Systems Thinking

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Category:Others | Tags:management, systemsdynamics, systemsthinking

Created:on 2007-11-03 | Updated:on 2008-10-04

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Nothing-Buttery

Tags: reductionism, systemsthinking on 2008-10-04 -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.twu.ca
- Another apt description is due to Donald MacKay, author of A Clock Work Image (InterVarsity, 1974), who calls such notions "nothing-buttery". We encounter, nearly every day, the idea that "X" is nothing but "Y":
  
  A person is nothing but a collection of protoplasm.
  
  A person is nothing but a pile of atoms.
  
  Beethoven's 5th is nothing but vibrations in the air.
  
  Love is nothing but chemistry.
  
  A photograph is nothing but pixels on a screen.
  
  Sometimes the words "nothing but" are left out, but the problem remains: it is supposed that "X" doesn't really exist since sciences has shown that it's actually just "Y". Two of my main goals in teaching are to expose the problems with reductionism and to open students' minds to the much broader perspective offered by a Christian worldview.
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On the Nature of Models: Let us now praise famous men and Women (Stafford Beer)

Tags: cybernetics, management, systemsthinking on 2008-10-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Essential Message: Claude Shannon and the Making of Information Theory

Tags: communication, cybernetics, systemsthinking on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Hypertext, Cybernetics, Cyborgs and Virtual Realities

Tags: cybernetics, systemsthinking, systems thinking on 2008-08-30 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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An Introduction to Cybernetics by Ross Ashby

Tags: systemsthinking, cybernetics on 2008-08-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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On the Metaphysics of Management

Tags: Management, process, systemsthinking on 2008-08-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Cybernetics home page - University of Reading

Tags: cybernetics, systemsthinking, systems thinking on 2008-08-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Mental Model Musings

Tags: s, systems, systems thinking, systemsthinking on 2008-08-19 and saved by17 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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Redefining the CEO Agenda for the 21st Century - Umair Haque

Or consider what Eric Schmidt said today: that Google has a "moral imperative" to help publishers benefit from advertising. That's a living example of one of the principles we've discussed - good beats evil - being used to make real-world strategic decisions.\n\nHow many other CEOs have mentioned the words "moral imperative" recently? Almost none. The results of a search on that phrase related to CEOs, for example, are almost all Eric Schmidt - and I stopped counting after ten pages of results. More tellingly, the inverse search - CEOs who aren't Eric Schmidt talking about a moral imperative - yields almost no meaningful results.\n\nCan you imagine Steve Ballmer, Steve Case, Chuck Prince, Michael Eisner, Rupert Murdoch, or Jeff Immelt talking about a "moral imperative"? It's about as likely as Elvis coming back from the beyond. Why don't they? Because orthodox management and strategy have given them tools and concepts built for an industrial era. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the companies they run (or ran) are falling squarely into strategy decay.\n\nAnd that's how Google ends up in a league of it's own. Schmidt's quote is important because it's a vivid demonstration of Google having the courage to question business as usual - in fact, this time, Schimdt is challenging perhaps the foundational orthodoxy of industrial-era business.\n\nGreed is good, right? Wrong. In fact, good is good: today, it's good that can be deeply strategic, and powerfully profitable.\n\nThink about that for a second.\n\nNo - Google doesn't always get it right, it doesn't always do no evil, and doing good isn't the only new principle of management (here's another one). In the coming days, we'll discuss Google's weaknesses. But Google - to resort to an inelegant turn of phrase - gets it.\n\nI discuss Google often because I think it just might be the first real 21st century business: a company with a radically different set of principles wired into it's DNA. Larry, Sergey, and Eric, I think, understand intuitively that the tools and c

Tags: Management, systemsthinking on 2008-08-15 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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- Or consider what Eric Schmidt said today: that Google has a "moral imperative" to help publishers benefit from advertising. That's a living example of one of the principles we've discussed - good beats evil - being used to make real-world strategic decisions.
  
  How many other CEOs have mentioned the words "moral imperative" recently? Almost none. The results of a search on that phrase related to CEOs, for example, are almost all Eric Schmidt - and I stopped counting after ten pages of results. More tellingly, the inverse search - CEOs who aren't Eric Schmidt talking about a moral imperative - yields almost no meaningful results.
- Can you imagine Steve Ballmer, Steve Case, Chuck Prince, Michael Eisner, Rupert Murdoch, or Jeff Immelt talking about a "moral imperative"? It's about as likely as Elvis coming back from the beyond. Why don't they? Because orthodox management and strategy have given them tools and concepts built for an industrial era. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the companies they run (or ran) are falling squarely into strategy decay.
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Governance and Metagovernance: On Reflexivity, Requisite Variety, and Requisite Irony Bob Jessop

Tags: systemsthinking, cybernetics on 2008-08-15 -All Annotations (0) -About

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SemioPhysics Articles - HEINZ

Tags: cybernetics, systemsthinking, causality on 2008-10-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

