At the time of writing, Bitcoin has fallen from its $1000-plus value, but it’s still sitting high at just $100, or so, less. Because of the ruthless competition involved in Bitcoin mining, intrepid internet entrepreneurs have been moving over to the cheaper, though less competitive alternative, Litecoin. If the trend continues, Litecoin will soon mimic the cutthroat community of Bitcoin, losing its practicality. Furthermore, if you find all of the cryptocurrency rhetoric and serious-business economics articles sucking all of the fun and joy out of trying to make a digital buck, then the internet’s most beloved Shiba Inu is here to save the day.
It appears Dogecoin is a real (insofar as any digital currency — or currency, for that matter — is whatever “real” means) digital currency for which you can mine using a computer. In this case, though, you’re digging using a doge house, because there’s still humor left in the world.
Systems are everywhere. They shape us and we can, do, and should shape them. Our destiny is tied up with them but they are pretty invisible. In this essay I explore some useful systems dynamics and perspectives and share two essays by others exploring the same vast territory in search of insights we can use to make the world better.
Dear friends,
We live amidst all kinds of systems. We ourselves are living systems. We are also active participants in political systems, economic systems, information systems, ecosystems. These social and natural systems shape our lives, shape our beliefs about what is real and possible, and shape our destinies. Remarkably, they are almost invisible to us. We can see their parts and their impacts quite vividly all around us and even inside us. But we can’t see THEM.
We can only get a handle on them with systems thinking.
Now, I like to think of myself as a systems thinker. But there are ways in which I am and ways in which I’m not. Systems thinking comes in many forms. I’m fairly good at some of them and fairly clueless and incompetent at others.
But one thing I know, which is not necessarily common among many systems thinkers, is exactly what I just said above: Systems thinking comes in many forms. I have a broad definition of systems thinking:
Systems thinking is any style of thinking that delves into the interconnectedness and wholeness of reality.
That covers a lot of ground.
I think this idea of systems thinking – in any and all of its forms – is one of the most important factors in our collective fate. Our main source of folly – our lack of wisdom – is our tendency to take too narrow a view of an issue or problem. Our solutions then run into the factors that we overlooked because we weren’t thinking in terms of interconnectedness and wholeness. This failure to notice important factors undermines our solutions, making them less effective or even causing them to create problems elsewhere. We end up on a down escalator that feels like a hamster’s wheel to hell.
That’s why I define “public wisdom” as taking into account what needs to be taken into account for long-term broad benefit. What we don’t take into account will come back to haunt us, big time. Reality bats last. Over and over.
So we really need to include information and people who can help us stretch into “the big picture” and its important interconnections.
Here are just a few examples of systems thinkers we’d be wise to include in our deliberations:
systems scientists – ecologists, cyberneticists, chaos and complexity scientists, evolutionary researchers, and various multi-disciplinary scholars;
holistic and evolutionary philosophers, historians and ethicists – perhaps especially those who come from marginalized groups;
sociologists, cultural anthropologists, neuroscientists, and other specialists in the dynamics and relativity of what we think we know, individually and collectively;
indigenous spokespeople and shamans who know how to enlighten modernist minds.
To give a sense of the eclectic nature of my view of systems thinking, here are some of the interconnected system-related understandings and resources that I believe we can and should be attending to and using more consciously:
feedback dynamics: incentives and disincentives, reinforcers and magnifiers, resistance dynamics, resilience…
self-organizing dynamics: the intrinsic nature of things and motivations of people, actual and potential connections, diversity, shared purpose…
positivity: the attractive powers of possibility, appreciation, fun…
collectivity: networks, relationships, community and tribal dynamics, mutuality, empathy, interdependence…
ultimate oneness: the non-local, non-dual, intuitive, resonant, synchronous, transcendent unity of life, its manifestations and dynamics…
inquiry: humility, curiosity, and exploration in the face of complexity, novelty, contradiction, paradox, and uncertainty….
While the above are my own reflections on what the systemic approach involves, I also believe it is important to ground ourselves in some of the more advanced mainstream disciplines and thought leaders of systems thinking. The excerpts below represent two perspectives that I particularly respect among systems thinkers seeking to make the world a better place.
I gave a talk on “The future of Humanitarian Response” at UN OCHA’s Global Humanitarian Policy Forum (#aid2025) in New York yesterday. More here for context. A similar version of the talk is available in the video presentation below.
Some of the discussions that ensued during the Forum were frustrating albeit an important reality check. Some policy makers still think that disaster response is about them and their international humanitarian organizations. They are still under the impression that aid does not arrive until they arrive. And yet, empirical research in the disaster literature points to the fact that the vast majority of survivals during disasters is the result of local agency, not external intervention.
Hi, I'm Federico Pistono, author of “Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK” and I’m writing a new book called “Open Source Society”!
This book will be a collection of suggestions that governments, institutions, companies, individuals and communities can use in order to move humanity forward.
You can see the inception and outline of the book at a lecture I recently gave at the University of Life Sciences in Oslo, Norway.
I hope the book will be a compendium of not only great ideas, but will also be a blueprint for a new kind of society, created by the greatest minds on the planet, working together.
That’s where you come in, because I would like YOU to be part of the book, by contributing with your ideas and concrete suggestions.
My question to you is the following:
>> “If you could change three things in the world, what would they be, why, and how do we implement them?”
I’m looking for practical, actionable items, either at the policy level, international agreements, strategies for companies and corporations, or that individuals and communities can put in practice, in less than ten years. Submissions will close on March 1, 2014.
In a new Open Government National Action Plan that was released today, the White House affirmed its support for open government values, and set an agenda for the remainder of the current Administration.
“The new plan includes a wide range of actions the Administration will take over the next two years, including commitments that build upon past successes as well as several new initiatives,” the Plan stated. “The Administration will work with the public and civil society organizations to implement each of these commitments over the next two years.”
With respect to national security secrecy, the Plan includes a new commitment to “transform the security classification system” based on the principle that “classification must… be kept to the minimum required to meet national security needs….”
If there is one thing the sustainability movement appears to want ownership of, it is the word ‘economy'. A circular version has been doing the rounds for some time, but it could be under threat from a new kid on the block, equally as caring, but perhaps, well, more sharing.
A circular economy. Or a sharing economy. Which would you put your money on? The first would claim to have more gravitas as it involves a seismic shift in not only how business works, but how resources are utilised. It is also potentially worth big bucks to corporations – hundreds of billions within the EU alone, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Some would also argue that a true sharing economy could not exist unless a circular economy was already in place.
I’ve been invited to give a “very provocative talk” on what humanitarian response will look like in 2025 for the annual Global Policy Forum organized by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York. I first explored this question in early 2012 and my colleague Andrej Verity recently wrote up this intriguing piece on the topic, which I highly recommend; intriguing because he focuses a lot on the future of the pre-deployment process, which is often overlooked.
