Brugo's Blog Systems 2017

12/11-13 Systems Leadership

For our last Systems class, our plan is:

1. Fill out our course evaluations. They are electronic, so please bring a laptop, tablet, or phone with you, as well as your campus login and password.
2. Blog groups to discuss this week’s reading and reflect on what we’ve learned this term, and what next steps we’d like to take to enhance our system understanding and practice. During Wednesday’s class folks volunteered to lead their blog groups – just to be sure, will those folks please confirm via email with me by Monday. For Monday’s class, I’m going to send around a request via email to a member of each blog group to take this role. I would like these discussion leaders to read their group’s blogs and prepare some ideas for discussion, and they will not be required to prepare a discussion reflection.
3. Pecha Kuchas! Hopefully your 3SO groups have this well in hand. If you have not heard from your 3SO “goad” about preparing this, please email me, and I will goad your goad. I am going to ask each of you to evaluate each Pecha Kucha, and will consult your evaluation when making mine – I append the evaluation form, which I will hand out in class.

This week’s reading examines both the “what” and the “who” of system leadership, a fitting place to end our exploration of system thinking and doing. We have two articles by Peter Senge and colleagues – Senge is a global leader in systems thinking and organizational learning, and his work is widely used by practitioners in private sector, non-profits, and government.

The earlier reading, “Collaborating for Systemic Change”, explores how to move from “transactional” relationships to learning communities. They explore three kinds of systems work:

• Conceptual: Understanding the underlying logic and applicability of different system approaches
• Relational: Promoting trust for deep and effective communication
• Action-driven: A toolbox to “get the system in the room” and do effective work together

In the newer reading, “The Dawn of System Leadership”, Senge and colleagues share what they’ve learned about the core capabilities of system leaders, who, despite the opening example of Nelson Mandela, they argue are made not born. These include the ability to see through other’s eyes (think: interpretivist systems), the ability to use tools that enable them to see the larger system (think: functionalist systems), and the ability to move from agenda-driven problem solving to “follow the energy” and co-create the capacity to move toward a shared, desired future (think: complex systems). They end with some general advice on how to develop those skills, and I’d be interested in hearing about how you might put this advice to use in your career planning.

I’d love to hear how this later reading resonated with what you’ve learned this term in Sharon’s class – hopefully there are some synergies to explore.

 

Blog Group:
	Criteria				Comments
	Oops	Ah	Yeah	Wow
Organization of Presentation	I cannot     understand presentation because information is not well sequenced.	Difficulty following presentation	Presents information in logical sequence.	Presents information in logical, interesting sequence
Presentation Content	Uses very poorly designed presentation materials	Presentation materials rarely support presentation and are not organized	Presentation materials relate to material and presentation.	Presentation materials explain and reinforce material and presentation.
Presentation Style	Reads with no eye contact / monotonou, poor timing coordination	Occasionally uses eye contact, but still reads from notes, stilted timings	Maintains eye contact most of the time but returns to notes, good timings	Maintains eye contact with audience, seldom returning to notes, smooth timings
Intellectual Content	Uninteresting or irrelevant to 3SO	Some of 3SO covered in presentation but low info or uninteresting	Good coverage of engaging material	Interesting and engaging selection of 3SO mateiral
Interaction	Does not have grasp of information; cannot answer questions	Uncomfortable with information and answers rudimentary questions.	At ease with topic: answers questions.	Demonstrates full knowledge by answering questions with explanations and skill

11/27-29 Change from above and below: Learning Networks for Systems Change

Welcome back from break!

This week, we are fortunate to have as our guest practitioner Jennie Curtis, who is the founding executive director of the Garfield Foundation, a private grant making foundation. The Garfield Foundation funds innovative models for change in three program areas that are dear to our hearts here at the MENV: Collaborative Networks, Environmental Sustainability, and Community Revitalization. In 2003, Jennie proposed that the Garfield Foundation apply a systems thinking approach to create the RE-AMP Network, a coalition of 175 Midwest organizations collaborating to drastically reduce global warming pollution. Jennie serves on the RE-AMP steering committee, and co-chairs its executive committee.

We will begin class with blog groups, to discuss the readings and catch up a bit on our Thanksgiving adventures. This week I’ve offered you a paper I wrote with my collaborator Will Butler on The U.S. Fire Learning Network, a collaborative learning network that I’ve partnered with over the past decade. Using the adaptive cycle framework that we’ve seen a number of times during this class (especially in the Resilience in Practice reading on adaptive management), Will and I describe how the Fire Learning Network acted as a catalyst for systems change, operating at multiple spatial/temporal/organizational scales simultaneously to nudge fire management out of the rut of responding to wildfires with ever more fire suppression, a response that only made things worse over the decades. This is of course an idea drawn from complexity theory – but also note our focus on fire fighter’s social identity and how the make sense of their place as actors (even “heroes”) in the system, an idea that draws heavily on interpretivist systems analysis.

