Where does learning take place?

This blogpost started with an argument on Twitter. Harish Jose quoted the organization theorist Ralph Stacey:

Organizations do not learn. Organizations are not humans. @harish_josev

This was reinforced by someone who tweets as SystemsNinja, suggesting that organizations don't even exist. 

Organisations don’t really exist. X-Company doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about its place in X-Market. @SystemsNinja

So we seem to have two different questions here. Let's start with the second question, which is an ontological one - what kinds of entities exist. The idea that something only exists if it lies awake worrying about things seems unduly restrictive. 

How can we talk about organizations or other systems if they don't exist in the first place? SystemsNinja quotes several leading systems thinkers (Churchman, Beer, Meadows) who talk about the negotiability of system boundaries, while Harish cites Ryle's concept of category mistake. But just because we might disagree about what system we are talking about or how to classify them doesn't mean they are entirely imaginary. Geopolitical boundaries are sociopolitical constructions, sometimes leading to violent conflict, but geopolitical entities still exist even if we can't agree how to name them or draw them on the map.

Exactly what kind of existence is this? One way of interpreting the assertion that systems don't exist is to imagine that there is a dualistic distinction between a real/natural world and an artificial/constructed one, and to claim that systems only exist in the second of these two worlds. Thus Harish regards it as a category mistake to treat a system as a standalone objective entity. However, I don't think such a dualism survives the critical challenges of such writers as Karen Barad, Vinciane Despret, Bruno Latour and Gilbert Simondon. See also Stanford Encyclopedia: Artifact.

Even the idea that humans (aka individuals) belong exclusively to and can be separated from the real/natural world is problematic. See for example writings by Lisa Blackman, Robert Esposito and Donna Haraway.

And even if we accept this dualism, what difference does it make? The implication seems to be that certain kinds of activity or attribute can only belong to entities in the real/natural world and not to entities in the artificial/constructed world. Including such cognitive processes such as perception, memory and learning.

So what exactly is learning, and what kinds of entity can perform this? We usually suppose that animals are capable of learning, and there have been some suggestions that plants can also learn. Viruses mutate and adapt - so can this also be understood as a form of learning? And what about so-called machine learning?

Some writers see human learning as primary and these other modes of learning as derivative in some way. Either because machine learning or organization learning can be reduced to a set of individual humans learning stuff (thus denying the possibility or meaningfulness of emergent learning at the system level). Or because non-human learning is only metaphorical, not to be taken literally.

I don't follow this line. My own concepts of learning and intelligence are entirely general. I think it makes sense for many kinds of system (organizations, families, machines, plants) to perceive, remember and learn. But if you choose to understand this in metaphorical terms, I'm not sure it really matters.

Meanwhile learning doesn't necessarily have a definitive location. @systemsninja said I was confusing biological and viral systems with social ones. But where is the dividing line between the biological and the social? If the food industry teaches our bodies (plus gut microbiome) to be addicted to sugar and junk food, where is this learning located? If our collective response to a virus allows it to mutate, where is this learning located?

In an earlier blogpost, Harish Jose quotes Ralph Stacey's argument linking existence with location.

Organizations are not things because no one can point to where an organization is.

But this seems to be exactly the kind of category mistake that Ryle was talking about. Ryle's example was that you can't point to Oxford University as a whole, only to its various components, but that doesn't mean the university doesn't exist. So I think Ryle is probably on my side of the debate.

The category mistake behind the Cartesian theory of mind, on Ryle’s view, is based in representing mental concepts such as believing, knowing, aspiring, or detesting as acts or processes (and concluding they must be covert, unobservable acts or processes), when the concepts of believing, knowing, and the like are actually dispositional. Stanford Encylopedia

---

Lisa Blackman, The Body (Second edition, Routledge 2021)

Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things (Polity Press 2015)

Harish Jose, The Conundrum of Autonomy in Systems (28 June 2020), The Ghost in the System (22 August 2021)

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (2005)

Gilbert Simondon, On the mode of existence of technical objects (1958, trans 2016)

Richard Veryard, Modelling Intelligence in Complex Organizations (SlideShare 2011), Building Organizational Intelligence (LeanPub 2012)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Artifact, Categories, Feminist Perspectives on the Body

Related posts: Does Organizational Cognition Make Sense (April 2012), The Aim of Human Society (September 2021), On Organizations and Machines (January 2022)

And see Benjamin Taylor's response to this post here: https://stream.syscoi.com/2022/01/02/demanding-change-where-does-learning-take-place-richard-veryard-from-a-conversation-with-harish-jose-and-others/

Is there an epistemology of systems?

@camerontw is critical of a system diagram published (as an illustrative example) by @geoffmulgan in 2013.

Is there an epistemology of systems? I zoomed into this map randomly and saw ‘high drug use’ above ‘lack of youth activities’ but not connected. How are connections made, by who, when, where? How are they validated? Should maps be allowed to circulate without those contexts? https://t.co/lCdDrjCdkD

— cameron tonkinwise (@camerontw) October 9, 2021

 

To be fair to Sir Geoff, his paper includes this diagram as one example of "looser tools ... without precise modelling of the key relationships", and describes it as a "rough picture". I don't have a problem with using these diagrams as part of an ongoing collective sense-making exercise. Where I agree with Cameron is the danger of presenting such diagrams without proper explanation, as if they were the final output of some clever systems thinking.

To extend Cameron's point, it's not just about which connections are shown between the causal factors in the diagram, but which causal factors are shown in the first place. Elsewhere in the diagram, there is an arrow showing that Low Use of Health Services is influenced by Poor Transport Access or High Cost. Well perhaps it is, but why are other possible influences not also shown?

A more important point is that the purpose and perspective of the diagram is obscure. Although the diagram is labelled Systems Map of Neighbourhood Regeneration, so we may suppose that this is intended to contribute to some regeneration agenda, we are not invited to question whose notion of regeneration is in play here. Or whose notion of neighbourhood.

And many of the labels on the diagram are value-laden. For example, we might suppose that Lack of Youth Activities refers to the kind of activities that a middle-class do-gooder thinks appropriate, such as table tennis, and not to socially undesirable activities like hanging around on street corners in hoodies making older people feel uneasy.

Even if we can agree what regeneration might look like, and who the stakeholders might be, there is still a question of what kind of systemic innovation might be supported by such a diagram. Donella Meadows identified a scale of Places to Intervene in a System, which she called Leverage Points. This framework is cited and discussed by Charlie Leadbeater in his contribution to the same Nesta report. And Mulgan's contribution ends with a list of elements that echoes some of Meadows's thinking.

