On now to recognize the somewhat universal responses to system and relationship overload, as strains resulting in loss of resilience and a risk of sudden disruption; replying to Helene on Systems Thinking World on her “UN Call for Revolutionary Thinking” thread.
The most general pattern is resilient relationships becoming rigid, like the surface of a balloon does *before* it can be easily pricked by a pin, or as people become rigid before losing patience. I think that comes directly from resilient systems generally being organized as networks of things that share their resources, and when all the parts run out of spare capacities to share at once the system can’t be flexible, and is then vulnerable to sudden failure.
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@Helene – Thanks for the reminder. Here are some principles for detecting and responding to the inflection point. Mathematically it’s “passing it’s point of diminishing returns”, when increasing benefit of expansion starts to decrease. Long successful habits of expanding a system become a liability, and strain their internal parts and environments.
It means about the same thing for a whole economy as for a little girl outgrowing her only party dress. Ignoring strain on one’s limits brings an unexpected end to the parties. The problem for systems operated by abstract rules of thinking, is that responding to change isn’t in the rules. So there’s a need to revive common metaphors for responding to the unknown, like for “overdoing it” or “crossing the line”, as strategic signs of externalities needing close examination.
Overload is a surprisingly common feeling, with visible effects
The most common signs of “overdoing it”, and needing new strategy, are formerly stable and flexible sub-systems
becoming “unresponsive”,
developing “the shakes” or “become rigid”
To open a LinkedIn community discussion in “Systems Thinking World”, on the “whole systems approach” and scientific method I use, for discovering and understanding natural systems, I offered the following lead-in
We might study anything identifiable, and growth curves in time-series data seem associated with some kind of growing system, developing from scratch. The usual difficulty discovering what’s going on inside them may be strong evidence that they’re organized and changing internally, not visible to or determined by their environments. If such individual systems exist, would they also have locations, external bounds of some kind, a beginning in time and an end?
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7/24/12
54 comments
#1• Jessie Henshaw • There are a few problems I’m trying to raise with this. One is the scientific difficulty of studying things you can point to, but can’t actually define. Science does better with “data” and numerical relationships, studying that as a ‘map’ for a more complex ‘territory’. Organizational change within individual natural systems isn’t readily mapped by “data”, though.
Is that one of the reasons there appear to be so many kinds of individual events and natural systems that display periods of essentially explosive creative organizational development, from storms to personal relationships, to social movements, disease outbreaks and swarms of new technologies, but science seems not to have yet identified that as a field of study?
12 days ago
#2 • Fabian Szulanski • What about agent based modeling? Would that be a point of departure for helping understand? Then some emergence, bifurcation and disorder could eventually appear.
12 days ago
#3 • Jessie Henshaw • @Fabian Well, that would be studying models for mathematical rules, not natural systems, wouldn’t it? To study natural physical systems, as if they were ABM’s, is more like what I’m suggesting.
Say you assume the natural world is like the big amazing computer the physicists postulate it actually is. Well then, we’re looking right at nature’s ABM without realizing it, and just need to discover it’s way of inventing things. We don’t have access to a “decompiler” of nature’s source code, though, do we? What we see are systems that evolve new organization by changing everywhere at once, somehow. It makes it appear that nature is doing fresh programming, on many levels at once, with nearly every process and event she creates. Continue reading Natural Whole Systems Thinking – philosophy & method on STW→
Helene has a nice short inquiry into “Configuring yourself for the transformation” the nature of “the milieu itself”. We’d been exploring ideas for how to define “the commons” as both a place and a trust, and a new paradigm for organizing people to make the world work as a whole. I responded with what I feel is a nice concise statement of how self-organizing systems physically work.
– 8/27/12 Helene then also linked to this in her lovely elaboration of “the commons” approach and the systems thinking needed, as “Commons Sense for a Sustainable World”
Configuring Oneself for Transformation –
Our system of systems is made of parts that we could consider as coexisting in a milieu, an environment that is not just a container with properties greater than the sum of the parts, but that has a substance, a density, a richness. Something exists “in between” the parts, from which the parts get some “nutrients”. Many metaphors can be used, call it a field of possibilities and potentiality, a collection of intangibles that would precipitate serendipity, attraction, connection, exchange, osmosis… the Noosphere… and that would finally lead to a metamorphosis. Continue reading the commons, the milieu, the space of connection→
A discussion commentfrom a LinkedIn conversation on Systems Thinking World to clarify what “steering” means for complex systems and in response to a question (paraphrased).
