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An odd sort of day today, the first of two in a small session discussing system thinking, complexity and the like with people from very different traditions. I'm never fully sure what labels to apply here although I sometimes designate it as systems thinking v complexity but I no that isn't the best way, neither is restricting systems thinking to systems dynamics. MORE
Dr. Arthur is external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and visiting researcher at PARC’s Intelligent Systems Lab. This second, digital economy is essentially acting as the neural system for the overall economy. A major portion of every complex biological organism, including us humans, is the autonomic nervous system. The need for sophisticated control functions to help manage complex systems applies not just to complex biological systems, but to man-made ones as well. MORE
Firstly to prevent confusion with much of systems thinking, especially cybernetics (which by the way has huge value). Secondly to distinguish work on complexity in human systems from that based on non-human systems (although again there is much of value). MORE
I recently participated in MIT’s 2010 Systems Thinking Conference for Contemporary Challenges. This annual conference is sponsored by Systems Design and Management (SDM) - an interdisciplinary program between MIT’s School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management. The SDM program aims to provide mid-career professionals with a systems perspective that will help them address and solve large-scale, global, complex challenges. MORE
What crystallized for me is that it’s not a particular flaw or issue, but it’s a system that can have multiple flaws or multiple points of breakdown. The point is, we have to quit looking at it as design, development, etc; not just as a process, but as a system. MORE
Long the most expensive, time-consuming, and fraught activity in IT, the integration of systems and data has seen recent breakthroughs that make it far easier, faster, and less costly to bring systems together in a high quality way. Here's how SAP is changing the art of the possible MORE
The new transportation system for America became clear last month. Here it is: airports with high speed rail connections to other cities. Here's the news: Virgin Atlantic just invested in the new highly successful Brightline passenger train company, renaming it Virgin Trains USA. The trains will go from Miami to Orlando, and from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Point: Virgin Airways has flights into all four cities. Look for a merged airline-train schedule and ticketing coming soon. MORE
In the first week of October I participated in a Cognitive Systems Colloquium hosted by IBM at its Thomas J. These systems will learn and interact to provide expert assistance to scientists, engineers, lawyers, and other professionals in a fraction of the time it now takes.” . MORE
The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management.” ” @euvieivanova — “If you want to get better at something, you have to stress the system to increase its capacity. MORE
Every large and successful institution has an immune system – a collection of individuals who are prepared to mobilize at the slightest sign of any “outside” ideas or people in order to ensure that these foreign bodies are neutralized and that the existing institution survives intact and can continue on course. In more stable times, institutional immune systems are very effective at keeping institutions focused and on course, resistant to the distractions that might lead to their downfall. MORE
When I look back over my long, relatively eclectic career, complex systems have been a common theme in all the activities I’ve been involved in. It started in the 1960s, when I was an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago majoring in physics, - the study of complex natural systems. My main research interests were centered on large computer systems, including mainframes, supercomputers and distributed systems. MORE
It''s worth parsing this into individual points, because this is (I guess) connectivism from Dron''s perspective: all of which adopt a systems view all of which recognize the distributed nature of knowledge all of which embrace the role of mediating artefacts all of which recognize that more is different all of which adopt a systems perspective all of which describe or proscribe ways to engage in this new ecology. It''s interesting that he makes the point about ''systems'' twice. MORE
Changing leaders will not change the system from which they emerged. Leadership today is more of an architectural task, or one of setting up the right systems. Focus on the Why of Work — Current compensation systems ignore the data on human motivation. MORE
The pilot training system outside North America and Europe played a significant role it seems. The automation of aircraft systems results in safer flights — most of the time. Just checking-the-box continues to be all too prevalent in training systems. Boeing 737 MAX. MORE
Kotter (the change management guru ), has begun to advocate for a dual-operating system approach, where companies jointly support an operational hierarchy and an innovation network that are coupled. MORE
Software-intensive systems are generally quite flexible, - able to evolve and adapt to changing product and market requirements. However, their very flexibility makes it difficult to adequately anticipate and test all the interactions between the various components of the system. MORE
In a complex system we: start journeys with a general sense of direction but without precise targets. The post Fidelity in complex systems consultancy appeared first on Cognitive Edge. MORE
Leyla Acaroglu has an excellent post on Tools for Systems Thinkers: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking. “In Causality : In complex systems we can determine the relationship between cause and effect only in retrospect. MORE