I’ve also assigned an article written by Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize winner who developed the concept of common property resource regimes that we read the week we did the Fish Banks exercise. This paper was a product of Ostrom’s final burst of innovative thinking, before her death in 2012 –  after spending most of her lifetime examining how traditional communities could organize collective agreements to maintain sustainability, Ostrom was applying her ideas about collective governance to a more dynamic, globalized, interconnected modern world. Personally, at a moment when our national leadership is hostile to nearly all environmental initiatives and global treaty systems like the Paris Climate Accord appear to be faltering, I find it hopeful to consider how distributed and polycentric (multi-centered) approaches might succeed. We also have a movie about the RE-AMP network that will complement Jennie’s talk, and a blog post from Beth Kanter comparing systems and network leadership. I thought you’d particularly enjoy this blog post, since it explicitly establishes the connection between network and systems thinking, and does it in a lively blog format, with a lovely comments section where different practitioners connect with one another and weigh in with their ideas – see how blogging can be a powerful approach to professional communication! Note that Selections from the Network Weavers handbook have NOT been provided, I think we’ve got enough readings assigned already – consider that an optional, skimmable reading.

After blog groups, Jennie will provide a talk and PowerPoint emphasizing two things: applied systems analysis in a network context and, systems practice mindset as a network evolves and matures. She will introduce herself and the Garfield Foundation, provide a brief overview of the model she deploys of "systems informed collaborative networks", and provide a case study of the RE-AMP network, focusing on how it addresses 3 systems practices: 

1. Seek health, not "mission accomplished"
2. See patterns, not just problems
3. Unlock Change, don't impose it

There will be opportunity for you to ask questions and share ideas from your experience (or the readings). Specifically, you might consider asking Jennie about these issues, if they interest you:

- The RE-AMP systems map and the leverage points that emerged and were acted upon;

- RE-AMP Network structure and governance

- RE-AMP Network assets (on-line Intranet, member capacity building services, annual meeting, staff support, etc.)

- The role of funders & RE-AMP becoming a grant-making intermediary

- RE-AMP's evolution and what are its current priorities (13 years after its founding)

Note that the syllabus says “3SO draft distributed to your group for editing/formatting”. Your 3SO is due next week, at the start of class, so make sure you leave enough time for final editing. The following week you will prepare your Pecha Kucha, for presentation in class (on 12/11 or 12/13). If you would like to meet with me to discuss the 3SO this week or have any questions, please get in touch – we can schedule a meeting, meet using a Zoom conference, or email. I’ll be at office hours on Monday, but am also available other times during the week.

11/13-15 Change from below: Social Networks and Organizational Design

This week our guest practitioner is Chris Allan, who has thirty years’ experience in community development and environmental protection around the world, and whose focus is building international networks to address wicked problems. He has a professional Masters Degree in Social Change and Development from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

Chris is going to start off with two examples of systems mapping, one from the country of Niger about food security, and then the second from a group called the International Funders for Indigenous Peoples – a Strategic Plan that Chris prepared for this group is one of your readings, so you will be familiar with his work. Chris will explain the process he used to construct the systems map, and walk backwards through the layers to show how to get from a systems map to action. After that, we’ll go into workshop mode. Chris will ask each 3SO group to map out the system for the issue they’re working on. At the end, each group will take a few minutes to explain the elements of their maps. The outcome from process will be feedstock for the mapping element of your 3SO memo.

Our other two readings this week complement Chris’s visit, taking a funders perspective on systems transformation. Given that many of you are going to operate in a setting where you need to apply for and win competitive grants it’s good to be able to look at systems work through the eyes of a funder. This is true whether you are in the governmental or non-profit sector, and even, given the need to attract private investment or competing for resources internally, the private sector. Funders are as challenged as the rest of us by the difficulties of evaluating wicked problem that doesn’t’ operate according to a simple cause-and-effect dynamic, and these two readings are some of the best thinking on best practices.

As you will see from the Stroh reading, a systems grant-making strategy is much like an adaptive management strategy, or a disaster resilience strategy, or a restorative economic strategy – it relies on ongoing learning, is attentive to non-linear dynamics, and attempts to identify and influence key leverage points. If they want to influence transformation, funders have to be attentive to diverse stakeholders, attune to the operation of power, prepared to develop an ongoing partnership with the projects they sponsor. The idea of a theory of change is a very interesting and powerful concept, see if you can get a handle on what it is and how to develop one.