So can you describe how “small changes at a location in a system alters the direction of the whole,” discussing the theory, certainly, but also examples because this dense country boy sometimes has trouble wrapping his mind around abstractions.
Yes, it would help to think of “steering point” as referring to a potential for controlling the direction of something, unless also speaking of someone or thing using it to steer something. They might also be like Lagrange Points in space, where due to a balance of forces it’s easier to turn.
For natural systems there’s a particularly large variety of situations where “small change” has “big influence”. It would include all the temporary positive “feedbacks”. You might as well just start listing them at the beginning. There was the “big bang”. We didn’t directly observe it but from all appearances it was produced by a process that multiplied from small beginnings, and really really blew up. That original chain of events was very small and had big results!
That ANY event in nature implicitly starts with its own “big bang” of a sort is one of the curious direct implications of the continuity principle. The proof is that it would violate energy conservation for energy uses to start without developing, requiring an individual burst of energy uses and the development of the processes doing it for every event.
True, you often don’t notice them, but with a little experience you can find them most places, like in a keystroke. Any keystroke begins with a brief multiplying cascade of focused energy releases to move your finger, “kaboom” is how it would sound if you stretch out the time scale and have a volume control on the energy surge moving your finger. It’s the attack of the “ka…” sound at the beginning of that word (same use of “attack” as in music), that refers to the explosive growth period if the local self-organizing system that releases the directed energy. Continue reading Steering for the organizational Lagrange Point→
We keep leaving unaddressed that political will is just not enough
to overrule the power of money.
It’s in the interests of money to change course, to use profits to offer services to the commons rather than exploit it till it fails.
Even spending on astoundingly expensive arts an crafts, like “building pyramids” to ourselves, may not be an ideal service to the economy and the earth, but is a far better one than investing profits to multiply demands on it. It would generate earned income, which would then relieve debt. It would keep profits from being used to extract ever growing unearned income, for ever growing inequity and debt.
Yes, there’s a very solid case to be made to “do something”. We’ve also been fooling ourselves from the start about political will being able to overtake and control the behavior of money. Because for the past 40 years even discussing that subject has been avoided…, now if we don’t face the need for a more comprehensive approach our efforts are clearly doomed to fail.
There’s also a readily visible, but somehow counter-intuitive, strategy that works for lots of businesses large and small, and for self-organizing systems throughout nature. It’s for “the bosses” to recognize the system needs them to change roles, and become “service provider in chief” rather than “exploiter in chief” for the system to survive and thrive. A CEO of a large corporation or the managing partner of most professional corporations, needs to be the lead service provider to their network of resources, not an authoritarian ruler demanding ever growing profits.
How to apply that same principle to the economy as a whole is for the financial fund owners (retirees, NGO’s, governments & the super rich) to use their profits to heal the earth, managing their funds like endowments. Some already do, and that just needs to become universal. That reverses the traditional practice using profits to multiply your exploitation of the earth for more.
Rearming a rag tag gang with guns that shoot straight…
On the Systems Thinking World, Helene and others had been discussing the sustainability strategy now called “circular economy” aka “cradle to cradle”. That is a name change I was unfamiliar with that threw me off guard at first. In theory, the economy would be “decoupled” from depleting non-renewable resources if they were 100% recycled. That vision and intent are great. It needs to respond to the past great failures of the same purpose, though, how “sustainability” was turned back into “business as usual”(BAU), to become a strategy for maximizing growth. Continue reading “Wasteful Splendor” Astoundingly expensive arts and crafts→
I’ve written several short “what this site is about” essays, you’ll find in various places elsewhere. They all attempt to introduce a way to begin studying the eventful lives of the individually organized and behaving systems of nature, our many kinds of animated companions with which we share the environment . It’s naturally quite hard to understand what’s happening inside a visibly eventful social group, for example, though we may be intensely aware of its presence. That also applies to much of the eventfulness of history in general, that life is a place where “things happen” and often for relatively invisible and apparently local causes. Any natural system is defined by its own internal loops of relationships, is a way to state that as a problem, so for an observer, the working parts of any animated system start off being largely invisible.
