For governance of or practice with systems theory
This is an open source document. I am delighted to add in smarter (or more simply woprded) considerations if you want to mail them to me at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk .
I am taking approach of a graduate in mathematics (as far as I know the only subject that is wholly defined by is this theory systemic)
1 There are liars, damn liars and statisticians.
As a postgraduate in statistics I start with this because I feel it defines a mathematician’s Hippocratic oath.
Never oversell a measurement system if it is going to be used to select human beings or in other ways judge people’s lives, put them at risk if your assumptions are misunderstood etc
Sadly, many measurement professions that I have met in big business do not seem to apply this rule. In making their own business case, the devil and the details have been taking the hindmost ever since the spreadsheet spawned far more numbers than time people afforded to questioning what assumptions each number was determined by.
I am not going to name these professions here. It may be safest to assume any profession whose numbers you rely on literally to make big decisions is conflicted unless they can transparently explain why they are conflict-free. To be clear, a network of system theorists I belong to has believed for over 25 years now that humanity may not survive into the 22nd century because networks are an unprecedented revolution in systemising human relationship with the globe. More below, except to say that if our race turns out not to be sustainable – professions abandonment of Hippocratic oaths will be a major root cause.
2a Human relationship systems are always spinning (life-flowing or towards death). A vita duty of governance involves being able to calibrate which of these 2 trajectories a system’s movement through time is on. Moreover, as long as decay hasn’t repeated through too many cycles there are almost always systemic ways to intervene. Global corporations, professions, media, even democratic governments all qualify as human relation systems. All are measurable in terms of what they are compounding. If someone tells you this is not so about an organisation that has a critical impact on you, I will try and help if you will confidentially brief me on as much of the context as you can
2b Connecting the globe with networks is itself a meta-human relationship system, by meta I mean systems multiplying systems multiplying systems. Consequently, although we are talking 2 or 3 generations out, it is possible to map whether the globalisation we are currently systemising is sufficiently free of conflicts to be sustainable. Currently it is not . The good news is: there remains tine to intervene. The bad news is that transparency’s and sustainability’s main system mapmaker networks that I belong to have been issuing this warning now for over 20 years. Predicting when a system as large as the globe becomes impossible to turn round is not something anyone would estimate to the nearest quarter. But suffice it to say, what we started as forecasting as a generation away is now the last call responsibility of this generation including you and me.
3 Systemic intervention approaches are very different from what many advisers of large organisations offer. This comes back to another rule all mathematicians know in their water. Namely that when you design a systemic tool , you need to have a clear idea of three boundary matters. First situations your method does not apply to. Second within situations that its has application, what it does and what it needs to systemically interface with. I cannot think of any non-trivial systemic measurement method that does all the work by itself. Its success in intervening is dependent on what other systemic interfaces are combinatorially applied in the intervention. I stress this point because if you are caught up in a systemic crisis, you should never want to get all the resolution advice from one profession. Only from professions that are prepared to connect their expertise in systemic ways. Of the interventions that fail to turn round a collapsing system, the most common mistake is to have failed to bring all professions connectively to the operational table in time.
4 Any human relations systems cannot be effectively ruled just by top-down. The quality of the governance system’s future exponential duties depends on how truly critical flows including trust loop every way round. This is because such systems are always inseparable from other systems –micro (systems that have more detail inside that eg bottom-up people will have the most information of), macro (eg a corporation is part of a global market sector and it’s the whole sector’s spin that is most relevant in mapping whether its putting the whole of humanity at risk) and inter (for example national leadership decisions are no longer enough to protect people from interlocal waves such as natures tsunamis, earthquakes, plagues etc)
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