Category Archives: For teachers

Natural Whole Systems Thinking – philosophy & method on STW

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

Related theory pages:  1 Natural Pattern Languages,  2 ‘Big Data’ and the right to human understanding,  3 Global accounting of responsibilities for economic impacts,  4 Missing Principles of Ecological Thinking – in plans for the Earth,  5 Steering for the organizational Lagrange Point,  6 “The next big challenge” a biomimicry for a self-regulating financial commons,  7 General intro: Natural Systems & Synapse9,  8 Archive of early data analysis studies.  9 & other theory posts

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Could we study systems that invent their own theories?

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

#1Jessie 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

the commons, the milieu, the space of connection

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

Emotionally proof reading your logical models…

Excerpted from intro to JLH website homepage. JLH 6/29/12

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.

Continue reading Emotionally proof reading your logical models…

Why ‘reality’ doesn’t work as a concept!

The curiosity that “reality” doesn’t make sense as a concept (as it can’t be represented in the mind) becomes more sensible in natural language terms at least. You can then ask what makes reality work so well as a process.  … Comments from a LinkedIn discussion group “UN call for revolutionary thinking [for] economic survival..6/24/12

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1.       Struggling to get scientists to discuss natural self-organizing systems6/24/12

Jessie Henshaw @L –  It could help to notice how you restated my saying “They [scientists] tend to go direct from data to models without studying [the] complex working processes the subject came from or operates with.”    To me, your response displays the basic problem I’m describing.

I’ve spent years with large and small scientific communities trying to get them to let me demonstrate a way to study the instrumental processes of individual complex systems, helping expose how they develop and change.  After 30 years of that, making steady advances all along myself… I still feel about as stumped as before about how to share them.

A sign of the problem is in how you restate my complaint, changing the subject.   Your restatement of it was “her generalization that scientists in general leap from data to models without regard to systems”, saying that has not been your experience.

You changed the phrase “without studying [the] complex working processes the subject came from or operates with” to the phrase “without regard to systems”. That rephrasing shifts the subject from phenomena of nature (in their own form), to system models (as concepts for nature) defined within the researcher’s own framework of explanations. That’s my complaint!

Continue reading Why ‘reality’ doesn’t work as a concept!

The mind’s “little friend” behind the scenes.

A great insight was mentioned on On The Media this week, on a language algorithm that detects anachronisms in Mad Men, exposing how modern terms and phrases that evolved since the time period slip in unnoticed.   It exposes how change in the world that people are not watching as it occurs, seem to completely escape our awareness. So new things keep popping up in what we think is “normal”, becoming part of the “ever present” reality we wake up with every morning.

 

There’s a wonderful, still deeper truth, to your story, “about an algorithm that detects anachronisms in Mad Men and Downtown Abbey.”

Yes, modern TV scripts intended to be accurate about historical speech do contain “tell tale signs” of our real ignorance of the history, particularly for the histories of change we don’t pay attention to.   We don’t, though, misplace the history of changing ideas for subjects that we keep track of, as they change.

The larger general problem that points to is partly that it is not just TV that is affected, for course.    What’s affected is actually all of “reality” that simply appears in our brains a fixed “ever-present” state of things, glossing over most all of the things in our lives that that are constantly changing.   Without the real data on the flows of change, we seem just unaware of the flow of time at all, is where I arrived at.

I’ve studied it as the quite important question of physics.  It’s just hard to catch your brain making the little sequential steps of change in your own perception of “the ever-present reality” every night during sleep.  It helps explain why science so strongly tends to represent nature as having fixed equations, but always a new changeless set of them each time someone tries to describe things.    I think the root of it is that consciousness seems to include a kind of stop motion image making function, that updates its whole “software package” for the next day, as we sleep each night.

One of the more testable illusions that seems to give us is how the “ever-present” of our consciousness deceives each of us so completely, into thinking that the world we see in our minds is the one everyone else also lives in.  That just isn’t so, of course, and so the data of the continuity of change shows clearly too (that I study).  The strong illusion that our minds perceive “reality” persists anyway!   Cool, no?


What sustainability & degrowth plans tend to skip…!

