#ISSS2016 Boulder

2792 The authors compare three collaborative action research projects aimed at generative systems change. The goal of the article is to reflect on the dialogic methodologies they employed, the impacts and outcomes experienced by the participants as leaders and innovators of systemic change, and the evolution of the authors’ own practices as facilitators and catalysts of change. Wilson reflects on a three-year action research project in peri-urban Mexico on sustainable community development. Focusing on the emergent edge of the evolving system of local-state relationships, she recounts the changing attitudes, emotions, and behaviors of the public sector professionals and local community leaders engaged in the project. Wilson reflects on the sense of vulnerability and insecurity raised by the dialogic methodology she used, and the impact on her own practice and sense of self in the presence of these tensions. Bush explores a year of engagement within two urban systems within Asheville NC: public housing and community schools. Using distributed ethnography, he follows public housing's resident leadership’s efforts at self-organizing governance and an Ashoka Change-Maker School’s experience in spreading its educational approach. Offering propositions about leadership for resilience in urban systems, he reflects on the challenges to and evolution of self-awareness for individuals, organizations, systems, and himself as a practitioner-researcher. Walsh reflects on her praxis in regenerative development from 2006 to 2015 in the context of environmental gentrification in a neighborhood in Austin, Texas. To become an instrument of critical, creative, and collaborative change, she developed and fostered regenerative dialogue for green home repair and a community food forest. Walsh reflects on the ways this approach supported her and the residents in harnessing the generative potential of social conflict and vulnerability. The comparative analysis of the three stories concludes with propositions for leadership practices that foster thrivability in complex social systems. 1. Banzhaf, H. S., & McCormick, E. (2006). Moving Beyond Cleanup: Identifying the Crucibles of Environmental Gentrification. SSRN eLibrary. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=990074 2. Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review, (53), 23–40. 3. Hazy, J. & Uhl-Bien, M. (2015). Towards operationalizing complexity leadership: How generative, administrative and community-building leadership practices enact organizational outcomes. Leadership Vol. 11(1) 79–104 DOI: 10.1177/1742715013511483 4. Snowden, David (2002). Complex Acts of Knowing: paradox and descriptive self-awareness. Journal of Knowledge Management. Volume 6 . Number 2. 2002 . pp. 100±111 DOI: 10.1108/13673270210424639 Keywords: social systems design, leadership, thrivability, urban systems, generative dialogue

2803   Aristotle's Four Causes and Teamwork in Corporations Kulak, Daryl 

2775 The denigration of the world’s ecosystems has been driven by the economic imperatives of insatiable multi-national corporations whose goals are to concentrate the ownership and control of global resources in a progressively narrowing band of society. The impacts of this denigration are understood as crises called, ozone depletion, global warming, sea-level rise, extreme weather events, water scarcity, and the shrinking polar ice regions. These challenges involve significant degrees of complexity in our rapidly changing world. Engaging societies and communities in the meaningful changes of behaviour necessary to halt and reverse the denigration of our life-supporting ecosystems is extremely difficult, given that the majority of these societies are a significant part of the problem. They rely almost universally on the same epistemological basis of understanding the world as the multi-national corporations that are destroying it. In many ways, these societies support the behaviours of the multi-national corporations through their consumerism and political systems of representation. Decision making frameworks based on systems thinking can facilitate enhanced understandings of sustainability and potentially enlighten societies to behave differently. However to do so they must communicate an understanding of complexity that engages society at the level of values and beliefs, as these determine actions. They must also be transparent, inclusive, contextually relevant, and based on epistemological concepts that are much more strongly aligned with sustainability. The epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples are based on principles of interconnectedness, holism, relevance over long periods of time, inter-generational equity, and uniqueness to place. Indigenous Peoples have out of necessity had to develop ways of retaining their values and beliefs while accommodating the enforced changes associated with the destructive colonisation processes experienced in many parts of the world. The Waitangi Tribunal was born of the first recognition of New Zealand’s 1840 founding document in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975. This tribunal was established to avoid further transgressions of the Treaty. Many early claims were about environmental degradation while others related to the retention of cultural values, knowledge and language. Claims all identified impacts upon mauri, life supporting capacity. Indigenous concepts raised in hearings included; retention of intrinsic values / mauri; spiritual and cultural values; obligations to enhance mauri; and implications for future generations. Often successful, these claims resulted in significant rethinking of projects and ultimately informed changes in law. The Resource Management Act (1991) has the purpose of promoting sustainable development taking into account environmental, social, cultural and economic well-being of society. However while the ground-breaking new law incorporated numerous indigenous concepts, it stopped short of actually including mauri. The Mauri Model Decision Making Framework allows Indigenous Peoples to contribute understanding based on their own knowledge so that they can be effectively included in resource management decision making processes. The Framework adds a strengthened decision making context due to its ability to incorporate culturally relevant knowledge seamlessly alongside scientific understandings of a situation, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data consistently into the same assessment. When mauri is defined as the life supporting capacity of the air, water and soil the theoretical basis is created for relevance in terms of New Zealand law, and a means to measure and evaluate impacts in a holistic way then exists. Thus through integrating systems techniques and the indigenous concept, Mauri, the Mauri Model Decision Making Framework creates a new approach to cross-cultural communication and action. Independent research has assessed the Mauri Model as an exemplar against Bellagio STAMP and it is now included in curricula in engineering, planning and international studies at the University of Auckland, as well as being an online resource.

