Tag Archives: system thinking

leading implementation of complex programs

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This is just something I have wanted to write down a few thoughts on for awhile. My field is engineering and planning, and I have been involved in a number of programs that are complex technically, financially, and on the people side. I’ve seen some things done well, I’ve seen some things done badly, and I’ve done a few things well and learned a few lessons the hard way myself. So here are my thoughts:

  1. Organize the entire program around achieving a vision and set of goals which everyone understands. Create a crystal clear vision and set of goal statements for the program. Make sure these are thoroughly understood by all senior and mid-level decision makers – communicate, market, train, drill, test – whatever it takes to make sure they get it. Then, set specific objectives for individual functional units within the organization, and for all individual staff members, that advance these goals, all these goals and only these goals. Make each objective SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound. Then track every individual’s and every unit’s progress towards meeting the objectives, and hold individuals and managers accountable for meeting their objectives.
  2. Make sure the knowledge level of the entire staff is up-to-date with industry standards and best practices, then encourage system thinking, creativity and innovation to advance the leading edge. Create a formal training and continuing education program for staff. Create a psychological “safe space” for discussion of ideas that are outside the typical daily functions of the organization. Organize talks, discussion groups, and other events. Bring ideas and speakers in from outside the organization. Encourage and reward staff to spend time reading and attending events outside the organization, then bringing back ideas and communicating them to colleagues. Be on guard for the development of group think, and actively encourage and reward the sharing of ideas that are new to the organization.
  3. Focus on communication of system behavior, risk, and other complex information. Continuously improve staff knowledge of communication approaches, strategies, and tools by weaving these into the training and innovation program. Bring in specialized staff with communication and visualization skills. Set up a specific job role, group or committee whose job it is to oversee communication approaches in all aspects of the organization.

September 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. and Russia may have blundered into a proxy war in Syria. And on a loosely related war-and-peace note, Curtis LeMay was a crazy bastard.
  • The ecological footprint situation is not looking too promising: “from 1993 to 2009…while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense, widespread and rapidly intensifying in places with high biodiversity.” Meanwhile, as of 2002 “we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green material) produced on Earth each year (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf (Pauly and Christensen 1995), and we use 60% of freshwater run-off (Postel et al. 1996). The unprecedented escalation in both human population and consumption in the 20th century has resulted in environmental crises never before encountered in the history of humankind and the world (McNeill 2000). E. O. Wilson (2002) claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if every human consumed at the level of the average US inhabitant.” And finally, 30% of African elephants have been lost in the last 7 years.
  • Car accidents are the leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 24. The obsession with car seats may not be saving all that many lives, while keeping children out of cars as much as possible would be 100% guaranteed to save lives. And one thing that would be guaranteed to help us create more walkable neighborhoods and therefore save children’s lives: getting rid of minimum parking requirements in cities once and for all. And yet you don’t hear this debate being framed in moral terms.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • Monsanto is trying to help honeybees (which seems good) by monkeying with RNA (which seems a little frightening). Yes, biotech is coming.
  • Some people think teaching algebra to children may actually be bad. Writing still seems to be good.
  • There have been a number of attempts to identify and classify the basic types of literary plots.

algebra, what is it good for?

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This New York Times opinion piece (sort of) argues against teaching algebra.

Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower. I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers. My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources…

What of the claim that mathematics sharpens our minds and makes us more intellectually adept as individuals and a citizen body? It’s true that mathematics requires mental exertion. But there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x² + y²)² = (x² – y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis…

I WANT to end on a positive note. Mathematics, both pure and applied, is integral to our civilization, whether the realm is aesthetic or electronic. But for most adults, it is more feared or revered than understood. It’s clear that requiring algebra for everyone has not increased our appreciation of a calling someone once called “the poetry of the universe.”

I think everyone is capable of and needs to learn math, logic, critical reasoning and system thinking skills. I think there is some merit to the idea that the way math is taught is a turn-off to so many people. There is also some merit in the argument that teaching people to manipulate symbols on a page is not really logic or reasoning or system thinking. A more ideal way to teach math (and reading and writing, for that matter) would be to integrate it into more interesting subjects like science, economics and history. Students could be gaining an intuitive feel for the world we live in through those subjects, while at the same time understanding how reading, writing, and arithmetic (and algebra and calculus and statistics and physical and mathematical models of various types) are powerful tools that can help increase the depth of that understanding.

