Books, Articles and Newsletters

The images may be used and shared, provided that the author is credited as Annika Varjonen / Visual Impact and the name of the event – Learning Finland? Systemic Challenges and Opportunities – is mentioned alongside.

Nirosha’s leadership and innovative approaches learnt through JGA’s Systems Thinking apprenticeship have transformed how her team tackles public health challenges, inspiring her colleagues to adopt more comprehensive and interconnected strategies. Currently, she has just secured a critical grant for her department off the back of systems thinking methodologies. Nirosha is also co-authoring a...

Georgina Wilson, [a JGA STiP apprencticeship graduate] Founder and CEO of BUD Leaders, has spent over a decade pioneering systems change initiatives that empower Black and other Global Majority women in business. Through BUD Leaders, a pioneering black-led, female-led social enterprise, Georgina works to disrupt leadership structures and drive equity. Her organisation collaborates with large...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the human dimension of the complex interactions which are a key feature of VSM. It focusses on personal emotions, power, conversations and relationships, and the tensions between personal identity and organisational identity, particularly in periods of organisational and strategic change. It draws on psychology, and the social sciences to provide a...

in Enacting Cybernetics: (2024) Vol.2 Issue 1, p2 (DOI: 10.58695/ec.12) Numerous lean transformation projects fail or do not achieve the desired performance and/or viability that is necessary for a sustainable implementation of lean management. However, there are some factors that support the successful implementation of lean management in day-to-day business. In the opinion of the authors, these...

Aim of the guide: This VSM guide serves as a quick and practical resource for understanding and applying the Viable System Model in organizational analysis and design. It should help to spread the powerful knowledge of management cybernetics.

Abbas, R.& Michael, K. (2023) Socio-Technical Theory: A review. In S. Papagiannidis (Ed), TheoryHub Book. Free pdf download at https://open.ncl.ac.uk / ISBN: 9781739604400. Socio-technical theory originated in the 1950s at the Tavistock Institute in London (Ropohl, 1999), led by Trist and Bamforth (1951) and Emery (1993), resulting from industry-based action research focusing on coal mining (Fox...

PM World Journal (ISSN: 2330-4480) Vol. XII, Issue II – February 2023 24pp The following article is an introduction to the design of megaproject organizations based on the viable system model. It combines approaches from project management with approaches from systems theory. The understanding of complexity and how it is effectively managed by the organizational code is a central theme. After...

Systemic Change of the Healthcare System Systems thinking is an important component of the design field that looks at the complexity of a diverse group of entities and how they are all interrelated to form an “ecosystem.” Each entity is connected to the others through the direct flow of resources or indirectly via an intricate web of relationships. One change within a system impacts every other...

The work of Collective Leadership for Scotland has been based upon the five components: Practices that support self; Understanding complexity; Curiosity and inquiring stance; Relational; and Working more comfortably with emergence. One of these components is about understanding complexity and the role of systems thinking as we seek to work on complex societal issues. This resource is offered as a...

Systems Thinking Practitioner Apprenticeship – Level 7 Delivered by Cherith Simmons Leadership and Development in partnership with SCiO – Systems and Complexity in Organisation, the professional body for systems practitioners in the UK. The broadest and deepest master’s level systems thinking course available to apprentices in the UK. 100% UK Government funded through an employer’s apprenticeship...

Article in Critical Social Policy Vol 42, issue 4 [free to read and download] Discharge to Assess (D2A) models of care have been developed to expedite the process of discharging hospital patients as soon as they are medically fit to leave, thereby improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare system. This article focuses on the implementation of a D2A model in Kent, England, which...

The Covid-19 crisis is a cataclysmic event and caught us all by surprise. It is considered a health and economic crisis, but at the same time and rarely discussed, it also reveals the weaknesses in the systemic processes in our society and organizations. The Viable System Model (VSM) by Stafford Beer allows us to structure the various weaknesses and to put them into a coherent framework. The VSM...

The Psychology of Education Review Volume 44 Number 3, Special Issue 44pp - In this paper, problems with the philosophy and research relating to various interpretations of ‘closing the gap’ are used to open up a discussion of, and illustrate, the process whereby a narrow interpretation of ‘science’ and neglect of systems thinking result in the generation of huge amounts of dangerous and misleading...

