#ISSS2016 Boulder

2790 Sustainability of this civilization is only a wishful thinking without frank analysis of, followed by strategic plans to deal with, the competing value systems currently playing on the stage of the international politics. High profile keywords here are refuges, terrorism, China Threat, globalization, and “conflict of civilization” (even we do not quite agree with the term in Huntington’s original sense). Among the major competitors with our current mainstream value system are Chinmunism (Hu, 2010), i.e. the so-called Chinese way of order (including social order, state order and world order, with cultural genes traceable back to Chin’ Dynasty 2000 years ago and to Communist movement from 1917 to 1990), and the Islamist Ideology or Islam fundamentalism (e.g. Goldberg, 2015) that becomes a high profile issue in media and our lives for obvious reasons. A guestimated of 50%+ of Chinese-speaking people (700 million) might support a Chinmunistic world view, and in at least 25 countries that 50%+ of Muslims prefer the Sharia Law to be the law of their land (PEW Research, 2013). The authors have noted, among many differences of the text and the context of the two sets of ideas and values, i.e. one sets up of the ruling paradigm for China in 2000 years, and another defines a desirable world of “Umma”, there is an interesting commonality between them: They all aimed at reducing the diversity, complexity, and the degree of freedom of the society they take control, an interesting case for Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. This paper compares the similarities and differences of these two value systems to facilitate the readers to draw their own conclusions and decide for their own actions.

2812 What is the difference between people outside, or within, organizations that look at a problem with a lot of limits and see unusual and new possibilities, and those who look at a problem with a lot of limits and see no way out? How would an organization intentionally transform its worldview and its problem-solving practices to creatively reconsider its own structures, policies, and assumptions when solutions to key needs and complex problems are limited or prevented by institutional or resource constraints? Education, government, and business leaders agree that creativity and innovation are essential for future organizational success and even survival, yet leaders are often blinded by past policies, organizational goals, or assumptions about resources and systems relationships when faced with complex and changing problems. However, research suggests that there are qualitative differences between individuals, teams, and organizations that become cleverly, resourcefully innovative in the face of complex problems under constraints, and those who do not. The culture and practices that activate shrewd, transdisciplinary, and unconventional problem-solving in the face of resource limits and other constraints are associated with a familiar, but largely unexamined, concept called ingenuity. Most frequently, ingenuity has been used to describe innovative solutions that are surprisingly smart, unconventionally resourceful, and contextually superior, often completely changing an institution or social-technical culture. In this messy intersection where creative, innovative problem-solving is at once demanded and prevented, ingenuity is the human factor necessary to hack the hairball, to pursue the impossible by being willing to seek unconventional connections arising from diverse knowledge, skills, and perspectives; dialogue at the margins; resilience; imagination; creative and resourceful improvisation; and systems thinking. The culture and practices of organizational ingenuity integrate systems thinking into a framework designed to provoke the unconventional approaches to complex problems that produce exponentially better solutions for sustainable business and a sustainable world. As organizations develop broad-based cultures and capacities for ongoing innovation, there is a need to distinguish the concept and value of an innovation culture that integrates systems thinking and the resilient, empathetic, value-driven, collaborative, improvisational, diverse, counter-intuitive, paradoxical capacities of ingenuity. Keywords: systems thinking, innovative, business, resilience, human factor