Great changes of World View are also Life Changes such as the experience of being born to grow up, enjoy life and pass on the wisdom as one declines. It seems ALL NATURAL FORMS develop and pass away by some variation of that same chain of START-UP TO END-UP flowing organizational experiences and developments.
germiation
emergence and formation of a new system by rapid growth of the germinal design
the turn to the future design seen happening at the growth inflection point, to begin adapting to its new environment as it adapts, refines and matures its internal and external relationships
To then enjoy and endure the rite of “having a life” in the roles it finds in the ecosystem it was born into to engage with others
There is the downside, too, having possibly richly contributed to the lives of many others during its life, taking on new roles of sharing the wisdom of the experienced for the inexperienced to consider, like makijng the rain.
The Whole Long Now – and the Rain
The Long Now clock is to be found and potentially read nearly everywhere you look, from the S-curves tracing the universal progressions of emerging systems. Both the physics of change (requiring continuity of processes) and the universal evidence of the natural systm growth stages that the S-curves are generated by, indicate that the universe as a whole goes through the same characteric organizational stages, of:
THE CONTINUITIES THAT DEVELOP WITHIN & AROUND THEM, TO HOLD THEM TOGETHER DURING THEIR LIFE CYCLES AS THEY GO THROUGH THEIR COMING, LASTING AND GOING CHANGES OF FORM CHARACTERISTIC OF EMERGING SYSTEMS.
As animated systems, using energy to self-organize, they transition from being lifeless to lively as they emerges within their ‘natal context,” and then perhaps mature and ‘grow up’ as enduring and adaptable as part of the system of “systems with a life” to enjoy as part of an environment, or to waste, whatever the case available that may happen by itself or that it may be attracted to.
IT MAKES EVERY NOW A LONG NOW, IN SO FAR AS S-CURVES OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND DECAY ARE NATURE’S TIMEPIECES FOR LIFE CYCLES OF NATURE. SO ALL THE MAIN LIFE STAGES OF COMING AND GOING ARE EXPERIENCED BY EVERY LONG NOW; WHATEVER THE SCALE AND KIND, BEGUN AND COMPLETED BY EVERY NEW THING AND EVENT IN NATURE AS “WHAT’S NOW HAPPENING,” FROM BEGINNING TO END.
It’s all happening in the S-curve ¸¸¸.•´ ¯ ¯ `•.¸¸¸ So, the question is, how do we make the one that suits us?
key organizational elements for the working relationships of complex systems
ideas of complex relationships that fit the reality
We care because of the new bridge it creates between human ideas and the working organization of complex working systems we make, use and need to respond to of all kinds, an emerging broad advance in understanding complex system organization design. The idea of pattern language, invented by Christopher Alexander for architectural design in the 70’s, actually started blossoming some time ago, it a most surprising place, in the creation of complex design concepts for computer programming known as “object oriented design”.
As it continues to expand and mature it is becoming a wonderfully versatile method for sharing and recording expert understandings of “how relationships work”, with application to almost any fields. It became the basis of modern computer programming, as “object oriented design“, with each object fulfilling a “pattern of relationships” that connects with others. For me… its a language I can begin to use to translate my research on natural system designs into, into “JPL” (aka Jessie’s Pattern Language), for subjects such as how natural systems transition from “type-r” to “type-K” behaviors (a subject underlying much of the discussion on RNS of complex system successions,life stages and cycles,”dual paradigm views”, “organizational stage models”, as observable patterns of organized change in relationships).
The reason it works for “object oriented” programming and “natural systems science” and in other areas too, appear to be the same. Pattern languages let people use their considerable natural understanding of complex relationships, like “home” “friends” “communication” “trust” “patience” etc. to open our eyes to similarly complex working relationships and meanings of complex systems elsewhere too, as “designs”. The standard “design pattern” of pattern languages connects human relationship concepts to working organizational relationships of behavioral systems of ANY kind. That seems to be why the design model that Alexander invented turns out to be so adaptable to our needs in our now overwhelmingly complex new world…! ;-) I can see it readily becoming applied to breaking down the silos of separation between knowledge disciplines, too, the so called “blind men and the elephant problem”, something just completely unimaginable in reality today.
