New Chapter, New Book

At the invitation of the editors I have contributed a chapter to this book entiled'   

Ison. R.L. (2012) A cybersystemic framework for practical action. In Murray, J., Cawthorne, G., Dey, C., and Andrew, C. eds. Enough for All Forever. A Handbook for Learning about Sustainability, pp. 269-84. Champaign, Illinois: Common Ground Publishing.
 

This book can now be purchased from the publisher's online bookstore. 

Learning for Sustainability

Chris Blackmore and I have just had a chapter published in “Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change”.  It is one of our contributions to Rio+20.  This timely book – which appears at the brink of Rio +20 -  contains 31 chapters from authors from around the world. The book is introduced by Juliet Schor (author of True Wealth: how and why millions of Americans are creating a time-rich, ecologically-light, small-scale high-satisfaction economy) while the epilogue has been written by Stephen Sterling (Professor of Sustainability Education, Centre for Sustainable Futures, Plymouth University, United Kingdom).

We are living in times of incertitude, complexity, and contestation, but also of connectivity, responsibility, and new opportunities. This book analyses the consequences of these times for learning in formal, non-formal, and informal education. It explores the possibilities offered by the concept of sustainability as a central category of a holistic paradigm which harmonizes human beings with Earth. To change people and to change the world are interdependent processes - this book contributes to both. 

 Moacir Gadotti, Director of Paulo Freire Institute, São Paulo, Brazil.

Please have a look at the blog – www.transformativelearning.nl where you will find a more detailed description of the book and a link to the publisher should you be interested in purchasing the book. See also the link under News on the right.  If appropriate please share this posting with your colleagues and networks.

Senegal - back to Africa

As I stepped out of the plane and made my way into the terminal in Dakar I began to realise that I had not been back to Africa for 31 years.  Over my week long visit to Senegal I was constantly taken back to that first visit I had paid to Dar es Salaam in 1980-81.  It did not take me long to understand that my numerous visits to South Africa from 1994 were different.  South Africa has been a different Africa.

Dakar is not a great city, but the Senegalese have every right to be proud of their country and the strength of their democracy.  The rains had not arrived on our visit - but they were due.  On our trip to Bambey and Tuaba farmers were already planting crops in anticipation of the rains. The mosque at Tuaba was among the most impressive I have seen.

Visiting an NGO office and later an experiment station at Bambey on our one trip beyond Dakar took me back to many similar visits in Asia and Africa.  The rest of the time was spent indoors in Dakar listening to research on and for  'food security' being discussed and reported. We were well looked after by our hosts at CORAF/WECARD.

On our short visit to Goree Island I was pleased to see the Mariama Ba school for girls, having read her novella, 'So Long a Letter' before arriving in Dakar. Like all tourists we learnt that the wall-scaling scenes in the Guns of Navarone had been filmed on the island, though there is no mention of this fact in the movie's entry in Wikipedia!

European Conversations 4 - Checkland

Not before time, and many years past his retirement date, Lancaster University hosted on Friday 20th April a special Colloquium to honour Peter Checkland. He has certainly been one of  Lancaster Management School's must illustrious scholars with significant international impact. Google, for example, thows up the following citations:

Systems thinking - Checkland - Cited by 7510

Soft systems methodology: a thirty year retrospective - Checkland - Cited by 4344

… to learning: A development of systems thinking for the … - Checkland - Cited by 391

I was delighted to be able to attend. It is not often these days that one has a chance to be part of a [insert collective noun] of Systems Professors!  There was a good turn-out of alumni and invited guests. The speakers were, in the main, stimulating, humorous, and well able to contextualise what they said in the achievements of the over-30 years action research programme at Lancaster that generated SSM.  A series of 10 videos have been produced of the event. My one grizzle was that it is a pity the programme did not allow for more questions and interaction.

A particularly pleasing feature of the event was the recogntion and praise the Open University (OU) recieved for its role in making SSM accessible to a whole cadre of  students who studied the course T301 Complexity Management and Change (and subsequent modules).  Mike Haines, a well known SSM consultant, spoke at the event about his experiences at the OU, as did John Naughton who wrote the original SSM course material.