• New ideas, concepts, paradigms.
• New laws and regulations.
• Coalitions for change.
• Changed market metrics or measurement tools.
• Changed power relationships.
• Diffusion of technology and technology development.
• New skills and sometimes even new professions.
• Agencies playing a role in development of the new.

So how exactly does the cause-effect diagram help with any of these?

---

Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (Earthscan, 2008)

Geoff Mulgan and Charlie Leadbeater, Systems Innovation (NESTA Discussion Paper, January 2013). See also Review by David Ing (August 2013)

Wikipedia: Twelve Leverage Points

Related posts: Visualizing Complexity (April 2010), Understanding Complexity (July 2010). There is an extended discussion below the Visualizing Complexity post with several perceptive comments, including one by Roy Grubb about the diagrammers and their agenda.

Linear Thought

Various concerns have been raised about Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, previously described as "disruptive" by a former Pentagon official, and now the subject of heated investigation and speculation around his short-lived role in the Trump administration, his alleged links with Russia and other countries, and his alleged obsessions about various topics.

According to the Guardian, US and UK intelligence officers were also anxious about Flynn's capacity for "linear thought".

I guess most people will interpret this concern as "insufficient capacity". When I searched for "linear thinking" on the internet, I found a number of pages that contrasted linear thinking with various forms of supposedly bad thinking, such as "fragmented thinking". I also found pages that tried to divide people into two camps - the scientific "leftbrain" types who think in straight lines, and the artistic "rightbrain" types who think in circles.

However, systems thinkers might be concerned about someone at that level having too much capacity for linear thought. (As one might be concerned about someone's capacity for gossip or deception.) In a previous post on this blog, I defended Flynn's former boss, Gen. Stanley McChrystal (labelled an "ill-fated iconoclast" by James Kitfield) against the claim that he was not a systems thinker. (This claim was based on a remark McChrystal had made about a subsequently notorious systems dynamics diagram. I argued that McChyrstal's remark could have been made either by someone who doesn't get systems thinking, or at the other extreme by someone who really gets systems thinking.)

The question here is about greater or lesser capacity for various kinds of thinking, because I'm trying to avoid the fallacy (identified by @cybersal) of categorizing people as this or that type of thinker. She rightly insists on seeing systems thinking not as an all-or-nothing affair but "as a lens to be applied in a particular type of situation".

By the way, Flynn himself has appeared on this blog before. In January 2010, using the lens of organizational intelligence, I reviewed his report on Fixing Intel. While I was sceptical about some of his recommendations, I can affirm that the report showed considerable capacity for systems (non-linear) thinking. Make of that what you will.


Links

Phillip Carter, What is Michael Flynn's game? (Slate, 31 March 2017)

Luke Harding et al, Michael Flynn: new evidence spy chiefs had concerns about Russian ties (Guardian, 31 March 2017)

James Kitfield, Flynn’s Last Interview: Iconoclast Departs DIA With A Warning (Breaking Defense, 7 August 2014)

Stanley McChrystal, The military case for sharing knowledge (TED2014, March 2014)

Stan McChrystal, Career Curveballs: No Longer A Soldier (22 April 2014)

Greg Miller and Adam Goldman, Head of Pentagon intelligence agency forced out, officials say (Washington Post, 30 April 2014)


Related Blogposts

A Job Description for Systems Thinking (November 2009)
Making Intelligence Relevant ("Fixing Intel") (January 2010)
Understanding Complexity (July 2010)

We Ought to Know the Difference

 

Is systems thinking really possible? Here's one reason why it might not be.

One of the concerns of systems thinking is the need to avoid the so-called environmental fallacy - the blunder of ignoring or not understanding the effects of the environment of a system. This is why, when systems thinkers are asked to tackle a concrete situation in detail, they often hesitate, insisting that it is wrong to look at the detail before understanding the context.

The trouble with this is that there is always a larger context, so this hesitation leads to an infinite regress and inability to formulate practical inroads into a complex situation. Many years ago, I read a brilliant essay by J.P. Eberhard called We Ought to Know the Difference, which contains a widely quoted example of a doorknob. As I recall, Eberhard's central question is a practical one - how do we know when to expand the scope of the problem, and how do we know when to stop.

C West Churchman went more deeply into this question. In his book The Systems Approach and its Enemies (1979), he presents an ironic picture of the systems thinker as hero.

If the intellect is to engage in the heroic adventure of securing improvement in the human condition, it cannot rely on approaches, like politics and morality, which attempt to tackle problems head-on, within the narrow scope. Attempts to address problems in such a manner simply lead to other problems, to an amplification of difficulty away from real improvement. Thus the key to success in the hero’s attempt seems to be comprehensiveness. Never allow the temptation to be clear, or to use reliable data, or to come up to the standards of excellence, divert you from the relevant, even though the relevant may be elusive, weakly supported by data, and requiring loose methods.

Like Eberhard, Churchman seeks to reconcile the heroic stance of the systems thinker with the practical stance of other approaches. But we ought to know the difference.

---

This is an extract from my eBook on Next Practice Enterprise Architecture. Draft available from LeanPub.

---

John P. Eberhard, We Ought to Know the Difference, Emerging Methods in Environmental Design and Planning, Gary T. Moore, ed. (MIT Press, 1970) pp 364-365

Eberhard's story, which he called The Warning of the Doorknob, was included in Ed Yourdon's Modern Structured Analysis (first published 1989). The story can be found repeated on the internet - for example https://practicalanalyst.com/complexity-escalation-and-infinite-regression/ and https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog468/l4.html.

Nicholas Berente, C West Churchman: Champion of the Systems Approach

Alëna Iouguina, Systems Design: Because everything* is systems (Shopify UX, 16 February 2017) HT @antlerboy

Jeff Lindsay, Avoiding environmental fallacy with systems thinking (December 2012)

Related posts: Big Bang DNA (September 2007), The Price of Fish (January 2013)


Updated May 14 2013. Links updated 10 December 2020. 

Are we making progress?

In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)

In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some progress in their business over the year.  By progress, the client meant that

• people were beginning to take up more responsibility and initiative without having to wait for the boss to tell them what to do
• there was more discussion amongst the staff as to how to manage some of the day-to-day challenges they meet and less referring to the boss for the “answer”
• mistakes were being used as entry points to examining business processes and working out how they could be improved
• they had a clearer idea of their collective purpose and how important relationship is to achieving that purpose
• the leaders were devoting more of their time to ensuring the conditions and structures of the business were optimised so that people could get on with their jobs (and less time micro-managing operational tasks).

The Price of Fish

Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris have written a wide-ranging survey of economics, choice theory (game theory, psychology and ethics), systems theory, chaos theory, global warming and evolution. So what's all that got to do with the price of fish?