Pattern Languages are for
1. identifying key organizational elements in systems of complex relationships, found in nature or in design practice,
2. communicating design elements for complexly organized systems or illuminating them in existing natural or manmade ones.
3. using the design pattern to refer back to the original natural forms and contexts from which it originated or is used to represent.
Two natural system design patterns, (for example):
Moving with the Flow
Sometimes you watch the people, sometimes their flows. The flows are roles in larger scale systems of group motion, forming as people avoid interference, but can confine them till they find an opening too. Markets flows form paths and break from them as new paths are found, often flocking in chase of a wave of anticipation, or uncertainty moving leaderless floods. Those are puzzling, since there may be no news the contagious change in direction, but systemic change generally usually has a real cause. Flocks of birds appear to do it just for fun though.
Alternating roles that Fit
Both natural and human designed complex organizations have independent parts that create emergent properties by fitting multiple roles. Day and night, male and female, work and relaxation, pencil and paper, cup and liquid, all the amazing polarities that produce reliable results because of how they fit their multiple roles, quite unlike any set of fixed rules could ever do. The trick is only physical parts and their relationships can do that, and a pattern language those relationships provide a way to develop concepts for understanding the working parts.
There are many types of Natural Pattern Languages, generally depending on the organizational medium (material and environment)
Social organization pattern languages
Natural system pattern languages
Architectural and Urban design pattern languages
Cultural pattern languages
Abstract Scientific pattern languages
Educational pattern languages
Computer knowledge design pattern languages
Commons & community design pattern languages
Economic pattern languages
Movie making pattern languages
Organizing pattern languages
… etc.
There are three uses of the term “pattern language”,
1. As the collection of design elements and patterns used to design or describe working complex systems
2. As an the organizational language of an individual design project describing its working relationships as a whole
3. As a property of an individual complex system, consisting of the working relationships between its parts and its environment, that might be view from various perspectives to recognize different elements.
So they’re simple conceptual models designed as versatile tools for engaging our minds with the actual working organization and relationships of natural and designed complexly organized parts of our world. So they come in those two basic forms, as Design Patterns one uses to guide the implementation of some plan or as Natural Patterns used to help people understand how designs can fit in with natural organizations.
This is a simple way to demonstrate the “dual paradigm view” as a bridge between the abstract complex systems theory and direct study of individual complex systems, to advance our understanding to of the mysterious phenomenon of “emergence”. The article suggested that as statistical systems ecologies generally could never be structurally stable, but did not compare that to systems that rely of “accumulative organizational design” particularly those with “learning parts” as ecosystems systems so often to have rather than “correlated random variables”. The moderator clearly liked this better than my first response not published.
The “dual paradigm view” addresses the dilemma of complexity science that computer models are fine for theory, but don’t really let you study nature. That’s what a way to connect mathematical systems theory with individual systems study addresses. Much of my work of the past 35 years has been on that subject, now recently raised by David Pines’ in a founder’s article for SFRI Emergence: A unifying theme for 21st century science, saying that physics and complex systems science now need a way to study the physical phenomenon of emergence and actual complex systems to progress. My reply to his article Can Physics Study Behavior not Theory, was first posted on Medium.
It’s interesting that with such a number of cross connecting areas of physics being discussed, the ultimate finding technically didn’t answer the initial question posed. That was Robert May’s “question about whether a complex ecosystem can ever be stable, or whether interactions between species inevitably lead some to wipe out others”.
The mathematical analysis of that question and others was limited to “kinds of random growth” and “systems of correlated random variables”. There are also lots of non-randomly behaving systems too is worth considering, and may have been overlooked in answering the basic question. The variety of organizational growth systems that are familiar everywhere in nature display many kinds of growth curves and outcomes, often having an overall appearance of being 1) quite lopsided, 2) quite symmetric, or 3) reaching extended stable states.
note: How the meaning of probability distribution curve shapes (as discussed in the article) differs from the meaning of these individual development curve shapes was skipped in this short comment on the article. Please do bring it up of course if needed. The question posed was about the development of individual ecosystems, and their potential structural stability.
