 complexity live. This is our third round of complexity live. Very excited. And I'm Angie, I'm your moderator today. And beside me, I have Hayley Campbell Gross. This will be a one hour live discussion. And those of us on the camera will have that discussion. And in the meantime, we will also have a live discussion, a live chat happening. So that's really exciting. Today's topic is systems change. And we're excited to jump in and start that discussion. So who's who I'm Angie again, I'm the cohost of the human current. And I will be your moderator. This is Hayley. Hi there, I'm Hayley, and I'll be looking at the chat box during our conversation. So if you see me kind of leaning over here, I have a computer that I'm looking at everybody's question. So feel free to chime in with anything as it comes up, whatever emerges in the conversation. And Joss is our host. And Joss, would you like to give a little background to complexity labs? Sure. If you're watching this channel, I guess you probably already know a bit about complexity labs. We're an online complex systems. And we've produced a lot of educational videos on all topics relating to complexity and systems thinking and its application. And we've just been producing actually, if you've been following the channel, you can produce your course on systems change. It's been a great course. It's been great to research it and put it together and it's getting published at the moment. So I'm looking forward to sharing my thoughts on that with you. Excellent. Thanks, Joss. And I'll pass it over to my cohost, Hayley, to do a little intro of what the human current is. So we are the cohost of the human current podcast. We are the complexity podcast. We talk about anything related to complex system science, systems thinking, and mostly interview style with experts in the field. We just recently went to the New England Complex Systems Institute's conference, the International Conference on Complex Systems. And that's a mouthful. And they had a week long conference, which we gladly participated in. And we collected 30 interviews with experts, speakers, attendees, and we've been sharing those interviews the past two weeks. And we've got many more to come. So tune in at human-current.com. Awesome. Thanks, Hayley. And next, I want to pass it over to our guest. We have Dr. Orit Gow. She's a senior lecturer in strategy and complexity at Regent's University London. Orit, welcome. And can you give a little intro? Hi. And thank you so much for having me. Can you hear me? Is that okay? Yeah. So, yes, I'm a lecturer for strategy, complexity at Regent's London. But mostly, really, I'm an expert generalist. So I've worked in many different fields from tech startups and corporate market research to peace building NGOs and policy and military think tanks. And I guess what really connects the dots for me, you know, from all of these different places is really a fascination with how do people operating in really uncertain and volatile and dynamic environments, how do they make sense of their system? How do they understand their challenges? You know, what kind of models? What kind of tools could they use to identify leverages and opportunities? And over the years, what I've really learned is that the decision makers who are more complexity aware, who have a better understanding, a better grasp of the underlying dynamics have always fared better. So this is really what I've been focusing my teaching and work on. Excellent. Thank you. Thanks for being here. James Grayson, you are the founder and CEO of Blind Spot Think Tank. Can you give a little intro? Hi. Yes, I've been interested in systems and sustainability for about 30 years, working with it, about 15 years as a sustainability consultant going around the world advising companies and so on. But of course, I saw the same as everybody else was that despite all the work, the problems kept getting bigger and getting worse. And so at that point, I set up Blind Spot Think Tank to look at why things keep getting worse despite everybody's trying harder. And systems thinking I think is part of the answer, but not completely because systems thinking has been around even longer than the sustainability problems quite managed to prevent or to solve them. I'm interested in what I call blind spotting, which is looking at what we're missing. I'm interested in new perspectives on sustainability. One of the main ones I use is global security to try and draw in more of the subsystems that normally get left out. And I'm interested in new policy responses. So for example, I've designed an economic tool which can implement the circular economy to make the economy design out waste rather than just produce more and more of it. So I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you. Thanks, James. We actually had James on our podcast. I can't remember what episode number that was. 54. Yeah. So definitely one of our one of our favorites, one of our gems. So thank you for being here on Complexity Live as well. And then David Ng, he's a Canadian. I am as well. Welcome, David Ng, your systems scientist, a business architect and management consultant and marketing scientist. Can you give another little intro? That's a long, long description. I live in Toronto. I've most recently been serving as a mentor at the Center for Social Innovation in Toronto. And so I'll be doing some systems change work. Recently I published an open innovation learning. It's available open access based off doctoral work that I've been doing at Ulta University. In my history, I was president of the International Society for the System Sciences in 2011-2012 and ran the conference that was in San Jose. And other people know me from being at IBM for 28 years where it's a management consultant and doing market development work. So I've been around for a long time. Wow. Yeah. That's a long time at one place. Thank you so much for being here and sharing. Alicia Harper is a fellow at Schumacher Institute and a partner at Future Considerations. Welcome to complexity live. Can you share a little more about yourself? Yes. Hello. It's lovely to be here. I work as a management consultant. So I get involved in organizational development, leadership work, future cities work, community partnership. And I'm usually the only person on the team who brings a systemic point of view to it. So I discovered complexity science and a facilitation practice called systemic constellations about nine years ago or something. And they changed my world, really. But my practice is very empirical in that it's about bringing what's known about how human systems flow and flourish to people in a really practical, accessible way. So most of the people I work with aren't the least bit interested in the theories. What they want is stuff that works. And particularly quite often people have found they've exhausted the limits of the tools and ways of thinking that they're used to working with, which we would call mechanistic. But I don't hear that word outside of systems thinkers. So I'm an empirical practitioner, I would say, very much on the ground what's practical and what lands with people who are too busy to really engage in any depth with the theory and the science