Coevolving Innovations

… in Business Organizations and Information Technologies

System envisioning: disclosing a collective future system

Much of the challenge of getting an organization to move forward is in establishing a collective understanding of what the joint future might be. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of system envisioning since I participated in some OOPSLA workshops in the late 1990s. Ralph Hodgson provided me with permission to repost a workshop summary where many of the ideas first came alive for me.

The idea of vision certainly isn’t new for businesses. My concern is that many visions never materialize, and lots of effort and resources get wasted. Two factors that contribute toward success are:

Digests: Finland, Palisades, Berkeley, Toronto

I’m privileged to be able to travel to conferences — literally around the world — to see and talk with speakers who have done research on some areas in management that I find interesting, or who have written a book or some articles.

Since 1998, I’ve been posted digests — personal notes, taken in real time during the meeting — on the Systemic Business web site, and on the ISSS web site. We’ve recently migrated the latter web site to a more modern architecture (Drupal), but sadly, the Systemic Business web site was static content and a chore to maintain.

Since I’ve had some catch-up time at home, I’m now happy to announce the Coevolving Innovations digests. Working down the backlog, I’ve posted four digests:

Customizing Gallery 2, uploading with Gallery Remote

Having satisfied the publishing of text — with a WordPress blog installed on a hosted domain — the natural next step is publishing photographs. While it’s easy to upload and embed images in a WordPress post, it’s better to have a specialized image gallery when the photo archive is large. The long term goal is to show random thumbnails on your WordPress sidebar, inviting the browsing images in your gallery, but that’s a feature for some later day.

Value-creating systems and business models: systems thinking inside

On my quest for management research based on systems theory, I’ve generally been disappointed since the systems foundations are rarely apparent from a superficial reading. Typically, when I read management research, I get a queasy feeling inside, because a lot of the content written is anti-systemic.

In contrast, when I read Johan Wallin‘s 2006 book, Business Orchestration: Strategic Leadership in the Era of Digital Convergence, I felt strangely comfortable. I attribute this to the lineage from which Wallin has come, so that there is “systems thinking inside”. Wallin completed his dissertation in 2000 in association with Rafael Ramirez. Ramirez is a graduate of the Social Systems Science (S3) program1 at the University of Pennsylvania, and now a professor at Oxford. In addition, Wallin worked closely with Richard Normann, immersing him in the Value Constellation model. I suspect that the average reader would be oblivious to the fine distinctions that systems theory makes. For management researchers, however, such foundations enable a strong scientific foundation, rather than simplified metaphors that break down under scrutiny.

Installing and customizing WordPress on your own domain

On a previous post, I had recommended using creating a blog on wordpress.com to avoid the myriad of technical issues of getting a blog running. However, as the last point in that article, I suggested that the next step was to “move your content to your own hosted domain”. I’ve now encountered a series of friends who are technically competent, but I’ve got the benefit of experience with web design considerations where they “don’t know what they don’t know”. Thus, while I’m installing their web sites — I’m doing three at the same time — I’ll document my steps here.

If you’re uncomfortable with transferring files via FTP, you might as well stop reading now. These instructions are for web sites hosted on site5.com, but they should be pretty close for any provider that offers Fantastico and cPanel.

I am happier than 98% of people who take the Authentic Happiness Inventory Questionnaire

The Focus section of the Globe & Mail newspaper this past weekend centered on happiness. The Authentic Happiness Inventory Questionnaire, developed five years ago by Christopher Peterson (from the U. of Michigan) was reproduced as 24 questions in the newspaper. Matthew Trevisan reports that …

thousands of people have taken the test online, with an average score of 3.24 out of five. Pretty good, considering that most of the people who take it are what Prof. Peterson calls “seekers.”

“I mean, if you are happy as a clam, why the heck would you go to a positive psychology survey?”

Well, I’m a researcher, so I was just curious as to how I would score. Since I hate doing arithmetic, I found that the questionnaire is available on a University of Pennsylvania site by Martin Seligman. (You can register a userid there, to add to the statistics, and take the test). It turns out that I score 4.33, on a 5-point scale.

Authentic Happiness Inventory, David Ing

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      Hosting multiple Dialogic Drinks on "From Unfreezing-Refreezing, to Systems Changes Learning" online, March 12 (Europe), March 14 (Americas), March 15 (Australia). #Leadership meets #SystemsThinking . Short presentations, longer discussions https://www.eqlab.co/from-unfreezing-refreezing-to-systems-changes-learning-david-ing
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    • Introduction, “Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2”, edited by F. E. Emery (1981)
      The selection of readings in the “Introduction” to Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2, Penguin (1981), edited by Fred E. Emery, reflects a turn from 1969 when a general systems theory was more fully entertained, towards an urgency towards changes in the world that were present in 1981. Systems thinking was again emphasized in contrast […]
    • Introduction, “Systems Thinking: Selected Readings”, edited by F. E. Emery (1969)
      In reviewing the original introduction for Systems Thinking: Selected Readings in the 1969 Penguin paperback, there’s a few threads that I only recognize, many years later. The tables of contents (disambiguating various editions) were previously listed as 1969, 1981 Emery, System Thinking: Selected Readings. — begin paste — Introduction In the selection of papers for this […]
    • Concerns with the way systems thinking is used in evaluation | Michael C. Jackson, OBE | 2023-02-27
      In a recording of the debate between Michael Quinn Patton and Michael C. Jackson on “Systems Concepts in Evaluation”, Patton referenced four concepts published in the “Principles for effective use of systems thinking in evaluation” (2018) by the Systems in Evaluation Topical Interest Group (SETIG) of the American Evaluation Society. The four concepts are: (i) […]
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    • 2024/02 Moments February 2024
      Chinese New Year celebrations, both public and family, extended over two weekends, due to busy social schedules.
    • 2024/01 Moments January 2024
      Hibernated with work for most of January, with more activity towards the end of month with warmer termperatures.
    • 2023/12 Moments December 2023
      A month of birthdays and family holiday events, with seasonal events at attractuions around town.
    • 2023/11 Moments November 2023
      Dayliight hours getting shorter encouraged more indoor events, unanticipated cracked furnace block led to replacement of air conditioner with heat pump, too.
    • 2023/10 Moments October 2023
      Left Seoul for 8 days in Ho Chi Minh City, and then 7 days in Taipei. Extended family time with sightseeing, almost completely offline from work.
    • 2023/09 Moments September 2023
      Toronto International Film Festival, and the first stop of a 3-week trip to Asia starting with Seoul, Korea
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