Books, Articles and Newsletters

OMM Update - The SCiO Organisational Maturity Model; Fractal Life, Lessons from a sports association study - part 2 – Denis Adams

SCiO has made the strategic decision to create a Professional Development Programme for the Systems Professional. The structure will be a portfolio of development modules built around three themes: Technical Skills, Craft Skills, and Theory. Patrick will lead a practical session on the craft skills of mapping levels of logic. This is a foundational skill with many areas of application, including...

The SCiO Professional Development Programme (PDP); The OMM (Organisational Maturity Model); Lessons from a Sports Association Study — Denis Adams; Book Review: Think before you Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing‘. Stafford Beer, ed David Whittaker

SCiO Professional Development Programme - A different model of professional development

The Organisational Maturity Model (OMM) has been developed by SCiO. It is driven by a questionnaire and is designed to show the structural integrity of your organisation (currently from a single user perspective). The OMM allows managers to improve the capability of their organisation to operate more effectively and adapt to change. It does this by providing a framework to develop the structural...

Archetypes of the VSM: This pamphlet gives useful one page summaries of the VSM pathological archetypes. These are recurring problematic patterns - referred to as pathological archetypes - and are suitable for identifying and communicating problems in systems through the viable system model.

While it is inarguable that many complex pro-jects have indeed over-run and under-delivered, it is profoundly untrue that this is an inevitable outcome. Rather, it is simply the case that the prevailing acquisition environment militates towards failure. It is unrealistic to depend on toolsets and skillsets that may be adequate for simple projects but cannot cope with complex-ity. They might work...

RRP: £54 Paperback: 324 pages Publisher: Springer; 2010 edition (15 Mar. 2010) ISBN: 184882808X This compilation of readings is a practical guide for practitioners involved with managing complex and uncertain situations. At a time when the media continually tells of a world facing many crises, it provides an opportunity to gain understanding of robust approaches to managing complex and ever...

Stories: At Last - The First Meeting with Stafford Beer; An opportunity to develop your systems thinking in practice - a new modular OU MSc: Systems Thinking in Practice; Book Reviews: Systems Thinkers. Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp. Springer; 316pp. edition (18 Sep 2009) ISBN: 978-1848825246; Systems Approaches to managing change: a practical guide. Ed. Martin Reynolds and Sue Holwell. Springer...

Jane has used an approach which attempts to map the various customer needs within complex public sector services for several client organisations. Jane will describe how the Circles of Need® approach has transformed the client understanding to such an extent that radical re-design has been feasible. In addition, she will reflect on the role and power of systems thinking and relate it to the roles...

The latter portion of Warfield's career was devoted to a new concept: Interactive Management. Developed in conjunction with Dr. Alexander Christakis, and first deployed significantly at the University of Virginia in the early 1980's, this methodology was intended to help organizations solve complex problems. Warfield and Christakis brought their Center for Interactive Management to George Mason...

Feedback from the SCiO survey; Update on The SCiO Organisational Maturity Model; VSM training; Elections to board; Bookworm: Future Ready How to Master Business forecasting (1st Edition); Website update; Communications; Next open meeting; Development day; Mandelbulbs

RRP: £1; Hardcover: ‎ 358 ppp; Publisher: ‎ Wiley;1st edition; Language: ‎ English; ISBN ‎ 978-0470747056 The recent crisis in the financial markets has exposed serious flaws in management methods. The failure to anticipate and deal with the consequences of the unfolding collapse has starkly illustrated what many leaders and managers in business have known for years; in most organizations, the...

RRP: 49,00 € Hardback 342 pages ISBN : 3258074941 Publisher : Haupt Verlag AG (1 Aug. 2009) Language : German Dieses Buch richtet sich an jene Führungskräfte, die den grundlegenden Charakter der Organisationen, in denen sie handeln, besser verstehen wollen. Die Organisationen einer modernen Gesellschaft sind zum größten Teil hochkomplexe Systeme, die wir nicht - wie weithin üblich - als Maschinen...

RRP: £25.39 Paperback: 338 pages Publisher: Wiley (24 July 2009) ISBN: 0470060565 The world of management is in crisis - the old remedies no longer work and organizations are failing at an increasing rate. Although many talk of 'joined up thinking', few offer practical guidance on how to achieve this in organizations. The Fractal Organization sets down the practical implications of a well tested...

RRP: £35 Paperback : 424 pages ISBN : 0321658396 Publisher : Addison-Wesley Professional; 2nd edition (10 July 2009) Language: : English Best practices for managing projects in agile environments―now updated with new techniques for larger projects Today, the pace of project management moves faster. Project management needs to become more flexible and far more responsive to customers. Using Agile...

There will be a SCiO sub-group update, with an interactive element, this time instead of a workshop. Dave Mettam will be updating us on the Organisational Maturity Model produced for SCiO by the OMM sub-group.