behind it, unfortunately. That's great. And you're the perfect person for us to start our discussion with, too. We talk about systems change and this live discussion is about systems change. But just to set the groundwork in terms of what is systems change. And so Alicia, I'd love for you to respond to that. How do you define systems change? And then what does the role of complexity or systems thinkers, what does that have to do with systems change? What does that bring? Well, if I answer that from the perspective of my clients, because that might bring a different flavour in. Very few people write a brief which is about systems change with the people and the consultancies I work with. There's a little bit happening in the public sector and with not-for-profits in the UK because systems thinking has become a bit of a fad. But people don't typically understand what it means. And so they tend to write a brief which is within a much bigger mechanistic way of seeing the world. So typically people come with a need for innovation. Why aren't we innovative? How do we change our culture in some way? How do we develop better partnerships? How do we develop leaders who are more rounded? So that's what the briefs tend to be. I would say for me, I'm very struck by the quotes about how the world in the process of becoming, right? It's not static, it's evolving. So the idea of creating change is a bit of a misnomer. But for me it means understanding why things are as they are and what opportunities we have to change things. So can we change things? And if so, how might we encourage the sort of change that we would want to see? So I guess in my work, systems change is only ever used by the other consultants really. And I'm sorry, just remind me of the second part of your question, Hailey. Yeah, so Angie, we get that all the time. It's one of our compliments. The second part is what is the role of being a complexity thinker or systems thinker within systems change? Well, again, I make it very specific to my context. I'm normally working within a group of consultants or a consultancy, people who've come through a different heritage. So usually we're working on, actually, what are our belief systems and how do we mesh them? So there may be people who have come from leadership development consultancy. And often that's about if we just change the individual and we just upskill the individual, then they can change anything. And so stepping in with more of a systemic view, I'm able to challenge that and bring something else into the mix, which of course is typically about, well, how is the system set up? What's the history of the system? How these things, creating an environment where some things can happen and other things are much more difficult? And how can we work with people in such a way to develop a better environment, a different set of conditions through which other things might be catalyzed? And how do we keep our eyes open for new things that might be emerging and surprising things and all these things that we're, these concepts that we're interested in complexity, but which I think a lot of organizational systems filter out, if that makes sense, they're sort of not, not looking for it. And of course, we've got lots of examples in the world at the moment about the unlikely but not impossible having emerged and organizations are typically really thrown by that. Yeah, good points. Thank you for that. Is there, James, I'm curious just to add one more person to this, this conversation. You do a lot of work and really focus on blind spotting. And so just in your experience, how do you define systems change and how does being a systems thinker show up in that? For most people it seems, it often looks to me like systems change is a way of trying to to market the kind of management consultancy or the kind of academic research that they might have wanted to do anyway, or that anybody might have been interested to do at any point over the past 50 years. But for me, systems change is about solving the big, wicked, intractable, complex problems that have so far, so far defeated us as a society. And ideally, if we can, not just solve one or two of them, but probably and possibly even more realistically, aim to solve them all. And that will often seem to people to be totally unrealistic. We can't solve these complex problems because they're so complex and everybody talks about systems thinking and all the complexity experts all agree that it's much too hard and we should focus on system change at a kind of subsystem level, looking at one bit or another bit. But to me, that's just productionism dressed up as systems thinking. I'm interested in the systems, the big systems and the big problems and actually solving them. And how can we use systems thinking and complexity to do that and to probably kind of drag us out of the herd thinking that the whole society and also the systems thinking and sustainability communities have been stuck in for decades. Yeah, good point. Thank you for adding on to that discussion. And Joss, it looks like you would like to also jump in there. Yeah, I hope my connection's okay. I'm not going to break up here. So what is systems change? I guess I'd kind of bring a more theoretical approach to it because I'm teaching it. I'd say systems change, taking it from systems thinking is about changing the whole system instead of the parts. So I think that's very different to what we normally do is really focus on parts. Even when there's a problem with the whole system, we quite often kind of try and trace that back to some specific part within the system because we're not very good at looking at whole systems and dealing with problems that are very kind of distributed and complex. So the system may have kind of a systemic problem, but we can't deal with that. So we kind of trace it back to some individual part. And then we kind of focus all our resources on tackling that specific problem. So like if there's a problem with housing, we'll kind of get a bunch of, we'll set up a commission or something, we're going to hold a lot of people together and we'll put someone in charge at the top and give them a part of money and a part of authority and tell them to go and tackle that problem. And when they don't solve it, we'll kind of blame them. And in a way, that's kind of the totally the wrong way to tackle a kind of a systemic problem because actually a systemic problem is, by definition, it's spread out throughout the system, right? The system has changed. We're dealing with these wicked problems, these complex wicked problems, which is systemic, which means that it's not actually one part of the system that has the problem. It's the whole system. It's the way the parts individually are acting and interacting that creates that emergent outcome. So like a simpler problem would be, the simpler problems, you can isolate them and you can kind of define them and then you can go and tackle them in a linear fashion. So if you have a car and it has a puncture, then you can just see it has a punchy, you go and fix a punch and the car works. And that's very simple. A systemic problem like climate change is not like that, right? The problem with climate change is that we're