Terry
Thanks for your thoughtful reply and all the good reasoning it
contained! Please accept my apology for having such an overwrought
reaction to your original post. It is not surprising that an
engineer like you favors functional things like a verb. This may
surprise you - to me a verb can be a nominal object- not a noun but a
referential entity in which functionality is a dominant but latent
characteristic. You can inventory verbs! You probably would agree that
a verb requires a context in which its functionality is executable -
in relationship to what it acts upon - that good old noun stuff
again! I can't imagine any kind of functioning system without state
descriptions to let you know where you are or what you have
accomplished. Although as an architect you might think of me as a noun
guy only interested in the artifact or situation produced , I do truly
like verbs and the processes they describe and enable. But when you
get right down to it I guess along with my verbs I like spatio
temporal phenomena which you engineers recognize as states.
Thanks for helping me understand your approach to system thinking -
but count the nouns just for me.
Warm regards,
Chuck
(I was away this weekend and just got this post. Thanks again)
On Jul 25, 2009, at 11:46 AM, Terence Love wrote:
> Hi Chuck,
>
> Thank you for your message. I miss the conversations and arguments
> with
> you. I'm sorry if what I wrote irritated you. I am using terms
> accurately
> rather than emotionally. I realise you find the reasoning different
> from
> what you normally use. Please accept that I wrote what I wrote
> carefully.
> I'd like to try again. Here goes..
>
> There are some people who focus on 'things'. In reasoning, they
> focus on
> nouns. In the sentence 'the cat sat on the mat', they focus on the
> cat and
> the mat. This is common. This noun-based way of viewing the world is
> usually
> associated with a personal internal emphasis on a way of interacting
> with
> the world that focuses on things, ownership and ego. Some of the
> results of
> this emphasis on nouns are the kinds of language shift that converts
> activities into nouns. An example is where people rephrase 'Chuck is
> swimming (verb)' into 'Chuck is having 'a swim' (noun)'. The
> interesting
> thing is that the verb 'swimming' makes good concrete sense in that
> people
> can see you doing it, whereas the noun 'swim' is a purely ethereal
> abstract
> entity. I.e. if I asked you to give me the 'swim' that you were
> having so
> that I could look at it, it wouldn't make much sense.
> In contrast are people that focus on activities rather than things. In
> reasoning they focus on verbs. In the sentence 'the cat sat on the
> mat',
> they focus primarily on the activity of 'sitting'. This verb-based
> way of
> viewing the world is usually associated with personal internal
> emphasis on
> interacting, doing and controlling.
>
> Over the last few years, my interest has been in the design of
> interventions
> in complex socio-technical systems. Looking at design in this way
> offers
> many benefits. It dissolves many of the theory messes typical of the
> design
> research literature, and there are huge advantages in viewing all
> design
> activity as interventions in complex socio-technical systems. This
> perspective rewrites a lot of the existing design theory in a
> simpler more
> integrated fashion. Complex socio-technical systems are small and
> large.
> They range from global design and manufacturing and governance to
> the design
> of a shopping list. They are complex in ways that exist beyond where
> design
> theory usually treads. Below I've listed some of the characteristics
> of
> complex socio-technical systems and an indication of the level of
> abstraction of the type of analyses needed.
>
> One of the problems of working in this area, however, is that
> conventional
> design theory simply doesn't work in this realm. It doesn't have
> sufficient
> theoretical competence. Nor does management theory.
>
> When analysing designs for interventions in complex socio-technical
> systems,
> the primary focus is system behaviour - a verb-based way of viewing
> the
> world. Why? Because you can draw subsystem boundaries anywhere and
> include
> what you want and how you want it and call them what you like. Nothing
> matters except how the system behaves (verb). A noun-based view of
> objects
> has very little relevance. Choosing sub-system groups doesn't need
> to make
> sense, they don't need to be accurately named (something like
> 'Group1b' is
> as good as anything). They are transient ephemeral entities on the
> path to
> understanding how the system behaves in response to changes. In
> contrast, an
> activity-based, verb-based, view of the system is everything.
> Attempting to
> describe complex system behaviour by inventing a noun object ('a
> swim') is
> pretty useless. It is only in the very most trivial systems that a
> system
> behaviour can be accurately and completely described by a fixed
> single code
> (noun). A problem is that our natural laziness pushes us in that
> direction
> of converting verbs about activity and behaviour into noun forms.
>
> It's easy to draw parallels to theorising about 'creativity'. Making
> theory
> in the area of 'creativity/creating things' is theorising about
> interventions in a complex socio-technical system. The noun-based
> approach,
> i.e. using terms such as 'creativity' or 'innovation', is much like
> lumping
> together things for the moment into a temporally convenient
> subsystem (Group
> 1B). The noun-based representations of complex activities don't
> adequately
> communicate an accurate and complete description of the activity
> and how
> things behave and change. That requires a verb-based approach. The
> recent
> exchange of emails on this list following your post and the messy
> literature
> on 'creativity' (and innovation) illustrate some of these issues.
>
> Best wishes and thank you for the criticism,
> Terry
>
> ===
> Complex socio-technical systems comprise:
> Multiple constituencies - changing over time
> Multiple overlapping sub-systems
> Complex sub-system behaviours dynamically changing over time
> Multiple overlapping processes across subsystems
> Mixed ownership of sub-systems
> Varying purposes and roles of system and sub-systems
> Complex and dynamic distribution of formal and informal power and
> control
> ===
> Conceptual level of designing interventions in complex socio-technical
> systems (this list from a system variety perspective):
> 1. Level at which things happen
> 2. Level at which people ordinarily plan what happens
> 3. Level at which people analyse how people ordinarily plan what
> happens
> (design research typically is at this level)
> 4. Basic systems models and systems thinking
> 5. Thinking about variety in systems and balance between control
> variety,
> system variety and environment variety
> 6. Thinking about distribution of control, system and environment
> variety
> across sub-systems and their conceptual representations
> 7. Thinking about the time and location of distributions of control,
> system
> and environment varieties
> 8. Thinking about the dynamic shifts in power and control that
> result from
> dynamics of change in time and location of control, system and
> environment
> varieties. (Level of research into design of interventions into
> complex
> socio-technical systems)
> ===
>