John Naughton, the final speaker addressed the conundrum that faces SSM and Systems approaches more generally.  Why is it that they are not more widely taken up?  This is a question that Peter himself posed, concluding that in the history of ideas 40 years was but the blink of an eye.  John elaborated on this theme drawing on Thomas Kuhn's scholarship - explanations based on paradigm shifts that John finds particularly satisfying and relevant.  In a sense Kuhn's thesis is about the nature of clubs, who makes the rules, how membership is negotiated and how, after a falling out, a new club is formed (invented?) with new rules for membership. John has posted his talk, delivered in more scholarly terms than these.

For my part I find Kuhn's ideas satisfy a form of ex poste analysis.  My concern is to better understand how the current situation can be transformed, purposefully.  I am too impatient for Kuhn. I am also not convinced that the epistemological-technological complex that we humans have invented in the last century is as susceptible to breakdown as Kuhn's analysis suggests.  Each piece of technology reifies understandings of a particular form and time. I include here social technologies such as GDP, road rules and the like. Elsewhere I argue that in the Anthropocene all the social technologies that human's have invented in the past ought to be subject to critical reappraisal in terms of systemic fitness for today's circumstances - amongst which I would include the concept of paradigm itself!

In his closing remarks Peter cited three sources of possible illumination for the failure of SSM to be taken up.  These were:
(i) G.H. Lewes (1879) "..the new object presented to sense or the new idea presented to thought must be soluable in the old experience.."
(ii) G. Vickers "people seek confirmation which reassures the person of the validity of his (sic) judgement of reality. Confirmation is needed and is prized".
(iii) Diana Athill (Somewhere Towards the End, 2008 Granta Books): "How does the written word work? Whatever is needy in the reader is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need".

My interpretation of these insightful observations in terms of my own scholarship is that several phenomena are at play:
(i) we each have our own (unique) traditions of understanding out of which we think and act  - interpretation draws on these unique traditions;
(ii) human communication has a biological basis - we can never share understandings - all we share is our ability to live in, and use, language. Thus agreeing that mutual understanding has occurred is a protracted process - and much aided by experiential activity rather than words, whether on paper or verbally;
(iii) humans language - that is human communication is a braiding of emotioning and languaging (verbal and non-verbal). Put another way how something is said, or who says it can, in context, be more powerful than what is said (Geoffrey Vickers' concept of appreciation could be said to function on this 'mechanism');
(iv) the challenge posed by Peter could be reframed as: how can the experience of listening differently be created for an other?  This is a challenge that Humberto Maturana set for himself.  Those keen to understand what Maturana has to say (usually triggered by personal contact or a circumstance that makes one open to his work) grapple with his writing from which new understandings emerge. Many however are not triggered by the 'new language' to listen differently and thus dismiss his work.
(v) acceptance of the theoretical basis of SSM involves an epistemological shift that challenges personal identities in more profound ways than merely accepting a different explanation (as in a paradigm shift).  This is the shift from starting with situations of concern and using systems as epistemological devices created for the purpose of learning about, and changing, the situation in contrast to seeing systems as ontologies, 'real things' in the world.
(vi) there is also a praxis legacy issue - SSM practice was primarily centred in a university setting which had many advantages but it has not spawned major practices (in the sense of a doctor's or consultancy practice) that specialise in SSM. Had such practices existed they could have made it known that SSM was being used, made claims about its usefulness and thus created both brand recognition and demand pull for business and training.  In a sense the systems consultancy Vanguard is doing this for its approach with demonstrated utility in the public sector. Whilst there are many consultants who use SSM very effectively, most in my experience use it as a form of silent practice - the approach and underlying thinking and practice skills are not given away as part of the engagement with clients (despite advocacy to do so).

Despite these issues of uptake of SSM I am pleased to say that it can still be studied at the OU as part of the MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice (STiP) core module (course): 'Thinking strategically: systems tools for managing change' (TU811). SSM also appears in several other OU courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and features strongly in Rosalind Armson's recent book based largely on OU experience.  But it is a pity that  resources are'nt available to create a specialist SSM course as both a way of thinking and acting as well as a methodology (and method) for practical action to improve.  The former Lancaster applied masters experience demonstrates that to 'get it' well, SSM requires a significant immersion in both theory and practice. 

European Conversations 3

Travelling via Crewe to Glasgow, Dumgoyn and looking out over Loch Lomond.