But part of my fascination with the subject is that I often ask myself similar questions when thinking about the equally mysterious world of highly complex emergent systems, that is, systems where the whole can at times be quite different from the sum of their parts. MORE
A painless conversation with a pleasant salesman turned into another bureaucratic nightmare when "the system" decided that the wrong boxes had been ticked in the wrong way and started sending me paperwork reflecting charges 3 TIMES what I was expecting. It''s not them, it''s "the system". They are constrained by the system and have minimal ability to intervene. MORE
Meanwhile Ben Betts says what a lot of us feel: No Business Should Want a Learning Management System. Two articles are trending right next to each other on eLearning Learning this week: Over the past few years, I've been involved in many LMS Selection Processes. MORE
Proclamations of systemic change, particularly in higher education, are more hype than reality. In spite of growing enrolments and expansion of higher education systems worldwide, a small number of folks, generally untethered from reality, are proclaiming higher education as a system in demise. Why, as the knowledge economy expands, would we expect to see knowledge producing systems decline? I recently delivered a talk at UniSA on the topic of how large systems change. MORE
He believes that the current US economy favors big companies over small ones because in today’s environment, three key forces are driving innovation: large-scale ecosystems; globalization; and the vast, systemic challenges posed by business and societal problems that technology now enables us to address. This kind of complex systemic innovation leverages lots of known ideas and makes them work together to help address important problems. MORE
“A System is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay constant long enough for us to discuss it. ~ JeanHouston – “It is as if a worldwide nervous system is in the works. MORE
Every large and successful institution has an immune system – a collection of individuals who are prepared to mobilize at the slightest sign of any “outside” ideas or people in order to ensure that these foreign bodies are neutralized and that the existing institution survives intact and can continue on course. In more stable times, institutional immune systems are very effective at keeping institutions focused and on course, resistant to the distractions that might lead to their downfall. MORE
This post is to introduce you to our Learning and Performance Support Systems program, a new $19 million 5-year initiative at the National Research Council that I will be leading. MORE
While some action and coordination in the workplace can be automated with performance support systems, collaboration and cooperation are still intensely human and require continuous learning. Working Together. Complexity (Cynefin). Social (TIMN). Practices. Group Work. Chaotic. Tribal. Novel. MORE
Another female author is chipping away at the feminist false and harmful belief system. Claire Shipman, co-author of a book on helping girls risk more and gain confidence, tip toes into science, gets a few things wrong, but nevertheless chips away at the false feminist belief system on gender. This book acknowledges the science of the brain and takes on specifically learning in girls and boys. MORE
Naturally I have done a lot more thinking since then but the fundamentals remain: you don’t scale a complex system by aggregation or imitation but be decomposition to an optimal level of granularity followed by recombination (possible exadaptive recombination). MORE
I put up the input/out model I developed (and published with Peter Stanbridge) that splits computational from cognitive complexity and positions both against process management and "systems thinking". MORE
A triple operating system aligns work and learning and has a network perspective. My perspective is that people in organizations cannot take appropriate action unless they have systems in place to consider alternatives, and are aware of the complex environments in which they operate. MORE
I recently read The Human Strategy , a very interesting article on Human-AI decision systems by MIT Media Lab professor Sandy Pentland. Perhaps the most critical function of any organization or society is its decision systems,” wrote Pentland. “In MORE
In thinking about this question over the last few years, I started to notice that a number of subtle, non-intuitive concepts that I learned many years ago as a physics student seem to apply to the world of big data and information-based predictions in highly complex systems. So is the world of highly complex systems , especially those systems whose components and interrelationships are themselves quite complex, as is the case with systems biology and evolution. . MORE
He then proceeded to articulate the two key reasons for focusing on cities, one centered on people, the other on technology and systems. are increasingly the central arena for success or failure. ” “And a city is a system - indeed, a city is a complex system of systems. The week before my trip to Berlin, I attended an Engineering Systems Symposium hosted by MIT. Cities are arguably the ultimate system of systems. MORE
Our panel included Denis Cortese - CEO and President of the Mayo Clinic ; Ronald Paulus - Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Geisinger Health System ; Chris Coburn - Executive Director of Innovations at the Cleveland Clinic ; and Armando Ahued Ortega - Health Secretary of Mexico City. Dr. Cortese started out by telling us that he was not going to talk about actual healthcare, but rather, about systems and systems thinking as it applies to healthcare. MORE
But, they do not work so well when dealing with highly complex systems with fast changing, interacting components, where it is much less clear what is going on in the present, let alone how things will evolve into the future. What do we mean by applying design principles to complex, unpredictable, people oriented systems and problems? But the mechanisms to increase robustness will in turn make the system considerably more complex. MORE
