Sensing the Water

  Dave Snowden gave the Annual Mike Jackson Lecture at Hull University on March 23, 2023.  His talk was titled, “Systems Thinking: Making Sense of the World in Order to Act in It.”  Very early on in the lecture Snowden foregrounded the notion of complexity with a succession of defining statements summarized here: When we are working in complex systems we never know enough to make a perfect decision Hindsight doesn’t lead to foresight in complex systems – what has come before is not the best predictor of what will come next Our task is to work with “the evolutionary potential of the present”   Indeed, much of Snowden’s career has focused on sense-making in complex systems.  His Cynefin framework is an example of a widely used tool to facilitate understanding and decision making in varied contexts, helping decision makers to distinguish those conditions in their systems that can be predictably changed from other conditions that are beyond the realm of predic...

  My granddaughter is two, and her language is exploding.  Recently she moved from part-day to full-day preschool, which required taking a nap at school…..without a pacifier.  That was a big change.  Before she entered full-day preschool she had taken a predictable and tightly scheduled nap in her own bed, in her own dark room, wearing a weighted sleep sack (google it, it’s a thing now), with a pacifier in her mouth. Now she naps on a cot, in a lighted room, surrounded by her classmates, sans sleep sack, sans pacifier.  I watched with fondness and curiosity as she told herself the stories of how to manage this change. At circle time you have to sit.  Stay on your mat. That’s a baby.  Babies have pacifiers.  I don’t.  I’m a big girl. Big girls have ice cream.  What about I eat ice cream? These are the stories she is telling herself, and us, about the rules that structure her environment.  Note her cheeky way of dropping requests for ...

 A friend asked me “Why Just Learning Systems?  Do you mean that you work with only learning systems?  Just learning systems?  What does the “just” in just learning systems mean?”   What a great question.  The answer can be short, or it can be more lengthy, developmental, evolving over time.  I’ll start with the short, immediate answer in this essay.  The title, Just Learning Systems, arises from an awareness that to create the systems we need we will have to reflect on and learn about justice, together.  The systems we need will be just systems.  That’s a short answer, a simple answer, but what does it mean? Well, I’m not an expert on justice.  Let’s start with that admission.  Then let’s move on to a source of justice-related expertise, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  to see if we can borrow from and build on expert thinkers.  From the Stanford Encyclopedia we learn that: “ justice takes on different m...

The authors Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair have extensive experience with global, national, and organizational change initiatives.  Writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review they provided recommendations for working in systems based on a model of social systems architecture  fortified by archetypes of successful improvement initiatives.   Setting up his model of social systems architecture, Seelos writes :  “ System work seeks to address social problems by making substantive and lasting changes to the system in which the problems are embedded. Doing such work requires thinking about causal architecture. To reform a system necessitates understanding and then transforming the causal processes that constitute those systems. ” Causal processes are embedded in a layered architecture where observable phenomena at the top of the architecture are driven by hidden dynamics that lie below observable system features.  The layers of architecture defined by Se...