“Organizational learning must concern itself not with static entities called organizations, but with an active process of organizing which is, at root, a cognitive enterprise. Individual members are continually engaged in attempting to know the organization, and to know themselves in the context of the organization. At the same time, their continuing efforts to know and to test their knowledge represent the object of their inquiry. Organizing is reflexive inquiry.” (Argyris & Schön, 1978, 16–17). Systems Thinkers Toronto turned out a dozen people last week for a demonstration the new SDD dialogue management software and a discussion of dialogic design practice, which can be seen as an embodiment of organizational and social system cognitive organizing. I teach a basic form of the methodology in my Systemic Design course in OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation graduate program. As a core practice of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras these methods have been developed from Christakis and Warfield’s Interactive Management over the last decade. The formal …
Learning from the Global Community of Dialogic Design
Co-Evolving SDD Practice In several short years, many leaders and institutions now openly acknowledge the necessity for inclusive social transformation. We also now find stakeholders raising the concern that social change must be driven by participatory and democratic processes. We recognize the fact that our third millennium world needs new methodologies and new tools capable of harnessing the collective wisdom of people from all walks of life in order to protect its sustainability and foster up harmony into its evolution. The practice of Structured Dialogic Design is positioned as a powerful tool in this context. A group of nearly 30 practitioners and scholars met in Limassol Cyprus for May’s international meeting not to revisit the history of the past 40+ years but to “create the history of the future.” The community of scientists and practitioners of the science of dialogic design has now expanded to include people from all parts of the world and a variety of languages …
Co-designing for power balance in social systems
Power remains a hugely unresolved issue in strategic design, “systems change,” OD, and progressive management. Healthcare, like other public and social sector institutions (education, social welfare, government) is organized by what Jane Jacobs in Systems of Survival calls Guardian systems, the moral syndrome of ruling. As in government, the values of authority, prowess, rank, restraints on trading, and “deceit for the task” are important in these sectors, though we don’t like to admit it. Even democratic governments are not democratic in values or style, they inherit the mantle of the warrior class, which makes a living by “taking”. In some ways, business – even corporate America – is fairer and more open. In Jacobs’ model, business (or merchant systems) tends to care about collaboration, honesty, results and of course customers – this leads to power toward winning joint ends and achievement, rather than winning process (or means) struggles. Power manifests …
Designing for Emergence – Monitoring Collective Network Intelligence
Alberto Cottica presents the story of emergence in large, specialized social networks as the social technology necessary to address the wicked complexity of today’s societal problems. Alberto’s analysis recognizes that citizen level participation could intervene as a powerful social force is guided (even “tweaked” as he says) by monitoring and reinforcing leverage points int he network subsystems. His recommendation for technological design is quite close to what Structured Dialogic Design accomplishes in its smaller organizational scale. But as in most discussions of the kind, the analysis falls short in the implementation. There are no operational real examples of the theory in action (at least in the talk). Alberto doesn’t address stakeholder interaction and the formation intention, or group pathologies in any event. I agree that we should work toward the broader scale of citizen intelligence and engagement possible in web-enabled networks. We can also reach the goal of fine-tuning critical …