Generic common curve shapes
for the development of organizational systems.
We probably know of lots familiar examples of these from personal experience, where the systems involved are going through progressive organizational change during their periods of acceleration or deceleration. Reversals in curvature don’t always reflect systemic changes in direction for organizational development, but often do though (shown as gaps in the diagram for raising those questions).
The one looking like a TW distribution curve is familiar to all economics and other matters, as a “meteoric rise” followed by “immediate decline”, like many a seemingly fine business plans might experience. The quite unusual thing is this same shape turns up in Gamma Ray burst records too (see image of BATSE 551 #1 below). It raises the question of whether that system (presumably of radiation from black hole collapse) reflects the organizational stages of a system that experiences a “blows out” (like some of our best business plans do) or that of a statistical distribution for correlated variables, or something else?
In any case, just asking that raises the possibility of a bridge between TW correlations and the fates of natural system organization designs, and perhaps a need to consider whether the other kinds of system are available to change the outcome for May’s ecosystems, depending on their design.
Gamma Ray Burst “BATSE 551 #1” – Raw data dynamically smoothed.
For understanding the emergence of new forms of organization in nature, the study of theoretical models seems not to be yielding the kind of useful understanding we so critically need now. What I introduce is a”dual paradigm view”, to address the dilemma, a better technique for learning from nature directly. Computer models are fine for testing theory, but need to be used differently to help us follow the continuities of nature. There is a very big conceptual hurdle, getting mathematicians to study the patterns of nature directly… The physics based method I developed, using models of probability to help locate individual developmental continuities offers a direct way to address the problem Pines raises. It could genuinely offer complexity science a better way to study their actual subject, and couple their theories to actively occurring emergent processes and events. Among other discussions of it on RNS Journal:
Emergence is what we see from cosmic events to the flocking of birds…
David Pines makes a very intelligent assessment, saying in part “The central task of theoretical physics in our time is no longer to write down the ultimate equations, but rather to catalogue and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself.”
I was one of those who figured out why that would become necessary back in the 1970’s. The behavior of complex systems of equations that permit true emergence will not be knowable from the equations. It’s not just their complexity, but that their emergent properties are emergent and dependent of histories of development rather than being formulaic.
I have also been writing papers and corresponding on the problem very widely since then, and really wondering why I was so unable to get systems thinkers, from any established research community to join me, in studying the commonalities of individual emergent systems. I started with air currents, that generally develop quite complex organization quickly with no apparent organizational input, behave very surprisingly, and seem individually unique.
I actually developed a fairly efficient scheme for studying any kind or scale of emergent system, using the simple device of starting with the question: “How did it begin”. What starting with that question does is immediately shift the focus of interest to considering systems as “energy events”, that you consider as a whole in looking for how they developed. That approach also directs you to look for the event’s naturally defined spatial and duration boundaries, which are highly useful too.
In addition to being fairly productive as research approach, it also made it easy to skirt lots of spurious questions, like “how to define the system”. With that approach your task is finding how the subject defines itself, still looking for a pattern language of structural and design elements to work with, within and around the system, confirming what you think you find.
What I finally arrived at in the 90’s was that the equations of energy conservation implied a series of special requirements as natural bounds for any emerging use of energy. I was thinking that the issue was how nature uses discontinuous parts to design continuous uses of energy, and in working with the equations noticed that the notation for the conservation laws were either integrals or derivatives of each other.
Then one afternoon I just extrapolated an infinite series of conservation laws to define a general law of continuity, and integrated it to find the polynomial expansion describing the boundary conditions for any energy use to begin. It was a regular non-convergent expression, a surprising confirmation of Robert Rosen’s interest in non-converging expressions for describing life, and became very useful as what to look for in locating emergent processes to understand how they worked. I circulated the proof for discussion many times, submitted it for publication a few times and wrote numerous introductions, the following the most recent:
One of the fascinating scientific subjects I research is how human understanding comes from narrative. Without getting too technical, narratives about relationships, environments and culture change issues come from people “observing the flows” of the natural processes, the flows by which those changes in our world take place. The basic starting point, then, is having some way to observe those flows. No awareness of the flows, *no story*!
