Preparing my paper / presentation / slide-deck for the upcoming conference in Birmingham, I had another instalment of my 22 year dialogue with Dave Snowden. That latest dialogue is reproduced below, but the result was the following post by me on LinkedIn.
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Ian GLENDINNING – Systems Architecture & Information Abstraction Consultant
The ISSS-2025 Conference is in Birmingham at the Leadership Institute of the University of Birmingham, Friday 11th to Tuesday 15th July.
The theme is “Advancing Together: An Invitation for Systemic Collaboration” – between the many different constituencies interested in Systems one way or another – Systems Sciences, Thinking & Engineering, Operations Research, Cybernetics & Complexity Sciences to name a few.
On Saturday afternoon, I’m presenting on “Rehabilitating the Value of Wisdom” as a follow-up to my 2024 workshop in DC on “The Tyranny of the Explicit”. It’s about the language we need to be using when dealing with non-predictive-systems whose trajectories are “more than science” even though their emergence and evolution are soundly science-based.
The name of the game is pragmatism, and natural language that supports an integration of the scientific and human perspectives. Drawing on 25 years of philosophical research on top of 25 years of systems engineering experience as well as the resources of many other players in this space, including Dave Snowden and Dr Mike C Jackson OBE.
Mike is also part of the conference and you will find the full list of speakers and agenda here:
https://lnkd.in/eUSishYj – Agenda – Advancing Together: The 69th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences – web.cvent.com
Hope to see you there 🙂
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The reason I was prompted to make that promotional LinkedIn post was that, as I mentioned in the intro above, I’d had another constructive dialogue with Dave Snowden on LinkedIn this morning. That thread reproduced below, was Dave reflecting on attending a conference on Systems in Government Context in Sheffield …
Dave Snowden – Sitting here in Sheffield, having presented material on citizen engagement and also reflecting on some of the other presentations. One of the most striking contrasts was between presenting systematic change (neutral between systems thinking and complexity science) as a set of desired behaviours, and presenting it as a means by which those behaviours might emerge. Witnessing the type of audience engagement which defined how people should respond, based on a culturally specific view on transparency, etc and seeing how the political players in the group responded by gaming.
Coming away more convinced than ever that we should stop talking about an emergent property, behaviour as if it were desirable and had causal properties. The reality is that behaviour only determines actions once it has become habituated, which takes a long time and may be socially determined anyway. If you try to teach it (i) it won’t work and (ii) it will be gamed and used as a power game. Obliquity, proximity, and high interactions (around something meaningful) are all more impactful.
Please repeat after me: “it all went wrong with Skinner”
Ian GLENDINNING – That whole second paragraph (and your Virtue ethics reference in one of the comments) – I can’t disagree – but it leaves me again with that “and you still want to call it all science” feeling?
Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING its coherent to scientific understanding used as an enabling constraint
Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING It was interesting today – Mike Jackson said there was a creative tension between ST and scientific approaches to complexity and that ST had arise to account for things that science could not then account for. I like that but using science as an enabling constraint is a triadic option to the dichotomy of science – non-science and science itself had radically changed since the foundations of ST. New Materialism brings together sceince and the humanities in ways we could not have imagined a few decades back.
Ian GLENDINNING – Ironically at the Birmingham ISSS conference starting end of next week, Mike and I are presenting at the same time in parallel sessions – bad news for me I’m guessing 😉
Anyway – science as “enabling constraint” I’m good with.
[As we’ve agreed before, all the complex process that cause [all the emergent stuff in your para] have scientific explanations and bases, but all that obliquity and socially-determined habituation and gaming arising / evolving over many cycles of interaction are not themselves “science” – in terms of things like predictability and objective repeatability, etc.]
Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING Obliquity also has a basis in science, as does habituation (which forms a regularity)- you’re (rather like Mike and others) taking a view of science that is just a tad out of date. Any method or approach needs to have some backup
Ian GLENDINNING – In a nutshell, my linguistic objection is that it is dishonest (doesn’t help, causes problems and misunderstandings) to keep calling that integration of science AND humanities, “science”. [And I’m talking now. It is precisely during these recent 3 decades I’ve been working on understanding that integration.]
Ian GLENDINNING – Dave Snowden We’re agreeing they have a sound basis (in 2020’s Science) – they have that solid back-up – but their subsequent trajectories in the real world are not scientific. It’s not a matter of being “out of date” – I could take offence 🙂 – it’s about constructive linguistic choice to move things forward.
Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING trajectories are in the main emergent properties My point (no insult intended) is that a lot of science is about non-predictive systems, but we can understand the mechanisms, what can’t happen and regularities
Ian GLENDINNING – Dave Snowden Again, can’t argue with that. My problem is simply with the language we use when dealing (planning, managing, justifying, funding, etc.) the trajectories of those “non-predictive systems” emerging 🙂 Your practical approach(s), are clearly very good – I’m a fan-boy after all 😉 – just a hopefully constructive linguistic objection in that political management space 🙂
Ian GLENDINNING – Thread-reader unroll … oh, no, wait a minute 🙂 (This exchange is pretty much my slide-deck for Birmingham. Thanks for your indulgence Dave Snowden )
Dave Snowden – Ian GLENDINNING if you want sone promotion put up a post and link to me
Ian GLENDINNING – Dave Snowden Ha, yes. Didn’t mean to hijack your thread – but it has been useful to me, and I will take you up on that offer.
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If you want to pick-up the whole preceding dialogue, just search “Dave Snowden” and/or “more than science” on the blog above. The latter goes back to 2001, my association with Dave back to 2003.
Or tune in to the conference presentation to hear the latest, also linked above.
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