Transduction — leading transformation — Issue #132
This week:
- Upcoming Events
- Systems and Complexity in Organisation
- Cybernetics
- AI
Upcoming Events:
SE Stakeholder Engagement — Productive Conversations (0.5d)
This training programme could equally be called ‘honest conversations’, ‘difficult conversations’, ‘constructive conversations’, or ‘challenging conversations’.
Fundamental to the success and flavour of organisational life — and systems practice interventions — are the quality of conversations we are able to have. If we can develop an honest and shared attempt to get at shared understanding — shared ‘truth’ if you like — or at least to fully appreciate each others’ understanding — then we can make true progress.
This interactive session will:
- Discuss different types of feedback / difficult conversation
- Understand how the brain rationalises and protect us
- Increase awareness of our own habits and perceptions
- Prepare and plan for a difficult conversation
- Have effective performance conversations
- Learn how to respond / look after yourself in the moment
And help you to have productive conversations even when it seems most unlikely. You will need to bring a record of an ‘unproductive’ conversation you have had, or fear having, and be prepared to work with others around it and other examples. You will end the session with the ability to surface more productive conversations even when it is difficult.
Trainer
These courses are delivered by Benjamin P Taylor, an expert in systems, cybernetics, and complexity in service transformation.
Pricing Info
£250 +VAT
To enquire please go on this link: https://www.systemspractice.org/courses/ise-stakeholder-engagement-productive-conversations-05d
ILG Large Group Interventions (1.0d)
In a classic 2005 article, ‘Techniques to Match our Values’, Weisbord set out the ‘learning curve’, with a movement from ‘experts solve problems’ to ‘’everybody’ solves problems’ to ‘experts improve whole systems’ to ‘’everybody’ improves whole systems’. Inherent in the development of systems practice from the start has been recognition of ‘the whole’, which comes in various forms from group dynamics to organisational viability.
This programme will give an overview of intervention approaches which ‘bring whole systems into the room’ rather than have a few experts work on individual issues. We will look at some of the history and the wide range of interventions that have been developed, and provide an overview of some of the most interesting.
We will compare and contrast these approaches and provide ‘ways in’ to consider when, and which, large group intervention might be an appropriate part of a systems practice intervention.
Trainer
These courses are delivered by Benjamin P Taylor, an expert in systems, cybernetics, and complexity in service transformation.
Pricing Info
£500 +VAT
To enquire please go on this link: https://www.systemspractice.org/courses/ilg-large-group-interventions-10d
ICS3 Workshop Design (0.5d)
This module provides learners with an understanding of the design of workshops and relevant considerations, taking into account the potentially very different contexts and definitions of what a ‘workshop’ is. It introduces a range of tools and approaches for workshop design, building on the facilitation module. It gives tools to consider evaluation and learning about workshop design, and compares various approaches, enabling learners to better select and apply appropriate workshop design approaches to their context.
A workshop can be distinguished from a meeting (though the boundaries may be blurry at times), by some of the following indicators:
- intensive discussion and activity, designed to progress thinking and planning
- intentionally designed activities (rather than simply an agenda), or flow
- an impact focus, usually above and beyond just a discussion or decision — some kind of output taking an intervention or initiative forward
An alternative use of the work, to workshop (something), refers to taking a product or idea into a period of intense focused experimentation and development, often bringing in fresh or different perspectives than the original developers of the product or idea. This is of course closely related, but implies some partly-developed ‘content’ as the workshop focus, as opposed to simply a product or idea. In either case, some input is expected to a workshop, whether process, content, or both.
The learning will cover:
- What a workshop is
- Where and when we might use a workshop
- A range of tools and approaches
- How to appropriately select an approach, and design a workshop to fit the requirements in context
- The importance of reflection and how to evaluate and build a learning loop
- Workshop design tools, core and conceptual
This is a very practical, hands-on course based on you creating an initial workshop design from your context, using sources offered, and sharing and discussing it in the session.
This course complements the course on Facilitation for systems practice interventions, though they can be done independently or in any order.
