Abstract
Four pervasive institutional settings inimical to the flourishing of systems practice and also unhelpful in equipping us for living and working in situations typified by a climate-changing world are introduced and described. These are: (1) the pervasive target mentality that has arisen in many countries and contexts; (2) living in a ‘projectified world’; (3) ‘situation framing’ failure; and (4) an apartheid of the emotions. It is argued that for systems practice to flourish it is necessary to move the focus away from both the individual as practitioner and the historical concern with methods, tools and techniques. The proposed alternative is to understand that managing involves maintaining and improving an ongoing relationship between a systems practitioner and his or her context; that is, a co-evolutionary dynamic involving design for emergence.
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Notes
- 1.
I find it difficult to find the right language to express what I mean at this point – I choose ‘framings’ in the sense that each of the three I have chosen can be understood as incipient social technologies .
- 2.
For example I could have chosen ‘systemic development ’ as explicated by Bawden (2005). One reason I did not is that material based on the so-called ‘Hawkesbury’ tradition has been included in Blackmore (2010) which, like this book, also doubles as a set book for the OU course ‘Managing systemic change: inquiry, action and interaction’ (code TU812). Another option could have been the Imagine Methodology (see Bell and Morse 2007).
- 3.
A juggler-context relationship could be understood as exemplifying the structural coupling of an organism with its milieu or environment.
- 4.
As an example see Ison and Armson (2006).
- 5.
The word antidote means to ‘give as a remedy’ – it is often linked to health matters as in ‘an antidote for the poison’.
- 6.
Russell Ackoff (undated) argues that we cannot learn from doing anything right. In exploring why organisations fail to adopt systems thinking he points to a general phenomenon – that of failing to embrace and learn from mistake s. He cites August Busch III, then CEO of Anheuser Busch Companies, who told his assembled vice presidents, ‘if you didn’t make a serious mistake last year you probably didn’t do your job because you didn’t try anything new. There is nothing wrong in making a mistake , but if you ever make the same mistake twice you probably won’t be here the next year’. Of particular concern is organisations and individuals who transfer responsibility for their mistake s to others thus avoiding learning.
- 7.
This reading concerns situations connected with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) National Health Service (NHS) , a very large and complex organisation. MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus , is a bacterium responsible for difficult-to-treat infections in humans (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus. Baby P, Accessed 17 May 2017) (also known as ‘Child A’ and ‘Baby Peter’) was a 17-month-old boy who died in London in 2007 ‘after suffering more than 50 injuries over an 8-month period, during which he was repeatedly seen by social services’ (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Baby_P, Accessed 17 May 2017).
- 8.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/22/policy, Accessed 17 May 2017.
- 9.
And of course the monitoring and policing becomes a self conserving praxis … which blinds people to the indicators that mean something!
- 10.
Source: The ultimate turnaround from Labour, the dying Government. By abandoning targets, Labour is admitting the depth of its failure, says Philip Johnston (2009).
- 11.
A structure determined system is a delicate concept to get across. It should not be confused with causal determinism or pre-determinism. A system (or thing) can only do that which it has an appropriate structure for. I can’t fly, no matter how you poke me. Thus something’s structure determines what is possible for it.
- 12.
Take this book for instance – for me it is really an exercise in reification of an ongoing inquiry into what it means to be an effective systems practitioner. However my framing does not hold for staff in my University or at the publisher who see it as a project – with all that that entails re deadlines etc.
- 13.
Winter and Checkland (2003) also say that this core image of practice can also be seen in many of the college textbooks on project management and in many of the official sources of information about project management. It can also be seen operating in project management education and training programmes, and is generally the dominant image in much of the literature on project management, both academic and popular.
- 14.
‘Stationarity – the idea that natural systems fluctuate within an unchanging envelope of variability – is a foundational concept that permeates training and practice in water-resource engineering. It implies that any variable (e.g., annual stream- flow or annual flood peak) has a time-invariant (or 1-year–periodic) probability density function (pdf), whose properties can be estimated from the instrument record’ (Milly et al. 2008). These authors explain why, in a climate changing world this central set of assumptions that have guided practice no longer apply i.e., stationarity is dead!
- 15.
As noted by Bateson (2001) systems and cybernetics ‘can be a way of looking that cuts across fields, linking art and science and allowing us to move from a single organism to an ecosystem , from a forest to a university or a corporation, to recognise the essential recurrent patterns before taking action’.
- 16.
For further background see papers associated with the seminar ‘Theory and Practice of Governance in the Project State’, the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki, October 2003.
- 17.