2842 We are at the turning point of an era with a huge potential of change in which humanity can decide to finally address the failures of our economic, social, governance and belief systems. However the current narrative build around the hopes of being saved by science and technology is getting more and more traction into a society in which digitalization, the illusion of zero marginal costs, sharing economies and big data seems to be the answer to our most pressing problems. This is ironical, since science and technology (S&T) have been not only central to the development model followed by human societies in the last centuries but often very effective instruments of mass destruction, environmental degradation and social exclusion. S&T have been definitely part of the problem, a key component of our model of economic development, and not only an exogenous factor as considered by mainstream economics, which anyway recognize their crucial role to improve productivity and sustain long-term growth. But they are also deemed to be the core of the solution, a paradoxical vision grounded in the idea that finding a technical fix is a good way to avoid the less comfortable question of how power and wealth are distributed in society and with what consequences. In particular the younger generation seems to be distracted by the excitement about technological and scientific new developments and its untapped potential. Addressing the systemic underlying root causes which are the real drivers of our problems is too complex compared to building the new app and the social enterprise that goes with it. While for previous generations changing the world for the better would require also political and social innovations, now it seems that S&T has even displaced every other source of hope. The launching of the latest digital artifact creates a widespread frenziness, but also a true and exciting entrepreneurial spirit is mobilized by the potential of technologies to address human challenges. In a sense, we put S&T at the core of societal evolution, or to say the least we do not conceive any transformation without them playing a significant role, and this is also why we think they should rescue us from all disasters, even those provoked by ourselves. In light of these developments I would like to emphasize the following questions in my contribution to ISSS 2016: How can we go beyond a paradigm of “S&T solutionism” and channel the huge potential these developments will bring? How can we change the route towards a future in which humanity has to adapt to digitalization and its consequences, instead of putting digitalisation at the service of humanity?

2791 What our media named as terrorism today are perceived as revolution by some. What we call revolution in mainland China and Russia, are no less violent and cruel than terrorism too. This paper observes and identifies the roots, the triggering historic events, the similarities among the differences, of the two huge phenomena and their two driving ideologies, i.e. the Extreme Islamism and the Bloody Communism, that have deep influence to our time and our daily life. As one of our subject has been just fading away into history (not really) and another is still going on while this paper is being written, we highlight the similarities or even isomorph of these two violent social phenomena, raising a question behind such similarity – what are the driven forces that enable these phenomena to emerge, or, why on this planet a certain number of people are doomed to believe, engage, fight for, and victimized by such pathological ideologies?

