Governing in the Anthropocene: What Future Systems Thinking in Practice?

The revealing and concealing features of the metaphor ‘earth as Anthropocene’ are explored in an inquiry that asks: In the Anthropocene what possible futures emerge for systems thinking in practice? Framing choice, so important yet so poorly realised, is the starting point of the inquiry. Three extant conceptual pathway-dependencies are unpacked: governance or governing; practice or practising and ‘system’. New data on the organisational complexity within the field of cybersystemics is presented; new ‘imaginaries’ including systemic co-inquiry and institutional recovery are proposed as novel institutions and practices to facilitate systemic transformations within an Anthropocene setting. The arguments of the paper are illustrated through a research case study based on attempts to transform water and/or river situations towards systemic water governance. It is concluded that future systems research can be understood as the search for effective ‘imaginaries’ that offer fresh possibilities within an Anthropocene framing

Fruits of Gregory Bateson’s epistemological crisis: embodied mind-making and interactive experience in research and professional praxis

Background: The espoused rationale for this special issue, situated “at the margins of cybernetics,” was to revisit and extend the common genealogy of cybernetics and communication studies. Two possible topics garnered our attention: 1) the history of intellectual adventurers whose work has appropriated cybernetic concepts; and 2) the remediation of cybernetic metaphors. Analysis: A heuristic for engaging in first- and second-order R&D praxis, the design of which was informed by co-research with pastoralists (1989–1993) and the authors’ engagements with the scholarship of Bateson and Maturana, was employed and adapted as a reflexive in-quiry framework.Conclusion and implications: This inquiry challenges the mainstream desire for change and the belief in getting the communication right in order to achieve change. The authors argue this view is based on an epistemological error that continues to produce the very problems it intends to diminish, and thus we live a fundamental error in epistemology, false ontology, and misplaced practice. The authors offer instead conceptual and praxis possibilities for triggering new co-evolutionary trajectories

Stafford Beer in memoriam – ‘an argument of change’ three decades on.

Purpose This paper is written in memory of the late Stafford Beer. The paper engages with only one dimension of the whole man: Stafford Beer as the diagnostician and prognostician of the social conditions that he so keenly observed. Design/methodology/approach The paper revisits a talk that Stafford Beer gave, over three decades ago, to administrators of the UK National Health Service (NHS). It uses the content of the talk, entitled “Health and Quiet Breathing”, to diagnose the problems that have been encountered in the development of NHS information management strategies. The paper concludes with some brief personal recollections of Stafford Beer as a friend and as a teacher. Findings The paper finds Stafford Beer’s managerial cybernetics to be a useful tool in understanding many of the problems that have beset NHS information management strategies: lack of operational research, problems in the commodification of information, financial scandal, and bureaucracy. In its examination of these issues, the paper recognises Stafford Beer’s status as a legatee of not only Norbert Wiener, but also of the great philosophers. Value The paper demonstrates how the problem-orientation of Stafford Beer’s managerial cybernetics continues to be fresh and relevant to today’s society and provides a brief portrait of him both as a friend and as a teacher

Systems thinking and practice for action research

This chapter offers some grounding in systems thinking and practice for doing action research. There are different traditions within systems thinking and practice which, if appreciated, can become part of the repertoire for practice by action researchers. After exploring some of these lineages the differences between systemic and systematic thinking and practice are elucidated – these are the two adjectives that come from the word 'system', but they describe quite different understandings and practices. These differences are associated with epistemological awareness and distinguishing systemic action research from action research. Finally, some advantages for action research practice from engaging with systems thinking and practice are discussed

Systems practice and the design of learning systems: orchestrating an ecological conversation

Human beings live in language and only they can take responsibility for how they think and act. So what understandings of response are possible? The relationship between responsibility and response-abilty is explored in the light of emerging critiques of the prevailing Western attitude to reason, viz: Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) fundamental challenge to prevailing models of Western thought. They argue that reason (on which much practice is built, including research practice) is: (i) not disembodied, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies and bodily experience; (ii) evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of perceptual and motor inference present in 'lower' animals; (iii) is not universal in the transcendent sense but rather universal in that it is a capacity all humans share; (iv) mostly unconscious; (v) largely metaphorical and imaginative and (vi) not dispassionate but emotionally engaged. Systems practice is introduced as a means to orchestrate a particular type of conversation; it is also an ecological conversation. As a species our unique selling point is that we can engage in conversation. In the process we bring forth both ourselves and our world. To converse is to turn together, to dance, and thus an ecological conversation is a tango of responsibility. A conversation is inventive, unpredictable and is always particularizing to place and people. Drawing on experiences of teaching systems thinking and practice for environmental decision making a praxiology is outlined for stakeholder responsibility and response-ability. It is argued that capacity building in systemic inquiry and the design of learning systems are central to this praxiology

On boundaries and disciplines: constructing a set of key systems thinkers

Over the past four years, the Open University has been working on an internal project of systems scholarship, called 'Systems Thinkers'. We have examined the life and work of fifty key thinkers, held discussions on their significance, and are in the process of writing a book and a postgraduate course about these thinkers. This work has raised many interesting questions about the boundaries of systems as an intellectual and practical discipline. In this paper, we will discuss some of these questions, asking what it means to be a discipline and how to establish its boundaries