This session will look at the way that recursive structures create dilemmas for organisations, how these dilemmas translate into ethical problems for the organisations and individuals involved and the role of leadership in resolving these ethical dilemmas. The argument is that this is a normal process for complex organisations and that using a recursive model provides a framework for understanding...

RRP: £14.50 Paperback: ‎ 139 pp Publisher: ‎ Business Expert Press; ISBN 978-1606490372 The fundamental challenge facing business leaders is how to drive performance into the future - the 'dynamics' of strategy. To tackle this effectively, they need a clear understanding of what causes performance to improve or deteriorate, and what power they have to change this trajectory for the better. Without...

In this talk Jane will explain how she sees modelling working within Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model – System 4 activity and how System 4 modellers can network across the recursions of a VSM based organisation to offer a service to the whole organisation. She will look at what has been achieved so far and what the next challenges are in building a fully functional S4 modelling service.

RRP: £9.16 Paperback: 240 pages Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Co (20 July 2017) ISBN: 1603580557 Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. This essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the...

RRP: £27 Paperback : 240 pages ISBN : 1412969255 Publisher : Corwin; 1st edition (1 Oct. 2008) Language: : English Coaching is one of the hottest topics in education today. Yet many educators are confused about the roles and responsibilities of coaches. This handbook will gather together the leading experts in coaching and provide a snapshot of the current coaching landscape. Key features...

OOP available £2+ Paperback : 224 pages ISBN : 0955008182 Publisher : Triarchy Press; First Edition (11 April 2008) Language : English With the UK's public sector in crisis, John Seddon's fiercely outspoken new book is already causing a stir. Wrong-headed, ill thought-out reform from a succession of monetarist governments has led to unwieldy systems of mass production that do little for the people...

Mostly we tend to think about what "is", or what we think we think should be. This carries over into both problem solving and to analysing and designing organisations. Many modelling approaches have this bias towards modelling what is and I'd argue that this is true of both SSM and most approaches to VSM. In some other traditions of looking at the world, there is a deep vein of thinking focusing...

RRP: £30.00 PDF download: 720 pages Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (7 Dec. 2007) ISBN: 0470060670 Award winning author Kim Warren presents his new book: Strategic Management Dynamics - a complete framework in the field of Strategic Management. Strategic Management Dynamics builds on, and goes substantially beyond the existing strategy textbooks with its focus on understanding and managing how...

Overview the research approach I adopted as part of a DBA programme
Explore the value of ‘ Soft Systems Methodolog y’ in the context of this study
Discuss the student dilemma
Reinforce the importance of good supervision to academic rigour

In this paper, the authors look at the traditional model of governance and contrast it to governance as embodied in Beer's Viable System Model. They illustrate this by reference to three of their recent consultancy projects in designing governance structures and show how the VSM provided not just a useful and flexible design template, but also how it provided a variety of practical solutions to a...

RRP: £35 Paperback : 466 pages ISBN : 0470012862 Publisher : Wiley; Pap/Cdr Edition (8 Aug. 2007) Language: : English "John Morecroft′s book is an ideal text for students interested in system modelling and its application to a range of real world problems. The book covers all that is necessary to develop expertise in system dynamics modelling and through the range of applications makes a...

Denis Adams will tell practitioner stories which illustrate some under-utilised ideas which though simple, usually have profound impacts on models-in-use and consequential actions. The emerging principles will raise questions about using many of the common tools of cybernetics systems thinking in forensic systemic exploration, for example: Why the ‘activity monitoring information to control action...

'out of print' but available at low prices from online 2nd hand booksellers; Hardback: ‎ 452 pp Publisher: ‎ Kluwer Academic/Plenum; ISBN 978-0306474651 Systems Thinking is a new paradigm set to revolutionize management practice in the 21st century. Systems Approaches to Management is the most comprehensive guide available to the application of this new paradigm in the field of management. It...

RRP: £123 Hardcover: 538 pages Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (8 May 2007) ISBN: 0471740632 This book presents two recently developed knowledge areas that can significantly improve the management and the performance of business enterprise: System Science and Cybernetics and Key Performance Areas. Included in this book are advanced (and evolving) methods and technologies for planning and budgeting...

(Article available on Research Gate by making a personal request) International Journal of Public Sector Management 20(3), April 2007:178-191 This paper seeks to describe a “bubble strategy” to public sector change, based on the principles that a change initiative must be defensible and supportive of an alternative, entrepreneurial culture. Design/methodology/approach The research is developed...

RRP: £34 Paperback: 226 pages Publisher: John Wiley (23 Mar. 2007) ISBN: 0470025549 From the father of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), Peter Checkland, comes a new, accessible text which clearly and concisely looks at SSM. The book leaves out all of the development detail and historical/intellectual material which can be found in Checkland's other classic works, but contains the practical...