2898 How can knowledge be created (incentivised) and distributed (shared socially) when it is what economists define as a public good - it is very expensive to produce, its use by any one person leaves no less for anyone else and it is generally difficult to sustain property rights over? In economic terms the marginal cost of distributing knowledge is zero and as marginal cost should equal price for optimality, price should be zero. Clearly if the price were zero there will be no incentive for anyone to produce it. So what is to be done? To charge for it on a per use basis is hard as it can be cheaply and costless transferred from one person to another. Despite this it is undoubtedly been made available in ever increasing quantities and quality. Universities were one traditional way of creating new knowledge in the public domain. These were supported out of general taxation or endowment and scholars working in them were expected to make their ideas available free to all who might be interested. Modern academic capitalism seeking to establish IPR in academically produced knowledge undermines that. These essence of creative advance in knowledge is that the ideas of all are available to all to do with what they will. If for commercial reasons sharing in this way may be undesirable and if it does not occur then a particular line of inquiry will be blocked of and in the longer term this could kill creativity.

Description: We need to examine the foundation of our global economic system that assumes unlimited growth in a finite world, to consider the paradigms of regenerative capital, steady-state economics, and innovation. This means considering no-growth and negative-growth models, and perhaps shifting our concept of growth from quantity to quality, from extraction to investment in natural and human capital.

Chair: Alec Tsoucatos and Mila Popovitch

Ancient and native cultures have a direct experiential knowledge of whole systems and what is a sustainable natural balance. What are the lessons and how do we incorporate them into modern science, leadership, and society?

2783   This workshop will expand upon the content and ideas provided in the earlier session: Outdoor Adolescent Rites of Passages: Theoretical Foundations, Contemporary Shortcomings, and the Emerging New Model. Participants will be engaged by exploring personal connections to the outdoors and meaningful experiences they have had in the wilderness. A practical and working model of a community-based outdoor youth engagement initiative will then be presented. Participants will be asked to contribute to the development of this model through critical feedback, generative dialogue, and human-centered design. Participants will leave the workshop with a deeper understanding of how outdoor rites of passage can be offered in any community, as well as having contributed to the development of a practical initiative in Colorado.

2905 System thinking is about seeing things as a whole, as unity. However the seeing could happen from different points of view according to their corresponding perspectives. As a result, there is a diversity of system thinking. This diversity provides the foundation to unite the different perspectives in order to advance to the next level of system thinking, the special systemic properties of the observers and decision makers. In this discussion panel, we present the Health and System Thinking from different perspectives, both theoretical and clinical, both microscopic and macroscopic, as well as both Eastern and Western. These include system thinking from Energy medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Indian Ayurvedic Medicine, Micro-systemic environment of cancer cells, and Mathematical systemic view of acupuncture
 Coordinators: 1. Traditional Chinese Medicine: Thomas WONG 2. Energy medicine: Dr Dominique Surel https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-dominique-surel-2a081b
 Invited practitioners for in person or on video discussion: 1. Indian Ayurvedic Medicine by Dr. Shim 2. Micro-systemic environment of cancer cells by Gary Smith https://uk.linkedin.com/in/gary-smith-5338aa4 3. Mathematical systemic view of acupuncture by Kent Palmer https://www.linkedin.com/in/kent-palmer-95bb767

Each speaker will have a 5-10min talk about their work relating to health and system thinking. Then we will have discussions and questions concentrating on the theme of how “Unity in Diversity” may apply.


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2788 The proposed presentation will present the theoretical findings of my master’s thesis, as well as their practical application to youth engagement programming around the world. The presentation will first outline a traditional rites of passage framework as it relates to community-based engagement of youth. Research from the fields of psychology, anthropology, experiential education, and systems dynamics will be presented to demonstrate the importance of such practices in healthy youth and community development. The challenges that contemporary outdoor youth engagement programs are encountering will be explored, highlighting the specific system obstacles they face in effective implementation. The presentation will progress to present a research backed, theoretical model for the development of community-based outdoor rites of passage programming. The proposed model involves active community mentorship networks, locally based preparation and reintegration of participants by community members, and self-directed adolescent design of rites of passage experiences. Lastly, I will discuss the practical application of this model in various youth engagement initiatives around the world. The audience will be engaged to both share their own outdoor rites of passage experiences, as well as contribute tangible additions to the emerging new model of community-based outdoor youth engagement. Future research on the relationship of such programming to asset building communities will be proposed and discussed at the end of the presentation.

