Most organisations I work with know something isn't quite right. The same problems keep coming back, people in different parts of the organisation describe it in ways that don't match, and nobody has the time, budget or appetite for a consultant to come in and tell them what they already half know.
…As I mentioned last week, and as you can guess from the above photo, I've been in Toronto for the past few days. I'm on my way home, overnight, via Dublin.
It's a long way to come for a couple of days of unconferencing and a bit of sightseeing either side, but it's been worth it. There's nothing quite like the Mozilla community, and the #MozAlums crew are fantastic.
…Photo taken by me in Bluebell Wood, Morpeth
While I haven't got ages to write one today, I decided over the weekend that I would get back into the habit of writing weekly updates. I haven't written a weeknote since archiving my blog and spinning up Substrate.
…Most organisations don't work systemically. They deal with problems one part at a time, and then are surprised when they find the same issues returning time and again.
For mission-driven organisations such as charities, co-ops or public service institutions, it can be hard to picture what working systemically would even look like. Instead of a bunch of theory, people first need a quick sense of systems practice, in terms that make sense for their own organisation.
…I'm not sure how I've only just heard about it (perhaps because I forgot to renew my SCiO membership) but the SysPrac26 conference is the week after next. I've decided go, rearranging my existing commitments on Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd September.
…On the afternoon of Wednesday 25th November (UK time) I'm going to run a free session based around Sightlines. I'm going to keep it to 10 places to keep it participatory and conversational. It's a bit of an experiment.
…Andrew Curry summarises and adds to Art Kleiner's post about things we already know are going to happen in 2030. Kleiner channels Pierre Wack's idea of the “predetermined element” using the example of the River Ganges:
…When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.
– Ilya Prigogine
When reading this post I couldn't help but think about Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) which I think is the perfect fit for an organisation made up of humans and AI agents. I've written about VSM numerous times as part of my postgraduate studies into Systems Thinking.
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