The Systems Grantmaking Resource Guide is not meant to be read cover-to-cover, since it’s a compendium of techniques. Rather, I suggest that you familiarize yourself with the different kinds of resources, and the criteria used to classify them, and skim through the examples, focusing on the ones that resonate with you – this is great collection of systems thinking tools. One way to write your blog post would be to pick one, and speculate about it might be useful for you to enhance your understanding of your capstone or 3SO.

Finally, I’d like to get a volunteer(s) from each class to provide a brief demonstration of Kumu, a popular systems mapping software – I’ve got two for Wednesday, but none for Monday – Monday folk, if one of you is using the software and wouldn’t mind providing a brief demo, shoot me an email to confirm.

11/6-8 Leveraging Transition and Transformation

I like to think of our Systems class as building in complexity over time – starting from simple, intuitive foundations (the habit-forming guide), and layering the three systems perspectives and associated analytical techniques on top of that. The last four weeks we saw how these ideas come alive in systems management, and in this second to last section of our class we are exploring how a systems perspective enables us to understand and even bring about transformative systems change. It’s the Olympic level of systems thinking and practice, and I hope the preceding material provides you with the foundation to wrestle with these very challenging, very important ideas.

This weeks’ readings are some of the best foundational material I know to lay the groundwork for this last section. Donella Meadow’s classic formulation of ideas about systems leverage is required reading for systems change agents – I advise you to skim it and get a feel for how the leverage points build toward more fundamental change, and then read the Easterbrook blogpost, which brings these ideas to live in reference to two cases we can all appreciate, the economic system and the climate system. Chapter 7 of Meadows is less important, but I thought for those of you who dig Meadows it would be good to read the rest of the book, in a chapter that is remarkably reflexive, adaptive and humble, for someone who we’ve come to associate with linear and top-down functionalist systems thinking – in many ways, Meadows transcends our three analytical categories of functionalist, interpretivist, and complex.

The two “systems innovation” papers are a bit more up to date, and even incorporate Meadows ideas about leverage – if you are only going to have time to read one thing closely, these two papers are it. These two essays are remarkably readable accounts of how we truly live in a world of systems – that a systems strategy is the way that we see successful innovation take place – as well as a very insightful account of how difficult systems are to change, what their core features are, what kind of different systems exist, how these differences matter in plotting a systems change strategy. Its full of powerful and familiar cases – you are going to love this reading.

The last piece is the first part of the Stroh reading, on leveraging grantmaking. This article uses the language of complex adaptive systems to ID a change strategy for Foundations who are eager to leverage (there is that word again…) their resources effectively to address wicked problems. In many ways, this piece anticipates the work of our guest practitioners during the following two weeks.

I know it’s a heavy reading load this week, and do encourage you to read selectively. As I noted, the systems innovation papers will yield the greatest bang for the buck, in terms of careful, close reading.

10/30-11/1 Systems Management 5: Disaster Resilience and Recovery

Our guest practitioner this week is John Thomas, an expert in systems management, especially the resilience of complex built systems, such as we find in all of our specialization areas - including water and energy infrastructure, transportation, food, and more. I append his bio below.

John has prepared the following introduction for us - I also append his guide to the readings (note that only SELECTIONS are required).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Natural and man-made threats and catastrophes are increasing in frequency and magnitude, causing Federal and state agencies to focus on securing resilient infrastructure to protect public health, safety, and well-being. However, because resilience is a relatively new concept, there are no integrated concepts, methods or models to turn to for guidance and no established practices to emulate. Its an exciting new field, with lots of experimentation underway.

The purpose of this week's class is to introduce resilience by considering practical applications to urban infrastructure such as power, water, transportation, and communications. The class will present a complex systems perspective on resilience, with practical examples and applications to critical infrastructure systems. Class discussion will center on readings that describe resilient systems and review Federal policy guidelines for critical infrastructure. The class will involve a combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class group exercises based on a real world case study. The reading assignments for the class do not assume prior or special knowledge about resilience or infrastructure systems. The exercises will engage students to form small groups and work together to conduct assessments to a proposed problem scenario.

For a more in-depth perspective on John's work and perspective he brings to resilience, see the abstract and diagram on this website: http://integralresilience.org/p3/

John Thomas completed his PhD in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. His research focuses on critical infrastructure resilience and the relationships between human systems interacting with technological systems. John received a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and a MBA at Santa Clara University. He has over 20 years of professional experience across a range of industries including wireless communications, software development, semiconductors, defense radar, and consumer electronics.