European Conversations 2

Navigating the Anthropocene

If you are a climate skeptic, or one of the great 'switched-off', then my heading for this post may anger you, or merely fail to make sense.  Last night I watched the 93 minute movie called 'Home' which provides a comprehensive overview of the contemporary human condition as I understand it.  It is done in visually startling ways.  I recommend you watch it.  Given my background and interest there was for me nothing greatly new in the different elements of the film, but the totality is compelling.  Of course how I and the makers of 'Home' understand our situation is clearly not shared by governments and the majority of citizens otherwise we would be doing something else - and doing it with more urgency. 

LikewiseWilliam D. Nordhaus' article 'Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong' in the New York review of Books (March 22, 2012) ought to be compulsory reading for all Parliamentarians...and climate skeptics!

I also found Decca Aitkenhead's interview with Abhijit Banerjee in yesterday's Guardian thought provoking - his book, 'Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty' co-authored with  Esther Duflo is clearly worth engaging with, especially as I am now involved in designing and facilitating the 'Learning Project' as part of the AusAID - CSIRO Africa Food Security Initiative. I liked the following points in particular:

• "When aid is carefully designed to navigate the specific socio-cultural landscape of its recipients' lives, it begins to deliver the sort of results [Jeffrey] Sachs claims."

• "there is no Big Idea or golden bullet, so we should stop thinking about "Aid", and start thinking about "aid". 

• "When studied closely, it becomes clear that people who live on less than a dollar a day are not uniquely mysterious, but subject to the very same psychological and behavioural patterns as the rest of us"

• "the real single biggest difference," Banerjee agrees, "is that the state has delivered a whole bunch of stuff for us, and we forget how much is enforced and sustained by the state. The poorest person in the UK drinks extremely high-quality water, and this is not something that is just God-given;"

• "Weaker states cannot deliver, nor can they expect therefore to have the right to restrain"

• "There's an inconsistency in time between your self in repose and your self in action, and that's a permanent tension we live in all the time."

•  "Nobody wants to be told that there's actually just a thousand small problems, and you'd better figure out how to solve all of them. That's not a good message to deliver to anyone." 

• "I think the real value of aid is in promoting and digging deep into something, and committing to generate innovations," he explains. "And that's what a national government has a hard time doing. Why? Because it's something that requires the willingness to fail, many times."

• "We need to learn to work with political systems that are not perfect instead of taking the view: let's first fix the politics, then we'll fix the rest." 

  Given the  attention being paid to this book I would have welcomed more critical scrutiny of the authors research methodology i.e., the use of randomised control trials ....to produce the evidence base, emulating the pharmaceutical industry. To my mind this is a trap that leads to a dead-end.  Drug trials on humans, who basically have the same physiology can, if ethically defensible, produce 'solid evidence' that enables action with some confidence, but as we also know environmental or contextual variables can effect interactions that even the best designed RCB experiments cannot deal with.  When the situation changes from humans to development 'experiments' then the situation is 'wicked' or characterised by uncertainty, complexity, interdependencies, multiple stakholders and thus perspsectives and possibly conflict. Hence the ex poste studies of these authors can say very little about what should be done in future - that will depend, as they seem to realise, on  activity carefully designed to navigate the specific socio-cultural landscape of  recipients' lives.  This is what reflexive systems thinking in practice sets out to do.

  The danger in these authors' methodological approach is that policy makers will take the evidence and convert it into blueprints - rather than to see it as inputs into careful, long-term contextually sensitive design and adaptation. This lack of reflexivity leaves the approach, as noted by Aitkenhead, open to accusations of underestimating the importance of power.  Such critiques are valid but I wish those who make them would articulate how they conceptualise power and thus what the praxis is they would have as a response to power as they understand it!

Why so little systemic sensibility?

I have already bemoaned the absence of a systemic sensibility amongst many keynote speakers at the recent Planet Under Pressure conference in London. Having been UK based now for over a month I find the absence of a systemic sensibility assails me almost everywhere I look or listen. Of particular concern is the BBC, as exemplified by the 10pm News on BBC 1 or the Today program on Radio 4.  Take last week for example where the reportage on two issues stood out as lacking systemic sensibility. These were the conflict in Syria and fracking in England.


Most reporting on Syria has descended to a simple narrative of good versus evil.  I have yet to see in the mainstream media any nuanced account of events that situates what is said in the ethnic and religious complexity of Syria and how this is played out demographically both in the country as a whole and in particular locales and cities. What is reported is less intellegent and certainly less nuanced than most computer games dedicated to the struggles of good and evil. Of course I am not the first to notice this lack.