One of the themes running through the book is that the price of fish bears no relation to the value of fish, especially if we are concerned about long-term value and the sustainability of fish stocks.

Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This definition has also been applied to accountants and economists. Michael and Ian are leaders of the Long Finance initiative, a movement within the City of London that aims to overcome this kind of short-term financial cynicism.

Michael and Ian describe the price of fish as a wicked problem - a problem that lacks easy definition as well as easy answers.  "Sustaining the supply of edible fish is a wicked problem that presents global risks." (p 301) And yet they suggest that the system might possibly sort itself out. "As fish run out and have to be sustainably fished, the historic underpricing of fish ceases." (293)

But this is no time for naive optimism, and the system will undoubtedly need some intervention. "When the price is the same as the value, there are opportunities for sustainable financing. So far, price has not equaled value for fish. This is the biggest, wicked decision-making problem of all: knowing how to set a price that equals the value." (p 295)

In other words, the problem is not just the alarming dwindling of fish stocks but the collective cynicism that not only led to this problem but also amplifies it and resists dealing with it effectively. The key word in the problem statement is the word "set" - even if a few clever people can agree what the right price of fish should be, the real challenge is to set this price into global trading and consumption systems.



While the survey is light on the sociopolitical elements of the problem, the authors complain that governments have often made things worse, by inappropriate regulations and subsidies. Thus lazy or short-term thinking on the part of government is another manifestation of cynicism.

The Wikipedia article What's that got to do with the ...? derives the phrase from the alleged tendency of economists to connect everything with everything else. The authors go much further in this respect than most economists. But one trouble with systems thinking is this: once you start it's difficult to know where to stop. (In systems thinking circles, this is known as the warning of the doorknob.) Although the authors have covered a great deal of material, it's not hard to think of other stuff they could have mentioned.

I don't think the authors are in any hurry to write a sequel, but if they did it might be about the Price of a Bee. While fish are undervalued, bees (apart from those involved in honey production) have no direct economic value at all; but when the bee population is threatened, global agriculture as a whole is in serious jeopardy. The indirect value of bees is vastly greater than the market for honey. Under the right conditions, with appropriate political and financial systems, people and communities may be able to make long-term ethical investments in sustainable fisheries, with a reasonable prospect of a long-term financial return: the Long Finance initiative is trying to stimulate the kind of system change that will create these conditions.  But how on earth do we get communities to invest in the world bee population, without creating a market for bees? And would we really want that? Systems thinking tells us to be careful what we wish for. (Mary Catherine Bateson calls this The Revenge of the Good Fairy.)

Systems thinking also tells us that management (both public sector and private sector) has a tendency to over-intervene, to meddle and micromanage and ultimately make things worse. On the other hand, doing nothing doesn't feel like a good option either. (See Owen Barder on Good Global Citizenship, January 2013.) But there may be some kind of leverage or nudge that might just help a complex system to avoid catastrophe. It is always difficult to steer a path between naive optimism and pessimistic fatalism, but the battle against cynicism requires that we try.

---

Price of Fish website
Long Finance website
Wikipedia What's that got to do with the ...?

For the warning of the doorknob, see my post We Ought to Know the Difference (April 2013)

---

Matt McGrath, Dispute means mackerel is no longer catch of the day (BBC News 22 January 2013)

Timothy Taylor, Do markets work for bees? (10 July 2014)

Related post: The Price of Everything (May 2017)


10 July 2014

Conflicting Narratives

@queenchristina_ writes an excellent article on Google, Starbucks, and Amazon, arguing that "for these multinationals immorality is now standard practice" (Independent 13 November 2012). See also Martin Hickman, Good Bean Counters (Independent 16 October 2012).

It is much too easy for British politicians, journalists and taxpayers to get a sense of moral outrage when they discover how little UK tax these American companies pay on their UK earnings. There may be nothing illegal about the fact that the coffee beans are purchased from a Starbucks subsidiary in Switzerland, or that the UK subsidiary pays a royalty for the use of the Starbucks brand to another Starbucks subsidiary in the Netherlands. By a strange coincidence, the Netherlands charges a very low tax rate on royalty payments. Of course there are many British companies that use similar devices to reduce their UK tax bill.

The word "account" essentially means "story". The Starbucks accountants have constructed a story in which Switzerland and the Netherlands are essential links in the Starbucks value chain. British politicians have constructed a different story in which Starbucks is ripping off its British hosts. The moral outrage comes from the clash between these two narratives.

When two narratives clash, it seems natural for us to want to impose our preferred narrative on the Other. Wouldn't it be grand if Starbucks saw the error of its ways and started to pay a fair rate of UK tax. Or wouldn't it be equally grand if the UK tax laws were changed to regulate against these tax avoidance schemes? Or from Starbuck's point of view, wouldn't it be grand if UK corporate tax rates were reduced, so it could simplify its value chain at no cost to its shareholders? (Obviously words like "grand" and "fair" depend on the narrative.)

Of course, what is more likely is that the politicians will issue some threat of tighter regulation, the companies will make some temporary gesture to alleviate public hostility, and that the media will move onto the next target. In the meantime, politicians and the media can make things uncomfortable for corporate executives in the public eye.

And here's a slightly older example - the attempts by the US Government to hold BP to account for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One BP executive complained that "The administration keeps pushing the boundaries on what we are responsible for." (Wall Street Journal 1 June 2010 via NakedCapitalism)

In any case, there are always going to be conflicting narratives. I was at a workshop in the City this morning discussing how externalities might affect the future of money and the future of commerce. We discussed a range of topics, from mega-cities to carbon trading. 

But what exactly are these externalities? Almost anything that one person thinks to be part of The System and another person thinks to be outside The System. As William P. Fisher, Jr points out, "If we have to articulate and communicate a message that people then have to act on, we remain a part of the problem and not part of the solution." (Reimagining Capitalism Again, Sept 2011).

Oliver Greenfield identifies the following challenge:

"The externalities created by companies - or, for that matter, nation states - in their pursuit of self-interest can seem rational at the local, country and even regional level.  But at a global level, in a closed system, externalities are costs. What is rational at a company or nation state level is irrational at a global level." (Green Economy Coalition, April 2012)

Thus we have conflicting narratives, which result from disagreement about system boundaries (including time horizon as a type of boundary). A true systems approach might give us a systematic way of playing contested narratives off against each other.