Required readings:

1) (Hollnagel, Paries, Woods, & Wreathall, 2011) The Resilience Analysis Grid offers a method for assessing the resilience processes of a socio-technical system. The four processes correspond to sensing, anticipating, adapting, and learning. The grid provides a set of questions as a starting point for interrogating a system and obtaining a resilience measurement. This document is the epilogue chapter in the book, which is titled ‘Resilience Engineering in Practice.’ (pages—all)

2) (Park, Seager, Rao, Convertino, & Linkov, 2013) This paper makes important distinctions between risks and resilience concepts applied to complex systems. Four processes that characterize the resilience of a socio-technical system are identified—sensing, anticipating, adapting, and learning. These processes are further explored during the in-class exercises. (pages 356-362, Sections 1-3.1)

3) (The White House, 2013) Presidential policy directive 21 establishes national policy on critical infrastructure security and resilience. The directive identifies 16 segments of infrastructure and calls for Federal agencies to develop plans to coordinate with public and private infrastructure owners and operators. (pages 1-3, 6-7)

Additional readings—optional

4) (DHS, 2013) The National Infrastructure Protection Plan was developed by the Department of Homeland Security in response to PPD-21. The document identifies key functions, roles, and responsibilities for a range of government agencies assigned to the 16 infrastructure segments. A program calls for ‘voluntary’ adoption in the private sector.

5) (Brown & Westaway, 2011) This paper presents an integrated approach to incorporate multiple human-centered perspectives of resilience impacting complex environmental change systems. Socio-ecological system concepts such as diversity, uncertainty, adaptive capacity, self-organization, and applications like community resilience are introduced.

 

10/23-25 Systems Management 4: Regenerative Economics

Last week we explored the possibilities of greening capitalism through a variety of system analytic tools, including sustainability assessments and value chain indices. This week we take a systems perspective on how to improve the capitalism much further. First, we consider a range of critiques of market-based capitalism and the economic theories that underlie it. Second, we explore a variety of alternatives, all of which draw on a complex systems, social-ecological perspective. Hunter Lovins’ reading is the most integrative, weaving together a foreboding vision of the near-term future  - in which the whole world experiences the “overshoot” that we modeled in our fisheries exercise - with a hopeful looking-back from 2050, when sustainability has been achieved.  Hunter links our inability to redress either resource exhaustion or growing inequality to the flaws of neoliberalism, an economic model that emerged during the traumatic post-war period and triumphed after the fall of communism, as a result of the deliberate and concerted efforts of business elites to circumscribe governmental oversight. As an alternative, Hunter advocated adopting a new story, something she calls a “regenerative economy”, which promises a way to combine ecological and human flourishing. The companion piece by Kate Raworth, about “living in the donut”, combines the systems view of planetary boundaries that we’ve seen before with the idea of social boundaries. Echoing Lovins, Raworth notes that this framework refocuses our attention from maximizing GDP remaining within a safe space, and describes how some policies can both promote ecological and social well-being, such as insulating homes or promoting reproductive rights.

This week’s guest practitioner is Jeff Hohensee, who works with Hunter Lovins – I append his bio below. Jeff is going to lead us through a deeper exploration of the restorative economy. If you have the time, I suggest you also take a look at the optional reading by Fullerton, which lays out the idea of a regenerative economics in greater depth, and explicitly links it to the kind of complex adaptive systems approach we saw in the Resilience in Practice reading a few weeks back. You might also check out the “Rethinking Capitalism” article, which I think makes the comparison between neoliberalism and a regenerative approach much more intuitive, by comparing it to a machine and a garden approach, with the government assuming the role of gardener. Finally, the optional piece on neoliberalism is much more hard-hitting than Lovins’ take on it, presenting it as the evil brainchild of a frustrated and monomaniacal Austrian economist, and suggesting that its “scientific approach” leads naturally to oppression and an ultra-reactionary politics, since banishing human well-being, democracy, and morality from the way we order our world inevitably causes suffering and the angry backlash of those who are excluded from the benefits of a winner-take-all system. Heavy stuff.