In a conversation last week (ok, an engagement), the topic of content systems came up. This approach emerged from an initiative on an adaptive learning system I led. This includes adaptive systems for learning, but also context-based performance support. MORE
It’s a land grab for the command and control systems that were mostly already there. The idea of these post-internet majors muscling up for some 30-year urban megaproject—a subway system, aqueducts, the sewers—seems goofy.” MORE
“We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. MORE
I recently read The Human Strategy , a very interesting article on Human-AI decision systems by MIT Media Lab professor Sandy Pentland. Perhaps the most critical function of any organization or society is its decision systems,” wrote Pentland. “In In modern societies, decision systems provide a leader the ability to make informed and timely decisions, supported by a complex enterprise of distributed information and communication systems that provide situational awareness. MORE
According to a local professor, the New Brunswick education system is too centralized , but it’s not just education. First we might look at the underlying premises of the current system. In addition, the education system is in for some new competition. MORE
The idea of systems and thinking systematically, about the properties of the whole being different from the parts and the dependency on interaction between system elements has been around for a long time. But general systems theory traces back to the start of the twentieth century. MORE
There are advocates for a dual operating system to deal with the complexity of the networked era: one that is hierarchical and another that is networked. This trinity is not three separate operating systems. MORE
I wrote up my visit to the Intelligent Content conference for eLearnMag , but one topic I didn’t raise was an unanswered question I raised during the conference: should the ‘smarts’ be in the content or the system? Now the obvious answer is the system. Having well-defined content and letting the system use contextual information to choose the content is the typical system used in the industry. MORE
System Related Topics Dave Snowden
AUGUST 19, 2019
Firstly to prevent confusion with much of systems thinking, especially cybernetics (which by the way has huge value). Secondly to distinguish work on complexity in human systems from that based on non-human systems (although again there is much of value).
Harold Jarche
SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management.” ” @euvieivanova — “If you want to get better at something, you have to stress the system to increase its capacity.
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Harold Jarche
SEPTEMBER 27, 2019
The pilot training system outside North America and Europe played a significant role it seems. The automation of aircraft systems results in safer flights — most of the time. Just checking-the-box continues to be all too prevalent in training systems. Boeing 737 MAX.
Clark Quinn
DECEMBER 17, 2019
In a conversation last week (ok, an engagement), the topic of content systems came up. This approach emerged from an initiative on an adaptive learning system I led. This includes adaptive systems for learning, but also context-based performance support.
Dave Snowden
JUNE 21, 2017
The idea of systems and thinking systematically, about the properties of the whole being different from the parts and the dependency on interaction between system elements has been around for a long time. But general systems theory traces back to the start of the twentieth century.
Dave Snowden
OCTOBER 1, 2017
Naturally I have done a lot more thinking since then but the fundamentals remain: you don’t scale a complex system by aggregation or imitation but be decomposition to an optimal level of granularity followed by recombination (possible exadaptive recombination).
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
NOVEMBER 27, 2017
I recently read The Human Strategy , a very interesting article on Human-AI decision systems by MIT Media Lab professor Sandy Pentland. Perhaps the most critical function of any organization or society is its decision systems,” wrote Pentland. “In
Dave Snowden
NOVEMBER 13, 2017
In a complex system we: start journeys with a general sense of direction but without precise targets. The post Fidelity in complex systems consultancy appeared first on Cognitive Edge.
Harold Jarche
NOVEMBER 16, 2018
It’s a land grab for the command and control systems that were mostly already there. The idea of these post-internet majors muscling up for some 30-year urban megaproject—a subway system, aqueducts, the sewers—seems goofy.”
Harold Jarche
JULY 14, 2017
“We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
OCTOBER 23, 2013
In the first week of October I participated in a Cognitive Systems Colloquium hosted by IBM at its Thomas J. These systems will learn and interact to provide expert assistance to scientists, engineers, lawyers, and other professionals in a fraction of the time it now takes.” .
Clark Quinn
MAY 10, 2016
Kotter (the change management guru ), has begun to advocate for a dual-operating system approach, where companies jointly support an operational hierarchy and an innovation network that are coupled.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
NOVEMBER 27, 2017
I recently read The Human Strategy , a very interesting article on Human-AI decision systems by MIT Media Lab professor Sandy Pentland. Perhaps the most critical function of any organization or society is its decision systems,” wrote Pentland. “In In modern societies, decision systems provide a leader the ability to make informed and timely decisions, supported by a complex enterprise of distributed information and communication systems that provide situational awareness.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
MARCH 24, 2015
But part of my fascination with the subject is that I often ask myself similar questions when thinking about the equally mysterious world of highly complex emergent systems, that is, systems where the whole can at times be quite different from the sum of their parts.