all, it's a tragedy of the common externalities and emergence from externalities. So like each of us are incentivized to a certain way to go and drive our car because the cost of doing that is externalized to the whole system, right? And that creates an emergent critical state in the whole system. So it's actually, the problem is kind of distributed out in the whole system. It's each one of us that are creating that overall structure, that overall emergent outcome. And in that case, you can't focus on one part. There isn't one part to go and tackle in a linear fashion. You actually have to kind of create a solution, create a platform, create an environment that affects the system in many different locations. And you create, it's really about, because it's about emergence, because the problem is an emergent outcome, right? Like inequality, that's kind of an emergent outcome. It's not one person, you know, there might be conspiracy theories, but it's not one person who's creating all this kind of gross inequality. It's actually the way we all kind of act, the way we're incentivized to act that creates that problem. And you actually have to kind of create a dispersed platform that changes the way people act and interact. I mean, like bribery is another good example of an emergent outcome, emergent, you know, wicked problem because it's all of the actors in the system, right? It's not one person. And it's the way they have to kind of create a kind of a platform and tackle that in a district. You almost have to create a new narrative, a new way for the parts to kind of understand themselves and the way they interact. So as you get a new emergent outcome that solves the problem. So I mean, I guess that's the main thing, it's a systems problem. So you can't tackle it in kind of a linear fashion solving one part. You have to have a kind of distributed approach to dealing with it. Thanks for adding that, Joss. Our discussion board is is really exciting over here. And so I want to actually take it back to David. So you in the discussion board asked making a distinction between systemic and and systematic change. And I thought that was an interesting question, David. Yeah, so we have to be a little careful language often when we're getting around systems. And so the first thing that I would ask people to think about is when they're talking about systems change, is that systems plural or system singular? And people often don't think about having multiple holes at the same time that when you're changing a system that you're actually changing multiple things. So as an example, if you're thinking about changing the climate system, there could be an economic system that also is there happening at the same time. So when you're doing that, you end up with a question about whether their systemic change, which is a whole or multiple holes, and people sometimes confuse that with being systematic, which would be to plan outside activities and do them in a sequence or even have a learning procedure where you would do things in a sequence. Systematic may or may not be systemic until people may be confused. Thank you for that clarification. I thought that was really interesting when you put that on the board. And I was also thinking as people were talking about systems change, about how often we often think of systems change as something we're doing to that system. But we're part of all those systems. And so what's our role in that as well and facilitating that. So that's something that popped into my head as we're all sharing. I want to pass it over to Orit. And then we'll go to James, and then I've got some more specific questions to move the conversation forward. So Orit. Yes. So just two points to kind of add to that interesting discussion. First of all, systems change all the time. They change naturally. So it's important to remember that even the most intractable problem you think you're dealing with inevitably is not permanent. I kind of like to think of them as these great hurricanes. You know, at some point, they will run out of momentum of energy sources, or they will hit land. So the actual sources for change are already embedded within the system, which is why I like to spend a lot of time understanding the internal contradictions and tensions that are building up in whatever system I'm trying to analyze or approach. But having said that, it's also really important to remember that at the end of the day, the systems, whatever problem that we're trying to deal with makes sense. It works. And it works for a lot of people that are involved. It has some kind of a political, economic, technological and cultural coherency. So in that sense, it costs and it is painful to create that change. And people will get hurt, even if like in peacebuilding, you know that at the end of the day, they will be better off. And this is really important to think about because actually system change is also destruction. We're destroying patterns, we're destroying relations, we're destroying resource flows, we're destroying incentive structures. And we need to be aware that not just morally, but also because as we start to operate, actually, there will be an opposition system that will naturally emerge to counter whatever we're trying to do. And some of it will not even relate directly to us, it might relate to again unintended consequences down the line of whatever we're trying to do, other connected systems, et cetera, et cetera. So it's very important to think about the dynamics of action through system change as well. Yes. So important to also think about that opposition that will come into play and change is uncomfortable. Yeah. So there's going to be some of that. Thank you for that point. And William Bridges comes to mind with his book on transition and thinking about how change triggers an emotional transition and how we show up in that. So thank you for that. I'm going to pass it over to James for a second and then move the discussion to our next question. But James, I want to pass it over to you because you mentioned in the chat box around linear features and opportunities. And so I just want to pass it over to you and then we'll move on to our next question. It was just a little point, little quick point really that I think that the key with systems change, in particular when we've got these immense global acute problems like climate and a whole bunch of other things, is that we need to be thinking about solving them quickly. So we need to be particularly interested in the system change methods, which can give us an abrupt shift from one paradigm or one system state to another. And so we need to be careful in our own thinking and watching our own thinking that we're not talking ourselves out of the biggest, fastest opportunities. And those big fast change opportunities to me often look linear. So it's actually about relatively simple things that can be done to complex systems. So although the systems are complex and have incredibly complicated nonlinear features, the change processes can in many instances be relatively straightforward and things that could be done or could have been done at any point in the past decades. But because they aren't quite the thing that we're looking for, they