Just a holding post for a dialogue I just don’t have the bandwidth to engage right now. I admire the work of both Dave Snowden and Mike Jackson in the wider “Complex Adaptive/Anthropic/Critical-Systems Thinking” space. Known them and their work back to the origins of my Psybertron work, but first referred to the both in them same breath here a couple of years ago.
However, the most recent post is here on LinkedIn to which they both responded, Dave opined …
1 – The origins of ST are in the Macy Conferences, not Systems Dynamics – they came a decade early. And in those events, the split between Ashby and Bateson is significant. I would argue that Bateson is a precursor of complexity science, while most ST followed Ashby
2 – The use of archetypal characters and a questionnaire is useful only if you see the categories as modulators of team behaviour. Categorising individuals runs into the same problems as pseudo-sciences such as Myers-Briggs.
3 – While systems thinking has always sought to address complexity, it isn’t complexity science, which has a different genesis, albeit with some overlaps – see map below.
https://www.art-sciencefactory.com/complexity-map_feb09.html
For me Dave’s points 1 and 3 are about understanding the origins / history / genetics of how different systems & complexity, cybernetics & dynamics branches evolved to be – post-Macy for me too – but this shouldn’t lead to tighter definitions of each labelled branch. On the contrary it’s about flexible/porous #GoodFences and better understanding the whole in terms of relationships between the branches, but never feeling bound by the limitations of any one branch simply because one label is chosen in dialogue. Surely anyone bringing an enlightened view to their endeavours cares about the whole?
Pretty much what was behind my response to an earlier LinkedIn post from Dave. (Somewhere Dave has edited one of his responses out of that thread, my response is across two comments. I had already answered his second plea.)
Dave’s point 2 – is pretty much my #MoreThanScience agenda. Just because something isn’t science is no reason to debunk it as pseudo-science. Valuable stuff exists beyond science – simply more honest not to call it science. (See values and labels in the previous otherwise completely unrelated post too.)
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