Harold Jarche
APRIL 12, 2018
Changing leaders will not change the system from which they emerged. Leadership today is more of an architectural task, or one of setting up the right systems. Focus on the Why of Work — Current compensation systems ignore the data on human motivation.
George Siemens
SEPTEMBER 3, 2013
Proclamations of systemic change, particularly in higher education, are more hype than reality. In spite of growing enrolments and expansion of higher education systems worldwide, a small number of folks, generally untethered from reality, are proclaiming higher education as a system in demise. Why, as the knowledge economy expands, would we expect to see knowledge producing systems decline? I recently delivered a talk at UniSA on the topic of how large systems change.
Harold Jarche
JUNE 1, 2012
“A System is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay constant long enough for us to discuss it. ~ JeanHouston – “It is as if a worldwide nervous system is in the works.
John Hagel
DECEMBER 7, 2017
Every large and successful institution has an immune system – a collection of individuals who are prepared to mobilize at the slightest sign of any “outside” ideas or people in order to ensure that these foreign bodies are neutralized and that the existing institution survives intact and can continue on course. In more stable times, institutional immune systems are very effective at keeping institutions focused and on course, resistant to the distractions that might lead to their downfall.
Euen Semple
DECEMBER 16, 2014
A painless conversation with a pleasant salesman turned into another bureaucratic nightmare when "the system" decided that the wrong boxes had been ticked in the wrong way and started sending me paperwork reflecting charges 3 TIMES what I was expecting. It''s not them, it''s "the system". They are constrained by the system and have minimal ability to intervene.
Dave Snowden
JANUARY 13, 2015
I put up the input/out model I developed (and published with Peter Stanbridge) that splits computational from cognitive complexity and positions both against process management and "systems thinking".
Clark Quinn
MARCH 13, 2014
I wrote up my visit to the Intelligent Content conference for eLearnMag , but one topic I didn’t raise was an unanswered question I raised during the conference: should the ‘smarts’ be in the content or the system? Now the obvious answer is the system. Having well-defined content and letting the system use contextual information to choose the content is the typical system used in the industry.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
DECEMBER 4, 2013
This post is to introduce you to our Learning and Performance Support Systems program, a new $19 million 5-year initiative at the National Research Council that I will be leading.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
JANUARY 2, 2012
He believes that the current US economy favors big companies over small ones because in today’s environment, three key forces are driving innovation: large-scale ecosystems; globalization; and the vast, systemic challenges posed by business and societal problems that technology now enables us to address. This kind of complex systemic innovation leverages lots of known ideas and makes them work together to help address important problems.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
OCTOBER 29, 2010
I recently participated in MIT’s 2010 Systems Thinking Conference for Contemporary Challenges. This annual conference is sponsored by Systems Design and Management (SDM) - an interdisciplinary program between MIT’s School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management. The SDM program aims to provide mid-career professionals with a systems perspective that will help them address and solve large-scale, global, complex challenges.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
APRIL 7, 2015
Software-intensive systems are generally quite flexible, - able to evolve and adapt to changing product and market requirements. However, their very flexibility makes it difficult to adequately anticipate and test all the interactions between the various components of the system.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
DECEMBER 7, 2012
In thinking about this question over the last few years, I started to notice that a number of subtle, non-intuitive concepts that I learned many years ago as a physics student seem to apply to the world of big data and information-based predictions in highly complex systems. So is the world of highly complex systems , especially those systems whose components and interrelationships are themselves quite complex, as is the case with systems biology and evolution. .
Dion Hinchcliffe
DECEMBER 13, 2019
Long the most expensive, time-consuming, and fraught activity in IT, the integration of systems and data has seen recent breakthroughs that make it far easier, faster, and less costly to bring systems together in a high quality way. Here's how SAP is changing the art of the possible
Dave Snowden
JANUARY 12, 2015
An odd sort of day today, the first of two in a small session discussing system thinking, complexity and the like with people from very different traditions. I'm never fully sure what labels to apply here although I sometimes designate it as systems thinking v complexity but I no that isn't the best way, neither is restricting systems thinking to systems dynamics.