Joseph Stiglitz on the Euro

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Joseph Stiglitz has written a new book about the Euro. Here’s an interview in the New York Times.

It is difficult to overstate the economic trauma Europe has suffered in recent years — veritable depressions in Greece and Spain, alarming levels of unemployment across much of the continent. You place much of the blame on the euro. What happened?

The euro was an attempt to advance the economic integration of Europe by having the countries of the eurozone share a common currency. They looked across the Atlantic and they said: “The United States, big economy, very successful, single currency. We should imitate.”

But they didn’t have the political integration. They didn’t have the conditions that would make a single currency work. The creation of the euro is the single most important explanation for the extraordinarily poor performance of the eurozone economies since the crisis of 2008…

You conclude that the best-case scenario from here is to reform and save the euro. But absent that, you contend that it is better to just scrap it as a failed experiment. What needs to happen to make the euro viable?

A banking union with deposit insurance. Something like a euro bond. An E.C.B. that doesn’t just focus on inflation — you want it to focus on employment. A tax policy that deals with the inequalities. And you have to get rid of limits on government deficits.

If I understand this correctly, he is suggesting that the problem is that the Euro is not issued by a true central bank, but instead by individual countries with varying levels of wealth and power.

I was debating with a friend the other day about whether the average citizen is capable of understanding current events and issues well enough to support good policies. I think the average human being certainly has the raw intelligence to do so, but even the well educated mostly have not been provided with the mental tools they would need to understand the complexity of the world around us. Central banking is a good example of something an intelligent human being is capable of understanding, but almost none do. I never learned anything about it in elementary or high school. I learned some basic concepts about the money supply and interest rates in college economics courses, but I didn’t really get it the first time around. Part of it is that algebraic equations are just not the right way to introduce big picture concepts to most people including me (and I was doing just fine in engineering school at the time). Simulations or even physical models would work better to gain an intuitive understanding, backed up by symbolic algebra and calculus later.

I’m not really suggesting that the answer is to turn over public policy to the economists. They understand the theory behind the central banking system, sure, but they may neglect the larger social and environmental context it is embedded in, may neglect to consider complex, dynamic, nonlinear behavior that does not fit neatly into their elegant steady-state algebraic theories, and are often terrible at communication with decision makers and the public. We need experts and respect for experts, but we also need a broad base of intuitive understanding of systems among politicians, bureaucrats, and the public. It could be done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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Andrew Bacevich on BillMoyers.com shows how decisions that happen on a President’s watch, even an almost universally respected and even revered one like Eisenhower, can have consequences decades later.

As for Eisenhower, although there is much in his presidency to admire, his errors of omission and commission were legion. During his two terms, from Guatemala to Iran, the CIA overthrew governments, plotted assassinations and embraced unsavory right-wing dictators — in effect, planting a series of IEDs destined eventually to blow up in the face of Ike’s various successors. Meanwhile, binging on nuclear weapons, the Pentagon accumulated an arsenal far beyond what even Eisenhower as commander-in-chief considered prudent or necessary.

In addition, during his tenure in office, the military-industrial complex became a rapacious juggernaut, an entity unto itself as Ike himself belatedly acknowledged. By no means least of all, Eisenhower fecklessly committed the United States to an ill-fated project of nation building in a country that just about no American had heard of at the time: South Vietnam. Ike did give the nation eight years of relative peace and prosperity, but at a high price — most of the bills coming due long after he left office.

This caught my eye during a week when events during the Iranian Revolution (1979) are influencing the 2016 election. And the revolution was in turn caused CIA participation in destabilization of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953. And the destabilization of Iran had begun far earlier under the British, who openly sought to control the natural resources of the region.

Bill Clinton’s decisions in the 1990s on trade, drugs, and financial deregulation are also being discussed in this election. I think we are already suspecting that George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and even Afghanistan in the early 2000s will go down as our country’s greatest blunders of modern times. I wonder how some of Obama’s decisions on intervention in the Middle East, relations with Russia and China, and financial regulation (or lack thereof) will turn out in the long run.

skyscraper game

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This looks pretty cool – an iPhone game for kids that lets them look inside a skyscraper.

