STEPS Centre Seminar, 1.00-2.30pm Monday 27 June 2016, IDS Convening Space
‘STEPS: to a systemic ecology of mind (with apologies to Gregory Bateson)’
By Ray Ison
My
seminar will cover a broad sweep of issues under the general rubric of
building systemic governing capability in the context of the
Anthropocene. My starting point will be to lay down a challenge as to
whether those present have a systemic ecology of mind? I will then
unpack what I consider to be significant limitations in much
contemporary scholarship because of failures to understand: the 'feral
concept' of system; praxis, or more specifically systems praxis;
complexity, or complex adaptive system; transformation and governance,
or governing. I will ground the seminar in examples from recent
research projects that employ, or are concerned with, social learning
and systemic inquiry. In the discussion we can explore implications for
the STEPs programme.
Ray
Ison has an international reputation in, and has been a major
contributor to, ‘cybersystemics’. What is this field you may well ask?
Ray's rationale for using this term was explained in the presentation
last year at ISSS2016 in Berlin of his Presidential Address for the
International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), and also in a
special ‘systemic inquiry’ at Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover details of
which can be found at this Blog site.
Amongst
other matters raised at these events was the significant institutional
complexity in the cybersystemic field and the lack of intellectual and
political influence for investment in and the furtherance of
cybersystemic scholarship – particularly in key policy and research
funding fora associated with the UN, Brussels, Washington and the like.
This is despite the growing awareness that the issues of our time, the
Anthropocene, if you will, are systemic in nature and thus require
systemic responses, i.e., transformations. Ray has been Professor of
Systems at The Open University (OU), UK since 1994.
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