Britain is somewhat behind the US and Australia in coming to terms with what fracking is, and appreciating its systemic implications.  For example, fracking had clearly slipped past the concerns of one of my close colleagues who knows lots about environmental issues. Last week a report was released essentially giving the go-ahead to fracking.  This is a great tragedy. And the early reporting of what is at issue has not helped. My exception is a good interview with Caroline Lucas this morning on Radio 4.   So what was missing from the reporting that leads me to claim it lacks systemic sensibility:

1. Reporters do not critically examine how commissioned reports are framed.  The framing adopted for Syria is to tame, in the words of Rittel and Webber, a 'wicked problem'. In the case of fracking it has largely been framed as a technical issue, subject to risk apppraisals.  It is also framed as a practice that can help to secure the UK's energy future.  In all instances these are inapproporiate framings.  Fracking is best understood as a human activity not a purely technical activity - and we know that human systems are different and regularly fail.  Over time I would claim they always fail. Risk is also an inadequate framing; I prefer danger because the systemic consequences of fracking are dangerous and when they go wrong are irreversable.

To think that shale gas is part of a solution to the UK's energy future rather than an exacerbation of the problem of carbon pollution, is to fail to adequately appreciate and resolve the social purpose of fracking.   As Caroline Lucas outlined the current institutional arrangements should be such that no company or bank in their right mind would invest in fracking because it was a social and thus economic dead end.   Instead we need investment in technologies that advance a post-carbon future.  Doing the wrong thing righter does not secure the future.

2. Reporters do not critically examine through their questions the systemic implications of boundary judgments that are made through discourse, terms of reference, membership of review panels etc. In the case of fracking look at the terms of reference, also the panel membership and then ask questions about the potential implications of fracking failure (i.e. heavy metal contamination of waterways and aquifers + insurance liability for subsidence). Of course behind this observation lies the systemic failure of our governance arrangments because they fail to generate practices that formulate strategies and actions, such as reviews, based on multiple partial perspectives. 

Fortunately not all media reportage lacks a systemic sensibility. Mariana Mazzucato in her Guardian Article ' Without State Funds there'd be no Google or Glaxo' makes a lot of systemic sense.  But she is an academic and not a reporter....and a heterodox economist to boot!

European Conversations 1

At EMCSR in Vienna: Edgar Morin

In my book ‘Systems Practice’ I apologised for my lack of engagement with systems scholarship from France, Germany etc. I thus felt fortunate to be present at EMCSR to hear a keynote address by EdgarMorin. Rainer Zimmerman on behalf of the Bertalanffy Centre honoured Morin with a Ludwig von Bertalanffy award in complexity thinking.  In his excellent address Rainer said (Laudatio: Edgar Morin at the University of Vienna, 10th April 2012):

‘Ladies & Gentlemen, colleagues & friends, dear Edgar Morin,

with some short remarks I would like to once more welcome this year’s recipient of the Ludwig von Bertalanffy award in complexity thinking. You might have already a strong inkling as to who this may be. You are right: It is Edgar Morin. And we are very happy to have him here in person today.

The Bertalanffy Centre honors with this award his outstanding achievements in the field of complex systems, not only in terms of his technical results, but especially with a view to his extremely relevant input for a sociological interpretation of these results and the perspective of practical and highly political consequences derived from it.

Edgar Morin’s biographer, Emmanuel Lemieux , once called Morin “The Undisciplined” (L’indiscipliné), and that is I think what he can be actually called, within the range of this words’ double connotation. In fact, being “undisciplined” is probably the most important pre-condition in order to eventually succeed in a project which in Morin’s case shows up as a new approach to what is classically called “Scienza nuova”.

This project is best described in a text however that is not really published yet, because it has been part of a former draft for Morin’s gigantic work of “The Method” (La méthode) of which six volumes have been printed so far. One finds the crucial passage in the originally third part of the work under the provisional title “The Becoming of Becoming” (Le devenir du devenir) conceived between 1987 and 1989, but skipped later on: [I quote in my own translation.] “We should arrive now at the point that is called epistemological, which is the point of critically examining the scientific theories under the viewpoint of their value, of their pertinence, of their coherence. This obviously implies that experience is not sufficient in order to valuate a theory, because – as it is not a simple reflexion of something given, but an interpretation that organizes knowledge – it must be examined also under the viewpoint that is evidently superior. Superior, that is to say that epistemology must be a knowledge of knowledge, a theory of theories, a science of sciences.”  Hence, we can realize immediately the explicitly interdisciplinary scope of this approach which even encompasses what Sigmund Freud once called a “meta-theory”: a scientific (indeed: onto-epistemic) theory which is able to outline the various modes of actually developing theories in the first place.

