Solving for Pattern

Looking at search trends for “systems thinking,” I came across these videos of a 2004 roundtable at the 3rd International Conference on Systems Thinking in Management.

Pictured are Russ Ackoff, Margaret Wheatley, Michael Maccoby, Allenna Leonard, Michael Jackson, and Peter Checkland. Also on the videos but not pictured here are: Barry Silverman, John Sterman, Ian Mitroff, and moderator Vince Barabba.

A few snatches of the 3+ hours of conversation:

Video 1

Margaret Wheatley
My favorite definition of ethics is from the Catholic theologian David Steindl-Rast, who said, “Ethics is how we behave when we decide we belong together.”

Peter Checkland
The interesting thing about questions is always the assumptions behind them, which they take as given. … I rather like West Churchman’s [approach] when he said: “You are beginning to use a systems approach when you begin to see the world through the eyes of another.”

Ian Mitroff
The hard-soft [systems distinction] is one of the softest distinctions I’ve ever encountered in my life. … I don’t think we ought to spend the time on hard-soft. We ought to get rid of those silly dichotomies — which I think is one of the points of the systems approach, to get beyond those. Those really inhibit thought and creativity.

Video 2

Michael Jackson
To use mechanical models and biological systems to understand the nature of social systems can be a real mistake.

Michael Jackson
One of the weaknesses of the systems movement is that there are different silos that very few people try to break down.

Margaret Wheatley
One of the things that I’ve learned from biology and from being a student of living systems is that even this notion of separation and individualism is not a biological concept. You can’t go into the living world with a notion of independent actors and see anything that’s useful.

Michael Maccoby
We are the only animal that needs meaning to survive.

Peter Checkland
The worldview of the 1950s is that systemicity lies in the world — the world is an interacting set of systems, some of which don’t work very well, and we can come along and make them work better. … We had to abandon systems engineering when we failed to be able to apply it in soft, messy, management problem situations. … [Instead] we work with the notion that people create meaning together and can reach accommodations. …

When we asked ourselves: “what was the worldview we had now developed?” we saw that it was totally different from the 1950s worldview we had started from. … The 1950s view of systemicity is that it lies in the world, and you come along and engineer the systems in the world to be better. Our process involved us to take a phenomenological stance, philosophically, and an interpretive stance, sociologically. We gave up on thinking of the world as containing systems. … What we were doing was putting the notion of systems into the process of dealing with the world, the process of inquiry into the world.

Ian Mitroff
I don’t believe in the terms objective and subjective. They ought to be replaced by the term “judgement.” We differ in out judgements.

Michael Jackson
I think it’s incumbent upon us all the time to justify why we think working or operating in a systems way is any better to operating in a way that some people might call common sense, or based upon history, or based upon analysis. We’ve got to demonstrate that working in a systems way actually brings better results.

Peter Checkland
In teaching these ideas, you do find very different propensities to understand them among different students. We don’t correlate with ordinarily measured intelligence. … On our master’s course, over thirty years, most of the distinctions went to women, though we never had more than 40 percent of women in any one year in the course. So there’s anecdotal evidence that women are more inclined to think systemically or holistically.

Michael Maccoby
You can’t understand yourself without systems thinking. You can’t do it. … We [tend to] think our particular values and personalities are human nature.

Russ Ackoff
You will never get support for a plan from people who didn’t participate in making it.

Vince Barraba
The key to the [1980 census] program was that we published the assumptions under which the decision would be made. We published them in the Federal Register and asked people to comment on the assumptions, not on the decision. … It was not a well received decision. … But the final [ruling] of the appellate courts was that the process the Census Bureau used was neither capricious nor arbitrary.

Watch >>

“Virtually every thought in this book (or in any book) is an analogy,” writes cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter in 2007’s I am a Strange Loop.

