We are delighted to share the news that there is now a Level 7 Systems Thinking Practitioner Apprenticeship available in England.
Systems thinking practice was developed specifically to address highly complex, adaptive, and dynamic situations. It helps you to model each situation as a system incorporating many different parts, dependencies and relationships. Systems thinking practitioners are uniquely equipped for achieving large-scale transformational change.
If you live in England, you can benefit from the scheme. The Apprenticeship is a two-and-a-half year, day release, post-graduate qualification with government funding of up to £18,000 per person. It is fully supported by expert tutors, comprehensive learning materials, and ongoing action learning.
This is a practice-based, portfolio assessed programme which draws on core systems approaches and practice skills. You’ll be supported in your job to actually put the learning to work right away, and you will be evaluated on how you incorporate your continual learning into your practice.
It’s been designed by practitioners for practitioners — the people who have not just read the books, but have written them. More importantly, these are people who have been there, done it, know about all (or at least most) of the pitfalls, and can guide you away from them.
The professional body for systems practice, SCiO, is providing world-class systems practitioner-tutors, and is supporting the curriculum development and overall approach of the programme. They are acting in collaboration with Cherith Simmons Learning and Development, who provide the apprenticeship. Further details are available here.
If you’re not in England, you can still sign up to individual modules here.
And if you are interested in developing your transformation skills, take a look at the RedQuadrant tool shed. This is a small group action learning journey with Benjamin Taylor, founder of the consultancy RedQuadrant, supported by 24 online modules covering all aspects of organisational transformation. Get a 20% discount by mentioning Enlightened Enterprise Academy.
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My Weekly Blog post:
I understand the critical importance of managing the four dynamics within every human organization: segment, blend, empower, and harmonize. Segmentation involves specialisation and expertise, I often find myself in this mode, focused on my professional identity. However, I also embrace the blend, acting as an ambassador between different groups. I recognize the need to empower unique skills and perspectives, occasionally seeing myself as the star of the show. Moreover, I understand the significance of harmonizing common goals, aligning with a greater purpose. Striking a balance between these dynamics is a constant challenge, as an excess of any can disrupt productivity and unity. It’s vital to test and learn how to maintain this equilibrium, as I discussed in my presentation at the Compass tech conference.
System ConvenerLocation: Based at home and in the City of London communityPart time: 29.4 hours per week Up to £31,000 (pro rata) dependent on experienceApplications close at 9am on Monday the 20th of November 2023
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 February 2024 | Viewed by 1981
Special Issue “The Systems Thinking Approach to Strategic Management”Print Special Issue FlyerSpecial Issue EditorsSpecial Issue InformationKeywordsPublished PapersA special issue of Systems (ISSN 2079-8954). This special issue belongs to the section “Systems Theory and Methodology”.Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 February 2024 | Viewed by 1981
SCiO’s Development Event offer an opportunity to draw upon the collective expertise of SCiO members in a friendly and supportive atmosphere. By taking Development Events online, using the Zoom meeting platform, we aim to make them accessible to more SCiO members Development Events are both for members who are just starting out on a journey to explore Systems Thinking approaches, and for those who have many years of exploration and practice.
Members only; FREE; Online event; English; Book now
The classical Daoists were known for turning their attention to nature. Xunzi specifically condemns Zhuangzi for this. But the word ‘nature’ is connotatively misleading, particularly for modern westerners. If we translate it instead as ‘reality’, we can see early Daoism as containing a particularly relentless focus on empiricism.
“Empty your mind and turn to nature” sounds like hippie bullshit. Reframe it as ‘discard your preconceived model and just fucking pay attention to what’s going on without imposing what you think is happening’, and it’s something else entirely.
…
The point is, reality never stops spinning away from our beliefs about it. It’s a lesson that one has to constantly re-learn. It’s hard to hold onto it, it’s a lot of work to keep breaking out of one’s frame.
Reality doesn’t care. It will keep spinning away from you, forever. (There’s a technical sense in which this can be made somewhat precise: living systems should be expected to periodically move near fixed points with positive lyapunov exponents along undetected variables)
(Translated: as long as you’re alive, you should expect to be periodically surprised by blowups from directions you hadn’t noticed before — because a positive lyapunov exponent looks like a negative one in the rear-view mirror)
So if you want a long life, you must ‘attune yourself to nature’, in the practical sense of ‘fucking pay attention and don’t let yourself fall into the trap of imposing your predictions onto the data’
This may sound trite, but it’s really fucking hard. It is. Not forcibly interposing your beliefs between your eyes and the rest of the world is a constant struggle, but when you stop doing it, you start to die.
