Virtual Systemic Inquiry - GPS for New Community Paradigms?

The next segment of the STW/STiA course moves back by two segments and three blog posts. The Kumu map for this section covers the development of a process termed Virtual Systemic Inquiry or VSI.  It is designed to provide a review and means of collaborative communication in developing a systemic approach, as involving an entire system, to community wicked challenges.

An extended and updated multi-video explanation of this Predicament (updated 1/30/2019) is available to begin providing an extensive explanation, for a fairly involved process in which both the steps and the rationale behind them.

The basic Predicament is that difficult and wicked challenges require sets of multiple individuals with diverse backgrounds but geographic or other logistical factors make working together difficult.

Short version, it is a process using web-based resources such as Cacoo, Debategraph, Gmail, Google Docs, Insight Maker, Kumu, LinkedIn, Lucid Chart, MediaWiki, Prezi and Skype or other similar programs to communicate and collaborate through systemic process interventions with others in an effective and efficient manner. despite being geographically, and therefore also time zoned separated, 

A series of Insight Maker, some of which are highlighted and expanded upon below will help make the argument in support based on insights from this course and past new community paradigms articles. 

The logistical challenge of selecting the most appropriate people to participate in the collaboration and developing the means of interaction to improve the likelihood of effecting the intended results remains.

According to a VSI perspective, it's not reasonable or appropriate to expect a single individual or even a small group to determine how to intervene meaningfully and effectively to address a complex wicked situation. That is, however, exactly what we do in most local governments, selecting five individuals for four years who then head a complicated oriented management system based on a solitary figure setting a top-down agenda to address complex issues and when it doesn't work we get another person and repeat. 

Large-scale collaboration then is essential if one wants any hope of addressing wicked problems at a community level in a meaningful and effective manner. Collaboration though presents a number of challenges itself because it, in truth, it brings in more complexity. The goal is to have it become, along with the issues being addressed, closer to what has been termed coherent complexity. 

Complexity though, its true nature, can still remain hidden for a number of reasons despite the significant complexity inherent in the wicked challenges facing our communities being immense. Many of these wicked challenges are the result of emergent properties of larger, even global systems that cannot be understood or fully comprehended by individuals or even by individual components (institutions, political parties, countries) of a larger system. Even if understood, they often cannot be adequately addressed by any of the individual components or subsystems alone. 

Wicked problems have become so complex, incoherently complex, that they're broken down and perceived as complicated by not only the general public but also those tasked with addressing them with top-down complicated and reductionistic based management systems, sometimes tending to reach high levels of bureaucratic complicatedness. 

Not only are the wicked challenges or situations themselves complex but the environment in which they exist, as an integral part of the challenge, and thereby the processes by which they must be addressed, particularly the social aspect, is also complex.

The model Perspectives on Csikszentmihalyi's views on Complexity vs Complicated illustrates important differences between complicated oriented problems and complex oriented problems which makes such an approach even more problematic.

Based on this Realization that situations warranting collaboration are invariably complex, and wicked problems are highly complex, collaboration is logically envisioned then as the most likely means to produce meaningful and effective outcomes. The complex nature of the wicked problems have and are expected to continue to overwhelm previously employed tools and methods.

The problems most successfully addressed by management systems based on reductionism and complicated algorithms are seen as being highly differentiated with little integration. Solutions then tend first towards greater differentiation followed hopefully then by integration. Seldom though are they able to achieve both differentiation and integration at the same time with any long-term success. Complex systems though can be both highly differentiated and highly integrated. This means that when imposing a complicated management system upon a complex system challenge that either differentiation or integration is going to be disregarded and therefore not adequately addressed. 

This then requires an integrated toolset, for which the VSI method provides both Tool Requirements and Tool Evaluation. VSI uses a wiki, as does New Community Paradigms, but as a focus page for the collaborations because of the ease of multi-user updating, allowing anyone involved in the collaboration to know that whatever aspect of the investigation they're searching for that the appropriate links can be found. 

Concept maps could be developed in Insight Maker and Kumu then linking those concept maps to the wiki with issue exchanges on the concept map being conducted through attached discussions. More formal models could also be developed in Insight Maker and Kumu. Again, once initiated, a link to the model could be added to the wiki and issue exchanges on the model again conducted through discussions. Kumu could potentially become the apparent heir simplifying the architecture by combining multiple pieces of the puzzle, focus page, discussions, concept maps and formal models together. It might though be too specialized and internalized though for use with larger groups.

Tools alone though will not be sufficient to ensure meaningful and effective outcomes. The participants must also be able to develop an integrated mindset to offset the natural and, in the right context, still definitely useful differentiations that they bring to the effort.  This will be different for different levels of the process but to be collaborative, a mindset founded on a shared vision is important with participants being on the same wavelength.

It is of critical importance for everyone involved to understand the intent of the collaboration by having them involved in the early establishment and the refinement of the intent from the beginning. Having the collaborators engaged in the development of the intent helps develop a sense of ownership which provides a basis for individuals to stay engaged and contributing. The challenge from a new community paradigms perspective is how to expand upon this to include an entire community.

Even with a well defined intent and community or group ownership of the challenge, working with a distributed group of individuals through multiple applications will require efforts expended on an ongoing basis to maintain focus. It is essential that all the component tools that may be employed be glued together in a manner that allows collaborators to keep track of their contributions and the overall development.

The Enabling Generative Interactions requires an integrative mix of differentiation and integration meaning that it can potentially become coherently complex in a manner that complicated top-down management systems cannot. 

Micro-worlds are models of the relevant relationships of a challenging situation or wicked problem set up in a manner with which people can interact to study the implications of their actions and as such are hopefully better able to understand the situation. A problem is that people often create these Micro-worlds unconsciously then tend to treat them as video games, seeking to understand only enough to win the game and miss the deeper underlying set of relations that are responsible for that micro-world working the way it does.

This review of Virtual Systemic Inquiry will continue in the next two blog posts and will be integrated with the Participatory Democracy with Systems Thinking Insight Maker model in the next post and later as a Kumu map.