Abstract
LIFE IS FULL OF UNKNOWNS and rich with complexities. Two people experiencing a situation might interpret it differently. Even familiar situations might take unpredictable turns.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that key systems terms are used in various ways. The terms complex and complexity, for example, might refer to a tradition or field of systems study, a mathematical theory or approach, a descriptor of situations and systems in the world, or a descriptor of individual perceptions, as in “The complexity of a system is in the eye of the beholder,” in C. S. Holling, “Perceiving and Managing the Complexity of Ecological Systems,” in The Science and Praxis of Complexity: Contributions to the Symposium Held at Montpellier, France, 9–11 May, 1984 (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1985), 217. For an introduction to the study of complexity, see Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 2.
For the phrase systems literacy, I am indebted to Peter Tuddenham. Drawing on forty years of experience in systems education at the Open University, Ray Ison and Monica Shelley described systems literacy as a curriculum for helping students recover or foster a systemic sensibility and thereby develop systems thinking in practice. Ray Ison and Monica Shelley, “Governing in the Anthropocene: Contributions from Systems Thinking in Practice?,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 33 (2016): 589–94.
- 3.
On feedback dynamics and diagrams, see Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008); George P. Richardson, “Problems in Causal Loop Diagrams Revisited,” System Dynamics Review 13 (1997): 247–52; and Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1990).
- 4.
General systems theory, in particular, has emphasized the study of isomorphisms or patterns. See, for example, Robert Rosen, “Old Trends and New Trends in General Systems Research,” International Journal of General Systems 5 (1979): 173–84.
- 5.
Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smithies, Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences (New York: MacMillan, 1969); Debora Hammond, The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003). For a contemporary example of a reductionism critique, see Joichi Ito and Jeff Howe, Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (New York: Grand Central, 2016).
- 6.
Gregory Bateson, as quoted in his daughter Nora Bateson’s film, An Ecology of Mind (Cologne, Germany: Mindjazz Pictures, 2011), http://www.anecologyofmind.com.
- 7.
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 243–44.
- 8.
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble,” Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene, May 9, 2014, https://vimeo.com/97663518.
- 9.
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1991), dates the hyphenated word feed-back to 1920. Online etymological sources date the word, in hyphenated and two-word form, to 1909 and 1865, respectively. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Trevithj.
- 10.
For a systems-based study of rice farming, see Stephen Lansing, Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
- 11.
On the historical development of feedback control devices, see Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and George Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications, 1991).
- 12.
Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 19.
- 13.
On Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, see Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener—The Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948); and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. D. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
- 14.
For a contemporary perspective on cybernetics, see Paul Pangaro, accessed March 29, 2017, http://www.pangaro.com/definition-cybernetics.html.
- 15.
The description of purposeful behavior in the caption of figure 7-2 draws on sources that include Chris Argyris, On Organizational Learning, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Ray Ison, Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate Change World (London: Springer, 2010); Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995); and Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
- 16.
On incorporating purpose, reflexivity, or complexity into scientific research and practice, see Hilary Bradbury, “Introduction: How to Situate and Define Action Research,” in The Sage Handbook of Action Research, 3rd ed., ed. Hilary Bradbury (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2015); Karl H. Müller and Alexander Riegler, “Second-Order Science: A Vast and Largely Unexplored Science Frontier,” Constructivist Foundations 10 (2015): 7–15; and Stuart A. Kauffman and Arran Gare, “Beyond Descartes and Newton: Recovering Life and Humanity,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 119 (2015): 219–44.
- 17.
Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978), 28.
- 18.
On identity, see Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets, Identity Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Howard Silverman and Gregory M. Hill, “The Dynamics of Purposeful Change: A Model,” Ecology and Society (in review); and Wenger, Communities of Practice.
- 19.
On ecological theories of structural coupling and niche construction, see Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, A Systems View of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); John F. Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Thomas C. Scott-Phillips et al., “The Niche Construction Perspective: A Critical Appraisal,” Evolution 68 (2014): 1231–43.
- 20.
Richard C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 109.
- 21.
