Ackoff Center Weblog

Systems and Complexity

Scalable Analysis

Published in Open Source Futures
Feb 2, 2018

In the preceding posts about trends, I have focused on how the different trends interact with each other. I do this because of an understanding that trends are the outcomes of systems of processes; the trend that we see is often the resulting phenomenon. We still do trends analysis, however, because they often can get at the important aspects of the systems that we discuss.

The contemporary thrust of systems thinking began with Donella Meadows and her associates in creating modeling software that could help people visualize the systems they were thinking about. Part of this effort led to the book Thinking in Systems, where she together with her coauthors laid out the principles for affecting change in systems. Donella Meadows was also part of the team led by Jay Forrester in creating a systems model for the world. Those forecasts, made for the Club of Rome, spelled out how the world was heading to an “overshoot and collapse” situation — a common feature of population explosion in an environment of finite resources.

Systems thinking looks at how different components interact and the importance of the indicators and the incentives that drive the behavior. Change the indicators and incentives, and behaviors change, and systems change. There is a much larger philosophy to this. Donella Meadows described the things that, if changed in a system, could lead to impacts, with the greatest (and hardest) impacts to be gained at the bottom.

12. Constants, parameters, and numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

Complexity sciences also look at various non-linear relationships in networks in different domains of sciences. The same techniques for examining ecologies and food webs are also useful for looking at social networks. Complexity sciences also share an affinity with information theories in looking at how simple rules can generate order out of disorder. This is not to say that these order generation systems break the second law of thermodynamics but that the order that arises from these simple rules can be quite startling.

There are various features of complexity that people should be aware of:

• networks
• thresholds and phase transitions
• normal accidents

Networks can create path dependence for innovation. An initial decision to pick California as the site of WW2 research can have lasting consequences half a century on, as Silicon Valley became established. We see it in the geography of innovation, as when centres are established, it can be difficult for new centres to compete.

Social networks show themselves to be powerful and necessary. Robert Putnam showed that there are at least two kinds of social capital — bonding capital that helps a group cohere together, and bridging capital — for links and brings different groups together. The strength of both social networks becomes important during periods of disasters as people and companies form linkages to assist each other.

Systems and complexity focus on how things interact with each other, causing unintended and non-linear outcomes, and generating surprises. These surprises are usually threshold events, when processes occur at a rate that changes the existing environment, leading to a different paradigm with different rules. Phase transitions is a useful term in this respect, as how water changes into ice, or when it changes into steam. In these different states, H2O takes on different volumes and behaves differently.

World Wars, and the Depression are usually signals of phase transitions, where the old rules are irrelevant and new rules apply. Or like the turkey, which gets fed until Thanksgiving Day, and promptly gets slaughtered.

The climate is a system where phase transitions are unclear. Although we can model the climate and the possible changes in precipitation patterns, much of it remains guesswork. We don’t know if the North Atlantic Oscillation is going to remain, or what would happen if the ice sheets in Greenland collapsed. But we do know that the new climate will be different enough from the present day, and this is one basis for the nervousness regarding climate.

Social systems are also prone to phase transitions. A youth bulge without productive channels for their energies could mean changes in the socio-political order. The classic case for such phase transitions is the various social revolutions throughout history, where different social classes fight to change or to preserve the status quo. The American Revolution removed the colonial rule and replaced it with an American-led government; the Bolshevik revolutions replaced the Russian aristocracy with a new group of educated elite imposing authoritarian rule. The French Revolution temporarily replaced the monarchy with a group of intellectuals, in turn, replaced by a military ruler, and later became a republic. Physical depravations might be one contribution to violent dissent, but even these social movements tend to require ideas, leadership, and some military power to be successful in changing the social order in a region. It is difficult to tell whether one attempt at revolution will be more successful than the other.

And so we come to the idea of “normal accidents” — how catastrophes come about. It is often not because of a single decisive factor, but rather an accumulation of small events that lead up to a catastrophic outcome, in what is termed a failure cascade. In the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, various

valves that were supposed to be functioning were not, although indicators showed that they were. Operators faced a variety of alarms, that disoriented them, leading to more flawed decisions, which worsened things.

