one long text? Since this course have been dealing with issues on a broad scale, I find it hard to find one single red thread to follow the whole researchpaper.

-Malin