In a few light swipes and taps, users “create” a made-up skyscraper by adding floors and choosing the color of the facade. On the app’s sidebar, select a tiny I-beam button to play a game where adding boulders, elephants, and sailboats sinks your building deep and lopsided into its foundation. An elevator icon takes you to an interactive view of interior life—families in their kitchens, watching television, tiptoe-ing through bedrooms. The details are incredibly ornate, especially in another mode, accessed by clicking on a little water drop, where you clog toilets and set fires on different floors. Watch how the building (which gets an anthropomorphic touch) reacts. They say if walls could talk…

Problems just keep backing up.
(Screenshot of “Skyscrapers” by Tinybop)

With virtually no text, the app invites you to play by intuiting through touch and iconography. Youngsters, presumably raised on the logic of iPhones, are the audience targeted by the app’s developer, Tinybop. “Skyscrapers” is the seventh in Tinybop’s “Explorer’s Library,” series, which “introduces kids to STEAM topics they learn about in school,” according to a spokesperson.

I looked at the Explorer’s Library and they have a number of cool simulation apps for kids, like plants, the human body, and weather. I think I might start with one of those rather than a skyscraper. I am always on the lookout for a really good ecosystem simulation for kids.

forests as a carbon source?

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This journal article talks about the possibility of a disturbing situation where climate change starts to kill trees, which are then no longer able to absorb carbon dioxide, which causes more climate change, and so on in an accelerating feedback loop.

Trees Can Limit Climate Change—Unless It Kills Them First

Scientists have considered forests a potential barrier to climate change, since plants on land take up about 25 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions. As trees in colder areas are exposed to warmer temperatures and more CO2 emissions, they will grow faster and absorb more emissions, helping to mitigate the effects of a primary greenhouse gas, the theory goes.
But, in an alarming twist, global warming is likelier to limit forests’ capacity for absorbing emissions in many parts of the continent, a study released today in the journal Ecology Letters finds. After combining climate projections with the tree records, researchers found no evidence for the boreal greening hypothesis. In fact, they found a risk of a negative feedback loop, as trees in their model reacted poorly to warmer temperatures due to drought and other disturbances.
That means as trees die faster than they can take up CO2 emissions, releasing trapped carbon, forests could become a net source of carbon, accelerating climate change. The study found that we could reach such a tipping point as early as 2050.

Mary Odum vs. Lawns

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Here Mary Odum, Howard T. Odum’s daughter, talks about “a prosperous way down“. If someone named Odum thinks we are going down, there is a good chance we are. It’s pretty depressing stuff that seems like an individual could have little impact on, but later she suggests that doing away with your lawn is a good first step.

Many chaotic current compete for our attention, yet the speed with which they are occurring suggests we are in an era of tipping points. How does one describe the collapse of an empire—where do we start with so much chaos in the world, and a global world view that promotes the mandate for economic growth? Do we begin with politics, or culture, or the financial system, pollution, or even renewable energy? Those competing current events are all related, but only if we use systems thinking to view the picture at a larger scale. The focus of most people on single causes such as climate change, or politics, or tech-happy solar futures, is comforting, since reductionism to single cause issues creates solutions such as adding technology (and thus more energy and pollution) allows us to keep on with our lifestyles. We tell ourselves (or we read too much Grist or Treehugger who tell us) that we don’t have to do anything except to buy more technology—we can keep what we’ve got, and the problems lie at the larger scale with us as helpless victims. We can buy a Prius, or a solar panel, and just keep on trucking, while blaming a powerful other, such as a presidential candidate, or Exxon, when it is the entire system, including us, who is responsible. Voting for one political party or the other is inadequate. Staying quiet while xenophobia and gun violence takes hold of your country is inadequate. Focusing on single cause environmentalist issues is not enough.

Reductionism closes the conversation to the real problem of growth, and the big picture, creating denial and a comforting absolution to Business as Usual (BAU). Reductionism allows us to fit in culturally to a world whose religion is economic growth, but it is a form of self-deceit. Our mandate that insists on the economic need for growth has to change in order for us to accept our personal responsibilities in all of this, and not blame our problems on scapegoats or find solutions that just make things worse.