Trainer
These courses are delivered by Benjamin P Taylor, an expert in systems, cybernetics, and complexity in service transformation.
Pricing Info
£250 +VAT
To enquire please go on this link: https://www.systemspractice.org/courses/ics3-workshop-design-05d
ICS2 Facilitation Skills for Systems Practice Interventions (0.5d)
This course provides learners with an understanding of the facilitation relationship in the context of systems intervention itself, and of the challenges it brings. It introduces a range of tools and practices for facilitation and provides guidance on workshop planning. Finally, it compares various approaches to facilitation, enabling learners to develop a stronger sense of the kind of facilitator they want to be.
Topics covered include:
- The facilitraining rainbow — where do you stand?
- Divergence, emergence, convergence;
- Differentiation and integration method;
- Adaptive change;
- Facilitation for ‘robust systems’;
- Session planning and session flow;
- The perceptual positions;
- Ground rules for workshops and ways into partnership;
- Maintaining your authenticity;
- Peter Block’s ‘six conversations that matter’;
- Chris Corrigan’s ‘seven little helpers’;
- Hosting and guiding and/or customer services;
- Context cues;
- History and three futures;
- Power tools and making concrete — Naming The Thing.
Trainer
These courses are delivered by Benjamin P Taylor, an expert in systems, cybernetics, and complexity in service transformation.
Pricing Info
£250 +VAT
To enquire please go on this link: https://www.systemspractice.org/courses/ics2-facilitation-skills-systems-practice-interventions-05d
ICS1b Consulting for Systems Practice Interventions — (b) Core (0.5d)
This course provides learners with a deeper understanding of:
- Discovery and research into the client system;
- Power questions, layers of analysis, and objectifying ‘the system’;
- Research and action-based approaches;
- Third-party and whole systems approaches;
- Maintaining the balance of responsibility for deep engagement;
- Structuring analysis and feedback, developing commitment;
- Choosing dirty or clean consulting.
To maximise your chances of being effective in achieving positive change, you should combine a sound understanding of systems approaches with well-developed intervention skills.
This in turn requires a clear conception of the role of the systems practitioner as ‘consultant’, of their relationships with stakeholders, especially the ‘client’, and the nature of the practitioner’s influence on the organisations they seek to transform.
Drawing on Flawless Consulting, Barry Oshry’s Organic Systems Framework, and more, Consulting for Systems Practice Interventions emphasises a collaborative approach and equal responsibility between the intervention practitioner and the client, navigating a path between the twin traps of ‘consultant as boss’ and ‘consultant as servant’.
These courses are relevant to anyone — consultant or not! — who is engaging in organisational change.
Trainer
These courses are delivered by Benjamin P Taylor, an expert in systems, cybernetics, and complexity in service transformation.
Pricing Info
£250 +VAT
To enquire please go on this link: https://www.systemspractice.org/courses/ics1b-consulting-systems-practice-interventions-b-core-05d
ICS1a Consulting for Systems Practice Interventions — (a) Foundation (0.5d)
This course will provide learners with key principles and a structure for interventions. Topics covered include:
- The five phases of the consultative process;
- ‘Techniques are not enough’: relationships in consulting;
- Dealing with ‘the space of service’;
- Setting up a clear ‘contract’ for interventions — including triangular and rectangular contracting;
- Authenticity and setting your assumptions;
- The client behind the client and the problem behind the problem;
To maximise your chances of being effective in achieving positive change, you should combine a sound understanding of systems approaches with well-developed intervention skills.
This in turn requires a clear conception of the role of the systems practitioner as ‘consultant’, of their relationships with stakeholders, especially the ‘client’, and the nature of the practitioner’s influence on the organisations they seek to transform.
Drawing on Flawless Consulting, Barry Oshry’s Organic Systems Framework, and more, Consulting for Systems Practice Interventions emphasises a collaborative approach and equal responsibility between the intervention practitioner and the client, navigating a path between the twin traps of ‘consultant as boss’ and ‘consultant as servant’.
These courses are relevant to anyone — consultant or not! — who is engaging in organisational change.