This is the reason why Edgar Morin has called this enterprise a “method”. As he clarifies in a talk given in Nice in 1980, “[this] is a method in the strategical sense of this expression that shall extract something absolutely evident, but always forgotten, ever since one speaks of scientific knowledge: the presence of the subject, that is to say of what searches, of what thinks and of what eventually discovers. Heisenberg once said [that] from now on the method cannot be separated from its object; we should complete this formula by saying that also, the method cannot be separated from its subject, that is to say from what it actually practises.”  This is the important point that is re-stated in the now third volume of the series called “The Knowledge of Knowledge” (La connaissance de la connaissance): “Each object must be conceived within its relation to the knowing subject that is rooted itself within a culture, a society, a history.”

In other words, this approach implies something that we can call “a cognitive revolution” which operates on the level of principles and modes of the organization of ideas.  Hence, what we can recognize here quite clearly is the explicit relationship to the ethical aspects of the sciences on the one hand, and the role that is played by undisciplined qualities on the other: The latter is actually what defines the route towards a becoming conception that is still unknown in the first place. Morin often quotes here Antonio Machado’s verse on the wanderer: “Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” (Wanderer, there is no way, it makes itself a way by walking.) This is a very important issue for the universities nowadays, especially for those who prefer to classify research according to the profit gained by its applications rather than leaving a space of free play for fundamental ideas that do not promise any clear results in the beginning, if at all.

In fact, unity and diversity are the main concepts from which Morin’s approach is furnished. And this is exactly where rational science meets the aesthetics of life on the one hand, and ethics on the other. Morin himself chooses a somewhat pointed formula for this in his more recent interview with Djénane Kareh Tager: “Ce qui sépare est à la source du mal. Ce qui relie est à la source du bien.” (What separates is at the origin of evil. What joins up is at the origin of the good.)  As he explains, this serves the derivation of daily life from its philosophical, scientific as well as artistic foundations, ending up in a poetical shape that represents (and unveils) love as its structural principle.

In a sense, we could say that Edgar Morin strives for the verification of life by means of an explicitly undisciplined utilization of scientific interdisciplinarity. Hence, strictly speaking, he looks for truth altogether, and he looks also for his own truth. (Note by the way that this is very much in the sense of the Italian school on what is called “anti-psychiatry” as introduced by Basaglia and Pirella in the sixties. They called this the principle of verifica.) And this is how he once answered the question for his becoming of a researcher (chercheur): “Je cherchais mes vérités. Je me cherchais. Je ne sais pas: je cherchais. C’est peut-être pourquoi je suis devenu un chercheur?” (I looked for my truths. I looked for myself. I don’t know: I searched. This is perhaps why I have become a searcher/re-searcher?).

While he was doing so, he actually produced many works for which we ourselves cannot be more than thankful: for this rich composition of ideas and conclusions whose avail and benefit is what sets us onto new lines of thinking, both in the sense of rational reflexion as well as in terms of emotional praxis. Thank you very much for that, Edgar Morin.’

I found many resonances with my own research and praxis interests in the talk by Morin.  Some points from my notes include:

·        Complexity is a grade of diversity of a system

·        A system can be both greater than or less than the sum of the parts

·        A system can only be understood in the context of the environment (of the system)

·        Classical science is in crisis – our institutions do not allow a change of paradigm

·        Universities are devoid of life

·        I am in society and society is inside me – each generates the other

·        The part is inside the world and the world is inside the part

·        We are always an excitation of emotions in the moment

·        When you have passion without reason you have madness but the opposite is its own form of madness

·        Quoting Heraclitus – living by dying and dying by life

·        What can we do? We are obliged to make a decision. Each decision contains a wager on uncertainty and this limits the power of human decisions

·        Today the Earth System faces disintegration in the absence of its own regulation

·        He believes it is possible to metamorphose – the examples of Christianity, Islam, socialism, democracy, capitalism are all examples of significant social developments that came from isolated situations – all situations have the possibility of the improbable

·        Hope does not reduce uncertainty but opens up possibility.

·        There is no principle of immortality