This is such an important thing for combating our alienation from the breakdown of traditional cultures, really all around the whole. It’s quite an unfortunate side effect of the great eruption of wealth in modern times, and the ever more intense global competition fostered by the world economy doing it. A small part of how it disturbs our ability to tell stories about what’s happening to us in yesterdays post What is a “rights” agenda, with ever increasing inequity?
Mining live stories from big data is way to build human understanding
Use maps of natural silos of conversation to find who you need to talk to and how!
I ran across five wonderful examples this week alone, of ways to bridge the enormous cultural and intellectual divides the keep us from arriving at a common understanding of what to do with the earth. My topic yesterday saw how an economy structured to produce both ever increasing complexity, inequity results in the breakdown of traditional cultures and ways of knowing, a loss of stories for giving our lives meaning. Learning to see the problems can also be used to find solutions too, of course, the main one here perhaps just learning to see what we’er doing to ourselves. The thought process leads to seeing what strategies are failing us is not so different from that used for discovering promising new ones.
One identifies where the cultures that guide us lose track of what’s happening to them. The other discovers exposes the flows of events in a way allowing us to create the new stories that will matter in our lives. It’s how all human rights are achieved, by recognizing them as the clear story that beings order to a disruptively changing world, recognizing how nature connects the dots, letting us frame not just “good stories” but also “true stories” about finding a sound new path.
The practicalities of recognizing “what’s really happening” so we can use our values to fashion the stories telling us what to do will mostly not need a lot of big words and shiny promises. You can do it with “big data”, even if today its main use seems to be for controlling personal data to make growing amounts of money from deny people their individuality. You can also us it to mine the data world to pick up clear signs of whole new cultures emerging you’d otherwise never be aware of, for example. Having ways of visualizing the eventfulness of change globally, on many dimensions, would be a very *different* kind of “news feed”, a true globally holistic “news feed”.
Every community could study the eventful flows of changing relationships, personal, cultural, economic, ecological, that matter to it, rather than just listen to media largely composed of chattering entertainers and politicians after money and power. If a way of mining data for signs of events could show people what’s really happening to their world, and that became the the talk of the community, everyone could participate in shaping the news and the new stories about our human rights tell us to do. It would give the media a real story to cover too. The practical job to make that possible, though, is more like science than philosophy. It’s to learn to recognize that eventful change comes from the emergence of new forms of organization, that generally begin with a viral burst of development, that energize whole systems, altering the balance and roles withing their environments, like organisms that growth from a seed to build new natural capital or flame out.
Shown as the general stages of growth for a new form of organization, from novelty to maturity
Examples
1. – Changes in Word Use – I am not an expert in semantic analysis, fundamental changes in word use, particularly if following a clear developmental pattern generally do indicate a change in the world of people and their way of speaking about it. Developmental changes in word usage expose important cultural experiences of the people writing the text. I’ve used comparisons of the Google histories of word frequencies obtained from scanned libraries of books, their “Ngram” tool. I’ve also used the histories of word use in magazines, newspapers and even Google Scholar, such as to identify
Along with the various other “story mining” methods discussed in the introduction to my scientific method for mining the stories of natural change processes, and method of interpreting them:
Learning to read the eventfulness of our world – People who have some personal experience with the environments in which these explosive changes took place, as eruptions of new organization for those worlds, these documented records of the shapes of their stages of growth provide rich reminders and new challenges to imaging what was really going on to produce the new environments the created.
Papers on “General Systems”(yellow), Papers and Citations for “General Systems Theory” (black & pink)
“Pop Corn” flurries of articles on sustainability as the subject emerged in the NY Times, and Accumulative trend
The 1990 beginning of the big eruption of mentions of Hip-Hop in the NY Times also coincided with the historic sharp decline in NYC crime rates, culture change as kids changed who they looked up to.