Indeed, analogous arguments are everywhere. They appear in the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants,” and in Stuart Kauffman’s theory of adjacent possibilities, and in Janine Benyus’ advocacy for biomimicry: taking nature as a model, measure, and mentor. Each of these concepts implies that new thinking and practice emerge in reference to what has come before.

“We are constantly seeing, in new situations, the deep essence that we are familiar with from previous experience,” Hofstadter says in an On Point interview (“The Brain As An Analogy Machine”).

From his new book with Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking:

In this book about thinking, analogies and concepts will play the starring role, for without concepts there can be no thought, and without analogies there can be no concepts. This is the thesis that we will develop and support throughout the book.

The index to Strange Loop lists analogies under two headers, those that are “serious examples” and those that are “throwaways” or “random examples.” When Hofstadter is at his hilarious best, the throwaways come so fast that one can miss the serious examples. But they are there as well.

The image above — hand-drawn, on a transparency — comes from Hofstadter’s 2006 Presidential Lecture at Stanford, which is delivered with gusto (and begins at 13:40 in the video below, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition”).

In yesterday’s post, “Forget sustainability – it’s about resilience,” Judith Curry links to the 2008 version of Brian Walker’s “Resilience Thinking” that I edited and published, and she writes:

Over the last 5 years or so, I have been framing my research and applications related to extreme weather events around the concept of resilience. I viewed resilience as a concept that was orthogonal to sustainability, and realized that infrastructure designed for sustainability may make it more vulnerable to natural hazards. Zolli’s essay makes the argument that sustainability and resilience are tied to two different world views, and I find his argument convincing.

Resilience thinking is associated with systems thinking, uncertainty, and wicked problems. Resilience is arguably a concept that has broader political palatability than does sustainability. Resilience thinking seems to be a particularly good match for dealing with extreme weather events, which is arguably associated with the greatest impacts from climate variability and change.

U.S. local-regional economic development strategies have evolved over the years. Wikipedia lists five waves: from 1930s depression-era competitive recruitment — often called “smokestack chasing” — to more recent theories and practices that emphasize industry clusters or sustainability or economic gardening.

None of the existing practices adequately address current social and environmental challenges.

A few years ago the public-private Portland Metro Climate Prosperity Project sought to develop a new model. It framed a “greenprint” for re-imagining what economic development might look like in a carbon-constrained world.

Here’s the January 2011 final pdf, and here’s the intro:

In 2009, the Portland metropolitan region became a pilot of the national Climate Prosperity Project, an invitation-only initiative led by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to develop a new kind of regional strategy that simultaneously emphasizes economic prosperity and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. We asked a simple question: how does the Portland region successfully scale up the green economy while meeting established livability and environmental goals? …

This Greenprint is a call to action. It is a set of strategies to elevate and prioritize our activities, starting immediately. We can no longer afford to work without a strong regional platform on which to frame collaborative efforts. We can and must align our initiatives to grow our competitive advantages, scale up our efforts, reduce our environmental impacts, and capture the benefits of the clean economy for all of our residents.

The greenprint was organized around seven action strategies:

This bundle of initiatives was never implemented, though other plans have moved forward. The city adopted a five-year, cluster-based economic development plan, supported by a regional partnership, as well as an equity-focused 25-year plan.

This week local and regional efforts and opportunities will be reexamined as the Science and Technology for Sustainability program of the National Academies comes to town for a workshop, Pathways to Urban Sustainability: A Focus on the Portland Region.

Here’s the description:

For more than 40 years, the City of Portland and the Portland Metropolitan Region have been national leaders in urban policies and investments intended to revitalize the central city and adjacent neighborhoods, preserve the environment, improve equity, and make the city more economically competitive and livable. The “Portland brand” has been both emulated as path breaking and discounted as overly idiosyncratic. Among the elements contributing to Portland’s success have been strong public-private partnerships, a culture of planning, and a willingness to implement diverse ideas generated by academics, consultants, companies, and government agencies. Regionally, Portland has benefited from its location in the middle of the progressive Cascadia Corridor, stretching from Vancouver BC to San Francisco.