This paragraph draws particularly on the work of Lynn Margulis. On Margulis’s definitions of symbiosis and symbiogenesis, see Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Lynn Margulis, “Lynn Margulis 2004 Rutgers Interview,” uploaded April 12, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8xqu_TlQPU; and Jan Sapp, “Too Fantastic for Polite Society: A Brief History of Symbiosis Theory,” in Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel, ed. Dorian Sagan (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012). On the pre-Margulis origins of symbiosis theory, see Sapp, “Too Fantastic for Polite Society.”
- 22.
For a recent review of microbiological sciences, see Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).
- 23.
Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” Quarterly Review of Biology 87 (2012): 325.
- 24.
Charles Mann, “Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother,” Science 252 (1991): 378.
- 25.
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (New York: Dutton, 2016), 113.
- 26.
On emergence, see P. W. Anderson, “More Is Different,” Science 177 (1982): 393–96; and Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001).
- 27.
On the 80/20 or success-to-the-successful pattern, see Pierpaolo Andriani and Bill McKelvey, “From Gaussian to Paretian Thinking: Causes and Implications of Power Laws in Organizations,” Organization Science 20 (2009): 1053–71; Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New York: Plume 2003); David Clingingsmith, “Are the World’s Languages Consolidating? The Dynamics and Distribution of Language Populations,” Economic Journal 127 (2015): 143–76; Daniel H. Kim and Virginia Anderson, System Archetype Basics: From Story to Structure (Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications, 1998); and Derek J. de Solla Price, “Networks of Scientific Papers,” Science 149 (1965): 510–15.
- 28.
On threshold models of collective behavior, see Mark Granovetter, “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” American Journal of Sociology 83 (1978): 1420–43; Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); and Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior.
- 29.
For introductions to these policy designs, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(Christianity), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income, and http://dividendsforall.net/.
- 30.
On systems and design, see Howard Silverman, “Designerly Ways for Action Research,” in The Sage Handbook of Action Research, 3rd ed., ed. Hilary Bradbury (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2015); and John Thackara, How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015).
- 31.
W. Horst, J. Rittel, and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 160.
- 32.
On time, stability, and inertia, see Scott E. Page, “Path Dependence,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 1 (2006): 87–115; and Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984).
- 33.
Russell Ackoff, “If Russ Ackoff Had Given a TED Talk …,” 1994, uploaded October 23, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqEeIG8aPPk; Frances Westley et al., “Tipping toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation,” Ambio 40 (2011): 762–80.
- 34.
Howard S. Becker, “The Power of Inertia,” Qualitative Sociology 18 (1995): 301–9; Harry Partch, “Harry Partch—Music Studio,” uploaded January 7, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8NIpPhXpfQ.
- 35.
On assemblage theory, see Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). On transition theory, see Derk Loorbach, “To Transition! Governance Panarchy in the New Transformation,” 2014, http://www.transitiefocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/To_Transition-Loorbach-2014.pdf. On resilience theory, see Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function (Washington DC: Island Press, 2012); and Westley et al., “Tipping toward Sustainability.”
- 36.
See chapter 9, “Solving for Pattern,” in Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San Francisco: North Point, 1981).
- 37.
Bruce Sterling, “How the Cyber Age Gave Peace a Chance,” New Scientist, August 17, 2016, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130874-700-how-the-cyber-age-gave-peace-a-chance/.
- 38.
For synthetic views of systems traditions as belonging to a common field of study and practice, see Michael Jackson, Systems Approaches to Management (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2000); and Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp, Systems Thinkers (London: Springer, 2009).
- 39.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 177.
- 40.
James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony 20, no. 10 (August 1965): 47.
- 41.
Donella Meadows, “The Power of Vision,” International Society for Ecological Economics, 1994, uploaded July 9, 2010, http://vimeo.com/13213667.
- 42.
John McKnight, “Asset Based Community Development,” March 2, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSwpQWAUQAc.
- 43.
C. West Churchman, The Systems Approach (New York: Delacorte, 1968), 231. On appreciation, see also Geoffrey Vickers, The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).
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Silverman, H. (2017). Systems Literacy: A Toolkit for Purposeful Change. In: Lerch, D. (eds) The Community Resilience Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-861-9_8
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