-------------

Jeff Hohensee has been working in business, community engagement, and sustainability for over thirty years. Jeff started his career in corporate finance working for Barclays American Business Credit and Fuji Bank subsidiary Heller Financial. He specialized cash management, financial analysis, asset security, and negotiations. Jeff left the private sector to teach. He worked as a public school teacher and as an adjunct faculty at Citrus College. In 1993 Jeff started at TreePeople. Over the next eleven years, he helped build a statewide network for environmental education and led pioneering social mobilization campaigns that integrated education, community building, leadership development and social marketing to inspire over one hundred thousand teenagers a year to lead service projects in their neighborhoods. Jeff first joined the Natural Capitalism Solutions team in 2007. Under Jeff’s leadership, NCS guided strategic planning, sustainability analysis and breakthrough implementation for corporate clients representing 3% of U.S. GDP. In 2011 Jeff joined the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado to oversee the development of the business plan and concept design for the renovation of the Alliance Center. The Alliance Center a historical, multi-tenant office building and Colorado’s Hub of Sustainability. This work cut per capita energy consumption by over 50% in the building, doubled revenue and increased the appraised value of the building from $6M to $14M. Jeff rejoined Natural Capitalism Solutions last year to work closely with Hunter Lovins to transform the global economy. He was responsible for the Regenerative Future Summit program. Jeff lives with his wife in a net zero energy home in the mountains west of Boulder.

October 16th and 18th: Systems Management 3: Sustainability Assessment

This week’s readings on private-sector system thinking light up across the board of the systems analytical approaches we’ve examined so far this term, so I thought I’d run down my thinking about how it all fits together in some detail. Here goes…

The article on wicked problems in business puts some of the ideas we’ve been developing this term – about complexity as well as multiple stakeholder perspectives on systems – to work in a private sector context. It’ll give you a chance to review the very useful idea of wicked problems, as well as think about solution strategies, such as feed-forward planning processes, focusing on experimentation and learning-by-doing, collaborative multi-stakeholder dialogue, and the importance of knowing your core identity (which resonated for me with “Seeing Like a State”, which emphasized changing the identity of forests and villagers as a core state-making practice).

The short article on “The art of systems thinking” shows how a bunch of ideas we’ve been discussing are critical in managing a business, including an emphasis on mapping the system with multiple perspectives (a soft systems approach), addressing power relations to build trust (a critical systems approach), and focusing on systems innovation rather than just problem solving (transformative regime change).

“The Big Idea” by the famous climber/entrepreneur Yves Chouinard (kind of an Elon Musk type figure when he was in his prime) worked for me on 2 levels – as a description of cutting-edge approaches to sustainability assessment (a technique we will model in class), and ideas about how these changes could bring about larger changes in the system in which sustainability assessment is embedded – changing the way that investors, markets, regulators, and consumers behave to foster a much more deep-rooted and influential sustainability transition. I imagined what a results chain mapping of the ideas in this paper would look like, embedding a sustainability assessment process that included ecosystem services and value-chain indices inside a broader logic for change, in which the normal operation of market rationality – not reliant on a transformation of our ethics or anything fancy like that- led to widespread adoption of sustainable practices, from Fortune 500 firms and Wall Street Banks, all the way out to countless global suppliers of raw material.

In this light, the articles in State of Green Business Report were fascinating, and timely. While the Chouinard article left me with a sense that this was cutting-edge thinking but still rather marginal – and it was written in 2011, which now seems worlds away – the articles in this collection enabled me to see how many of these ideas have come into prominence, and been adopted by some of the largest and most innovative of companies. Note that I recommended you read these pieces selectively, according to your interest - specifically, I suggest looking at Chapter 6, which notes that 4/5 Fortune 500 Businesses issue sustainability reports, and that 10 trillion dollars – real money, as they note – is pivoting to including environmental performance measures such as climate stress-testing in their financial assessments. Chapter 7 was also spot on, with its description of supply chain initiatives in the Food Industry, and Chapter 10 put the ideas of resilience – which we’ve looked at both in our complexity analysis class and in our resource management classes – to work as a key concept for corporations, who need to plan for shock and stress.

October 9 and 11th

The two readings for next week are a study in contrasts - one, an article from the New York Times on the devastating impact of Chinese fishing fleets on the fisheries and fishing livelihoods of Senegal, and the other a summary of the Nobel Prize winning research on how to beat the "tragedy of the commons" through collective institutions that enable the sustainable management of common property resources, like ocean fisheries. Note Ostrom's delineation of a set of rules that successful collective institutions must abide by to be successful, and reflect on how these simple rules resonate with our discussion of how to organize and manage complex adaptive systems, through simple rules that lead to self-organization and beneficial system-wide emergent properties. For our next class, you will be managing a fishing fleet, and your choices - individually, in your teams, and potentially as a fishing fleet across an entire ocean - will shape the possibilities for sustainable fisheries management.