Systems Thinking & Social Media Notes

Soc Media Presentation notes

Introductory:

There's been an epic thread running on ST World on LinkedIn
"Are you a Systems Thinker or simply practising self-deception? How can you tell the difference?"

100's of comments. I think Gene may have had his tongue a little bit in his cheek.

I was so amazed at the levels of debate and discursive energy expended on this discussion I couldn't
resist posing the question:

How many Systems Thinkers does it take to change a lightbulb?

The answers were so extensive and demonstrated such joyous interweaving of multiple subtle
theories that I repeated the question on Twitter where brevity is mercifully enforced

But apparently where ST is concerned this is no barrier to displays of philosophical pyrotechnics
though there was a significant drop in the self-importance index (SII)

ivo velitchkov @kvistgaard
One that is quick enough before the others get impatient with his talk about the
goal-seeking system he's in while doing it
•
Mike Parker
RT @MrBobcastle:They don't ? they think up a whole new system for it << shifting
into land & expand job creation consulting
•
Richard Craig@SystemsFunking
Is the lightblub the problem or just a systemic symptom of the whole elec generation
system #hilarious
•
Mike Parker
@sdv_duras none, they have to send for an engineer...good start from SDV, thank
you

sdv_duras @sdv_duras
@Sysparatem whilst they are in discussion about where the light bulbs are stored,
the intern phones office services.... who...

@Sysparatem "It's not byron the immortal lightbulb then..." said the junior
consultant... wonderingly...

T.S. Eliot said in Little Gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

I hope this is what we will do with our discussion today.
I confess to a small amount of misrepresentation, I said we would be looking at Social Media and
we will but I have to say I think it is only one example of a continuous and on-going wave of
disruption affecting everything we do.

However as it is particularly visible it seemed to me like a good hook on which to show ST
frameworks in action. And also a representative icebergs tip of a much larger process

Slide 2 Framework Fusion

So while we look at Soc Media and it's impacts on organisations as well as some approaches to
managing these impacts my core purpose is to show how ST frameworks can come together in
practice to provide some insight.

The emphasis is on using and applying approaches in a creative way, not on affirming that one
particular cookie cutter method provides absolute definition of a problem and thereby the means of
its solution.

On the contrary I hope to illustrate that dissolving problems by comprehending them in a different
way may result from widening the context under consideration , as Ackoff suggested.

Problem I

Nestle Palm oil
March 17th 2010 Greenpeace accuses Nestle of contributing to deforestation

Orang Utans affected by deforestation
March 17 – 28 68 related youtube videos get 1.2 million views
March 17th collateral Greenpeace videos tagged with message about Nestle palm oil policy 1.1
million views (by 28/03/10)
Nestle Facebook page overwhelmed with negative comments
19th March Nestle responds with web statement that supplier terminated but it was a ruse it would
be supplied through a partner

March 29th negative twitter comments re Nestle Palm Oil appear every 15 minutes WSJ picks up
story

NeverSeconds On the 15th June at 10:43 Guardian story that Martha Payne banned by Argyll and
Bute Council from photographing school meals for her blog

at 14:14 Guardian reported that less than 2 hours after Arg & Bute had released a strongly worded
statement they reversed the decision on live Radio following criticism from Jamie Oliver and a wave of negative
publicity on Twitter and other social media sites.

Rush Limbaugh & Netflix
On 1st March Limbaugh unleashed a misogynistic tirade against Georgetown University Law
Student Sandra Fluke
By March 14th 2012 142 sponsors had dropped Limbaughs radio show

Netflix was launching in the UK at the time and the message soon spread to UK social media not to
sign up for Netflix while Netflix US continued sponsorship of Limbaugh's show.

A day later Netflix US dropped their sponsorship

Problem II

Proliferation of customer touch points and shift of stakeholder significance
(Monsanto ignoring green lobby in classical stakeholder analysis matrix lost $200million plus over
GM in EU)
CSR pressures are no longer about PR because the concerned and the active and vocal have a direct
broadcast route to customers.
Every one in your organisation needs to be able to touchstone on the the ethics and values of the
org and be empowered to respond autonomously in support of them.
It's not a simple surface problem of how to use new marketing channels

Slide 5 Problem III

28 years ago it took a HUGE amount of effort to get a story as devastating as Bhopal into public
consciousness and even then if you had millions to spend on blanket PR you could still shut down
most of the reaction fairly effectively.

The time left when that will be feasible is running out. So it may well be that the answers which
have been around for decades will now come into their own.

Slide 6 Beer photo

What follows is a very brief look at 3 frameworks for ST which I think together gave me a viable
way of approaching the task above. They also led me to some quite significant conclusions.

Slide 7 Brain Diagram

Beer's development of the Viable Systems Model is a great example of what I think of as being a
core attribute of ST, looking for insight by applying patterns of relationship from one discipline to
another. In this case Beer went to the discipline of neurophysiology for an example of what he saw
as being the most accessible complex viable system around, the human being. “The Brain of the
Firm” goes into some detail about the nervous systems and their relationship as known at the time.
The explication was sufficiently clear and accurate for the first section of the book to be used as a
medical student primer on the subject for some years I believe.