I pretty much agree with all this. It’s not that the ideal concept of “growth” or improvement in our standard of living is wrong at its core. There is no theoretical limit to how much we could improve ourselves. But as long as we are dependent on planet Earth and its resources, there is a physical limit to how large our ecological footprint can grow without causing overshoot and collapse. Some technologies enable us to reduce our footprint per person or per joule of energy used or per dollar exchanged in the course of our economic lives, but when we adopt these technologies we often just take it as an opportunity to add more people, use more energy and exchange more dollars. And of course, not all technologies reduce our unit footprint – many increase it. In aggregate, our footprint is continuing to grow, most likely at an accelerating pace. There are only two possible endpoints – either a serious setback that forcibly reduces our footprint for us (like, god forbid, catastrophic war/plague/famine), or a turning point in technology/policy that allows us to begin shrinking our footprint while still improving ourselves. While the latter is theoretically possible, I don’t see any evidence that we are anywhere near it. Instead, we pat ourselves on the back for small reductions in our footprint per unit of growth, or even a reduction in the rate of growth of our rate of growth! For example, a reduction in our annual carbon emissions, despite the fact that they are too high and every year they are too high makes the situation worse, not better. That’s not the system thinking that H.T. Odum advocated.

Which brings me to Mary’s lawn. Ecological gardening is one of those “simple things you can do to save the Earth”. Not sufficient, but necessary. So let’s do it!

We can be the change, beginning today. Plant trees, as they take a long time to grow. Convert your lawn to native plants. Stop irrigating, except for watering new plantings by hand. Stop using fertilizers and pesticides. Begin building soil instead of depleting it. Compost on your property, Return hardscapes to permeable surfaces, and use rain barrels and rain gardens to limit runoff. Use a corner to plant an organic vegetable garden if there’s room and sun, to add to your sustainability. Foster a complete ecosystem for the critters. And finally, talk to your neighbors and friends about the changes and why you’re doing them. While you’re at it, talk to the person who manages your kid’s soccer field, or the golf course. Why are you letting your children roll around on a carpet of pesticides, or eat food grown by a poison-maker?

the iceberg model

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The “iceberg model” is supposed to help you think through the parts of a problem that are obvious and visible versus the (possibly much more significant) parts that are hidden beneath the surface.

LEVELS OF THINKING

1. The Event Level

The event level is the level at which we typically perceive the world—for instance, waking up one morning to find we have caught a cold. While problems observed at the event level can often be addressed with a simple readjustment, the iceberg model pushes us not to assume that every issue can be solved by simply treating the symptom or adjusting at the event level.

2. The Pattern Level

If we look just below the event level, we often notice patterns. Similar events have been taking place over time — we may have been catching more colds when we haven’t been resting enough. Observing patterns allows us to forecast and forestall events.

3. The Structure Level

Below the pattern level lies the structure level. When we ask, “What is causing the pattern we are observing?” the answer is usually some kind of structure. Increased stress at work due to the new promotion policy, the habit of eating poorly when under stress, or the inconvenient location of healthy food sources could all be structures at play in our catching a cold. According to Professor John Gerber, structures can include the following:

1. Physical things — like vending machines, roads, traffic lights or terrain.

2. Organizations — like corporations, governments, and schools.

3. Policies — like laws, regulations, and tax structures.

4. Ritual — habitual behaviors so ingrained that they are not conscious.

4. The Mental Model Level

Mental models are the attitudes, beliefs, morals, expectations, and values that allow structures to continue functioning as they are. These are the beliefs that we often learn subconsciously from our society or family and are likely unaware of. Mental models that could be involved in us catching a cold could include: a belief that career is deeply important to our identity, that healthy food is too expensive, or that rest is for the unmotivated.

– See more at: https://nwei.org/resources/iceberg/#sthash.XutaQX5M.dpuf

 

June 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

  • Coral reefs are in pretty sad shape, perhaps the first natural ecosystem type to be devastated beyond repair by climate change.
  • Echoes of the Cold War are rearing their ugly heads in Western Europe.
  • Trump may very well have organized crime links. And Moody’s says that if he gets elected and manages to do the things he says, it could crash the economy.

3 most hopeful stories

  • China has a new(ish) sustainability plan called “ecological civilization” that weaves together urban and regional planning, environmental quality, sustainable agriculture, habitat and biodiversity concepts. This is good because a rapidly developing country the size of China has the ability to sink the rest of civilization if they let their ecological footprint explode, regardless of what the rest of us do. Maybe they can set a good example for the rest of the developing world to follow.
  • Genetic technology is appearing to provide some hope of real breakthroughs in cancer treatment.
  • There is still some hope for a technology-driven pick-up in productivity growth.

3 most interesting stories