get overlooked again and again. So we just need to be careful not to unintentionally talk ourselves out of being able to solve the problems that the systems thinking community is actually here for. Hi, yes. Don't talk ourselves out of it. So important because it feels sometimes like we're being defeated in that. So thank you for that, James. I want to shift a little bit. And for this next question, I'd love to address this to David Ng and those that want to chime in afterwards. Let me know. David, compared to the last century, what changes should systems thinkers be more concerned about? What do you think? That's a great question. It's a lot to the work that I was doing in the international society for the system sciences when I was president in 2012. A lot of the system thinking readings tend to date back to the 1980s, which is actually pretty internet that people want that context. And so they might have thought the internet would come out someday, but they weren't living in a world that was global and all connected. So my focus during the ISS's presidency was specifically on what's new in the 21st century and the two issues that I brought up that have changed things are one, service economy and two, the Anthropocene happening. So first on the service economy, we've moved from a world where in effect it's an issue of supply versus demand. It used to be that manufacturer needs to have a problem in this world now where there are lots of products and services available. And so people haven't thought about quite often that they're in a service economy and that they need to change the way they work with that. There's always alternatives to the products or services that you have today and that changes the way that companies and individuals should work. The second one is the Anthropocene, which is in the earth science. The fact that we moved from the Holocene where human beings now influence the climate. Because up to this point at which the books on the Anthropocene came out, it was kind of believed that the climate is part of the environment, that we can do things in the world. And then in the 2000s and the first decade, there was a lot of work and research in resilient science. And in resilient science, they look at things like collapse. And so we need to be concerned a little bit more about systems that collapse and reform and how that happens. Yeah, those are big topic areas. I feel like we can have entire live discussions just based on those different areas. Yeah, and actually James in his pod, when we interviewed James Grayson, we talked a lot about Anthropocene. It was really interesting and a lot that we didn't know before we even had an interview. Thank you, David. Joss, do you want to add in, add on to this? Is Joss frozen? Joss is frozen. Oh, there he is. Hi, can you hear me now? Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, okay. Cool. What's changed? I think a lot of things have actually changed in the past 20, 30 years. Definitely globalized. Connectivity, I like to really, I think that's the biggest thing. And I think now, kind of point to why we need to change compared, I think a few years ago, it wasn't very easy to kind of convince things, convince people, particularly like in the mainstream, that we kind of had to change, that things like sustainability were important. And now it's the whole idea about how past the world's changing and how many issues we do have. And I think it's a lot about kind of feedback. It's not so easy. And kind of that we have greater interdependency. I don't think it's so easy to kind of push problems beyond the boundary anymore in some problems. We used to live in a kind of nationalized world where we could kind of, you know, project our problems onto another nation or another side of the world, or with the environment, project our waste wherever it was and you know, I think people are more aware of that. And when you kind of are able to show those problems to people, then you're able to kind of demonstrate that we do need to change. And I think then there's opportunity for getting some kind of change in the system. So I mean, going back to what Orrit was saying about change being a natural thing, I think that's totally true. I think that's particularly true in systems change because I think in systems change, you can't actually change a system. Like, I think you can change the parts in a system, right? You can go and fix your car or whatever, whatever the whole very big system. Like, I think that's almost impossible. What you can do, as Orrit was saying, is work with the potential in the system as David, as David, I've got. So there are certain contradictions in the system. And you can use those to evolve as it's evolving in certain directions to assist it to evolve in certain directions as opposed to other ones. Sorry, am I freezing up again? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty glitchy there. I think we got we were able to piece together the words. Thank you, Joss. Hey, Lee, how's our discussion going? Do we have any anything to add from our chat discussion? Yeah, there is a question. We can present to the group from Jimbo Jones. And he says, what are the pitfalls or limitations of framing? So I'm not sure there's a specific person wants to jump in on that one. Yeah, how about James, I wonder if you would would you like to jump in on that that question and and then also maybe you can add in your point of the whole point of system changes to change, not just the parts. Okay, sure, I'm not quite sure what the the aim of the question was with framing, but one of the core questions, one of the core framing issues with system change is what is the system that you want to change? And how ambitious should we be about the level or the frame of the system system that we're aiming for? And the traditional environmentalist or management consultant or organization will be looking almost always at just at subsystems. The subsystem of the organization or the subsystem of the waste management at a particular depot or the design of a particular product and whether it's going to become waste or not. I think with system change, what's interesting is to look at the system in terms of the systemic problem, which is not just the waste in one company, say, or the conflict in one area, but the prevalence of conflict globally and what that's doing to our humanity and our economies and the patterns of making waste or not making resources globally and how we can change those entire patterns and actually not just dabbling with it, not just doing it at a subsystem at a time incrementally or in evolutionary terms or in terms of what we think we can manage as individuals or within our organizations, but really genuinely being ambitious enough with the framing to actually talk about solving the problem as a whole. What would it mean to design out waste everywhere? What would it mean to operate at a civilization without the need for nuclear weapons or spending the kind of quantities of tens of trillions of dollars that we do on weapon spending and all of the other interrelated problems at that scale? I would aim the framing big and aim the thinking big and our ambition big and when that seems uncomfortable or