Against this vibrant backdrop, this National Academies Workshop will use examples from Portland and the Northwest US / SW Canada region to explore critical questions about the future of urban sustainability. The meeting will be organized into four sessions over two days. Session 1 will provide background about Portland and Cascadia, emphasizing policy innovations and lessons that are potentially transferable elsewhere. Session 2 will focus on ways to leverage local success through partnerships with state and federal agencies, companies, and non-government organizations, including the possibility of creating one or more interagency and multi-sector National Laboratories that gather, test, and disseminate best urban practices. Session 3 will ask how cutting-edge academic and corporate scientific and engineering research can help cities to become more sustainable. Finally, Session 4 will address the challenging question of how financially strapped cities, with the assistance of private foundations, can become agents for achieving broader societal goals not directly linked to their operational mandates, such as climate change mitigation, energy independence, poverty alleviation, and the preservation of biodiversity.

See also: the 2010 National Academies publication, “Pathways to Urban Sustainability: Research and Development on Urban Systems.”

Tropical deforestation and forest degradation are major contributors to carbon emissions, and therefore to climate change. On the other hand, there has been progress toward an international framework for reducing these emissions (REDD+).

So where do things stand?

After watching an extraordinary TEDx talk by Dharsono Hartono — embedded below — I looked at a few of the complexities and opportunities, with respect to Indonesia:

• “Land use [in Indonesia] — including deforestation, drainage and degradation of peatlands, and logging — accounts for more than 70 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, yet logging and plantation industries generate less than 5 percent of GDP” (Mongabay).
• A 2010 letter of intent between Norway and Indonesia commits US$1 billion to help Indonesia achieve its forest-related emissions goals (pdf).
• Earlier this month, the Indonesian government extended a moratorium on new logging and plantation concessions in 65 million hectares of forests and peatlands (Mongabay).
• Illegal logging and corruption have plagued the forestry sector (Jakarta Post and CIFOR).
• On the monitoring side, even state-of-the-art, satellite-based analyses offer widely differing estimates of forest carbon emissions. From a June 2012 Science perspective (“Carbon from Tropical Deforestation” sub. req.) by Daniel Zarin of the Climate and Land Use Alliance, commenting on two recent global estimates: “Harris et al. obtain a comparatively low gross emission estimate of 0.81 Pg C year⁻¹ for the period between 2000 and 2005; the equivalent value from Baccini et al.’s analysis is 2.22 Pg C year⁻¹. Neither estimate includes globally significant emissions associated with the loss of carbon-dense tropical peatlands, mostly from Indonesia, where such losses are responsible for roughly half of all greenhouse gas emissions.”

Calmly undaunted, Dharsono Hartono, formerly of PricewaterhouseCoopers and JP Morgan, has been working since May 2008 to develop a REDD+ forest carbon project in the peatlands of Central Kalimantan.

His TEDxJakSel talk, “Business Without Bribery,” was filmed in November 2012.

See also: Mongabay interview with Dharsono Hartono.

What is the role of science in society? It’s a critical question, involving: understandings of expertise, perceptions of credibility and legitimacy, methods for engaging with fact/value entanglements, and so on.

One approach seeks to get at the role of science by examining the ways in which scientific concepts, or models, are used.

Here are two takes, for comparison.

In the 2010 paper, “Resilience and Higher Order Thinking,” Ioan Fazey lists “Possible uses of Resilience Thinking as a framework of inter-related concepts”:

• Prediction — To help make decisions about the likely outcome of a course of action (e.g. using concepts of adaptive cycles to help understand when to target interventions to transform the trajectory of a social-ecological system).
• Explanation — To help suggest why something occurs (e.g. understanding regime shifts or crossing thresholds).
• Identify key questions — For research and/or practice.
• Facilitate design — To help form a plan or scheme to reduce vulnerability of a system to externally induced change.
• Communicate — To convey knowledge and ideas between researchers and/or practitioners.
• Motivate/Engage — To increase broad interest in social and ecological issues.
• Guide practice — To help develop new policies.
• Conceptual change — To help facilitate the way people view social-ecological systems (e.g. through the lens of resilience that sees social-ecological systems as dynamically complex and where, in addition to efficiency, innovation and flexibility are important).
• Development of higher order thinking — Subject of focus for teaching that facilitates development of more sophisticated cognition.