Use of “complex” followed growing economic complexity up to ~1960, when we appear to have either lost interest or the ability to keep up, with the fast increasing complexity of our world.
Today one might also use Twitter and other social media, and also collect data on product and book sales and lots of other sources. Of course, the sources would vary considerably from country to country, but the method would be the same. What’s important is for the text or numeric data being scanned for “natural coupling” be “neutral” and not influenced by the subject being explored.
What might be possible, putting it all together, is to identify natural cells of social relationships and their interests, cultural “silos” of relationships identified by their ways of using language, in real time. There are security questions whenever new kinds of information are made available, so such maps should be abstract. The most valuable feature of such a “map” of connections, though, is the ability to then see who’s NOT connecting, the isolated constituencies.
You’d see what conversations are intense in one group and missing from another, say between Twitter and the local newspaper as one possible divide., defining two communities with differing values and interests. That would be a great tool for understanding a society, and a great tool for social activist groups, letting them see how to stop “preaching to the choir”, for one example. It wold also give them insight into the words and interests of the groups they need to connect with, but hadn’t known how. Seen that way it’s a “partnership tool”, allowing people to see through the silo walls just enough to make some connections.
This is a serious effort to describe in natural language a well thought out way for a market economy to follow organic systems principles, and decouple from conquering the earth to reorient its development toward finding its secure place on earth. It would be driven by our goal seeking social and economic communities developing new markets and partnerships for mutual benefit as markets always serve to steer the economy, but having much better information on what’s profitable, and recognizing the true cost of inaction. As we find how to do it the economy would also change from building itself up internally to making itself at home externally.
By redirecting our resources from pressing ever harder on the limits of the earth, and instead aim for relieving the strain on ourselves and the earth, the economy would become relatively more profitable than before as it heals. A great many of the key goals of sustainability (SDG’s) being stated again and again at the UN, would be achieved naturally this way. Other critical goals would still take concerted planning and government action, but would become more practical to accomplish.
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Incentives to Sustainably Lower Our Global Footprint
Holistic and accurate measures of ESG costs of production and consumption
An Information System Everyone can understand, for a Self-managing World
Turning the economic pursuit from “conquest” to “homemaking”
“Nature’s Capitalism”, first profiting from building things, then by caring for them
Steering Capitalism with a purpose: giving us a good home on Earth
A. The idea
The natural way economies determine their futures is by “market choices”, as financial, business and consumer markets look for how to get what they want from each other and the earth. Then governments, the press, professions and open societies watch out for the common interest. That’s what designs of the economy of our future, telling developers what new parts to add or old ones replace.
Those market choices often don’t reflect common interests just for our natural lack of information. What was done around the world to deliver goods or services is not collected and passed along as they are paid for, What’s becoming possible is like that, ways to identify future societal costs that business may be held responsible for in the future, practices like adding to global inequities or harming our economic future.
Comparing comprehensive sustainability balance sheets, for finding development proposals with financially and culturally acceptable risks and benefits. Global benefits/People centered, Homemaking
Just one new fact about money can release a great wealth of information on that. It’s that the “hidden consequences” of using money we don’t immediately see have been scientifically shown to most often be close to “average”[1]. In information terms, that serves to “internalize all externalities”, opening the door to what has eluded us, a way to make sound decisions for the world as a whole.
It would let us build an information system making the choices responsible for impacts transparent for all to see. For example, spending one dollar generally adds about 1 pound of CO2 to the atmosphere. We might select the least cost engineering option for ending our addition of CO2 to the atmosphere as a standard measure, possibly bio-char, estimated to cost $.20 per pound of CO2. That would be equal to an impressive “tax” on GDP, of $.20/$1, an indicator of how poorly the earth’s profits are being used.
People would then clearly see, for example, that as we build more and more for the future economy to take care of, a natural turning point approaches for investors and everyone else, of diminishing total returns. So as growth becomes seen as a drain on future profits, the most profitable use of profits becomes caring for the environments creating the profits, not compounding our demands on them.