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:

1) http://www.synapse9.com/signals/2012/06/02/the-next-big-challenge-a-biomimicry-for-a-self-regulating-commons/ and [https://www.riodialogues.org/node/245656]

2) http://www.synapse9.com/signals/2012/06/05/budgeting-the-commons-needs-business-ecobalance-sheets/ and [https://www.riodialogues.org/node/247876]

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

3) http://globalcommons.posterous.com/sustainable-development-requires-new-institut and https://www.riodialogues.org/node/240649

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Continue reading What sustainability & degrowth plans tend to skip…!

News of the Commons

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,

“Commons-Sense

applying her insights gleaned from the further Systems Thinking World discussions on the UN Call for Action, she started, and her original proposal also came from.

– 1) Sustainable development requires new institutions … to adopt commons-based economic models, originally posted to the 2012 RioDialogues

– 2) Biomimicry for a self-regulating financial commons

– 3) Budgeting for “the commons” needs business “ecobalance” sheets

Helene currently lives in Barcelona. She devotes herself to “Connecting people & ideas across cultures, disciplines & sectors to shape a better future…”. Links to her other writing and visions for the commons are:  In my dreams… the Living WE… accelerating emergence… and  The Commons at the Core of our Next Economic Models?

Continue reading News of the Commons

“The next big challenge” a biomimicry for a self-regulating financial commons

Using a new paradigm of biomimicry
to create a global self-regulating financial commons.

This proposal was submitted to the Rio+20 Dialogues for comment and voting. See “News of the Commons” for introductions to the vision and the systems thinking needed. It’s part of the foundation of collaborative free markets needed for the health of the competitive free markets, as an element of Helene Finidori’s “Commons-Sense“.  In this case to recognize that the profitability of the whole is threatened by a continued common investment strategy for growth, and needs a way to change to a common investment strategy for well being.

It works for us

Nature systems initially develop using a “bootstrap” mechanism, growth, that continually expands their control of their environment.  For any system’s own internal as well as external needs that self-investment strategy needs to become responsive instead ever more controlling to survive.

See UN Proposal to guide the UN SDG’s by this principle for OWG 7 & 8
Early version: Jan 2014 –
A World SDG- and way to thoughtfully manage global systems
This and the earlier versions contain a lot of good thinking…
the Most polished final version is a Feb 2014 proposal to the UN:  
A World SDG

 

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A new economic paradigm: The next big challenge

The proposal is followed by a discussion of some of the systems thinking
on “the commons” that developed with a group of contributors to a Systems Thinking World discussion group. It is intended as a sample of the kind of “commons based economic models”proposed in the 2012 RioDialogues, by Helene’s Finidori, 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. Below is the original article (with references) for the UNCSD Rio+20 Outreach Forum Continue reading “The next big challenge” a biomimicry for a self-regulating financial commons

General intro: Natural Systems & Synapse9

There are quite a number of “systems of systems thinking”, that I broadly describe the history of in my entry in the Encyclopedia of the Earth on Complex Systems.  Every science made up its own, for example, which are sometimes linked and sometimes not really linked much at all.  The introduction to the “Natural Systems Theory” behind it, a scientific method for studying naturally occurring systems, is found on the research archive site.   The subject could also be called “General Behavioral Economics” or for its focus on the complex development of local systems of organization serving as the working “capital” of nature and apparently all kinds of energy using systems, or a “General Systems Ecology” as another name for the same thing.

The thinking somewhat overlaps with “General Systems Theory” and “Complexity Theory” but doesn’t focus as those fields do on inventing theories for nature. The focus on theoretical models, that people have often quite ingeniously developed, if for creating a substitute way to represent physical behavioral systems.  The study here is more focused on the organization and transformations of nature, the ones we cannot define.   So it might then be called a “Real Systems Theory” or “Non-theoretical Systems Theory“.   The focus is on studying actual individual systems of the natural world, in their own innate forms and locations. It still uses recorded information, but for study of where the information came from rather than how we can turn it into something else, using abstract models to represent it.  Carefully defined abstract models are certainly used, …but mostly to help expose and clarify the quite different means and different patterns of organization found in the intermittent relationships we find systems around us formed by, and how they behave as wholes.