And in the 1973 book Visualizing Change: Model Building and the Change Process, psychologist Gordon Lippitt presented a similar list, in the context of models more broadly (slightly edited for brevity):

• Representation — A model can be used to represent a complex situation and to provide means of making changes in it. It may also help to uncover new relationships between variables.
• Guidance — The model inherently provides rules or guidelines for dealing with situational variables. It can illustrate manipulative constraints and the interdependence of the variables.
• Interpretation — A model can assist in interpreting and testing theory and in establishing a framework for experimentation and discussion.
• Visualization — A model can be used to visualize a change process or an activity, either as an aid to the researcher or change agent, or as a teaching tool.
• Prediction — In certain cases where experimentation is impossible, or impractical, a model can help in predicting the outcome of given events or changes. Its value in this function will be determined by the extent to which the interrelationships are accurately delineated and understood.
• Recreation — Model building can be fun to formulate and can serve as relaxation for the change practitioner. Some of us refer to it as “professional doodling,” but it can be both meaningful and enjoyable.
• Communication — Perhaps the reason communication is not usually included as an important function is because it is considered to be implied in a model. But communication by implication instead of communication by design may be a reason why so many models are not efficacious. A model should execute only “one-way” communication. There are three requisite components for this type of message sending: the source (model builder), the channel (the model) and the receiver (the one directly or indirectly using the model).

See also: “Hamlet and the greenhouse effect as models.”

“Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we’ve just stopped noticing,” writes Roman Mars in his first post for the first 99% Invisible podcast, “a tiny radio show about design.” Tiny perhaps, but also playful, informative, and, indeed, highly designed.

From an interview with Mars, by Debbie Millman on the Design Matters podcast:

Millman: Would you say that there is a bit of a formula to how you organize and construct your storytelling?

Mars: A little bit. I make this joke that the show is two anecdotes, one big idea, one takeaway fact — and it has to be funny.

True to the podcast’s name, the best shows reveal the otherwise invisible, like the design of check cashing stores, steering wheels, the Plimsoll line — and this one below about “the arsenal of exclusion,” the tools that architects, city planners, policy makers, and developers use to restrict spaces and the flow of movement.

Two mysteries in this Google trends search for the phrase “systems thinking”: why those peaks in 2004 (perhaps a big conference on systems thinking in management), and why the relative decline since then?

Despite declining search volume, a 2012 U.S. National Academy of Sciences publication, Science for Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead, which came to my attention via this search, calls for systems thinking at the Environmental Protection Agency.

From the Nature article by Jeff Tollefson (“Report calls on US environment agency to embrace social sciences”):

The US National Research Council has released an overarching review of science at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), advising the federal agency to take a systems view and integrate the social sciences as it tackles an increasingly complex set of issues in the coming decades.

From the report’s final chapter on Findings and Recommendations:

SYSTEMS THINKING
It is important for EPA to try to balance its capacity and resources to address complex environmental challenges, to address potential favorable and unfavorable health and environmental effects, and to apply emerging scientific information, tools, techniques, and technologies. Approaching problems from a systems perspective will allow EPA to meet those challenges and make the maximum continuing use of new scientific tools.

The committee has suggested ways in which the agency can integrate systems-thinking techniques into a 21st century framework for science to inform decisions (see Figure 6-1). That framework will help EPA to stay at the leading edge of science by encouraging it to produce science that is anticipatory, innovative, long-term, and collaborative; to evaluate and apply emerging tools for data acquisition, modeling, and knowledge development; and to develop tools and methods for synthesizing science, characterizing uncertainties, and integrating, tracking, and assessing the outcomes of actions. If effectively implemented, the framework would help to break the silos of the agency and promote collaboration among different media, time scales, and disciplines.