---

See also


William P. Fisher, Jr, Question Authority (Oct 2011)

José M. Ramos, Temporalities of the Commons: Toward Narrative Coherence and Strategic Vision (Nov 2012)

Linked-In discussion on Good Bean Counters

and my post on Regulation and Complexity (Oct 2012)

Understanding Complexity

@zennie62 claims that McChrystal is not a systems thinker. What is the evidence for this claim?

Zennie's main argument is based on the fact that U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, whom President Obama recently sacked as Afghan war commander for making disparaging remarks about various people (see Mark Urban's blog), is on record making a disparaging remark about a certain systems dynamics diagram.

In my post Visualizing Complexity, I discussed this very diagram, which is an attempt to visualize the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan using system dynamics, rendered as a PowerPoint slide. (Many people have chosen to blame PowerPoint for the complexity of this diagram.)

General McChrystal's remark was that "When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war." That's the kind of remark that can be made either by someone who doesn't get systems thinking, or at the other extreme by someone who really gets systems thinking. Surely only a novice systems thinker would claim to fully understand a system as complex as this, especially while events are still unfolding.

Furthermore, there is an important distinction between systems thinking as a theoretical exercise and systems practice as a way of engaging with complex reality. From the latter perspective, it makes a lot of sense to see "understanding the slide" and "winning the war" as inextricably linked. For a practical systems thinker, the only authentic way to learn more about highly complex systems is to engage with them. (This is a critical element of what we call "next practice".)

And maybe General McChrystal just doesn't like this particular diagram. Zennie illustrates this point inadvertently by including an alternative systems dynamics diagram in his blog, using a completely different notation, which some systems thinkers might prefer.

Zennie Abraham closes his article with a further double whammy to "prove" that McChrystal is not a systems thinker

"If Gen. McChrystal knew systems thinking, and were honest, he'd realize the best course of action is not to be in Afghanistan."

"If Gen. McChrystal were a systems thinker, he would not have got himself into the trouble that cost him his job."

But these two points contradict one another. Surely if McChrystal didn't want to be in Afghanistan, the obvious course of action would be to give an interview to Rolling Stone that would get him fired. And although Ahmed Rashid calls this a "hurtful rumour" (Petraeus's Baby, New York Blog, 14 July 2010), this is exactly what some commentators are suggesting.

"McChrystal gave the interview in order that he be fired. And why did he want to be fired? He wanted to be fired because he knew that the policies he was pursuing and championing in the war in Afghanistan were not working, could not work. And he didn't want to be the one tarnished with the public blame." (Immanuel Wallerstein, Why McChrystal Did It, Middle East Online, 1st July 2010)

So maybe McChrystal is a systems thinker after all. POSIWID.

---

Scroll down to read comments by @Cybersal. See also Linear Thought (April 2017), Epistemology of Systems (October 2021).

---

Update (June 2021): I just found a great blogpost on McChrystal by Pauline Roberts, ‘Eyes on- hands off’ – are you ready to make the change? (August 2017), which comes to a similar conclusion for entirely different reasons.

---

Update (September 2021):

You never understand a system until you start to try to change it. Kurt Lewin

— Benjamin P. Taylor (@antlerboy) September 18, 2021

---

Update (November 2021): 

Zennie (who now tweets as @ZennieAAbraham) has written an attack on this post and an extended defence of his original article. His position is that if McChrystal could make a joke about a Systems Dynamics model, this could only mean that he had no background in Systems Dynamics and did not want to learn. He also presumes that McChrystal took no other action in relation to the model, since nothing else was mentioned in the New York Times story. My position is that this is pretty weak speculation on Zennie's part, and that making a joke about something does not conclusively prove a complete lack of understanding or interest.

Zennie Abraham, On Richard Veryard, Stanley McChrystal, System Dynamics, and Afghanistan (Oakland News Now, 30 November 2021)

The Power of Preconceptions

Post partly based on Chapter 2 of Organizational Intelligence by Harold Wilensky, published in 1967.

---

In his book, Wilensky presents a detailed account of the history of Allied strategic bombing during the Second World War, which demonstrates the longevity of preconceptions in the face of evidence.

British and American leaders strongly believed that strategic bombing would win the war, and that large-scale use of ground forces would be unnecessary. Their faith in the efficacy of bombing was reinforced by selectively listening to those advisers who were most strongly committed to the doctrine of bombing (for example, Churchill relied upon Lord Cherwell and "Bomber" Harris), and ignoring those scientists who articulated disparate views. Although there was growing evidence during the war that bombing was failing to achieve its strategic goals, and was diverting resources from more effective tactics, it was not until after the war had ended that there was a general willingness to examine the evidence more open-mindedly.

As it happens, the British and Americans held slightly different versions of this doctrine. The British preferred area bombing, which they wrongly expected to damage the German economy as well as undermining German morale. They did not regard as relevant evidence the fact that German bombing had not significantly affected the British economy or morale: perhaps they couldn't imagine that the German population might be equal to the British in initiative and resilience and resolve.

Meanwhile, the Americans preferred precision bombing, which they wrongly expected to disrupt the German production of armaments. As it happens, the Germans also had this expectation, for example in fearing the effects of American attacks on German ball bearing production, and had underestimated their own ability to find spare capacity as well as relocating production away from the factories that had been bombed.

Although there was some early systems thinking within the intelligence communities, and some intelligence analysts might have been able to think about the urban area or the armaments supply chain as a system, this kind of thinking did not significantly influence the dominant narrative.

In any case, the so-called precision bombing wasn't at all precise, so it wasn't that different in practice from area bombing; thus the apparent difference of doctrine between the British and the Americans was more imaginary than real. Difference of opinion at one level hides a fundamental agreement at a deeper level.

Writing during the Vietnam War, Wilensky notes how these beliefs, which had been discredited by military analysts after the Second World War, had mysteriously reemerged a generation later. Even if the decision-makers were aware of the evidence that strategic bombing had been an expensive failure during the Second World War, they may have thought that this evidence was no longer relevant, because they now had much more sophisticated technology - the B52.

And of course the same beliefs have continued to reemerge at regular intervals since, such as the conflicts in the Balkans and Iraq/Afghanistan. Faith in strategic bombing seems to be based on a combination of blind trust in expensive technology ("We've spent billions of dollars on this hardware, so it's gotta be good.") and wishful thinking ("We sure don't want to use ground troops here.").

More generally, we can identify any number of powerful preconceptions, across the public and private sector. There is typically a great deal invested in this kind of false doctrine - a combination of ego, political credibility and hard cash - as well as powerful vested interests who will profit financially or politically from the continuation of the doctrine. Surely one of the primary responsibilities of a critical intelligence is to challenge preconceptions of all kinds.


If your organization or industry is driven by preconceptions and false doctrines, I'd love to hear from you.