impossible or doesn't match the kind of theory that we're used to discussing, then just go through the discomfort and change the theory and keep working until we actually are really solving the problems. Yeah, good point and we'll talk more about blind spotting shortly and I think that that also fits in there as well and so thank you for our chat going on and adding to our discussion and Lisha, you have something you want to add? Do you want to jump in here? Yeah, I would just say that I think it's a brilliant question because I think the framing is really critical and often when we're working with people in consultancy we will often challenge even the framing so that the brief can be changing the brief in consultation with the client from the beginning because what we want to make sure is that we understand that we can set off on the right path and we're not just going to hunt down the problem so often of course we know that how something shows up in a system may be in a different place and may take a completely different flavour to the sort of source of it or where we can intervene so I think that it's really important to question the framing and to continually question it and behind the scenes we're often always really questioning what are my assumptions about what we're doing here, what are my beliefs and how are those flowing through into the work we're doing so there's a real I think there's a real level of awareness about how are you framing the problem and the potential for what you might then do but also how does that work on the inside as well as on the outside if that makes sense and I think Oryx's point about ethics is really important I think the ethics comes into the framing as well. Yeah that's a great point such a systems thinking lens to put on that and and how you show up and all that thank you for that and speaking of Oryx would you like to jump in and in this discussion here? Yeah perhaps just one more point in terms of framing another aspect that is really important is that the framing itself also needs to consider who is the person who does the framing because at the end of the day we can tackle different big problems and again the framing itself will be as big as needed and will be multi-dimensional and taking so many different trends and elements but it needs in order for it not to be an academic exercise it needs to be done from the perspective of whatever chain agents you are so for example my PhD was about the World Bank and their evolution of development doctrines but their view of the international system for the same problem would have been completely different from the one of the IMF even if they were overlapping so the framing itself it's not like a bird's eye view there's no such thing really as the system it is a way for you to make sense out of reality and you need to embed yourself in that so your own constraints capabilities connections etc are all part of that initial modeling so it's important to consider that as well. Yeah a very important consideration as well thank you so much for that I want to shift a little bit I mentioned blind spotting a couple times now and I haven't really given much context for that and so and James that term has really come up in your work and you've coined that and and I think that that also fits in with framing too so James Grayson what is blind spotting and how can blind spotting help us work towards systemic change? Blind spotting is the an activity you can do yourself or with a group of people where you're deliberately assuming that the way that we're thinking about something or the kinds of solutions that we typically come up with are not sufficient even if it feels like we're in a transition which is a progress towards a better world or a better organization we can use a use a kind of thinking experiment with ourselves to say well what if that isn't enough and what if we're missing something here and that that's the blind spotting looking for what it is that we're missing and I guess the one way of trying to frame the blind spotting is that where you've got a really big intractable intractable problem then you can say well the problem is just too complex it's too hard there are too many obstacles we can't solve it or you can say well we must be missing something on the scale of the problem our blind spots must be that big that we're able to go on day after day decade after decade not solving this problem and what is it that we're missing and if that means kind of challenging ourselves and coming up with new solutions or you know working in new ways then that's what we need to try to do and and that blind spotting process can be the the motivation to try and get us to that new position where we're able to actually solve the things that previously we couldn't solve thank you James and you've used blind spotting I mean you use blind spotting all the time it's I think it's part of your wiring and and how you do your work and how you you live out your best self and can you give some examples of how you applied blind spotting I guess it's something that you you can see at different levels I mean at a very practical scale I started 30 years ago working on waste and composting and one of the things that I was interested in was that throughout the whole UK almost all the local authorities were were trying to persuade everybody to use these dialect style plastic cone shaped composting systems and and they were they were really easy to use so you hardly had to think about what you're doing when you use one of these things you could put almost anything in and they and it would disappear but what I found about it was that they wish actually it was working on anaerobic bacteria generating methane and it wasn't giving you the the compost that you wanted it was actually a kind of a climate and climate destruction machine producing greenhouse gas greenhouse gases like mad and and so what I was interested in is how you know how you can switch mindsets out of thinking what's the most easy easy technical solution that you can come up with that gives the illusion of solving the problem to actually investing our thoughts and challenging how we normally they do you know developing aerobic systems and and I invented this thing which I call grass manure which is a way of making a kind of horse manure out of grass clippings but you can do the kind of the same blind spotting kind of process on policy questions you know for example I designed in their economic tool which which looked at what it is that we're missing every time when we try and handle waste issues you know for example waste management is dealing with waste after it's created when actually what we need to be doing is managing waste before it's created at the design stage and in the price incentives and so on and that's not difficult to do you just can't do it the way we always have been doing it in the past and the same with sustainability as an overall concept it's so easy for it to get pigeonholed into a kind of green niche when actually what we need to be doing is tying it together with economic stability financial stability managing conflict internationally in between countries and that's where I thought it was more useful to actually have a