2782 In this paper we discuss how socio-technical intervention in socio-ecological systems can increase understanding of burning issues that drives systems unstable and unbalanced. Using the challenge of drilling oil in the Yasuni National Park ecosystem in Ecuador and balancing it with the diversity of socio-cultural inhabitants in the ecosystem, we show how we can develop a space for evolution of mutual understanding of a CoI (Community of Interest) consisting of multiple system stakeholders and what mechanisms can help us in articulating concrete actions happening across different domains - ranging from scientific findings and publications all the way to artistic and emotional-engaging interventions, evolving in this way from mere transdisciplinary to rather holistic approach of solving complex socio-ecological problem. Paper presents outcomes of the pre-event, at-event, and post-event interventions at the workshop “Which data to look for? How to build thriving knowledge communities?“ related to the BunB conference. Our unique approach was to provide CollaboFramework (consisting of CollaboScience and CollaboArte socio-technical systems) that creates a dialogical space for mapping mutual fuzzy and multi-truth knowledge of known issues and guiding evolution of that initial knowledge through the set of dialogical interactions among stakeholders. CollaboFramework system is a novel approach that unites infrastructure for the collective-knowledge space with the set of socio-technical tools that incrementally evolve that collective-knowledge weaving. With CollaboFramework we recognize uniqueness and complexity of transdisciplinary dialogue of CoIs that aim solving wicked problems. We provide support for modeling personalized socio-technical processes governing each of those communities. Processes coordinate different components of CollaboFramework in the most efficient way for particular CoI and challenges it is facing at the moment. Processes guided with socio-psychological insights help CoIs to converge multidisciplinary knowledge into coherent and landscaped knowledge with the set of insights that will be capable of governing future actions and interventions in the problem-space, namely creating public media and artistic projects that will engage society and let all relevant stakeholders to be heard and recognized. In the future iterations of the CoI events, this will bring additional insights and start another iteration in the spiral of CollaboDialogue and calls for actions. In this paper we discuss how socio-technical intervention in socio-ecological systems can increase understanding of burning issues that drives systems unstable and unbalanced. Using the challenge of drilling oil in the Yasuni National Park ecosystem in Ecuador and balancing it with the diversity of socio-cultural inhabitants in the ecosystem, we show how we can develop a space for evolution of mutual understanding of a CoI (Community of Interest) consisting of multiple system stakeholders and what mechanisms can help us in articulating concrete actions happening across different domains - ranging from scientific findings and publications all the way to artistic and emotional-engaging interventions, evolving in this way from mere transdisciplinary to rather holistic approach of solving complex socio-ecological problem. Paper presents outcomes of the pre-event, at-event, and post-event interventions at the workshop “Which data to look for? How to build thriving knowledge communities?“ related to the BunB conference. Our unique approach was to provide CollaboFramework (consisting of CollaboScience and CollaboArte socio-technical systems) that creates a dialogical space for mapping mutual fuzzy and multi-truth knowledge of known issues and guiding evolution of that initial knowledge through the set of dialogical interactions among stakeholders. CollaboFramework system is a novel approach that unites infrastructure for the collective-knowledge space with the set of socio-technical tools that incrementally evolve that collective-knowledge weaving. With CollaboFramework we recognize uniqueness and complexity of transdisciplinary dialogue of CoIs that aim solving wicked problems. We provide support for modeling personalized socio-technical processes governing each of those communities. Processes coordinate different components of CollaboFramework in the most efficient way for particular CoI and challenges it is facing at the moment. Processes guided with socio-psychological insights help CoIs to converge multidisciplinary knowledge into coherent and landscaped knowledge with the set of insights that will be capable of governing future actions and interventions in the problem-space, namely creating public media and artistic projects that will engage society and let all relevant stakeholders to be heard and recognized. In the future iterations of the CoI events, this will bring additional insights and start another iteration in the spiral of CollaboDialogue and calls for actions.