Abstract
The primary concern of this chapter is to ask and imagine what conditions and processes might create the circumstances for the emergence of social value in relation to systems practice. A primary concern is to illuminate how effectiveness comes to be judged in relation to systems practice. Different perspectives on valuing are first explored and situated in the history of valuing and the related practice of evaluating. Through the lens of a final reading the transition from being systemic to doing Systems is explored. Within the modes of ‘doing Systems’ there is a need to understand how capability can be built. How capability-building processes are designed and enacted is a reflection of valuing and evaluating. Frameworks to consider these issues are provided. The chapter concludes by considering how, in a climate changing world, the valuing of systems practice can be understood in a context of hope.
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Notes
- 1.
Another way of exploring this is to ask: “what is it we see when we say we value what is happening? What happens if we reify values?” Framing this as “you can create a map from the territory, but you can’t create the territory from my map” – which is a subtly different concept than “the map is not the territory” – has helped to communicate my intended meaning (i.e., you can create the value from the happening, but you can’t create the happening from the value).
- 2.
The traditional approach that holds little appeal for me is to see values as a property of someone or reducible to a description or classificatory schema. Again, language does not help. On the one hand ‘values’ are often given noun form. Whenever the phrase ‘what value do we put on that’ or ‘how do you value that’ is used this usage implies something in which value exists. This obscures the praxis elements in which valuing emerges as a result of a context specific dynamic.
- 3.
A fear I have is that commentators, scientists and policy makers will continually attempt to reduce uncertainty to risk as exemplified by Giddens [14] who rather disingenuously argues that ‘risks associated with climate change, as I have often stressed in this book, shade so far over into uncertainty that they often cannot be calculated with any certainty’ [p. 174].
- 4.
In Chapter 5 I spoke of being and doing as recursively related. So, with awareness, to do one is also to do the other. I have chosen to capitalise the word Systems here to denote the process of making a connection with the intellectual and social history of doing Systems (as per Fig. 2.3) and of acting with awareness of both systemic and systematic practice.
- 5.
Epigenesis is a concept worth understanding in the systems domain. In biology it literally means development on top of (epi) development. Thus it refers to the current development based sequence of further development in an organism. It was originally coined to refer to embryonic development of a plant or animal from an egg or spore through a sequence of steps in which each step creates the conditions for the next step so that cells differentiate, organs form, and the shape of the living system results.
- 6.
For a critique that reaches similar conclusions, though from a different worldview, see Hodges [16].
- 7.
A speculative thought is that perhaps his understanding of the operation of DNA could also be seen as an isophor for the systems practitioner, an embodied juggling act!
- 8.
Donald Schön of course made similar arguments quite early on in his long and productive career.
- 9.
This is a particularly British expression usually meaning to convey the moment when a previously confused or mistaken person finally understands something, generally something important and maybe something painfully obvious to others’ (see http://horizon.bloghouse.net/archives/000204.html); it refers to the same phenomenon as my ‘aha moment’ referred to in Chapter 2.
- 10.
And these goods and services are distinguished specifically in relation to what we take/use (and hence value) from “the ecosystem” – i.e., they are not about ecology!
- 11.
Krippendorff [22] makes the important point that ‘acknowledging understanding does not mean similarity or sharing of conceptions, its affirmation constitutes an invitation to go on, including to other subjects’ [p. 142].
- 12.
- 13.
As observed on her website Bateson’s book is constructed around the proposal that lives should be looked at as compositions, each one an artistic creation expressing individual responses to the unexpected – see http://www.marycatherinebateson.com/reviews.html (Accessed 7th October 2009).
- 14.
I cannot claim that in your reading you will experience the authenticity that I do.
- 15.
This is evident in the use by Bateson of the phrase ‘whole systems’ which within the logic of the arguments I have mounted in Chapter 2 is not a particularly helpful or meaningful term.
- 16.
- 17.
In my experience many change management activities in complex organisations believe naively that enhanced performance can be achieved through staff development forgetting that the capacity to respond – to use new skills or understandings – may be constrained by a range of factors such as structure, processes, relationships (this is a similar set of phenomena as described in Chapter 9 for systems practice).
- 18.
I use capabilities in the sense of being able to act, to create an effective performance. Thus capability is associated with doing or enactment.
- 19.
This is the url for the Financial Times online – see for example, http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-rankings (Accessed 10th October 2009)
- 20.
The NSG is the business school for government operating from its heart [Whitehall] and dedicated to the public sector – (see http://www.nationalschool.gov.uk/about_us/index.asp)
- 21.
Unfortunately this research suggests that the five key components are additive – my own perspective, based on the arguments of this book is that investing in systemic thinking and practice would deliver all of the other components. (See: Hunting SA & Tilbury D. 2006. ‘Shifting towards sustainability: Six insights into successful organisational change for sustainability’. Australian Research Institute in Education for Sustainability (ARIES) for the Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, Sydney: ARIES).
- 22.
A ‘Fuschl Conversation’, initiated in 1980 in the Austrian village of Fuschl, is based on the process of dialogue, of ‘meaning flowing through’ (see [19, 21]). It can be understood as a collectively guided disciplined inquiry comprising (i) an exploration of issues of social/societal significance, (ii) engaged by scholarly practitioners in self-organised teams, (iii) who select a theme for their conversation, (iv) which is initiated in the course of a preparation phase that leads to an intensive learning phase (see http://www.ifsr.org/node/33 Accessed 9th October 2009).
- 23.
- 24.
The fail mark in undergraduate courses at The Open University (UK) is set at 40% – hence the cut-off point in this table.
- 25.
‘People First: How to make environmental sustainability something we can all live with’ 53rd Meeting of the International Society for Systems Sciences (ISSS), University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, July 12–17 2009. See http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms//About%20Massey/Vice-Chancellors-office/Speeches/2009/People_First_July_2009.pdf (Accessed 12th October 2009).
- 26.
Personal communication, 3rd October 2009, Bourn, UK.
- 27.
This can be described as a “demand pull” strategy compared to a “supply push” strategy.
- 28.
I base this suggestion on experience of a person who once played this role within the Dupont company. He operated at board level answerable only to the CEO of the day. Given this history in Dupont I have found the current CEO’s responses to the global financial crisis of interest (see http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2273# Accessed 12th October 2009).
- 29.
This suggestion needs to be understood within an appreciation of the historical and political significance of a court jester, i.e., “in societies where freedom of speech was not recognized as a right, the court jester – precisely because anything he said was by definition ‘a jest’ and ‘the uttering of a fool’– could speak frankly on controversial issues in a way in which anyone else would have been severely punished for” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester Accessed 12th October 2009).
- 30.
e.g. see the UK Commission for Employment and Skills at http://www.ukces.org.uk/ (Accessed 10th October 2009).
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Ison, R. (2010). Valuing Systems Practice. In: Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate-Change World. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-125-7_13
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