Slide 8 VSM Diagram

The tension between autonomy and central control. As is often the way with ST the suggestion with
VSM is neither completely one thing or the other. Yet it is not a messy compromise. Rather, in ST
frameworks, these types of apparently conflicting relationships usually indicate the point where
most careful thought needs to be given to how they are made to mesh.

Slide 9 Kelly Photo

I first came to PCP via the work of Ackerman and Eden at Strathclyde who had developed a
technique of cognitive and causal mapping based on Kelly's Repertory Grid technique
I subsequently commenced a reading of his core work “A Psychology of Personal Constructs” and
found all these hints and references to Forrester, Zorkybski etc.
Dynamic narrative empowering approach when others were inventing demonologies

ST PCP

The approach Eden and Ackerman developed is applicable in diverse situations but has been
somewhat canonised under the name of SODA . However the approach of cognitive and causal
mapping is applicable to many more situations than just strategy development workshops.

Slide 11 Map

In the illustration I'm using here I looked at how stakeholders in the BP oil spill might strive to
arrive at a shared view of causes and preventative measures to be taken. So the key element in this
approach for me is in the socially negotiated and inclusive building of models of understanding and
possible courses of action.

Slide 12 Head Map

DRAW

The circle, the zero

The limits of knowledge

The circle of firelight

The archetypal journey

Unknowing

Descartes “There are not stones in the sky therefore stones do not fall from the sky”

In The Laws of Form G. Spencer Brown noted:

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of
contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind.
Not reading.
Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one
needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are
not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged
and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the
frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions that are being
continually thrust upon them.
In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent
the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, she has, by her own faltering and
unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But
nonetheless returned, however furtively.

Alpha people don't do self knowledge …... Do they? --- Gnothi Seauton

“My Biggest Problem” thought board

Mashing

This structure was something put together for the purposes of investigation, it was made to
change so for example.

Slide 14 Pyramid I
This is an overview of how I think these three areas may fit together to deliver 21st Century
organisations.

I think now that the Outcomes arrows should probably also be two headed and that the “top”
of the pyramid has reciprocity with all the other spheres. Then I wonder if I'm only seeing the
top and maybe it is actually a diamond with another point reciprocal to 'Outcomes' if so what
would it be?

So the framework begs exploration and experiment rather than asking to be taken as a
finished article enshrining an explanation.

Harnessing the energy in Human-ness
Forming socially negotiated strategies
Articulating them through a fractal model enabling distributed leadership

This is not a small short term undertaking

But that doesn't mean you can't start
Getting results fast
The fractal structure of the model
Allows for cellular change

with a framework I'm looking for sympathetic resonance

Part 2

Slide 15 Beach Photo

Whenever I feel I need reminding of variety I look at this photo

Slide 16 Three men

To illustrate how social media tools can help to manage the massive increase in variety at the
organisational perimeter that we discussed earlier we have to return briefly to Beer and the key
concepts of Variety Attenuation and Amplification.

Slide 17 Managing variety blob 1

During recent further studies in ST I was fortunate enough to be working in Logica on Prediction
Markets and looking at how they would fit in to an emerging strategy for dealing with the new
business environment we were seeing gathering pace.

short intro to pred m

So the aggregate weighted views of self selected participants is a many to one relationship showing
variety attenuation

While the question posed in the market is a statement to all participants from the market owners of
what the discourse is. It sets the parameters . See how important the question is?

Slide 19 managing variety FB the other blob

Big data Jacqui Taylor Flying Binary

Beyond the circle once again, the richness of unknowing, the precious jewels in the darkness.

In this case the exploratory tool is trawling mass data, and drawing insight from apparent chaos
and once again

Slide 20 from this

The raw data = huge amounts unstructured data

the trawl parameters = question design

Slide 21 too this

The Question is the key

And the quality of the insights that we get from the questions that we ask will depend on how much
we can imagine we do not know and by implication the range of questions we can frame

Slide 22 The question fertilises the wasteland

Where is the Grail? It is not the finding of the grail but the asking of the question that brings the
wasteland back to life

Slide 23 Pyramid 2

And that depends on the rigidity of our Beliefs, assumptions, education and experience
particularly beliefs.

As Dr John C Lilley once wrote : “In the realms of the mind what one believes to be true either is
true or becomes true within limits to be determined by experiment and experience. These beliefs
are further limitations to be transcended”
And to assemble a range of cogent question areas to explore why not use causal mapping to
facilitate the application of collective intelligence to question framing?

For such insights and discoveries to be creatively applied we will need an empowering
organisational structure where discovery and growth are truly part of everyone's remit a fractal
structure perhaps such as that found in VSM

with a framework I'm looking for sympathetic resonance

Systems Thinking & Social Media Notes

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