Winter and Checkland (2003) propose the use of SSM as an alternative model for project conception and managing. They argue (p. 92) for: ‘a broader image of project management practice than that which has been dominant in the past’. They advocate a new perspective ‘with a focus on the process of “managing,” rather than the life-cycle process of “project management,” this new perspective seeks to enrich and enlarge the traditional life-cycle image of project management. It also offers to provide a new foundation for future research in the project management field’.
- 18.
In many ways a river catchment is no different to any business or other form of human activity in that they are, knowingly or not, coupled with a biophysical environment – it is just that in most circles this is not appreciated and all too often the environment is treated as an externality.
- 19.
Roux et al. (2009) for example refer to social-ecological systems , as well as organisations, as complex systems. They go on to say that ‘complex does not mean complicated. An engine is complicated. It is also predictable, at least by those who put it together. A complex system has particular properties that make it inherently unpredictable. Being able to recognise a system as complex allows one to better understand that system at least to the extent that one understands why, in a general sense it is the way it is. It is the unpredictability of such systems that has fundamental implications for their management.’
- 20.
Many scientists and non-scientists alike hold the view that ‘a natural system is a whole created by nature’. These few simple words represent ideas that have been the subject of many books. In the way in which I experience use of these terms I understand the users to reify ‘nature’ (as if nature existed) and system ‘as in the world’.
- 21.
There is a generic problem of privileging science, in the sense that science normally treats what it studies as a discrete, separate-from-humans object i.e., as ‘objective’. This led Maturana (1991) to characterise his concerns on the privileging of particular aspects of science and technology in the following terms: ‘In our modern Western culture we speak of science and technology as sources of human well-being. However, usually it is not human well-being that moves us to value science and technology , but rather, the possibilities of domination, of control over nature, and of unlimited wealth that they seem to offer…. We speak of progress in science and technology in terms of domination and control, and not in terms of understanding and responsible coexistence.… What science and the training to be a scientist does not provide us with is wisdom …. Wisdom breeds in the respect for the others, in the recognition that power arises through submission and loss of dignity, in the recognition that love is the emotion that constitutes social coexistence, honesty and trustfulness and in the recognition that the world that we live is always, and unavoidably so, our doing’.
- 22.
I do not claim that some people are more open to circumstances than others but I do claim that our capability is a product of our history (structural coupling ) and the relational milieu we find ourselves in at any moment, which of course also includes language or conversation. Thus different relational dynamics bring forth different emotions.
- 23.
I do not use apartheid to be deliberately emotive but as a descriptor for my experience of professional academic practice in particular and organisational life in general. By apartheid I mean separateness as in the Afrikaans use of the term i.e., emotions are still not considered a legitimate topic of consideration in most workplaces.
- 24.
Since writing this section Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics laureate Daniel Kahneman produced his book Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman 2011). ‘The central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The book delineates cognitive biases associated with each type of thinking’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow, Accessed 28 May 2017). My concerns in this section could be framed as paying attention to System 1, to use Kahneman’s term. To be honest I, as a scholar of Maturana , found little in this book that offered fresh insights other than to reaffirm my experience of how siloed science praxis is – Maturana as far as I can tell was not cited in this work.
- 25.
A concern in the many versions of experiential learning is that of ‘authenticity’ – the relationship of learning to the world of practice. The concept, it is argued, lies at the heart of the attempts by educators since John Dewey to address the relationship between learning and life (Maharg 2002).
- 26.
This is how Maturana explains the arising of love – thus when enacted it generates an underlying emotional dynamic that brings forth ‘love ’.
- 27.
We use ‘mirroring back’ as a form of practice in our research that acknowledges that what we say following, for example, a series of interviews, is our interpretation of what we heard, not a statement of ‘how things are’ (see Webber 2000).
- 28.
Geoffrey Vickers referred to this as an appreciative system in which choices about relationship making and relationship breaking are made, through which one’s standards of fact and value also change.
- 29.
We do not mean exact in the sense of a universal set of categories but exact in relation to the history of that person, their manner of living .
- 30.
See Meadows (2001) in which she describes the following dance: (1) Get the beat, (2) Listen to the wisdom of the system, (3) Expose your mental models to the open air, (4) Stay humble. Stay a learner, (5) Honour and protect information, (6) Locate responsibility in the system, (7) Make feed-back policies for feedback systems, (8) Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, (9) Go for the good of the whole, (10) Expand time horizons, (11) Expand thought horizons, (12) Expand the boundary of caring, (13) Celebrate complexity, (14) Hold fast to the goal of goodness.
- 31.
The situation in which the US President operates can also be understood as a structure determined situation so what President Obama can and cannot do is not merely reliant on a set of personal attributes, unfortunately!!
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Ison, R. (2017). Four Settings That Constrain Systems Practice. In: Systems Practice: How to Act. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7351-9_9
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