[1]Henshaw, J. 2011 Systems Energy Assessment. Sustainability MDPI. http://synapse9.com/SEA – People are “end users” of the consumption economy AND “end servers” of the production economy. The “end producers” for any dollar of goods or services are SO wide spread one must first assume, every dollar is distributed as an average share of GDP and reflects the average impacts of the whole, good and bad.
This post is for the UN’s OWG 5 proceedings next week, on Post2015 Macro Economic development positions. It led to the OWG 8 proposal “A World SDG“, introducing an integrated true scientific measure of sustainability... It’s now followed with “The Decoupling Puzzle – a partial answer” , on measuring our “decoupling rate”, and the development space reserved within planetary boundaries, such as for achieving world cultural wellbeing!
Sadly, as careful as I am with the language, there is some scientific thinking… so the social organizations generally found no way to engage in discussing it. The basic principle is that “when you build something you then need to take care of it”… something everyone knows in their personal lives. That runs into the problem that, culturally, we don’t see economic growth as “building something”. We see it culturally as a “constant” of prosperity… the ultimate tragedy of our times. that ever faster change is seen as “constant” it seems. 4/21/14 jlh
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As a young systems scientist many years ago
I noticed a need for a better type of economic model,
that would connect money to its “externalities” in part. More importantly it would let people see economies as the complex living organisms they really are. What I found was the universal stages of natural development, that are repeated in the way any natural event or system develops from small beginnings to multiply at first, and then by multiplying in it’s environment changes it, an Organizational Stages Model (OSM)
Economies are chock full of independently organized and behaving social and cultural communities behaving like organisms, that each develops from a seed of organization in an environment of resources. You can talk about “why” things occur, causes at a distance or coincidences but that’s an intellectual issue, a prediction, a theory.
This is about using the most general of pattern of “how” individual events occur the processes of developmental causation taking place in nature in every location where events occur.
Economies, for example, are all populated by actively creative and learning people, discovering things and following each other’s leads…. So what this “Organizational Stages Model” (OSM) approach focuses on for economies is how people learn and how what they learn to do spreads as transformational stages of growth and the emergence of new systems, and their natural limits. The simple rule, for the transformative stages of any process of new emerging organization, then, is that it’s organizational process will follow an “S” curve. The first half is of multiplying innovation and expansion of connections, a “burst of development”, and the second a process of rebalancing and integrating.
Organizational Stages Model
That’s the dynamic we need to capture in our minds to understand the world we live in. An economy is really a whole “civilization” in fact, organized like an ecosystem, accumulating and passing on its knowledge of “how to live” in the form of family and social cultures, as the living “genetic code” of the societies they create. THAT is what the word “growth” refers to, the compound rates of expansion of that whole organic living culture.
As systems of nature, all those living parts and the whole, first grow and then mature to live and later decline
by very much the same succession of life’s great transformative experiences.
The ultimate most useful model for it I found is really cool! It’s organized as “a Narrative of Life” as a great chain of instrumental transformations. I’ve been looking for a name for my life’s work on it.. perhaps “Life Narrative Studies” (LNS) would do. I won’t further introduce it here, as it’s what my whole site is about, but just present this new graphic to help readers get a feel for the general pattern.
How Natural Systems Work… is by forming processes that produce a profit, used to grow it, in a burst of creative self-organization, to become sustainable ONLY IF the profits that built it get used to maintain what was built; the essential road map.
That general model of nature’s “facts of life” is your “quick start”. Following is a foreword and then a compact introduction to a scientific method. Anyone can observe the details of how developmental systems work by just learning to study the development of individual systems in nature. You start with learning how to identify natural “living systems” as what fills our environments from watching how they develop. Then you can recognize them as cells of organization that produce resources for their own development. Easier reading descriptions are found in:
How Natural Systems Fail… A growth system that can’t change to maintaining itself after building itself, becomes disabled. As for our modern world economy, at the limits of the earth, keeps devoting more and more effort to expanding, it drains resources from maintaining itself. What’s wrong is the essential road map for sustainability is missing. It is absent from our great cultural conversations, absent from the models of the professions and groups trying to stabilize the economy or seek “sustainability”.