global security framing that encompasses a wider range of questions that then you can look at a problem-solving method for dealing with the whole complex system of all of these problems together which ironically I think become easier to solve as when you deal with the larger more whole system so there's just a few examples on different scales yeah thank you for those examples that makes me think of Anthropocene and David you mentioned Anthropocene earlier would you like to chime in here I'm curious how how you see blinds blindspotting show up whether it be with Anthropocene or perhaps your work with IBM or the International Society of Systems Sciences or other areas of your work sure so this whole discussion reminds me of research that was done at the University of Arizona College of Medicine on what's called the map of ignorance when they're trained to be certain because when a doctor has to say you've got cancer the first question always comes back is are you sure and the answer has to be the doctor has to say yes I'm actually sure because I wouldn't give you that diagnosis and otherwise it causes problems but doctors need to appreciate that science doesn't have all the answers so they created this this college and it's a program where they go through different types of knowledge and knowing and the one that's the most obvious is known knowns where we know what we know you have unknown knowns where you know so we don't think about maybe that we know how to swim but all of a sudden it gets around the water it says oh yes I remember how to swim um there's issues and the famous unknown unknowns which are things that actually uh you don't know you don't know and this is where people tend to be very blind is that they don't know they don't know um now the the the actual one that is really helpful is known unknowns because if someone tells you don't know it becomes a known unknown and the advantage of having a known unknown is that you can actually do research and learn from it um the there are things however like taboos that you can't actually discuss and that gets in the ways and denials and so my favorite example of that is is Chinese medicine traditional Chinese medicine so you go to a western um board that is certifying physicians and you say okay can we certify traditional Chinese medicine well we don't believe in Chinese medicine okay that means you're not going to certify them and the so they should certify themselves oh no we you know so you get caught in this trap where it's a known unknown and they're trying to figure how to deal with it so a lot of this discussion on blind spotting uh strikes me being in that same sort of theme I was taking some notes I thought that was yeah an interesting an interesting lines around you know what you know you don't know what you know and then the yeah all the notes all those things thanks for jumping in on that David uh lisha you do you want to mention anything about um the use of the purchase of purchase of uh process well yes I don't use the term blind spotting but actually um we um it's why we use participative processes when we're working with social systems because it's a recognition that um it is the unknown unknowns you know and so often um the work we're doing takes us into areas that have to do with social justice and and questions of equality and questions of who has power and what are the dominant stories and who gets to set the agenda and all of this sort of stuff and so we use participative processes which mean actually as far as you are able involving people directly who sit in different parts of the system so that we don't just have a well I went to interview them because that's still viewing it's still applying a filter right it's I'm asking questions that are questions that emerge from through my lens and so um I think there's something really important there which takes us back into this question about framing and it takes us back into the question about ethics because um there are always areas of discomfort and areas where clients won't go and for us as consultants it's a very live question about whether we are whether the work we're doing is is colluding with something that's actually we feel ethically we want to change so there's always this live question about the framing the scope um and and whether we are doing more good than we might be doing to cement something that we'd want to change yes very important question to be uh asking ourselves that and I you know I think about change and system change and it definitely involves some disruption or nudging the system and there's this quote by uh Jeff Lawrence which states there's no such thing as a dysfunctional organization because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets and so Orit I'd love to bring you into this conversation around that quote start if you start off this discussion around that quote I'm curious as a participating member of a social system how can we disrupt or nudge a social system to help it recognize itself well I completely agree with that quote because uh again systems emerge over time and they evolve and and and they make sense this is why they evolved the way they did and actually many times they evolve as a solution to a problem but over time because there are other elements in the environment that changes you have drift and they become actually problems rather than the initial solutions that they they evolve to become as an innovative process but at the end of the day we change systems in anything we do uh because they're alive and they're dynamic so whatever we do inside a system either enhances or undermines an existing pattern uh so once you're aware of that and once you become more aware of the patterns that are around you you can intentionally think about disrupting or enhancing them but that also means that a lot of system changers in retrospect were unintentional I mean think even about Kim Kardashian she's a system changer right she changed different elements in terms of I don't know female beauty and business of advertising whatever but I doubt if there was an intentional system change strategy behind it so a lot of the change that we see happening in system is because people are actually trying to better their position within a system but through whatever they're doing they're creating change and for others who want to disrupt the system actually identifying that can be a great tool because this is where you can find your opportunities and in that sense uh it's really important to remember that we all operate from within a system no one operates at the systemic level we can try to analyze things uh intellectually the systemic level but we all operate from the inside uh inevitably because you need to interact and exchange things with other people around you to implement anything so that's part of it uh such a good point or in such a good thing a good reminder for us to understand that we show up individually as as agency with agency in those systems and uh and so thanks for that and the reminder and I wonder uh David did you want to add anything to this conversation and the quote I don't just say the quote one more time by Jeff Lawrence there's no such thing as a dysfunctional organization