OCT 16
SCiO Open Meeting - Autumn 2017, Manchester (All Welcome) by SCiO - Systems and Cybernetics in Organisation
£20
An open meeting where a series of presentations of general interest regarding systems practice will be given - this will include ‘craft’ and active sessions, as well as introductions to theory.
Session: Portia Light - Fake art, bad science and what we can learn from using systems thinking to examine the mechanics of law
Stemming from the Enlightenment period, science has come to be viewed as the best way to establish truth from an objective standpoint. In its quest for the black and white outcomes of “guilty/not guilty”, it is perhaps not surprising that the legal system has become affected by the dominant reductionist narrative of positivism. Positivist politics have been enforced though both the technicalities of law and the details of legal procedures that have come to rely heavily on forensics.
Art on the other hand has, and always will be, a platform for communities who have been marginalised by scientific fact to disrupt the usual narrative, to point out its limitations.
When the two fields of art and science collide in the theatre of a courtroom it creates an intriguing situation from which to observe the mechanics of the legal system. With stories from the time she has spent observing such phenomena, Portia will show how considering what could be ‘true’ in what many people have come to define as ‘not true’ is key to creating both less-politicised and less-positive systems that allow for more variety of outcomes. Portia is a strategy consultant who studied Law and Anthropology to masters level at the London School of Economics.
Session: Steve Whitla - Making more meaningful models: A hands-on guide
This will be a practical session on visualising systems in ways that other people can understand. If “all models are wrong but some are useful”, we propose that some of this usefulness comes down to how meaningful the model is to those who didn’t create it. If you have ever built an elegant, powerful, predictive model of a system that excited little or no interest from the people affected by it, then this workshop is for you!
You can apply the principles from this session whether you are building a representation yourself or briefing a graphic designer, standing in front of a whiteboard with a marker pen or making sense of what someone else is scribbling in front of you, building a Powerpoint deck to explain your findings to stakeholders or revising existing material you have inherited. The session will be interactive and will involve drawing, but purely to make the principles come to life - you do not need any artistic talent.
The session will be run by Steve Whitla, the founder of Visual Meaning (http://www.visual-meaning.com), and illustrated with examples from real-life projects. Visual Meaning is a niche consultancy that seeks to make the world a more meaningful place by bringing systems thinking and visual thinking together.
*Session: Peter Lacey - System Dynamics in Healthcare
Peter Lacey will provide insights from the use System Dynamics modelling over a 20yr career in health and social care consultancy. He will provide people with a walk through of some existing models (see here: http://www.thewholesystem.co.uk/systems-thinking-modelling/hosted-online-models/ ) and explore some of the pitfalls and benefits of the approach. There will be an opportunity to explore both quantitative and qualitative elements of systems and how they feature in SD modelling against a background of the culture and expectations of the health and care system today.
Session: Benjamin Taylor - Meta-contextuality through the medium of Bongard games: why methods and practices depend on context
Many of us are searching for ‘neat and complete’ answers to the messiness and complexity of (organisational / social / economic / ecological) life. Me too, though I’ve always known it’s impossible. Then I stumbled across Bongard games on meaningless.com thanks to Mike Haber, and discovered a way to demonstrate - through experience - why it’s not possible. I’ll invite you to experience the joy of Bongard, and lead a discussion on Meta-contextuality, meaning-making and related ideas - focusing on why this is really valuable. This practice session will use a lot of pretentious language and high-falutin' concepts, but only for fun. The underlying idea is deadly simple, important, and useful.
Benjamin P Taylor runs RedQuadrant, a network consultancy, mainly in public services, and the not-for-profit social enterprise the Public Service Transformation Academy, is a nonexec director of SCIO and is trying to organise and make useful the world’s systems thinking at http://model.report www.linkedin.com/in/antlerboy
Mon 16 October 2017 09:30 – 17:00
book via headline link on eventbrite
Manchester Business School
Organiser: SCiO - Systems and Cybernetics in Organisation
SCiO is a group for systems practitioners and is based in the UK, but has members internationally. http://www.scio.org.uk/
Two of the features that distinguish SCiO from other systems groups are that it is focused primarily on systems practice and practitioners rather than on pure theory and that it is focused on systems practice applied to issues of organisation.
It has three main objectives: Developing practice in applying systems ideas to a range of organisational issues. Disseminating the use of systems approaches in dealing with organisational issues. Supporting practitioners in their professional practice. SCiO is a social enterprise and a not for profit organisation which is owned by its members.
Provenance and Purpose. Created initally by a network of practitioners in the North of England, SCiO acts as an extra channel for disseminating to others their experience of practical applications, education and research in complex problem solving. The name stands for ‘Systems and Cybernetics in Organisation’ but can also be thought of as short for the ‘Science of Organisation’.
Over the last sixty years the new disciplines of ‘Systems Thinking’ and ‘Managerial Cybernetics’ have emerged. The new thinking started from the consideration of complex problems faced during the Second World War; then later in the 1970’s the same patterns of thinking emerged with the new awareness of the complexity of ecological problems. The ideas developed and spread into other areas of science and in particular into management. In the last thirty years new insights and understanding have developed in the way to approach apparently intractable problems in many areas.
At this time the terms ‘whole systems approach’ and ‘systems thinking’ seem to be appearing more frequently in published policy documents and guidance on best practice in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, such as in the UK National Health Service; in documents on public health, sustainable communities, in education, in considerations of the environment, and in corporate governance. The members of SCiO believe that the use of systems thinking and managerial cybernetics can have major impacts on the well-being of our communities, and our business and social organisations.