---

Since writing this post, I have read Margaret Heffernan's excellent book Willful Blindness, which explores the power of wishful thinking and intelligence suppression in organizations. Strongly recommended.



Updated 5 November 2014

Subsidy as Economic Illusion

@james_randerson @guardian_clark and @TimHarford debate whether nuclear power can survive without subsidy.

@james_randerson picks up a statement by Chris Huhne, the new Energy Secretary, saying there will be no new nukes without government subsidy [Guardian 13 May 2010]. Surely that means no nukes, concludes James. But as @TimHarford points out, the question depends (among other things) on the carbon price. To the extent that the energy market is already distorted by a wide range of government initiatives, the concept of subsidy is not as simple as the politicians might wish.

More generally, the notion of subsidy is an accounting convention, and depends critically on how you frame the systems of interest. During the 1984 UK miners' strike, there was a fiercely political debate about the economic viability of the pits. The two sides in the dispute (NCB and NUM) adopted broadly similar styles of argument, but came to opposite conclusions simply because they chose to scope the cost-benefit analysis differently.

In housing, the notion of "subsidized housing" commonly refers to cheaper accommodation for people with low to moderate incomes, provided with financial support from government or charity. But as Malcolm Rigg pointed out at the PSI conference yesterday, mortgage tax relief can be regarded as a form of subsidy affecting (and arguably distorting) all parts of the housing market, including owner-occupation and private rental (including buy-to-rent).

Talking about subsidies creates the illusion that there is a flow of money or other resources from A to B. But these flows are an emergent property of a particular economic or business model. And as system theory should remind us, the model is not the reality.

Changing how we think

@benjaminm quotes John Seddon "Change in performance requires a change to the system and to change the system, management have to change the way they think". But (I wondered) does he mean new beliefs and mental habits (content) or a new method of arriving at beliefs and mental habits (process)?

@benjaminm would say both: "they need to unlearn assumptions/develop new ways of 'knowing' by studying the system". @benjaminm adds that "Seddon seems admirably focussed on an intervention model based on managers/teams studying the work to discover for themselves", and recommended @dpjoyce's write-up of Jeremy Cox's workshop at the Vanguard Network Day 25th February 2010.

However, although this piece explicitly references both Chris Argyris' double-loop learning and Gregory Bateson's second-order learning, much of the rhetoric seems aimed at simply replacing one set of assumptions and beliefs (which Vanguard calls "Command-and-Control View") with a new set of assumptions and beliefs (which Vanguard calls "Systems Thinking View"). 

COMMAND-AND-CONTROL THINKING		SYSTEMS THINKING
Top-down, hierarchy	PERSPECTIVE	Outside-in, system
Functional	DESIGN	Demand, value and flow
Separated from work	DESIGN-MAKING	Integrated with work
Output, targets, standards: related to budget	MEASUREMENT	Capability, variation: related to purpose
Contractual	ATTITUDE TO CUSTOMERS	What matters?
Contractual	ATTITUDE TO SUPPLIERS	Cooperative
Manage people and budgets	ROLE OF MANAGEMENT	Act on the system
Control	ETHOS	Learning
Reactive, projects	CHANGE	Adaptive, integral
Extrinsic	MOTIVATION	Intrinsic

source: John Seddon, Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, Triarchy 2008, p70.


Vanguard clearly regards the new set of assumptions and beliefs as "true"; thus the question about "changing how managers think" becomes a tactical question - how do you create a learning environment in which managers adopt the Vanguard principles for themselves, without obvious coercion. So the new beliefs (content) are primary, and the process of arriving at the new beliefs is merely a secondary means to an end. This is where the Vanguard notion of "Systems Thinking" diverges radically from those schools of systems thinking that focus primarily on the process of thinking deeply about systems, and regard the insights that emerge from this process as important but secondary.

Whatever advantages Vanguard's "Systems Thinking View" may have over the "Command-and-Control View", the two views appear to be at the same logical level in Bateson terms. Simply replacing one set of assumptions with another set of assumptions is merely changing WHAT you think, not HOW you think.

So I fully agree with @antlerboy, when he commented "as a starting point, mgrs/teams studying processes is brilliant. But not same as studying 'system' / knowing..."

---

If you just want people to adopt a new (replacement) set of mental habits, then this calls for mental training. If you want people to adopt a new (replacement) set of beliefs, then it calls for rhetoric and indoctrination. (Which is what makes Vanguard workshops look a bit like Alpha courses.) But if you want people to change their learning style, this is a much more fundamental and difficult change.

I just did an internet search for the phrase "changing how we think", and found a number of eloquent pages, many of them trying to reframe some familiar topics.

• @Adam Westbrook, It’s time to change how we think about “news”
• Doriah Williams, Changing how we think about climate change

I also found some psychological pages, trying to encourage and enable people to think "positive" rather than "negative" thoughts.

• Brett Steenbarger

Finally, I found some pages suggesting that various systems and technologies could alter our thinking processes, for good or ill.

• New memory tech will change how we think and learn
• Information sharing will change how we think

Visualizing Complexity

Lot of people have been mocking a Powerpoint slide produced by PA Consulting Group and first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, which attempts to visualize the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan. Some commentators refer to this slide as "Spaghetti Logic".

via MSNBC

Elisabeth Bumiller writes We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint. (New York Times, 26 April 2010) @presentationzen picks out the money quote from General James Mattis: "PowerPoint makes us stupid".

Elisabeth Bumiller also quotes General McMaster, for whom PowerPoint’s worst offence is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” says General McMaster.

I don't know the exact provenance of this particular slide, but I have seen similar slides in which the original analysis has been carried out in a proper modelling tool, designed for system dynamics and simulation, and then merely rendered into PowerPoint for communication purposes. We may of course question whether PowerPoint rendering is adequate for communicating this kind of complexity, but most of the complaints about the slide seem to be about the situation described by the slide, rather than the slide itself. (Which looks to me rather like shooting the messenger.)

Richard Engel summarizes both sides of the debate.

The slide is undoubtedly overwhelming. For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war – from media bias to ethnic/tribal rivalries – are interconnected and must be taken into consideration. It represents a new approach to war fighting, looking beyond simply killing enemy fighters. It underscores what those fighting wars have long known, that everything matters. But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security. Detractors say the slide represents an assault on logic, an attempt to jam a square peg into a round hole. They say the concept of occupying a foreign nation to protect security at home is expensive, time consuming, ineffective and ultimately leads to the "spaghetti logic" of the slide. They say this slide is what happens when smart people are asked to come up with a solution to the wrong question. [So what is the actual surge strategy? (NBC, 2 December 2009)]

In my opinion, visualizing the complexity of America's intervention in Afghanistan is surely helpful, whether the conclusions are that the American forces can operate more effectively by paying attention to some of the subtleties of the situation, or that the situation is just too damn messy and America should never have gotten involved in this mess in the first place.