There is certainly more I could go into in a more systematic way, and what I’ve done here is to give a sense of an introduction into systems/complexity sciences. There is certainly more to this area than what I have alluded to here, and these are the concepts in my mind as I think about constructing scenarios and thinking about how trends interact.

If you enjoyed this post, you could contribute to my book-buying fund at www.patreon.com/scalable_analysis! This will help me buy the books that I will read to add insights to share with you!

Systems and Complexity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Digital Transformation: Creating the Path to Strategic Outcomes

By Myles Suer | Dec 7, 2021

The average lifespan of a public corporation recently dropped to only nine years. Change and digital disruption have dramatically transformed the nature of competitive advantage. The rules of business today bear little resemblance to those which Michael Porter shared in his seminal book, “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.”

Digital today is not simply about digitizing the things you already do. Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani put it this way in their forthcoming book, "Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future" "With product lifetimes shortening, organizations are recognizing they can’t sustain a differentiated position by focusing narrowly on products and services.” Digital transformation, therefore, is about creating whole new business models. Businesses that succeed here can reimagine their corporate future and transform their basis of competition

Digital Transformation: Creating the Path to Strategic Outcomes

Is there a more apt example of trying to ‘do the wrong thing right” than in our schools?

So why bring it up yet again? Well, for me at least, two words: Russell Ackoff.

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to some serendipitous surfing online, I came across this 10-minute snip of an interview with Ackoff, a pioneer in the field of systems thinking who was a professor at the Wharton School prior to his death in 2009. I was staggered a bit after watching it because he was able to articulate something I have been feeling for a while now but had been unable to find the words for:

“Peter Drucker said, ‘There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.’ Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake and correct it you become wronger. So it’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Almost every major social problem that confronts us today is a consequence of trying to do the wrong things righter.”

Here’s the video.

I’ve been thinking about Ackoff pretty much consistently since I watched it, and the application of that lens to our current practice in schools is profound. Can there be a more apt example of trying to “do the wrong thing right” than in schools? Look again at that list above. Are we in search of efficiency, or effectiveness?

I think the answer is obvious. If you watch the clip, you’ll hear Ackoff dive into the education issue head on. He says, and I agree, that the system is not about learning (effectiveness). It’s about teaching (efficiency). And believe me, I understand why we have that focus. Given our devotion to an overstuffed curriculum, standardized tests, “college and career readiness” and more, about the only way we can see our students navigating the school experience is to “teach” it, to organize it, pace it, and assess it in some way that allows us to confer the adjective “educated” to each student. This despite the obvious truth that the vast majority of what we “learn” in school is quickly forgotten, and the truest “education” for our life’s work comes on the job, not in school

Is there a more apt example of trying to ‘do the wrong thing right” than in our schools?

‘The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching’

In their book, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track, authors Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg point out that today’s education system is seriously flawed — it focuses on teaching rather than learning. “Why should children — or adults — be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can?” the authors ask in the following excerpt from the book. “Why doesn’t education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create?”

 

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught.”
   — Oscar Wilde

‘The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching’

Transforming the Systems Movement

By Russell L. Ackoff

Posted on 3/31/2014

The situation the world is in is amess. This hardly requires documentation; it's obvious. Furthermore, as Leslie Gelb observed (1991), the prospects for improvement are not promising: the emerging world requires a new foreign policy agenda, and fresh faces to execute that agenda. The trouble is, the same old "experts" are still running foreign policy and most of them only dimly understand the world they preside over. Indeed, few people today, in or out of Government, have the backgroundand skills to grasp, let alone direct, the new agenda.

Reform will not do it; transformations are required, two kinds. First a transformation of the way nations and international institutions handle gobal affairs and second, a transformation in the way systems thinkers collectively conduct the systems movement. The second must come first if we hope to have any effect on the global mess.

 

To read more click here: Transforming the Systems Movement

Towards the Social Business School

Posted March 18, 2014

This post is a summary of a devastating critique that the great systems thinker Russell Ackoff made of business schools twenty years ago, why he’s still mainly right, and why social technologies now provide us with phenomenal possibilities for the Social Business School – an alternative and highly effective approach to business education.