because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets um actually there there's interesting uh statement by staff revere that the purpose of a system is what it does um and so uh there's drift between what you talk about in terms of um uh intention when you're talking about dysfunctional because dysfunctional uh we could go back to the the definition of a function function is contribution of the part to the whole and so you run into the issue of dysfunction being something where there's a change it's it can either be in the change in the part that doesn't match the whole or it changes in the whole and doesn't match the part right so um dysfunction is an interesting question uh but this reminds me of the the classic 1965 article um by uh Fred Emory and and uh Eric Trist on turbulent environments causal texture of organizational environments and what they look at is uh is how uh change happens and uh the change in terms of the environment so they have as an example a placid environment where the environment doesn't change and then everything is fine um there's four types but the most extreme is what they call the turbulent environment where in effect the the outside world is changing so quickly that you have problems managing and uh and having to coordinate to work together so um it's so when you talk about change it's not just change internally but it's also changing the external world and trying to line those two things up it sounds it sounds uh simple right yeah that's a lot of work that's that's great thank you and uh lisha you i wonder if you'd like to to or sorry i'm gonna pass it over to joss first okay i hope i won't break up um i'm thinking of what you're saying that is evolution i mean i think complex systems um they don't just change by someone kind of saying they're going to change you know like planning it out they change the evolution a career society that's that's evolution how that holds there's some changes and it's about not responding and adaptive parts have to they adapt and they evolve there's co-evolution they evolve together and you only really survive if that's it's the rest of the systems um and i think yeah systems change only really happens when the environment changes holds on to that and i think part of enabling that evolution is actually just kind of exposing the uh system to its environments it's kind of showing that you're living in a different environment you're living since you did in the past and no one's been working so am i am i breaking up yeah it's really hard to get what you're saying it's very uh yeah crazy i'm so sorry joss um no worries yeah that's too bad when we don't have the the good connections so just for the sake of time and uh we're gonna wrap up shortly but alisha or alisha would you like to uh add on i'm slow i'm i'm connecting to something that already said last time i just said um for me actually um it takes us into that realm of how how we are on the inside and then developing greater self-awareness and because that does show itself um in the way that we act and we're not always aware of the difference between what we think we think and and how we act and i i find that that um works its way into the work all the time so as an example um someone who was a participant in an organizational change program said afterwards um it's really strange we're all so much kinder to each other and it's completely changed my experience of work and that's very typical that wasn't that wasn't the objective of the work it wasn't the stated objective but something happens we seem to bring in greater humanity it seems to be really intrinsic to doing this work so i think there's it's maybe the topic for another another webcast but there is something about our embodied um our how we are embodied in this work and our state of being and how important that is and and how that affects the system um which yes which i i would say is really interesting yes thank you and this brings us to our last kind of comments our reflections and i know that there's more uh more insight that people want to share and so i just want to take a moment to go around and see if anyone has any last thoughts and then we'll follow that with a round of if there's anything uh coming out in our work that we should be um recognizing so uh james i'll pass it over to you first any closing thoughts uh i guess just to say that we should um continue to challenge our own thinking on what on system theory and systems change if we think for example that systems can only change slowly or that we can only create system change at a modest scale of some kind then we need to keep thinking because system change doesn't have to be just evolution evolutionary it actually does have to be quick and abrupt and it can be and there are ways to do that i mean i'll i'll put in the chat box uh the paper that was published by nato uh that i wrote on how you could do that which is a a kind of a whole system approach to multiple problem solving um and what what we end up doing i think often when we're uh dealing with environmental issues or system change is managing our own psychology uh avoiding the discomfort of dealing thinking about problems that are too big or too overwhelming and if we if we can be aware of that psychology in ourselves that we're responding in that way then perhaps we can work through it you know we we can be more ambitious about system change we can take on bigger problems and we can actually start to solve them which is what the the movement and the systems thinking community have i should have been able to do over the recent decades so thank you for having me on thank you james and just uh just to come back to you is there any uh work that any announcements or anything that you'd like to share um i mean i'd love to stay in touch with anybody who's watching this you know um let me know what you're thinking of this this uh this chat uh on twitter i'm at blind spotting on twitter so you know come and say hello and let me know your your ideas on system change everybody thank you thanks james uh or it would you what are your final thoughts reflections uh comments and then and then lastly uh is there any announcements you'd like to share or anything that you'd like to uh close out with thank you uh just uh going back to a few things that lisha said earlier about the importance of practitioners and the agency we actually have in ourselves i think that's intuitively in our personal lives we all do system change and you know to think about how you manage your love life your children your relationships we are also intuitively adapt to thinking about dynamics and thinking about what patterns you're trying to enhance or disrupt uh and and i think it's it's really interesting how do you transition that into your professional life as well so um that's kind of important because we do have that agency and that uh approach within us i think naturally um i've been working um many over the last two years on thinking about uh what can we learn from other times or periods in history where people actually had better tools to think about complexity so i mean obviously the world has always been complex uh and i found great inspiration in traditional chinese strategic thought