Trainer
These courses are delivered by Benjamin P Taylor, an expert in systems, cybernetics, and complexity in service transformation.
Pricing Info
£250 +VAT
To enquire please go on this link: https://www.systemspractice.org/courses/ics1a-consulting-systems-practice-interventions-foundation-05d
Link Collection:
My Weekly Blog post:
The advent of GPT4o marks a significant step towards a future where every spoken word becomes permanently recorded and searchable. This technology, inspired by McLuhan’s media tetrad, promises to enhance our ability to derive meaning from spoken language while rendering concepts like privacy and off-the-record conversations obsolete. Similar to ancient bards, our words will gain permanence, blurring the lines between spoken and written communication. However, this transformation also introduces challenges, such as information overload and the potential for obscured clarity amidst the sheer volume of transcribed speech. The implications of this shift will start small but accelerate rapidly, reshaping how we perceive communication and memory. As we approach the transcribulation threshold and the onset of the logosingularity, it prompts reflection on the consequences of living in a world where every utterance is documented and accessible. What will it mean when our every word is eternally preserved and searchable?
The speakularity. The total transcription event horizon. The legipocalypse.
Authors: Ö. Şenalp & G. Midgley
Systems Research and Behavioral Science Volume | Issue number 40
In this paper, we propose a research agenda to support the recovery of Alexander Bogdanov’s philosophical and systemic thinking that culminated in his magnum opus, Tektology. Our main reason for doing so is to re-address enduring questions about the unity of science and the unity of the systems paradigm. Since the turn of the new millennium, there has been renewed interest in the ideal of the unity of science. General system theory (GST), cybernetics and complexity science are three significant intellectual sources inspiring this renewal. It is not unusual for these ideas to be grouped under the umbrella terms systems science or systems thinking, which are two ways to present a single systems paradigm, and we will explain why its “unity” is both necessary and problematic. Bringing Bogdanov’s work back to address the unity question can help us to progress toward unity in diversity.
In special issue: Resurrecting Bogdanov on the 150th anniversary of his birth.
Persistent Identifierhttps://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/f9a4e972-a2b8-4ddc-a5d6-c7d31b61096a
- Systems Research and Behavioral Science — 2023 — Şenalp — Alexander Bogdanov and the question of unity An emerging(Final published version)
https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=f9a4e972-a2b8-4ddc-a5d6-c7d31b61096a
[Title and by-lines given verbatim, for fun…]
This was shared on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/angelamontgomeryphd_systemsthinking-science-business-activity-7196518562612576258-qocy by Angela Montgomery PhD of the Decalogue method (https://stream.syscoi.com/2024/05/15/the-decalogue-short-overview-intelligent-management-lepore-montgomery-siepe/)
My comment:
/please ignore if not in the mood for grumpiness/
I am glad you make the point that your work goes deeper — from what I know it does!
And thank goodness, because — not wishing to be too grumpy — this is advertorial (paid-for) word salad, akin to one of those LinkedIn AI articles — it’s disappointing that Forbes has gone down the route of fleecing consultants and coaches rather than journalism 😦
And so this article, though I don’t doubt many or all of the contributors are good-willed and highly capable people, sort of undermines them, Forbes, the concept of journalism and ‘systems thinking’ at the same time 😦
THE DECALOGUE SHORT OVERVIEW — Intelligent Management (Lepore, Montgomery, Siepe)
[A Deming and Theory-of-Constraints type systematic ten-step approach which is quite interesting]
Cybernetics is the science of the polycrisis What Stafford Beer and Dan Davies say and why you need to read themHENRY FARRELLAPR 17, 2024
THE WORLD IS A NETWORK — Fritjof Capra, October 2018, Science and Nonduality convention
Presented at the 2018 Science and Nonduality convention.
Topics
THE WORLD IS A NETWORK
October 2018
In this discussion, Fritjof Capra discusses systems thinking, the cognitive dimension of life, nonlinear causality, emergence of novelty in (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/world-is-a-network) living systems, ethics, world problems and solutions, transformative learning, and the importance of community. He covers the systems view of life from his book and emphasizes relationships, interconnectedness, and sustainability.Presented at the 2018 Science and Nonduality convention.