`Smart cities', urban development projects that design computational systems and sensory technology to monitor activity and regulate energy consumption and resource distribution, are a frontier for the prospective deployment of ICTs for sustainability. Often reduced to technological problems of optimization, these projects have implications far beyond narrow environmental and consumptive frames of...

Abstract: This note brings together a number of problems that are usually considered separately but which seem to have a common root in neglect of, or avoidance of, systems thinking. The note begins by reviewing a number of studies from which seriously misleading conclusions have been drawn because they uncritically adopted the perspective of reductionist science and failed to document outcomes to...

Article in American Journal of Evaluation, v39 n2 p201-220 Jun 2018 [download £29] Evaluation is defined by its central task of valuing--the process and product of judging the merit, worth, or significance of a policy or program. However, there are no clear-cut ways to consider values and render value judgments in evaluation practice. There remains contention in the evaluation field about whether...

"Critical Systems Heuristics," also just called "Critical Heuristics" or "CSH," is a framework for reflective practice based on practical philosophy and systems thinking. The basic idea of CSH is to support boundary critique – a systematic effort of handling boundary judgments critically. Boundary judgments determine which empirical observations and value considerations count as relevant and which...

Since 2010, local authorities in England have experienced an unprecedented reduction in their resourcing at a time when demands on services have risen substantially through social and demographic changes. Faced with such external challenges, various Councils' internal transformations have sought to change the organisation as a system, but also to alter the relationship with the environment. These...

Why IT outsourcing can fail is a big subject. Of course, not all IT outsources do fail, but many have inherent problems that take a long time to fix. In this paper, the focus is on medium/large IT outsources, and on structural and process issues. Many of these will exhibit at least some of these points of failure. Failure means different things to different parties: for the client organisation it...

Abstract: a species heading, at an exponentially increasing rate, toward its own extinction1 can hardly be regarded as anything but incompetent. Yet this is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves. We are destroying our habitat – and therefore our chances of survival as a species - through the conduct of endless work which either consumes abundant resources or creates products or by...

Journal of Organisational Transformation & Social Change Volume 1, 2004 - Issue 2, p163-177 - This paper uses the concepts of complexity and variety to analyse the widespread failure of some common approaches to large-scale organisational change. It is based on field research of organisation-wide change programmes in which three common approaches to change are assessed, including their inherent...

Article in Systems Research & Behavioural Science, Vol 31, issue 2, p197-214 [$49 download cost; 48h access $12] A framework based on Ulrich's critical systems heuristics (CSH) is presented to organize second-order critical inquiry in systems practice and action research. It is argued that such an approach not only improves the rigour of systems methodologies in action in a specific ‘situation of...

Conference Proceedings - The 30th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society St. Gallen, Switzerland -- July 22-26, 2012 ISBN 978-1-935056-10-2 The unconscious application of sophisticated tools, and in particular the popular reverence to data as the source of knowledge, seems to be the rule in many scientific activities, in which the application of tools replaces thinking and data...

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.

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...

(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...

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).

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...

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.

Chapter in Systems Theory and Practice in the Knowledge Age pp 239–246. [cost to download £19.95] The multiple dimensions of the factors affecting software development productivity represent a challenge for an interdisciplinary research to their nature. Because of the significant role played by people, software engineering is already one of the computer science disciplines that is closest to the...

A breif guide to Interactive Planning by Russel Ackoff

[wikipedia] " The leverage points, first published in 1997, were inspired by Meadows' attendance at a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) meeting in the early 1990s, where she realized a very large new system was being proposed but the mechanisms to manage it were ineffective. Meadows, who worked in the field of systems analysis, proposed a scale of places to intervene in a system...

Dozens of people are eager to explain the collapse of the Asian Tiger economies. Few of them predicted it. Other economic implosions, from the 1995 failure of Britain’s venerable Barings Bank to the 1987 dive in the US stock market, have been explained primarily after the fact. Few if any explanations for these phenomena postulate any connection between the rightward political slide and the edgy...

Occasional paper no.2, publisher Ontario Ministry of Labour, Ontario Quality of Working Life Centre, 1981, ISBN 9780774362863, 67pp, This paper consists of the first ever overview of socio-technical systems from its original formulation in the early Tavistock mining studies until the present. Socio-technical analysis is made at three levels - the primary work system; the whole organisation; and...