Patrick Hoverstadt and Jane Searles will describe the development of ladder governance in a service delivery case study. Traditional approaches to governance are rooted in an hierarchical paradigm and focus on financial control. Even following recent high profile governance problems, the responses (Turnbull, Sarbannes Oxley, OFR) have been dominated by a reliance on tighter financial controls...

RRP: £9.04 Paperback: 448 pages Publisher: Penguin (7 Sept. 2006) ISBN: 9780141020440 Why do we try to use military force to solve our political problems? And why, when our forces win the military battles does this still fail to solve those problems? It is because the force lacks utility. From Iraq to the Balkans, and from Afghanistan to Chechneya, over the past fifteen years there has been a...

RRP: £25 Paperback: 464 pages Publisher: Random House Business; 2Rev Ed edition (6 April 2006) ISBN: 9781905211203 Peter Senge, founder and director of the Society for Organisational Learning and senior lecturer at MIT, has found the means of creating a 'learning organisation'. In The Fifth Discipline, he draws the blueprints for an organisation where people expand their capacity to create the...

RRP: £43.58 Hardcover: 287 pages Publisher: Wiley VCH; 3rd ed. edition (4 April 2006) ISBN: 3527501177 This book is for everyone who doubts the correctness of current management practices and is looking for alternatives. Here, Professor Malik develops a radical opponent view, placing the company center stage rather than the group interests. This allows a valid logic to be developed for correct and...

RRP: £12.61 Paperback : 86 pages ISBN : 1576753565 Publisher : Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 1st edition (30 Oct. 2005) Language: : English Written by the originators and leaders of the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) movement itself, this short, practical guide offers an approach to organizational change based on the possibility of a more desirable future, experience with the whole system, and activities...

Transforming Turkey’s Tax Administration Through Systems Thinking PRACTITIONER R. Fatih ÖZÇELİK, Fifth Thinking Ltd. APPROX. DATE 2003-2005 SITUATION AND CONTEXT Turkey’s tax administration had long struggled with inefficiencies, low taxpayer compliance, and an extensive informal economy. At the beginning of the project, annual tax revenues were around $50 billion, a figure considered inadequate...

Critical systems heuristics(Ulrich 1983) is a framework for reflective practice based on practical philosophy and systems thinking. The name stands for three major concerns. The basic idea of CSH is to support boundary critique(reflective practice),or it can use boundary judgments for critical purposes against those who may not handle them so self-critically (emancipatory practice).

RRO: £10.83 Paperback : 368 pages ISBN : 193149858X Publisher : Chelsea Green Publishing Co; Illustrated Edition (1 Jun. 2004) Language: : English 'If you only read one book ... make this it!' L. Hunter Lovins, co-author of Natural Capitalism 'It is time for the world to re-read Limits to Growth! The message of 1972 is more real and relevant in 2004, and we wasted 30 valuable years of action by...

RRP: £39.31 Paperback : 292 pages ISBN : 0415335116 Publisher : Routledge (6 Nov. 2003) Language : English Action learning is a continued process of learning and reflection with the support of a group of colleagues, working on real issues. The action learning method is increasingly used to bring innovation to many different fields of work. The principles of action learning can achieve improvement...

RRP: £44 Hardcover: 378 pages Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (23 Oct. 2003) ISBN: 0470845228 Too often, today's managers are sold simple solutions to complex problems. But as many soon discover, simplicity is rarely effective in the face of complexity, change and diversity. Despite apparent promise, quick-fix panaceas fail because they are not holistic or creative enough. They focus on parts of the...

Learning, creativity, leadership and communities are all key to business success. All of these can be better understood in the context of data, information, knowledge and mental models. This paper makes some of these links and also shows how the additional understanding this gives can help in formulating solutions to common business and knowledge problems. This paper examines one of Max Boisot's...

RRP: £18.40 used Paperback: ‎ 368 pp Publisher: ‎ Nicholas Brealey International; ISBN 978-1857883114 [focus is causal loop mapping] Systems thinking can help you tame the complexity of real-world problems by providing a structured way of balancing a broad, overall view with the selection of the right level of detail, truly allowing you to "see the forest for the trees". Only by taking a broad...

RRP: £55 Hardcover: ‎ 352 pp Publisher: ‎ Wiley; ISBN 978-0471899495 This book offers a practical, fact-based approach to explain how enterprises deliver performance over time. Rigorous methods explain how to quantify the growth, decline and interdependence within the organisation's resources and capabilities as well as the continuous interactions with competitors and other external factors. These...

This paper is intended as a short introduction to the Viable System Model for those unfamiliar with it. It deals with some of the basic concepts embodied in the model, the modelling process, and its use in practice.