The Hidden Power Of Systems Thinking

The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking: Governance in a Climate Emergency is a persuasive, lively book that shows how systems thinking can be harnessed to effect profound, complex change. In the age of the Anthropocene, the need for new ways of thinking and acting has become urgent. But patterns of obstacles are apparent in any action, be they corporate interests, lobbyists, or outdated political and government systems. Ison and Straw show how and why failure in governance is at the heart of the collective incapacity to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergencies. They go beyond analysis of the problem and demonstrate how incorporating systems thinking into governance at every level would enable us to break free of historical shackles. They propose 26 principles for systemic governance. This book will be inspiring reading for students applying their systemic methods, specialists in change management or public administration, activists for ‘whole system change’ and decision makers wanting to effect challenging transformations. It is for anyone with the ambition to create a sustainable and fair world.

Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking explores a radical new conception of business and management. It is grounded on the reconnection of humans with nature as the new competitive advantage for living organizations and entrepreneurs that aspire to regenerate the economy and drive a positive impact on the planet, in the context of the Anthropocene. Organizations today struggle in finding a balance between maximizing profits and generating value for their stakeholders, the environment and the society at large. This happens in a paradigm shift characterized by unprecedented levels of exponential change and the emergence of disruptive technologies. Adaptability, thus, is becoming the new business imperative. How can, then, entrepreneurs and organizations constantly adapt and, at the same time, design the sustainable futures they’d like? This book uniquely explores the benefits of applying Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking to sustainable management. Grounded in Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies, it offers a modern scientific perspective fundamentally based on the concepts of bio-logical adaptability and lifefulness amidst complexity and constant change. The book introduces the new concept of the Gaia organization as a living organism that consciously helps perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. It is subject to the natural laws of transformation and the principles of oneness, emptiness, impermanence, balance, self-regulation and harmonization. Readers will find applied Eastern systems theories such as the Yin-Yang and the Five Elements operationalized through practical methodologies and tools such as T-Qualia and the Zen Business model. They are aimed at guiding Gaia organizations and entrepreneurs in leading sustainable transformations and qualifying economic growth. The book offers a vital toolkit for purpose-driven practitioners, management researchers, students, social entrepreneurs, evaluators and change-makers to reinvent, create and mindfully manage sustainable and agile organizations that drive systemic transformation.

Sustainable Self-Governance in Businesses and Society offers a sound introduction to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) and clarifies its relevance to support organisational sustainability and self-governance. While the VSM has been known since the early 1980s, it hasn’t been always easy to understand and to apply. It explains the self-transformation methodology to analyse the way organisations manage (or not) their complexity and govern themselves. The work is supported by multiple examples of application in organisations of all scales – from small to multi-national corporations and from organised social networks to communities and national organisations. It clarifies the relevance of Beer’s theory to support systemic learning and change in organisations, and to coach them to self-organise and self-govern. Readers interested in further understanding insights from complex systems and cybernetics theories for designing and transforming organisations will benefit from this book, as it works to offer very detailed insights on how to put the VSM theory into practice. It clarifies how it improves adaptive capabilities, agile and self-regulated structures, more capable of fully implementing corporate sustainability strategies and self-governing themselves. The chapters provide key reading for managers, consultants, practitioners, and post-graduate students working in organisational transformation, governance, and sustainability.

Louis R. Pondy was a leading management and organizational studies scholar whose work on open systems helped launch and define the future of the field. This book offers an assessment of Pondy’s contribution, through critical reflection on what happened to the relationship between conflict theory and “beyond open systems.” Exploring the ways in which Louis R. Pondy theorizes conflict and systems, and how he challenged the status quo paradigms, this book offers a historical analysis on Pondy’s work and the relation to contemporary management theory. The author develops a Triple Loop framework, building on Pondy’s theories as well as the work of Gregory Batesom, to demonstrate a beyond-open-systems approach and existing single- or double-loop systems. Demonstrating the value and legacy of Louis R. Pondy, this book will have international appeal to researchers, academics and students across management disciplines and organizational studies, including systems thinking and conflict resolution.

This book argues for computer-aided collaborative country research based on the science of complex and dynamic systems. It provides an in-depth discussion of systems and computer science, concluding that proper understanding of a country is only possible if a genuinely interdisciplinary and truly international approach is taken; one that is based on complexity science and supported by computer science. Country studies should be carefully designed and collaboratively carried out, and a new generation of country students should pay more attention to the fast growing potential of digitized and electronically connected libraries. In this frenzied age of globalization, foreign policy makers may – to the benefit of a better world – profit from the radically new country studies pleaded for in the book. Its author emphasizes that reductionism and holism are not antagonistic but complementary, arguing that parts are always parts of a whole and a whole has always parts.

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This book explores how the conceptual lens of Holistic Flexibility presents new advancements in systems thinking. Systems thinking is often associated with frameworks and methodologies that often confine the discipline to academic circles in operations research and management science (OR/MS). Holistic Flexibility for Systems Thinking and Practice challenges this status-quo and talks about systems thinking as a state of mind, giving it a cognitive character. The book presents both theoretical deliberations and practitioner cases of Holistic Flexibility. The development of systems thinking in OR/MS is described leading to the latest debates on the subject and the key pillars of Holistic Flexibility are discussed in detail. A range of case studies are presented that offer a firsthand experience of Holistic Flexibility in practice. Learnings are drawn to highlight the importance of a spiritual approach in management, an understanding which is used to further develop the conceptual lens of Holistic Flexibility since it was first introduced. This book presents a range of competencies required for systems practitioners to address and respond to complex situations in an interconnected world. A bold attempt to pragmatize systems thinking and systems practice, the ideas presented in this book weave a thread between the development of the discipline, current debates, and what lies ahead. It will be highly beneficial for OR/MS researchers and graduate students who are interested in systems thinking as well as researchers interested in connecting modern management thinking and Eastern mysticism.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on Knowledge and Systems Sciences, KSS 2022, held in Beijing, China, in June 2022. The 14 revised full papers and 3 short paper presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 51 submissions. The papers are organized in topical secions on ​data mining and machine learning; model-based systems engineering; complex systems modeling and knowledge technologies.