Coevolving Innovations – Coevolving Innovations

In the 1970s, five ways of knowing were established by C. West Churchman in The Design of Inquiring Systtems. In the 1990s, his student Ian Mitroff carried on the tradition and extended that work in The Unbounded Mind.  Now in the 2020s, the technology of Generative AI opens up opportunties to query or request responses through chatbot interfaces, drawing from bodies of codified knowledge in a style expressed implicitly or explicitly.  Just as there are multiple ways of knowing, there are multiple ways in which underlying language models can be implemented and/or mixed.

The January 2025 Systems Thinking Ontario session, included:

The discussion closed with an outline of Type 1 errors, Type 2 errors, Type 3 errors, and Type 4 errors, as structured by Ian Mitroff.… Read more (in a new tab)

The 125th meeting of Systems Thinking Ontario coincided with the closing day for the RSD13-RSDX online program.  As a regular systems convening group, we’ve had monthly meetings since January 2013.

Zaid Khan moderated  a discussion including me (David Ing), Tim Lloyd, Allenna Leonard, and Kelly Okamura.

We recollected starting as a spinoff from Design with Dialogue, adopting their tradition of meeting in a circle in the Lambert Lounge at OCADU.  In the summers, we’ve celebrated the Synthesis Maps created by Master of Design students from the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program in the Visual Analytics Lab.  The COVID-19 pandemic saw us shift to online meetings, with a few in-person opportunties taken in the summer.

This video recording is available for download, on Youtube, and also on the Internet Archive .

An audio version was also created during the meeting.

In 2025, Systems Thinking Ontario meetings are planned to continue.  We’re shifting to a different evening, to enable inclusion of students currently in the SFI program.  With an increase in the number of sessions where we’ll meet in person, we hope that novices will join our regulars.  Stay posted at https://wiki.st-on.org.

Systems Processes Theory has been under development for many decades, led by Len Troncale, a past president of the International Society for the Ssytems Sciences.  Many have found getting a grip on the science to be a demanding task, both in scope and in depth.

Over many decades, Lynn Rasmussen was a collaborator, refining and clarifying Systems Processes Theory.  Having already published previous books related to her professional coaching, Lynn turned her attention over the past few years to making the theory more accessible.  Thus, on September 4, 2024, Seeing: A Field Guide to the Patterns and Processes of Nature, Culture, and Consciousness was released.

Systems Thinking Ontario was privileged to celebrate the launch of her book.  Lynn joined us in conversation online from Hawaii, with her colleague Laura Civitello from the Maui Institute.

The conversation flowed quite easily with participants.  Some of the concepts were made more concrete by reference to the 2023 Maui Wildfires.

This video recording available for download, on Youtube, and also on the Internet Archive .

The only visual was the table of contents of the book.  A standalone audio was also created during the meeting.

A brief decription follows below.  Links to historical content (e.g.… Read more (in a new tab)

The Socio-Technical Systems (STS) perspective, dating back to the studies of Eric L. Trist and Fred E. Emery, was on the reading list of organizational behaviour classes in my undergraduate and master’s degree programs.  It wasn’t until 15 years later, when I got involved with the systems sciences and David L. Hawk, that the Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) perspective became more prominent in my worldview.  This emphasis is likely true for most audiences, where Socio-Technical is prominent, and Socio-Ecological is in the background or out of mind.

For the 10th International Conference on Socio-Technical Perspectives in Information Systems (STPIS’24) scheduled in Jönköping, Sweden, for mid-August,  I was invited to contribute a paper,   My travel plans didn’t take me to the Nordics this summer, so the organizers scheduled me for a remote online presentation.

Since the STPIS workshop has official proceedings, my thinking was mostly on completing a manuscript, that is available as a preprint.   The manuscript reviews the Trist and Emery histories, and then gets philosophical in proposing a shift from mainstream principles into a process-first approach regrounded with a postocolonial bridge to Classical Chinese foundations.  My concern on the short presentation was getting a message across to workshop attendees, with only a short slot.  My colleague Peter Bednar reported what I couldn’t see online.

Dear David, thank you for your amazing and thorough presentation. It was interesting, and deep. I always learn something from your stuff.

Civic Tech can be described as projects using technology “for the public good“.  Civic Tech may be related to, but different from Gov Tech.

For the May 2024 Systems Thinking Onrtario, we had two knowledgeable guests in conversation.  Dorothy Eng, executive director of Code for Canada since 2021, related her professional journey from engineering to consulting, and Civic Tech Toronto (with a long history of hacknights and speakers).  Curtis McCord was also involved in Civic Tech Toronto, and completed a Ph.D. dissertation on “Civic Participation and Democratic Experience: Civic Tech in Toronto” in the Faculty of Informqtion Studies at the University of Toronto in 2022.  The session was moderated by Zaid Khan, with some familiar regular attendees contributiong viewpoints.