[This is an absolutely awesome opportunity — Sandra is fabled, and rightly so, and Michael is such a storied facilitator and a clear and deep thinker, as well as being engaging and just general a delight to be around. I see him as one of the people who is successfully picking up the torch from Sandra’s generation and taking deep, effective and proven thinking forward with respect and with awareness of the adaptation that’s needed. If I had the time I’d go myself.]
🍀 Come to Berlin this October to join our Trainings with Sandra Janoff and Michael Donnelly.
We are very happy to host Sandra and Michael this year. This is a very rare opportunity to meet the source of hashtag#FutureSearch and real role models for hashtag#facilitation of complex, multi-stakeholder questions that matter and learn together.📣 We have a special rate until end of May:
🍀 Early bird 10% and another 15% if you book both trainings. Please Contact us with any questions.📣 Managing a Future Search: 9–11 October 2024
A Learning Workshop with Sandra Janoff and Michael Donnelly
https://lnkd.in/eww7xBWC📣 P10 Facilitation: Ten Principles for Leading Meetings that Matter 14/15 October 2024
A Learning Workshop with Sandra Janoff and Michael Donnelly
https://lnkd.in/eiYi-xGn📣 Future Search Learning Exchange, 16/17 October 2024
https://lnkd.in/ewZWQbMm
John McCarthy and the ‘AI’ schism from ‘cybernetics’ — links for reference
[Drawn to my attention by John Siegrist on this blog from Felix Hovespian https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7193830352144977920/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7193830352144977920%2C7193839932258353152%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd%5Fcomment%3A%287193839932258353152%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7193830352144977920%29&replyUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7193830352144977920%2C7194207491482615809%29&dashReplyUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd%5Fcomment%3A%287194207491482615809%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7193830352144977920%29]
John McCarthy Tue Jun 13 03:06:03 PDT 2000
https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/bloomfield/bloomfield.html
(From his interesting and very 90s website https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/)
pdf of the same: http://jmc.stanford.edu/artificial-intelligence/reviews/bloomfield.pdf
A book review, in which he says
Schopman mentions many influences of earlier work on AI pioneers. I can report that many of them didn’t influence me except negatively, but in order to settle the matter of influences it would be necessary to actually ask (say) Minsky and Newell and Simon. As for myself, one of the reasons for inventing the term “artificial intelligence” was to escape association with “cybernetics”. Its concentration on analog feedback seemed misguided, and I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert (not Robert) Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him. (By the way I assume that the “Walter Gibbs” Schopman refers to as having influenced Wiener is most likely the turn-of-the-century American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, though possibly McCulloch’s colleague Walter Pitts). Minsky tells me that neither Wiener nor von Neumann, with whom he had personal contact, influenced him, because he didn’t agree with their ideas. He does mention influence from Rashevsky, McCulloch and Pitts.
__
On his own thread, Felix Hovespian had responded:
“Most of what is called hashtag#artificialIntelligence today is based on 1st order hashtag#cybernetics, and therefore it’s very like hashtag#behaviorism.
It doesn’t take into account what the intelligence has to do in order to hashtag#observe, to construct, to hashtag#think … ”
[ Ernst von Glasersfeld and a History of Cybernetics,
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Various tweets on this point (turns out’Grok’ is an actually useful search engine for twitter — hurrah!) — all coming back to the same quote:
Apr 19 2022 Alex Dimakis
May 5 2023 Eryk Salvaggio
Jan 21 2024 Meredith Whittaker
IFSR Quarterly — now only on LinkedIn
[Email newsletter being discontinued in favour of LinkedIn]
The IFSR Quarterly informs you of the latest developments in the systems community.
The search history of the failure of modern technology.
how to stop windows rebooting overnight — Google Search
The speakularity. The total transcription event horizon. The legipocalypse.
What do you think it will mean when your every word is recorded, transcribed, and searchable?
If you don’t have anything good to say — Spontaneous Trait Transference