In supporting environmental science and engineering for the 21st century, there will need to be a move from using science to characterize risks, to applying science holistically to characterize both problems and solutions at the earliest possible time. ORD’s [Office of Research and Development’s] move toward embracing sustainability throughout its research program is a positive move in this direction.

Finding: Environmental problems are increasingly interconnected. EPA can no longer address just one environmental hazard at a time without considering how that problem interacts with, is influenced by, and influences other aspects of the environment.

Recommendation 1: The committee recommends that EPA substantially enhance the integration of systems thinking into its work and enhance its capacity to apply systems thinking to all aspects of how it approaches complex decisions.

FIGURE 6-1 Framework for enhanced science for environmental protection. The iterative process starts with effective problem formulation, in which policy goals and an orientation toward solutions help to determine scientific needs and the most appropriate methods. Data are acquired as needed and synthesized to generate knowledge about key outcomes. This knowledge is incorporated into an array of systems tools and solutions-oriented synthesis approaches to formulate policies that best improve public health and the environment while taking account of social and economic impacts. Once science-informed actions have been implemented, outcome evaluation can help determine whether refinements to any previous stages are required (see the dotted lines in the figure).

“Every noun obscures a verb,” quips Ray Ison in the book, Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate Change World.

None more so, I would add, than sustainability.

We know sustainability abstractly, like in the Brundtland definition of meeting cross-generational needs, or like in the economy-ecology-equity balancing diagram. Sustainability is often engaged as a set of guidelines for the stuff we produce or build or make. Think 350 or LEED or cradle-to-cradle. As important as these types of visions and guidelines are, this version of sustainability is not a living, breathing thing. It’s a noun, not a verb.

How about if we thought of sustaining as a process? What if we described it in terms of functioning: ways of being and acting that contribute to personal, social, and natural flourishing?

The lingo of functioning comes from the writings of Amartya Sen on the capabilities approach to human development. A similar approach appears in writings on psychological resilience that describe it — not as a trait that one is born with, but — as a competence or capacity to be developed, within social and environmental contexts. (See for example: Ungar, M. 2008. “Resilience across cultures.”)

A sense of personal agency is critical. Capacity development emerges from the interaction of individual agency with social and environmental contexts, whether we are talking about human development and psychological resilience, which are understood at individual scales, or sustainability and (social-ecological) resilience, which are largely understood at community or system scales.

Here are two examples of frameworks for sustainability and resilience that attempt to better account for individual functioning and agency.

For sustainability, from a 2011 paper by Arnim Wiek, Lauren Withycombe, and Charles Redman (“Key competencies in sustainability: a reference framework for academic program development”), which lists five key competencies: systems-thinking, anticipatory, normative, strategic, and interpersonal.

Systems-thinking competence is the ability to collectively analyze complex systems across different domains (society, environment, economy, etc.) and across different scales (local to global), thereby considering cascading effects, inertia, feedback loops and other systemic features related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks.

Anticipatory competence is the ability to collectively analyze, evaluate, and craft rich ‘‘pictures’’ of the future related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks.

Normative competence is the ability to collectively map, specify, apply, reconcile, and negotiate sustainability values, principles, goals, and targets.

Strategic competence is the ability to collectively design and implement interventions, transitions, and transformative governance strategies toward sustainability.

Interpersonal competence is the ability to motivate, enable, and facilitate collaborative and participatory sustainability research and problem solving.

For resilience, a piece from a 2012 publication I developed with my colleagues at Ecotrust, “Resilience & Transformation: A Regional Approach” (pdf), in which we described five bundles of capacities (full-sized image):

Your thoughts?

See also:

• Sustainable development à la Herman Daly
• No resilience without transformation