One very powerful technique for probing the organization of eventful and self-organizing cultural or economic systems is one I’ve rarely mentioned. Maybe it’s the one I should lead with, though. It’s a way of using your two natural modes of thought, intuitive and rational, to “proof read” each other’s work. It allows your feelings to read and inform your reasoning and vis-a-vis.
The effect of learning how to do that is to create “theories with feelings”, and “feelings that make sense”, something that is some individuals achieve on their own, but is rarely if ever taught as a practical technique. It’s very valuable for connecting your naturally “reductionist” explanatory thinking with your “holistic” intuitive and experiential thinking.
Finding the emotional content in a logic driven world
It helps overcome the problem that explanations are powerful tools but completely lack the responsiveness to their environments that intuitive feelings about things bring out. Similarly, emotional realizations maybe responsive to vastly complex sets of relationships, but it’s rare that people can derive their more practically useful logical elements, what I sometimes call “cybernetic body parts” that I look for to use in explanatory models of self-organizing systems.
Peter Heffron had liked my idea for how our economy could imitate the natural means for a growth system to transform to become stable, in explaining my comment that“I think removing the growth orientation from “sustainability” might be a lot easier than adding its “getting the parts to work together” aspect into “degrowth” (further discussed fyi). I then showed him thevery simple world model demonstrating the biomimicry for how a profit seeking economy (rather than growth obsessed one) could smoothly change strategies in mid-stream to achieve it.
He suggested I show it in a full scale world model, a big task, and I asked if he knew anyone with who might be interested in inserting my biomimicry concept into their model. He replied in a surprising way, as if I might not have heard of my own field of science essentially, so I felt I needed to go back to basics in my reply. I think it ends up being a nice statement, of what’s going on here, as a struggle to reconnect our theories with the natural world humans are struggling to find how to become part of again.
Women mostly don’t lose the basic ability to connect with nature, easily using words as being defined by the things of nature they refer to. It’s men who get frustrated by that, and rely, to a point of complete preoccupation sometimes, on defining words as abstractions made from other abstractions, struggling to rationalize an abstract world in their heads. That difference is a large part too, of what distinguishes my new form of physics for studying the forms of nature in their own terms, going back and forth with the traditional physics for representing nature as abstract theories, connecting the two ways of thinking that all my work has been about for the last ~35 years…
I’ve been working for 30+ years actually, on the mysteriously omitted features of sustainability and “no-growth” economic models. It’s remarkably easy to demonstrate that the way markets work, multiplying money involves about equally expanding all the economy’s physical impacts on the earth.
So one is the perennial great omissions from the discussion has been how to end the endless “making of money” and so make investment growth responsive to natural finite limits. Another is to deal with the problem misbehaving free markets, which just record popular choices, is direct evidence of popular misconceptions… These are two very serious cognitive gaps in nearly all the “advanced” plans being discussed in Rio, is the problem.
I propose corrections for these in my two RioDialogues.org proposals, doing necessities first as a strategy, to avoid omitting them as the expedient popular plans keep doing:
They propose new institutions for adopting “commons based economic models” to make creating an sustainable world commons rather than development to solve the of world economic crisis, as proposed by Helene Finidori
The BIG news is that “the commons“ got a lot of fresh attention in the 2012 RioDialogues, from the UN Commons Action Group site and its Facebook page, supporting proposals that Helene Finidori (1) and I submitted (2,3) for:
“New institutions.. for commons-based economic models”
a common trust and place to enjoy being at home
Helene’s proposal (1) won the voting for the“Sustainable Development as an Answer to the Economic and Financial Crises” topic in the RioDialogues vote, and good recognition!