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- The import of Heinz’s impact rests upon recognizing the difference
  between trivial thought and non-trivial understanding. For Heinz the
  abstract notion of a "machine" denotes any conceptual device used to
  contemplate something. Machines are mechanisms that link a
  system's external variables to the system's internal states (if there
  are any) and its operations. Machines describe the form of such
  linkages and can be realized in flesh and blood or on a silicon
  chip. They are not to be thought of as what people or beings are
  but rather machines are the generalized patterns of thought which
  connect. Heinz describes two types of machines: trivial and
  non-trivial. Heinz depicts the implications of trivial machines to be
  like the schemas of a light switch or a soda machine, in that they
  characterize modes of thinking in different domains that employ
  cause-effect thinking and the desire for predictability. Given
  the same input you get the same output. You have, for example, a
  cause (the input), the law of nature (the transfer function) and then
  you get the effect (output). With a trivial machine, say a soda
  machine, you put in your money, push the soda choice (coke, orange,
  7-Up) and get your soda. The trivial machine is designed to give
  a specific output to every specific input. Imagine that the soda
  machine had "internal states" that biased or even determined what soda
  would come out despite your selection. That is, pretend that the
  machine had developed internal dynamics that made its output
  unpredictable. What if you are in the mood for a coke and you
  punch the coke button but the machine is in a "7-up mood" and so gives
  you 7-Up? That kind of unpredictability would render the machine
  non-trivial.
- Heinz von Foerster: "the trivial machine is the mainstay, the paradigm,
  underlying our 'logical' working conditions in almost all fields of
  study." Some examples from Heinz's biography The Dream of Reality
  by Lynn Segal:
  
  Input
  
            Transfer
  Function
              Output
  
  ____________________________________________________________________
  
  1. Cause
  
  
  Law of nature
            Effect
  
  2. Stimulus
  
            Central nervous
  system
     Response
  
  3. Motivation
  
  Character
  
              Deeds
  
  4. Goal
  
  System
  
             Action
  
  5. Minor premise
            Major
  premise
         Conclusion
  
  6. Dependent argument    Independent
  Argument         Function
  
  "These machines have the following properties:
  
  1) They are
  predictable.
  
  2) They are history
  independent. Whatever took place in the
  past will not
  influence the present.
  
  3) They are
  synthetically deterministic. You can plug them
  together. You can
  synthesize them.
  
  4) They are
  analytically deterministic. If you want to find
  out how they work, you can give them inputs, observe
  the outputs, and figure out the transfer function.”
- "By contrast, the nontrivial machine is:
  
  1) Synthetically
  deterministic, i.e., you can glue a nontrivial
  machine together, just as you can do with a trivial machine. For
  example, you can write down a transfer table.
  
  2) Unlike the trivial
  machine, however, it is historically
  dependent. What it does, its output, is determined by its
  experience, its history.
  
  3) It is analytically
  indeterminable; you
  can't figure out what the machine is ` doing by
  operating it because it is too complex.
  
  4) It is therefore analytically
  unpredictable.” [11]
  
  Heinz, "If one wants to use the word 'reality,' the nontrivial machine
  models the reality with which we are working. The trivial machine
  is just a hope, a predicted wish for the way we would like things to
  be, we trivialize them. We trivialize complex systems so we can
  predict and explain them." [12] The trivial machine epitomizes
  our quest for certainty.
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Obituary: Heinz von Foerster | Independent, The (London) | Find Articles at BNET

Tags: foerster, cybernetics, systemsthinking on 2008-08-15 -All Annotations (0) -About

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PROFESSOR ANTHONY GIDDENS - Reith Lectures

Tags: Culture, systemsthinking on 2008-08-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromnews.bbc.co.uk
- As the changes I have described in this lecture gather weight, they are creating something that has never existed before, a global cosmopolitan society. We are the first generation to live in this society, whose contours we can as yet only dimly see. It is shaking up our existing ways of life, no matter where we happen to be. This is not - at least at the moment - a global order driven by collective human will. Instead, it is emerging in an anarchic, haphazard, fashion, carried along by a mixture of economic, technological and cultural imperatives.
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Making a Difference: Systems Thinking / Systems Change

Tags: ackoff, systemsthinking on 2008-07-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Business Model Warfare

Tags: innovation, systemsthinking on 2008-05-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

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YouTube - ronpdavison's Channel

Tags: systemsthinking on 2008-05-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

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FT.com | Willem Buiter’s Maverecon | Risk taking, remuneration and leverage

Tags: Risk, Markets, systemsthinking on 2008-05-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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It’s All About Me:Narcissistic CEOs and Their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance

Tags: HR, Systemsthinking on 2008-04-30 -All Annotations (0) -About

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What's Wrong with Pay-for-Performance | Labor & Employment > Compensation & Benefits from AllBusiness.com

Tags: hr, management, systemsthinking on 2008-03-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Systematically Poisoning Employee Engagement | Mission Minded Management

Tags: hr, systemsthinking on 2008-03-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Joel Liu

on 2008-05-31

( SF , CA , United States )

Systems Thinking

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