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An Organizational Stages Model (OSM)
– the science –
Foreword: Understanding natural systems involves learning how to first recognize them as individually developing systems, and then discover some of the hidden organization within them. You can find them where you see events have “lives of their own”. The real learning is a “learning by doing” process, as the key is discovering how to define your words by referring to self-defining objects of the natural world, not defining words with other words or use abstract models.
Abstract languages are “self-referential” and what a science of natural systems needs is words defined by nature. To understand system models, then, you then need to consider them as questions about the real world subjects that are NOT in the model… but referred to by the words associated with the natural subject, a new way of scientific thinking.
Most any history of events will have periods of accumulating change that speed up and then slow down. That becomes the main subject, the key that unlocks the basket of productive questions about “what’s happening”. It’s the question that identifies a systematic process of change as a sign of a developmental process and evidence of a self-organizing system doing it.
When some local system of change is “taking off” or later “fading away”, you notice where it and begin piecing together what is doing it, by watching for regularly changing rates of change. It could be anything from the history of your own career choices, to the stages of organization for “the big prom”, the founding of your own business or the dramatic global shifts in economies and societies that “history” is itself a record of.
[This is a sample graph showing a real systemic transformation. Only the data is shown to focus your attention on the changing rates of change](i)
It definitely helps to have some kind of “data” to indicate when locally developing changes are speeding up or slowing down, and notice the turning point from one to the other. The different periods of behavior display different states of organization, and are used for “building a narrative ” for how one transitions into the next. The traditional scientific. For systems with hidden organization, it’s the continuity of change that is the direct evidence, of organization you can’t actually see, but can expect to find if you look there for it.
Posts on the UN NGO Week 4 Sustainability dialog for “WorldWeWant2015“ – Post II references Post I below it, and is in reply to Alison Doig, working with Christian Aid, Green Alliance, WWF, Greenpeace and RSPB to understand the nature of the relation between environmental sustainability, quoted at the bottom. Alison lays out a set of simple but broad principles for sustainability, a preview of a longer paper, but missing key issues for working with the natural phases of developmental processes for environmental transformations. jlh
See also Jan 2014 OWG7 proposed World SDGincorporating this principle and others
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Post II Jessie Henshaw Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Alison, Your approach seems quite sensible, but to be missing one of the key controlling variables for all these objectives. That’s whether the improvements you seek are “by an accumulation of larger steps” or “by an accumulation of smaller steps”. An accumulation of smaller steps is probably sustainable, and an accumulation of larger steps is necessary to get any process of change started, but quite unsustainable, is the interesting rub.
This distinction is also quite missing from the whole discussion, always has been actually, so you’re not to be faulted for overlooking it. Still, it does in fact control whether any of the things we hope will be sustainable actually will be. I’m a systems physicist and this is the subject I study, both how all sorts of development processes need to begin and end, and how easy it is for people to overlook the whole subject. I’d very much like to work with you if you see how to build any of this into your report in progress.
As a matter of change over time, start-up development always needs to be divergent and expansive, a series of ever bigger steps, and maturing development always needs to be converging and self-limited, a series of ever smaller steps. In-between the physical momentum of change builds and decays.
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”
Sometimes you watch the people, sometimes their flows. The flows are roles in larger scale systems of group motion, forming as people avoid interference, but can confine them till they find an opening too. Markets flows form paths and break from them as new paths are found, often flocking in chase of a wave of anticipation, or uncertainty moving leaderless floods. Those are puzzling, since there may be no news the contagious change in direction, but systemic change generally usually has a real cause. Flocks of birds appear to do it just for fun though.
Both natural and human designed complex organizations have independent parts that create emergent properties by fitting multiple roles. Day and night, male and female, work and relaxation, pencil and paper, cup and liquid, all the amazing polarities that produce reliable results because of how they fit their multiple roles, quite unlike any set of fixed rules could ever do. The trick is only physical parts and their relationships can do that, and a pattern language those relationships provide a way to develop concepts for understanding the working parts.