This recording of the conversation is available on Youtube, with an alternate retention on the Internet Archive .

For those who prefer just to listne, a standalone audio was also created during the meeting.

A short description of the session follows below, with pre-readings linked on the original abstract.

— begin excerpt —

Civic tech is an approach to bettering public services through technology. It has and continues to be expressed in many forms: a movement, mindset, frameworks, service.… Read more (in a new tab)

On my May trip through the UK, I accepted an offer to lead an Expert-Led Session at the University of Hull.  I had previously been a Research Fellow of the Centre for Systems Studies, but haven’t travelled to the Hull for some years.  As we worked out the arrangements, I found out that the seminar wasn’t just an hour lecture, but a complete afternoon.

The Systems Changes Learning Circle is now in year 6 of an espoused 10-year journey.  The target audience of graduate students and faculty, with the luxury of time for lecturing and discussing, allowed for an extended exposition of our learning on systems changes.  The ouline covered:

This series of 4 recordings is available as a playlist on Youtube.  We started off mostly with reviewing slides, and then had progressed to more interactive discussion later in the day.  With the audio recordings, the presentation slides (including movies) were resynchronized as post-production.

This presentation segments are downloadable from this website, as well as from the Internet Archive .

Reading a theorist who espouses the dao (tao) in their systems work?  Here’s a challenge:  is the writer referring to daojia, or daojiao?

Yinyang and daojia are considerably older than daojiao.  The Systems Changes Learning Circle is most interested in philosophy of science, with a concrete application in Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM).  Yinyang is foundational in CCM, and religion doesn’t enter into the science of medicine, unless the inquirer wants to delve into the question of “what is nature”?

After the EQ Lab session of Dialogic Drinks, in April on “From Unfreezing-Refreezing, to Systems Changes Learning“, I challenged myself to see if I could create an presentation on Chinese philosophy of science that might be understandable to those of us trained in the Western sciences. … Read more (in a new tab)

Beyond city-building as urban planning is the idea of a Music City.  This sees development of cultural life across a wide variety of arts, alongside economic benefits brought to the region.  At the 119th meeting of Systems Thinking Ontario in March 2024, socio-cultural designer Adam Hogan and musician-designer Ziyan Hossain joined moderator Zaid Khan in conversation.  Both panelists are alumni of the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at OCADU.

After short self-introductions by participants, the panelists were lightly guided through some focus questions.  How does a music city relate to urban communities?  What encourages or discourages a music city?  What systems are associated with a music city?  Between focus questions, participants were invited to offer reflections and insights.

This recording of the session is available on Youtube, as well as on the Internet Archive .

A standalone audio was also created during the meeting.

A short description of the session follows below, with pre-readings linked on the original abstract.

— begin excerpt —

Music and urbanization. Two aspects of life that together form the concept of a “music city”. Music cities have typically been framed as vehicles for economic development. But what else do music cities provide? What can systems thinkers learn from the the dynamics of music cities?… Read more (in a new tab)

Having reached year 6 of an espoused 10-year journey, the Systems Changes Learning Circle is (again) convening monthly Dialogues on Social Innovation at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto.

Starting up in 2019, the Circle was convening regularly in the Climate Ventures space at 192 Spadina Avenue. The pandemic interrupted in-person meetings, and the core group continued philoosophical and theoretical development.

A return to normalcy encourages the Circle to serve as mentors on thinking through systems echanges.

As an introduction, an online Lunch and Learn was scheduled. Dialogues can be free-flowing, with a light guidance along three questions:

To better describe these questions, very short (5-minute) presentations were provided as orientation.

With only an hour scheduled for the Lunch and Learn session, participants only got a brief taste of the way a dialogue would run.

Brief animations served as metaphors on which dialogues could be built. Oriented towards an audience of practitioners, the presentation defers more rigourous theoretical explanations into later mentoring.… Read more (in a new tab)

EQ Lab runs Dialogic Drinks, “the kind of philosophical discussion you have in a coffee shop or bar”, twice per week.  Wtih this group interested loosely in questions on leadership, I was invited to host an online session on March 12 (evening in Hong Kong and Singapore, really early in Toronto) and on March 14-15 (evening in Toronto, morning in Hong Kong and Singapore).

The majority of the organizational change approaches presume the “unfreeze-move-refreeze” metaphor attributed to Kurt Lewin. Taking a different approach has resulted in the converging of a comprehensive alternative with Systems Changes Learning, after 5 years of development.

These Dialogic Drinks sessions are weighted less on presentation, and more on discussions and reflections.

With a condensed schedule for presentations, the imagery of short movies can express ideas more readily than the vector lineart that I usually use.  I recorded my voice (without the discussion of participants) and resynchonrized the slides and movies into a package.  The result was about 36 minutes of presentation, while the full Dialogic Drinks sessions each ran for more than 2.5 hours.

This recording of the presentation segments is available on Youtube , as well as on the Internet Archive .… Read more (in a new tab)