Coevolving Innovations

Earlier this year during the Russell Ackoff memorial, I reconnected with some members of the systems community in Philadelphia.  This event was taken as an opportunity to reinvigorate the systems community, in honour of Russ.  With his colleagues and former students scattered around the world, an Internet-based presence seemed appropriate.

We’ve now formally launched SysCOI.com — the Systems Community of Inquiry.  It is intended as open, worldwide network of individuals interested in systems thinking, the systems sciences and/or systems practice.

Inquiry is “an activity which produces knowledge” (Churchman, 1971).  The shared foundations and perspective in systems suggests more than a community of interest, but less than a community of practice (Wenger, 1999).  The interactions as a community aim to (i) foster interactions contributing knowledge and wisdom to the online world, and (ii) cultivate social relationships between systemicists.

The web interface follows an activity stream style of interaction, as has become popular with Facebook.  In the interest of completely open communications,  content posted on SysCOI.com is visible anywhere the Internet is accessible, and actively crawled by search engines.  There is no ambiguity about privacy with this online community: all communications are public.  The feature of choosing your “friends” on this web site enables following a smaller set of contributors, as the size of the social network increases.  Discussions with longer-running threads can be organized with groups and forums provided on the site.

In Toronto — partially in response to members of the International Society for the Systems Sciences looking for sustainable alternatives to the pattern of annual meetings outside of North America every other year — we’ve started a Systems Sciences Meetup group.  There’s a rich history of people and events in the systems sciences in Toronto, and we’ve been remiss in keeping the momentum going.

The purpose of these meetups is to enable conversations amongst like-minded people interested in (continuing to) climb the learning curve on (the) systems science(s).  Having a keynote speaker provides a centre around which the conversations can coalesce.  In November 2009, Allenna Leonard led the first meetup with a talk on “What are the Systems Sciences”.  Given the holiday season, we deferred the next meeting to January.

With the announcement of a Memorial Celebration for Russell Ackoff in Philadelphia in February, it seemed natural to prepare a session for those unfamiliar with his life and work.  Thus, for the January 6 Systems Sciences Meetup, I’ll be leading a talk on “Russell Ackoff, abridged“.  Having satisfied a personal goal to create a single double-sided page of  highlights, I’ll be relying on two maps as visual aids.

Following a style prescribed by the master himself — not just examining the system, but also its environment — the professional timeline of Russell Ackoff includes his relationships with the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations (that included Fred Emery and Eric Trist), as well as C. West Churchman and Peter Drucker.  Ackoff became a professor emeritus in 1986, continuing his involvement with the systems community through research institutions honouring him, and conferences featuring him for keynotes.  Ackoff’s legacy in the systems sciences lives on through former students in the Social Systems Science (S3) program at the University of Pennsylvania (1975-1988).  A full-size view of this professional timeline is available as an interactive page with links.

For a conceptual view of Russell Ackoff, a map of his writings selects from chapters collected in Ackoff’s Best (1999).  Five chapters from the first three parts of the book — systems, planning, and applications — give a feel for his system of ideas.  The full-size view of these selected writings is also available as an interactive page with links.

Activity on the web site for the International Society for the Systems Sciences happens in spurts. This past weekend, we got two major news items up:

• The formal announcement for 52nd annual meeting of the ISSS has been officially posted as July 13-18 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (This wasn’t a secret, as it was was promoted at Tokyo 2007 in August … but the web site is more accessible).
• The digests, presentations and audio for the 51st annual meeting of the ISSS has been posted as the Tokyo 2007 Retrospective. While the web site was being reorganized, a new Retrospectives index was created, to make finding Sonoma 2006 and Cancun 2005 a little bit easier to find. As an additional feature, the text digests for Atlanta 1998 and Asilomar 1999 have been restored.

So, you can plan to visit us in the summer in Wisconsin, and until the weather gets better, listen to audio from the previous years where you didn’t attend.