The idea is to NOT use development, as the solution to the world economic crisis, but to create new institutions allowing develoment efforts to work together, to serve the whole. It would create a sustainable world using “commons-based economic models”. The idea originates from the examples advocated by the Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrum, as the collaborative framework that competitive interests need so the whole can thrive.
Helene’s proposal is found on the next page, or by following the links (1). Her new (Aug 2012) collected thinking on it is in,
A comprehensive method guiding investors to compete for profiting the commons
It would not just count profits but also liabilities, in financial terms, using monetized business ESG balance sheets (eco-balance sheets), in combination with normal financial balance sheets.
Then everyone will see the real societal financial costs of making money today, that present or even past investors might well be held responsible for.
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The full application of this principle is “A World SDG“, to provide TRUE MEASURES of sustainability for business, consumer and policy choices, and applying the basic science research for ‘Scope 4’ accounting and the 2011 Systems Energy Assessment (SEA)paper. It is still “new science” though, and so demands fresh questions too. It takes investigating the actual organization of the working systems of our world, looking for regular patters of in the system as a whole, what causes them and how they are change, more than theory. It’s surprising both how little we notice going on around us, and how much we see but don’t notice what is implies. A workshop method for opening people’s eyes to what’s really happening all around them can be found in the 3Step Method of Learning to Work with Nature.
The original version of this proposal was submitted to the Rio+20 Dialogues for comment and voting as: “Budgeting for “the commons” needs business “ecobalance” sheets, to compare environmental liabilities and benefits”. See “News of the Commons” for introductions to the vision and the systems thinking needed for a commons based approach to sustainability. It’s part of my “reality math” series.
It’s proposed as part of the foundation of collaborative free market institutions needed for the health of the competitive free markets, as an element of Helene Finidori’s “Commons-Sense” and the “commons based economic models” she proposed. Their intent is to solve the global economic crisis by making the commons work for the whole, as a replacement for the paradigm of “prosperity” with ever expanding development.
The proposal would accelerate how the business community is responding to their environmental liabilities. They’re hiring teams of sustainabilty experts, using comprehensive sustainabilty reporting (CSR) to track Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) factors, following both private and public standards, such as for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The reason business has a new interest in environmental liabilities is that they are driving corporate assessed values, as economic liabilities.
To protect natural resources local stakeholders would still need a say in the use of local resources. To protect global resources for the future an equitable way to restrain growing economic demand is needed. World standards for Comprehensive Sustainability Reporting (CSR) wold accurately assess the impacts of business products. Then Economic Liability Assessments (ELA) of their economic costs to our future, would allow the world to act as a resource commons. It would provide equitable market constraints on high impacts would, to suppress demand, and fund investment in alternatives. ELA reports would be the basis of the “Eco-balance sheets” called for below, to be reported in business annual reports and factored into Pigovian taxes/tariffs on their products and services.
The basic scientific methods of doing accurate CSR and ELA assessments are what are discussed below. The current statistical methods of environmental and economic accounting contain a major systematic inaccuracy. Simply said the error is in relying on tracing individual records rather than assessing whole system requirements,
an inaccuracy caused by not asking who sliced up the pie, to check the accuracy of trying to trace all the crumbs.
a scientific method difference
between economic accounting and systems accounting
Slices of a business energy pie mostly go uncounted when relying on traceable records, leaving out all the energy demands of business services.
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Our Economic Liabilities for Environmental Damage
are direct costs of prior profits for business
that went unaccounted for.
New systems physics (3) would now allow the development of model “eco-balance sheets” to be placed along side normal “financial balance sheets” in annual business reports. That would provide a clear and quicker way than others for using market forces to correct our systemic problem of unaccountable impacts on our future.
Businesses have long accumulated unaccountable impacts by investing in growing irreversible exploitation, and now accelerating depletion, of what once seemed limitless capacities of people and the earth. It’s enormously costly for our future.
Investors and business managers can make better investing decisions if ESG measures capture the whole impact.
Those investment strategies incurred very costly economic damage to our future economy, that the businesses that created them were not charged for. For estimating environmental impact costs like that there are various methods, and some major recent innovations. Continue reading Budgeting for “the commons” needs business “eco-balance” sheets→
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
