SCiO Open Meeting - 18th September 2023

Face-to-Face Open Meeting: A new series of speaker presentations of interest to Systems & Complexity in Organisation's members and others.

SCiO's Open Meetings provide opportunities for practitioners to learn and develop new practice, to build relationships, networks hear about skills, tools, practice and experiences.

This session will be held in the Alliance Manchester Business School, high up in the Penthouse. We're looking forward to seeing you! 

The agenda for the meeting is: 

    9:30 - 10:00   Introduction to VSM/CSH

    10:00 - 10:30 SCiO notices and community exercise

    10:30 - 11:30 Epistemology, Agnotology and Systems Thinking practice - Lisa McNulty

• Epistemology (theory of knowledge) addresses several questions pertinent to Systems Thinking practice. For example, social epistemology is concerned with epistemic communities of practice, including formation and crossing of disciplinary boundaries, development of localised epistemic standards relating to the purpose of the discipline, and the relationship between consensus, dissensus, and political power. Meanwhile, agnotology addresses ignorance: how knowledge can be undervalued or suppressed, and how uncertainty can be manufactured. This talk highlights some of the most notable connections between current academic philosophy and systems thinking and invites listeners to put philosophy to work. 

    11:30 - 11:45 Break

    11:45 - 12:45 Meta Causal Loop Modelling - Miguel Pantaleón

• Standard Causal Loop Diagrams from systems dynamics are very effective tools for describing and structuring complex problems. It enables conversations and brings different perspectives into the analysis for improving the decision-making process. However, Causal Loop Diagrams have three main limitations, and to solve or reduce these limitations I developed the Meta Causal Loop Diagram, the integration of diagrams into a graph database technology to adapt the exploration of complex problems to human logic through natural query language. This has proved to be valuable to identify key stakeholders, their incentives and structural constraints in peace research and political settlement processes in conflicts, revealing opportunities in net zero strategies, improving the fragility and resilience analysis or identifying social areas for improvement in social services.

    12:45 - 13:45 Lunch Break

    13:45 - 15:45 Systemic Posture: Five movements for successful relationships - Lucia Petroni

• When it is time of relationship in the professional realm, switching from a individualistic or interventionist approach to one with a systemic posture is a great support in professional life as well as a “life rule” to be in any relationship in a healthy, truthful, harmonious and effective and productive, creative way.

    15:45 - 16:00 Break

    16:00 - 17:00 Critical Thinking: an argument clinic - Tony Korycki

• Methods such as Critical Systems Heuristics and Boundary Critique use the idea of evaluation and assessment in specific ways, within those approaches. However, what does critique mean, why do we use it, and how is critical thinking useful or important for Systems Thinking practitioners?

    17:00             Later in the Bar social

We are planning to video the sessions and making these available on the SCiO website, where speakers agree.