Whether this kind of diagram is the best way to visualize this kind of complexity remains an important question, but it isn't a PowerPoint question any more but a much more general question about systems thinking techniques for modelling (sense-making) and communication.

---

Please scroll down to view discussion below this post.

See also

• Hypnotizing chickens, Afghan insurgents, and spaghetti (27 April 2010)
• Joey deVilla, PowerPoint is NOT the Enemy (April 29, 2010) via @skemsley
• Chris Soderquist, We have met an ally and he is Storytelling (29 April 2010)
• Linda Booth Sweeny, Why We Should be Suspect of Bullet Points and Laundry Lists (30 April 2010)
• Complexity is not the enemy (10 May 2010)

 Related Posts

• Understanding Complexity (July 2010) 
• Epistemology of Systems (October 2021)
  
• The PowerPoint Collection 

Ice Nine

by Richard and Aidan

---

Earlier this week, Rachel was on her way to New Zealand via Heathrow. Here's how the interaction of several systems failed her.

1. Thanks to the latest security scare, it now takes two and a half hours to search all the handbaggage and get all the passengers onto the plane.

2. By which time the plane has frozen, and needs de-icing again. That takes another hour.

3. By which time the pilot and co-pilot have already spent so much time sitting on the plane that they no longer have enough flying hours remaining in this shift to take the plane to its destination. So the flight is cancelled.

4. The passengers are asked to return to the baggage hall, collect their checked-in baggage and start the process all over again. But there are many other flights that have been cancelled for similar reasons, and the baggage hall is already full-to-bursting with unloaded bags and frustrated passengers, so Rachel has to wait several hours before her unloaded bags appear on the carousel.

5. Then she has to queue to get onto the next available flight, and the process starts all over again.

By a happy fluke, the next plane Rachel boarded actually managed to take off, and she was on her way to New Zealand, but not before a last-minute search to find enough qualifying aircrew ...

---

Why does this kind of mess occur? Anyone can look at the whole system and see what could have been done differently. But each system is operated by a different organization, and there is a lack of trust and overall systems leadership.

As readers of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle will recognize, Ice Nine was the name of a fictional crystal that was capable of bringing the whole world to a complete stand-still. Quite an apt metaphor for failed systems then.

Why New Systems Don't Work

In response to my previous post Passive Adoption, which suggested that real adoption was always optional, @oscarberg replied that adoption is optional in theory only - if you resist adopting new ERP you will likely lose your job.

Here's how I rescue my suggestion from being disproved by Oscar's counterexample. In many organizations, I agree that individuals can't openly rebel or resist the official adoption of some corporate system such as ERP. However, despite the absence of visible resistance, the organization somehow frustrates the purposes of the ERP system.

How does this happen? Over-simplying enormously, let's say the business case (top-down purpose) of adopting ERP across the organization is based on the cost-saving from eliminating surplus stock. But local managers like to have surplus stock, because it gives them more flexibility to achieve their targets. So we can observe the local managers diligently complying with the demands on the ERP system, and yet for some mysterious reason the surplus stock doesn't disappear. In other words, people whose departmental interests may be slightly at odds with the overall corporate interest, or who may feel their autonomy challenged by a centralized ERP system, may somehow manage to mislead the ERP system in order to preserve their local surpluses.

So in what sense has an organization in this position actually adopted ERP at all? Sure, the software has been installed, but the people in the organization are subverting the operation of the system so that it fails to do what it was designed to do.So this isn't true ERP after all.

There are many other examples of this kind of failure. We have seen many examples of target-based systems that are intended to improve customer service and value-for-money, yet achieve the exact opposite. (Followers of Deming and John Seddon are constantly railing against this kind of folly.) So-called knowledge management systems, that perennially fail to make any serious inroads into corporate knowledge. And so on, and so on. (Please feel free to add more examples in the comments.)

Oscar's conclusion from this is that whereas the old approach has been to design apps without involving users & then force adoption from top down, optional software require even more focus on people to be adopted.

I agree with this, but I'd go a lot further. Yes we should design all software recognizing that its correct adoption is always kind-of optional: however compulsory it may seem, covert subversion is always possible. But it's not just about software design. When we forget to look at the human organization as a joined-up system, using systems thinking lenses, then we are likely to design software that is highly vulnerable to this kind of failure.

New systems can work. But we need to understand why new systems and attempted innovations often don't work, why "best practice" in systems design often fails to produce the desired outcomes, and how innovation benefits from a whole-system perspective.

Related post: Enterprise POSIWID (March 2012)

Getting the Big Picture

A discussion about enterprise architecture on Twitter exposed an interesting difference of opinion about this topic. In response to the question whether people felt threatened by enterprise architecture, @pauljansen replied "yes and rightfully so. An EA often sees the bigger picture 'they' cannot."

Paul's comment raises several interesting questions.

1. What does "seeing the bigger picture" really mean?
2. What is the ability to "see the bigger picture" dependent on - is it inborn talent or something else?
3. What is (or should be) the relationship between people who "see the bigger picture" and those who don't (for whatever reason)?
   

Exactly the same questions arise for "systems thinking" (whatever that means), but since this particular debate was between enterprise architects, I shall stick to that specialism for the purposes of this post.

Firstly, let's acknowledge that enterprise architecture (as commonly practised) mandates a particular set of lenses for viewing the enterprise - based on a set of abstract structural models - and these lenses frame what enterprise architects mean by "seeing the bigger picture".


More generally, seeing the bigger picture entails an understanding of how things join up. EA models are supposed to document this understanding. For some people, "seeing the bigger picture" is equivalent to "strategic thinking", and the two terms were used interchangeably in the discussion.

Does "seeing the bigger picture" call for some special ability or mindset?

@jpmorgenthal said that "strategic is a skill that cannot be learned", adding "it's genetic", and in answer to @aleksb6, who asked "if all behaviors are both nature and nurture, why is strategic thinking unique in your opinion?", @jpmorgenthal answered "strategic thought is not a behavior, it's an attribute like eye color".

@pauljansen took the view that it was both nature and nurture. "Some had 'the right eye color' but never used / recognised / cultivated it." @pauljansen "Short: left brain versus whole brain; those in certain positions came there because their rational focus, by talent or nurtured."

This sounds like enterprise architects have some special power to understand complex problems, which distinguishes them from the rest of the management team. To my mind, the trouble with this belief is that it encourages a kind of them-and-us attitude, which perhaps reinforces the feelings of threat and frustration on both sides.