and and also chinese medicine which has been uh mentioned here by david as well so for anyone who is interested you can look it up on social acupuncture.co.uk for some of my writing on this and i'd love to carry on that conversation with anybody who's watching and you guys as well of course thank you for having me again yeah thank you so much we'll definitely be checking out your work even more we did do a little bit of cyber stalking already thank you so much for being on alisha would you like to do any closing reflections thoughts and uh anything you like to announce yes i'm i'm just sort of um noticing what happens for me in my body when i hear james talk about is needing to do things on a on a big scale and it's uh it brings up real panic and a real sense i can't do that um i wanted to share a quote from gene bolton which i really loved um she talks about the causes of change being uh small quirky and local and it really settles my anxiety because i think i'm small quirky and local but there is there is something really practical about um developing a sort of curiosity about where do i have the appetite and the agency and the permission to make an intervention where is that so where can i how can i do something really practical and just being in a state of curiosity which i think for me personally prevents me being overwhelmed by the the scale of the task so i would i would i would offer that and there's some great systems games that i'm sure we've all played where you actually have an embodied experience of how you in a system can can bring about change even if even if you're waited to be a sort of less a less powerful node in it so um i think i think um i would just offer you know seek out those those opportunities to experience the agency that you that you do have and connect with other people that there are really so few of us you think this way i think and i think uh sort of joining joining us up and sharing our experiences is really important thank you for that that's excellent and i just want to say uh james actually put in the comment box here that curiosity is a super antidote for feeling overwhelmed and i would say curiosity is also an antidote for judgment as well so thank you for that i love that and and jean bolton we had her on the show she's such a treat yes yeah amazing person i i know i recognize the time we have a few i just we'll just go a little couple more minutes here i want to pass it over to david and do you have any closing comments reflections anything you'd like to share announce um systems is a pretty big domain so there's a lot of ongoing research and so i have three uh places point people uh actually more than three but um a lot of the work i do is based with the international society for the system sciences um and as part of that i had worked uh all in cozy the international council on together they formed a group called the system science working group and uh there's been a wiki that's from running years now i don't know it's been a long time since we've run this and uh research trying to bridge the system sciences and systems engineering the second one is for people who just want to go online i have a partnership with benjamin taylor in the uk who's been on this series before and it's the systems community of inquiry and it's a site where we post a lot of content and that's actually how i discovered the human current and also complexity labs because benjamin had put them up there and so people can join up and um i can just read it as a blog whatever uh but as a coi.com um the third one is if people are around toronto uh we have system thinking ontario which is a group that beats every third wednesday currently uh because uh we had this challenge where we have these members of international society for the system sciences that would be meeting everywhere except for toronto and i can bike to alena's house from my place so it's very funny meeting in austria and the uk and not meeting in toronto so we started this group this very regular thing uh i'm easy to find the web people looking for me i uh a blog at coevolving.com and on twitter i'm at davidine thank you david for that i also want to make a comment of uh lisha lisha uh made a made a comment here in the chat box i just want to share that people can find her and via future considerations or on twitter at systemic underscore uh arts arts yeah sorry i dropped down there and and that uh and we definitely suggest that you check that out and join the schumacher institute as well so thank you for that and joss is having um some that connection is not that great so uh we'll uh you'll just smile and not and instead of pass it thank you so much i want to um pass it over to my co-host here how is the chat going do you have any final reflections there's actually been some really great conversations between chat members which was really fun to watch uh people chatting with each other um and we addressed some of the questions when talking about our own changing ourselves um and how we are in fact a system and and what that kind of plays into this whole conversation of system change so i'm really glad that that actually organically came up in the conversation um and i think that that's a huge element and something that i've learned a lot about especially doing the podcast for three years that we the change starts within us really it starts there and then we uh ripple out into the systems we're a part of so thank you ladies thank you david everyone that uh talked with us on that it's been an incredibly enriching conversation as far as what's coming up for the human currents we um are releasing episodes uh very very frequently right now because of the conference where we collected uh interviews from the international conference on complex systems so uh really excited to release steven wolfram and the next week or two maybe two weeks um so that's going to be an amazing conversation to share with 45 minutes long and very enriching um to hear about his past and how he came into the complexity realm and then we have several others lined up after that including gad sad his identity online is the gad father uh and then we also have like simon and some other amazing um speakers coming up so really excited to share those with our listeners you can find us at human dash current dot com wherever you get your podcast and we're at twitter at let's work happy i say like that uh in wrapping up i want to thank our guests uh really appreciate your insight your wisdom uh your time and energy for being here what a rich discussion i wish we had a bunch more hours and so thank thank you to each of you and thank you joss this has been an awesome collaboration between the human current and complexity labs it's just been so much fun and fascinating are the next complexity live will happen on september 14th at 6 p.m gmt which is for those of us in north america that is 1 p.m central standard time and uh if you have any questions or need more information about that you can log on either to complexity labs or onto human dash current dot com so thank you everybody thank you for those that joined the live discussion as well and we're looking forward to the next complexity labs live complexity live thank you