This change in thinking is a sometimes confusing problem, which also displays “systems thinking” (as a culture and language) as going through evolutionary stages of emerging forms, like the great eruption of new biological forms called the Cambrian Explosion.   Here the struggle is to move from a “modeling” to a “learning” approach to the complex organizations of nature, and how that will settle will not be clear for a while.   This site records but one example of the struggle it involves, but clearly one of the places “where the action is”, at present.   ed 9/23/14

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Many “systems of systems thinking” represent the accumulation of an individual person’s work over decades, and may be original enough to not have apparent connections to other languages for how things work other than how they individually have learned to use them.   So as a “discipline”  Systems Thinking is a “silo” with lots of “micro-silos”.   Being thrown into them is a little “sink or swim”, with little to grab onto.

Like most systems themselves, though, most people have some “starting point” for their organized way of thinking about systems.   It might be the nesting of small operations/management units within large ones, for example, as you might find in studying how a business works.    I look at those common units of organization as a “cybernetic body parts” to be use to help understand the observed systems around you.  That treats systems thinking as a “learning process”, though, rather than as a a way to define the mechanisms of systems , though.  Real systems work in more complex ways than our mental models can describe.

My main focus in on natural systems that are identifiable “self-managing units” of organization (natural systems).   For them the “management” of the system becomes a role for the loops of relationships that are also the system’s “operations”, so operations and management are not separated, but the same.  The loops of relationships define the “body” of its organization as a whole individual working unit.   That definition by observation also provides an observable “natural boundary” to locate in the environment, and a way to define individual systems for research studies by their own unique shape and location.

Maybe the following summary would offer a kind of  “life preserver” for the “sink or swim” task, that the somewhat unwieldy accumulation of my work presents.  ;-)    My approach starts with recognizing that growth, for a business, social or physical system, is itself a:

  1. a self-managing system for building whole systems,
    1. starting from a seed of organization
    2. using existing resources in an open environment
    3. that I can observe closely, and
      1. helps me pick out simple models of working parts
      2. to then better understand the full relationships of the things seen in their real contexts
      3. importantly for understanding the transition between growth and maturation
        1. when the system’s surplus resources change use
        2. from first developing internal relationships to then develop external relationships
        3. from first building the scale of the growing system
        4. and then to maturing its relationships
Growth is a succession of
Systems develop on a path of changing organizational stages

My materials are kind of scattered all over my site and blog.

PICS projecting images of complex systems

Chapters of whole system events

TEA total environmental assessment PDF slides

Blog: Reading Nature’s Signals

Intro: Open Systems Physics

HDS systems design science: Consulting servicesPublication list

Proposal: Natural Principles for steering the global economy

My Influences general site  Synapse9 and  search tools

jlh

Steps to a natural systems view

Over the years I’ve made various attempts to give people a good set of principles for introducing my way of observing and understanding the workings of natural environmental systems (1).

9 steps of discovery

A suggestion that I try again resulted in the following page, describing 9 steps of discovery. They’re to be made meaningful to someone using them by leading to their discovering things they never would have guessed, about their own world.   The goal is gaining a far better general understanding how nature creates and animates her very complexly well organized systems.

The trick in all of it,
is that what we “see” is not what nature is doing, but what we’re thinking of,
making consciousness quite different from reality.

The real world system of nature to understand are the various familiar and unfamiliar things that develop and work by themselves.   That includes the weather, social systems, economies, ecologies, but also organisms, storms, currents, cultural events and emerging technologies, etc.   They’re also little things like rust spots that magically appear by themselves on your car or other small individual events.

Emergent complex systems that take place “by themselves” in the sense of there being no evidence of central deterministic control, are also found in any spontaneous gesture like a smile, a handshake, or even the experience of personal feelings and thoughts, as form of complex organization in nature that come and go, and lack a pre-existing template for how to do that.

These are clear case of nature having to invent the path in the process of building and completing the process.   What opens the door to appreciating them is having a method of observation that fits them all, as following the enduring pattern for all scales and kinds of observable events as completing their own individual life-cycle.

The critical observation is to answer the question “what’s piling up” NOT “what’s the formula”.   It’s only theory that world by formulas.  Nature works by piling up, so that’s what you study when the subject is how can nature behave in a way not in our formulas.

Observation (2)

something about both the thing developing is “in-spired” from inside
and why the environment it is in makes that possible

 

1) The Art of Observation from Physics for Open Systems, and added resources:

2) Image found at Homeschool Hints : Developing Observation Skills

Continue reading Steps to a natural systems view