To read more click here: Towards the Social Business School

Audi announces new design strategy

In discussing Audi’s new cooperative vehicle design approach, Achim Badstübner [1], head of exterior design identified a critical challenge faced by any organization attempting improve the manner in which they consider product development in a more holistic manner, that is “...to break down the culture of individual authorship and encourage cooperation...You have to be an expert and there is an advantage in digging deep, to really know every screw, every system and pattern for a specific thing, because you have all of the information at the point where you need it, but it is misguided in another way. If you dig too deep, it's a little bit like digging a hole: you're in the hole so you can't see the world around it."

The intensity to which one group focuses on an aspect of a problem is not without merit. As Vince Barabba [2] points out in his new book, The Decision Loom, “Many functional managers...attempt to maintain complete control to ensure that their function is run efficiently and not influenced by outside forces.” He points out that value of the functional silos is found in their “...ability to use their resources to generate deep and valuable functional knowledge.”

The problem that needs to be avoided is to ensure that the perfect solution for a specific function does not have negative consequences for another function with which it interacts.  Finding this problem has occurred after the design is put together is very costly.  Barabba’s suggestion is to treat the design activity more like a molecular structure and treat the functions as molecules that interact with each other. The important distinction of the molecular metaphor is that functional cells are contained by membranes and not walls. Membranes are capable of letting information in and out. In this way the functions share information and improve the chance that their combined capabilities will create a whole that is greater than the sum of their individual expertise.

---

[1] “Audi announces new design strategy,” Posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 at 5:44 pm by Rose Etherington,  Dezeen Magazine, December 19, 2012

[2] Barabba, Vincent; The Decision Loom, Triarchy Press, Stanton, UK 2011, Pages 193-198

If Russ Ackoff had given a TED Talk...

This presentation is from a 1994 event hosted by Clare Crawford-Mason and Lloyd Dobyns to capture the Learning and Legacy of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Russ knew Dr. Deming and speaks here about the difference between "continuous improvement" and "discontinuous improvement" as seen through the lens of systems thinking.

If Russ Ackoff had given a TED Talk...

Systems Thinking: Ancient Maya's Evolution of Consciousness and Contemporary Thinking

Posted by Assistant Professor Tadeja Jere Lazanski, University of Primorska, Portoroz, Slovenia on her blog:  "Systems thinking is a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. The only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the part in relation to the whole. (Capra, 1997)

There are some historical facts regarding systems and systems thinking. Systems thinking as a modern approach for problem solving was revived after WWII even though it had been an ancient philosophy. We can track systems thinking back to antiquity. Differentiated from Western rationalist traditions of philosophy, C. West Churchman often identified with the I Ching as a systems approach sharing a frame of reference similar to pre-Socratic philosophy and Heraclitus. (Hammond, 2003)

The first systems thinkers can be found in the oldest of human societies – the ancient Phoenicians with their cuneiforms, the Egyptians with their pyramids, Greek philosophers and Maya Indians are the earliest ancient societies of system thinkers. The Mayan numerical system and long count units has been proven as one of the most accurate systems for describing the present and future of the civilization in which we have all evolved. The Mayan calendars Tzolkin and Tun, based on mathematics as a strictly rational factor and enriched by intuition, are examples of an evolutionary system of human consciousness. The calendars and their meaning for sustainable society were completely explained and scientifically proven by Swedish microbiologist and Professor Carl Johan Calleman. The calendars presented personal intents of individuals and prophetic meanings for civilization. (Calleman, 2004) Basically, he deciphered the purpose of the calendars, what they represented and meant to the Mayans and how they used them. He discovered that the calendars were timing the development and evolution of consciousness (individual, societal, universal)."

To read this posting, click on the link: Systems Thinking: Ancient Maya's Evolution of Consciousness and Contemporary Thinking

Systems Thinking as taught by Ackoff

Posted by Chandler  on his blog, he writes about Ackoff: "I have read a few books he has written and have learned Systems Thinking from him. I am surprised that the field of Systems Thinking is not well understood. Following is my attempt to share what I learned from one of Ackoff's recent lectures."

To read this blog, click on the link: Systems Thinking as taught by Ackoff