The idea that some people have a superior ability to see the bigger picture resembles an earlier belief that some people had a superior ability to take a long-term view. Elliott Jaques based his theory of requisite organization on the principle that each level in the management hierarchy should be associated with a different time horizon, and it was this that justified higher remuneration for people in senior management positions.

In contrast with this view, @aleksb6 thought that many people would be capable of seeing the bigger picture if they wanted to. "They can, but not incented to see!" In other words, not seeing the bigger picture is often a question of perspective and motivation, not intrinsic ability. I agree with this.

I also partially agree with @enectoux 's comment that "Not everyone is able to see the big picture. Take an expert in any area... Not the right mindset." as long as it is understood that mindset changes with perspective and motivation. If someone goes to work for a large software vendor, or a technical person moves into a sales role, she will need to adopt a mindset that is appropriate for the new role.

And it is not hard to see how the "bigger picture" mindset conflicts with the mindset needed for certain activities, as @pauljansen acknowledges. "Alas, for many clients it is a disability, be it 'unlearned' in favor of focus (convergence)."

Perspective and mindset, motivation and interest - these are all important factors that influence which pictures we see. I recently came across a great example of the importance of perspective. Here's a pretty rural cottage for sale ...




... and here's a bigger picture ...



Source: Daily Mail, 29 October 2009

The Daily Mail bills the second picture as "Reality" - but of course it is only one reality, and there are many other big pictures. If you take the photograph from the other side, you can see miles of uninhabited landscape surrounding the cottage [BBC News, 28 October 2009, Daily Telegraph, 29 October 2009]. How you take the picture depends on what outcome you want. Bigger isn't necessarily better, if you are standing in the wrong place.



@pauljansen perspective is a nonrational rightbrain ability, and there4 it matters indeed @sboray perspective is a notion not logically deduced
@sboray what meets the eye and what meets the mind r different
@jpmorgenthal re: pictures, a strategic person would not look at each in isolation, but in relation to each other


In my next post Selling the Big Picture, I shall discuss (with further quotes from the Twitter debate) how pictures great and small, simple and complex, can be used to help or hinder the relationship between those who think they "get" the big picture, and those who apparently "don't get it".


For another example, see Big Picture Again (June 2011) See also Special Powers of the Architect - Getting The Big Picture (December 2010)

A Job Description for Systems Thinking

Michael Zang asked how to distill the essence of Systems Thinking into a job description?

Michael's question starts with the challenge of "selling" the idea of a Systems Director to an organization with little experience in this area. The job description therefore contributes to at least four different objectives.

1. To create vision and confidence that there is a job worth doing here (in other words selling).
2. To help select a suitable candidate for the job, without unduly narrowing the field.
3. To help determine a reasonable remuneration for the job.
4. To provide guidance and support to the job-holder, without unduly constraining initiative and innovation.

One of the challenges of a "job description" for systems thinking is that the traditional job description represents a fixed decomposition of responsibilities within the organization. The job-holder is required to carry out such-and-such specified activities, and produce such-and-such specified outcomes. This kind of job description comes out of a reductionist view of the organization. (This remains true even if the description is analysed in terms of systems-friendly "behavioural competences". Absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of reductionism, of course, as long as you don't imagine it's the whole story.)

Whereas a System Director will be working on the whole enterprise-as-a-system and the outcomes may be hard to define in advance. Maybe that's why there aren't many of them.

If you are going to have a System Director, that person will be a leader of systems thinking across the organization, not just going into a darkened room to "do systems thinking" with a small bunch of like-minded chums. In fact, you may follow her around the office and not see any activity that corresponds to a text-book description of what systems thinking is supposed to look like, but things just start to shift in interesting and positive ways.

So one way to explore the role of a System Director would be using the VPEC-T systems thinking framework. The "Content" of the job is presumably about system thinking and transformation, but the other elements (especially "Values" and "Trust") are perhaps more about Leadership.

A typical way of running an organization is that there is collective leadership exercised by all the directors together (notwithstanding the obvious fact that some directors will have more power than others) and in addition each director provides leadership in one specialist area. The role of Systems Director implies that one director is a specialist in systems thinking and systems practice, and brings this specialism (the Content in VPEC-T terms) to the general role of leadership.

Simply by opening up a discussion about the nature of leadership roles within an organization, and using a system-thinking lens like VPEC-T to provide a light structure to the discussion, could be a really good way of edging the organization into new ways of tackling complex problems.

The question of Trust is clearly a major issue for any organization. The System Director will draw a decent salary (presumably commensurate with her status in the organization), consume other resources, demand time and attention from her peers, push people out of their comfort zones, and so on, all for the sake of some uncertain and unquantifiable benefits to the organization. There is a much greater commitment here than employing an external consultant, so a considerable degree of trust is required.

But "selling" is not just getting an organization to accept the idea of "Systems Director". What's more important is for the organization to be able to trust the person occupying this role.

And in many unreflective organizations, people are trusted if and only if they fit the organization's stereotype of what people should be like. And yet someone who fits this stereotype may be unable to perform the role. So there is a critical tension to be confronted here.

For me then, what's most interesting about the job description is not the contents of the finished document (competences, outcomes, and so on) but the process of negotiating it - so that it provides a focus for critical discussions between stakeholders and their advisers that will help set appropriate expectations about the role, and start to build the trust that will be required.

---

Afterword

When this question was put to the Linked-In Systems Thinking group, some of the discussants went to some slightly unproductive places, perhaps responding in advance to positions they imagined others might take. For example, arguing which of the many available schools of systems thinking should be written into the job description. (My own opinion is that it would be better to keep the job description as neutral as possible rather than writing it in the language of any one school in particular.) There was also some (in my view wholly unnecessary) deprecation of people who don't share The Vision, dismissing them as left-brained Cartesians, with a special dig at accountants. One of the enemies of the systems approach (as identified by Churchman) is politics. Even in a Systems Thinking discussion group (which a naive person might imagine would know better) we can see how easily how schism emerges and the debate gets unnecessarily politicized.

Pick a Number

#systemsthinking #deming @dpjoyce asks "Anyone know where exactly Deming's 95% came from? Was is actual data? Vanguard also quote this, what did they study?"

Deming and his followers use a figure of 95% in at least two different contexts. 

• 95% of problems are system-related (whatever that means)
  
• 95% of the so-called improvement initiatives are futile because people don’t know the profound knowledge or competency

Vanguard repeats the first claim. For example "They found that 95% of the answers were down to a problem with the system rather than the worker." (via David Joyce). But this only makes sense if you draw the boundaries of the system to exclude the worker, which many systems thinkers would find puzzling or perverse.