Reality doesn’t care one way or the other. “Heaven and Earth are not humane. They regard all things as straw dogs.” Reality will always spin away from you. That’s just what it does. Act accordingly.
[Umm, I dunno, what do you think? ‘Meta-Ockham 1’ seems sensible but (2) seems to move the focus of the ‘science’ potentially from explanation to description? And in “discovering and encoding regularities in irreducibly high dimensional phenomena”, the ‘encoding’ slips in there rather subtly in a way which I think deserves more conversation? Certainly interesting anyway]
Complexity science and machine learning are two complementary approaches to discovering and encoding regularities in irreducibly high dimensional phenomena. Whereas complexity science represents a coarse-grained paradigm of understanding, machine learning is a fine-grained paradigm of prediction. Both approaches seek to solve the “Wigner-Reversal” or the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in the adaptive domain where broken symmetries and broken ergodicity dominate. In order to integrate these paradigms I introduce the idea of “Meta-Ockham” which 1) moves minimality from the description of a model for a phenomenon to a description of a process for generating a model and 2) describes low dimensional features–schema–in these models. Reinforcement learning and natural selection are both parsimonious in this revised sense of minimal processes that parameterize arbitrarily high-dimensional inductive models containing latent, low-dimensional, regularities. I describe these models as “super-Humean” and discuss the scientic value of analyzing their latent dimensions as encoding functional schema.
NERCCS 2024: The Seventh Northeast Regional Conference on Complex Systems will follow the success of the previous NERCCS conferences to promote the emerging venue of interdisciplinary scholarly exchange for complex systems researchers in the Northeast U.S. region (and beyond) to share their research outcomes through presentations and online publications, network with their peers, and promote interdisciplinary collaboration and the growth of the research community.
NERCCS will particularly focus on facilitating the professional growth of early career faculty, postdocs, and students in the region who will likely play a leading role in the field of complex systems science and engineering in the coming years.
The 2024 conference will be held as a hybrid at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY on March 20-22.
[I make zero representation concerning which, if any of these, are any good and which, if any, are game-playing, badly transliterated, literature review based messes]
Li Keqiang and cybernetics, a short thread:1/ During the post-Mao era there was a renewed interest in cybernetics which, alongside von Bertalanffy’s systems theory and Shannon’s information theory, was known as the “(old) 3 theories” (老三论).
Ruffo Caselli’s “Cybernetic Existentialism” Art Collection Based on Artificial Intelligence and Technology is Now on Display at a Museum in Uraj, RussiaPRESS RELEASEPublished October 25, 2023GetNews
The center for the multidisciplinary study of cybernetic existentialismThe ArtistItalian artist Ruffo Caselli paints canvasses representing elegant robots dotted with little squares, sensors and microchips. He is one of the world’s leading interpreters of the changes that have taken place in our lifetime.Since the late 1950s, he has linked his themes to contemporary technology and a mutant humanity searching for answers in a technological universe. From transistors to semiconductors and barcodes Caselli paints with oil colors on canvasses where even the space between people is populated by mysterious, omnipotent chips.The idea behind the art of Ruffo Caselli is one of a progressive mutation of our way of thinking that includes all aspects of our existence, personal relations, communication, work and play as they are intertwined with technology.MORE ABOUT HIMThe CenterThe Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Cybernetic Existentialism is a presentation platform for TECHNOLOGY IN ART.Carmen Gallo founded the Center in Manhattan in early eighties as a platform to present Art, Philosophy, Technologies and Trends of the Day in Technology.Recently the Center embarked on its most ambitious and visionary journey to date as it presented: “Fifty Years of Robotics in Art”, oil paintings by Ruffo Caselli, the father of Cybernetic Existentialism.The very uniqueness of this exhibit documents an unprecedented interpretation of a journey through the development of robotics in technologies used today.
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* curator at www.syscoi.com
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* SCiO - non-exec director - www.systemspractice.org
* Quadrant Resourcing - excellent interim change people - www.quadrantresourcing.com
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chosen path 