Nine Shift
DECEMBER 11, 2018
The new transportation system for America became clear last month. Here it is: airports with high speed rail connections to other cities. Here's the news: Virgin Atlantic just invested in the new highly successful Brightline passenger train company, renaming it Virgin Trains USA. The trains will go from Miami to Orlando, and from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Point: Virgin Airways has flights into all four cities. Look for a merged airline-train schedule and ticketing coming soon.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
JULY 9, 2011
When I look back over my long, relatively eclectic career, complex systems have been a common theme in all the activities I’ve been involved in. It started in the 1960s, when I was an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago majoring in physics, - the study of complex natural systems. My main research interests were centered on large computer systems, including mainframes, supercomputers and distributed systems.
Harold Jarche
NOVEMBER 21, 2015
There are advocates for a dual operating system to deal with the complexity of the networked era: one that is hierarchical and another that is networked. This trinity is not three separate operating systems.
Tony Karrer
OCTOBER 23, 2017
Meanwhile Ben Betts says what a lot of us feel: No Business Should Want a Learning Management System. Two articles are trending right next to each other on eLearning Learning this week: Over the past few years, I've been involved in many LMS Selection Processes.
Harold Jarche
SEPTEMBER 4, 2014
According to a local professor, the New Brunswick education system is too centralized , but it’s not just education. First we might look at the underlying premises of the current system. In addition, the education system is in for some new competition.
Harold Jarche
AUGUST 11, 2016
A triple operating system aligns work and learning and has a network perspective. My perspective is that people in organizations cannot take appropriate action unless they have systems in place to consider alternatives, and are aware of the complex environments in which they operate.
Nine Shift
MAY 22, 2018
Another female author is chipping away at the feminist false and harmful belief system. Claire Shipman, co-author of a book on helping girls risk more and gain confidence, tip toes into science, gets a few things wrong, but nevertheless chips away at the false feminist belief system on gender. This book acknowledges the science of the brain and takes on specifically learning in girls and boys.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
JULY 2, 2009
He then proceeded to articulate the two key reasons for focusing on cities, one centered on people, the other on technology and systems. are increasingly the central arena for success or failure. ” “And a city is a system - indeed, a city is a complex system of systems. The week before my trip to Berlin, I attended an Engineering Systems Symposium hosted by MIT. Cities are arguably the ultimate system of systems.
Harold Jarche
MARCH 6, 2013
While some action and coordination in the workplace can be automated with performance support systems, collaboration and cooperation are still intensely human and require continuous learning. Working Together. Complexity (Cynefin). Social (TIMN). Practices. Group Work. Chaotic. Tribal. Novel.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
OCTOBER 8, 2009
Our panel included Denis Cortese - CEO and President of the Mayo Clinic ; Ronald Paulus - Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Geisinger Health System ; Chris Coburn - Executive Director of Innovations at the Cleveland Clinic ; and Armando Ahued Ortega - Health Secretary of Mexico City. Dr. Cortese started out by telling us that he was not going to talk about actual healthcare, but rather, about systems and systems thinking as it applies to healthcare.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
MAY 9, 2014
It''s worth parsing this into individual points, because this is (I guess) connectivism from Dron''s perspective: all of which adopt a systems view all of which recognize the distributed nature of knowledge all of which embrace the role of mediating artefacts all of which recognize that more is different all of which adopt a systems perspective all of which describe or proscribe ways to engage in this new ecology. It''s interesting that he makes the point about ''systems'' twice.
John Hagel
DECEMBER 7, 2017
Every large and successful institution has an immune system – a collection of individuals who are prepared to mobilize at the slightest sign of any “outside” ideas or people in order to ensure that these foreign bodies are neutralized and that the existing institution survives intact and can continue on course. In more stable times, institutional immune systems are very effective at keeping institutions focused and on course, resistant to the distractions that might lead to their downfall.
Clark Quinn
SEPTEMBER 2, 2009
What crystallized for me is that it’s not a particular flaw or issue, but it’s a system that can have multiple flaws or multiple points of breakdown. The point is, we have to quit looking at it as design, development, etc; not just as a process, but as a system.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
DECEMBER 9, 2011
Dr. Arthur is external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and visiting researcher at PARC’s Intelligent Systems Lab. This second, digital economy is essentially acting as the neural system for the overall economy. A major portion of every complex biological organism, including us humans, is the autonomic nervous system. The need for sophisticated control functions to help manage complex systems applies not just to complex biological systems, but to man-made ones as well.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
APRIL 13, 2012
But, they do not work so well when dealing with highly complex systems with fast changing, interacting components, where it is much less clear what is going on in the present, let alone how things will evolve into the future. What do we mean by applying design principles to complex, unpredictable, people oriented systems and problems? But the mechanisms to increase robustness will in turn make the system considerably more complex.
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