I have found two sources that credit the second observation to Peter Scholtes.

• Nomination for the Deming medal (Peter Scholtes website)
• Pareto Distribution: Deming, Juran and Simon’s Rule and Worlds of Knowledge (Hanching Seminars and Consulting, 1998/11)

I tend to read this kind of claim as more rhetorical than scientific. Not only is it hard to find any empirical study that might support this kind of claim, it is difficult to see what kind of evidence might be adduced.

As I pointed out in my paper Reasoning about Systems and their Properties, to decide that one intervention is successful and another is futile is an act of interpretation, and assumes we know which system we are talking about, from whose perspective, with what timescale, and so on. In order to have any credible basis for dismissing an intervention as "futile" or "meddling" or "tampering", you actually have to do a full systems analysis on the case, and the results could still be disputed. You can't jump to conclusions - "Oh, this didn't work, so the people who attempted it obviously didn't know what they were doing" - because success and failure and their causes are extremely complex, and well-chosen interventions based on a deep and thorough systems analysis may also sometimes fail.

If this 95% were both meaningful and true, what would be the consequences for action, and what would be a reasonable target for improvement? Writing books and articles complaining about a general lack of management profundity, or the folly of "The Regime", looks suspiciously like an ineffectual meddle rather than a well-chosen intervention with a well-designed outcome. Will Deming's followers take their own medicine? See my post Easier Seddon Done.

---

See also Paul Hebert on Deming and Systems in Today's Business World - No Answers Just Questions, pondering whether the 95% still applies to knowledge/software or whether a 50%/50% split would fit better (via @baob)

Lean versus Complex

Some interesting discussion contrasting Lean with Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).

The Danger of Complex Adaptive Systems (Alan Shalloway)
The Danger of Lean - Ignoring Social Complexity (Jurgen Appelo)


Alan has a nice example of a school of mullet being consumed by a gang of dolphins. The mullet (species) has evolved a stratagem of swimming together to protect against predators. The dolphins (species) have evolved a higher intelligence, which enables them (specific individuals) to exploit the stratagem for their own advantage.

Which is the complex adaptive system here? Alan thinks it is the mullet system, and questions the value of CAS for protecting the mullet against risk. It is true that the mullet system has a degree of complexity: the dolphin cannot predict the path of a single fish, and can only nudge the system rather than control it exactly. But the mullet system is up against a much more intelligent adaptive system - that of the dolphins, whose tactics are learned rather than inherited.

Inherited behaviour, however complex it may seem, represents an adaptation to past challenges. Sometimes the same can be true of learned behaviour - the habits of management and problem-solving that have worked in the past. But in a dynamic competitive environment, the advantage of learned behaviour is that it can be changed. We regard dolphins as more intelligent than mullet because they are able to learn new behaviours, both by themselves and from one another.

Jurgen explains the problem of Lean and the advantage of CAS in terms of Cynefin. Appealing to a simplistic distinction drawn by Dave Snowden between "systems thinking" and "social complexity", he labels Lean as "systems thinking", argues that Lean fails to handle social complexity, and dismisses (that school of) systems thinking as outdated.

I prefer to explain the problem of Lean using ideas borrowed from Bateson. Lean is an adaptation that makes predictable systems more efficient. But highly adapted systems typically lack future adaptability. The mullet strategy is vulnerable to the dolphin intelligence. Indeed, the dolphin intelligence has evolved, among other things, in order to overcome the mullet strategy. So which system is the more complex, which system is the more adaptive?


Update

Alan has withdrawn his post rather than continue the argument with Jurgen. There is an archive version of the post on the Wayback Machine, complete with an interesting discussion thread. http://web.archive.org/web/20091101113550/http://www.netobjectives.com/blogs/the-dangers-of-complex-adaptive-systems


Updated 2 December 2016

Mapping Leverage Points to VPEC-T

Over twenty years ago, Donella Meadows published some thoughts on intervention into complex systems [PDF of original paper]. A version of this paper is included in her book Thinking in Systems, which has just been published, several years after her death.

After discussion with Nigel Green, one of the authors of VPEC-T, I have done a mapping between the five elements of VPEC-T and the twelve generic leverage points identified by Donella Meadows. There seems to be a surprisingly good fit.

Donella Meadows makes two important points.

• “Although people deeply involved in a system often know intuitively where to find leverage points, more often than not they push the change in the wrong direction.”
  

• “Complex systems are, well, complex. It’s dangerous to generalize about them. What you read here is still a work in progress; it’s not a recipe for finding leverage points. Rather, it’s an invitation to think more broadly about system change.”

So, with that warning, here they are, in ascending order of leverage ...

Places to intervene in a system (Donella Meadows)	VPEC-T
12 - Numbers – constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, standards	Content
11 - Buffers – the sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows	Content
10 - Stock-and-Flow Structures – Physical systems and their nodes of intersection	Content
9 - Delays – the lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes	Events
8 - Balancing feedback loops – the strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct	Events
7 - Reinforcing feedback loops – the strength of the gain of driving loops	Events
6 - Information flows – the structure of who does and who does not have access to information	Policy
5 - Rules – incentives, punishments, constraints	Policy
4 - Self-organization – the power to add, change or evolve system structure	Policy
3 - Goals – the purpose or function of the system	Values
2 - Paradigms – the mind-set out of which the system – its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters - arises	Values
1 - Transcending paradigms	Trust

Norms Matter

In his first Reith Lecture this year, Markets and Morals, Professor Michael Sandel discussed a couple of related examples in which economic incentives do not produce the intended system effect.

Firstly, an Israeli nursery. Parents would arrive late to pick up their children, causing cost and inconvenience to the staff. So the nursery introduced a system of fines, hoping to penalize these parents and encourage prompt pickup. As it turned out, the frequency of late pickup actually increased. It turned out that parents regarded this merely as a charge for extra time, and no longer felt guilty about the burden on the staff.

Secondly blood donation. In the UK, blood donation is voluntary; in the US, blood donors are paid, in order to encourage more regular donation. As it turns out, the US system produces more uncertainty and greater quality problems. Apparently blood donors no longer feel a sense of obligation in a market economy - blood is regarded as a commodity rather than as a gift.

As Professor Sandel puts it: Norms matter. This principle is not surprising to those familiar with Donella Meadows' idea of leverage points (PDF). Her paper identifies different degrees of effectiveness in intervening in complex systems. Economic incentives and punishments (rules of the system) rank 5th in her scheme, but the underlying value system (mindset or paradigm) ranks 2nd.