The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 2 of 3

In the last blog post, the Acumen/IDEO Design Thinking class (map) was looked at as part of the Living Cities online Collective Impact Course and compared with a similar program previously offered by the Stanford University dschool.

The stated NCP goal in taking a design thinking class the first time was to see how it could be incorporated into a community-based direct deliberative democracy approach to community governance. Design Thinking has had its own NCP wiki-page for some time. It has been of interest and relevance to New Community Paradigms for the reason that it is seen as being both solution oriented and inclusive, intentionally bringing in a variety of perspectives to face a challenge, not limited to only those with particular areas of expertise. Making it potentially useful to a diverse group of community members coming together to discuss problems, say with traffic and school crossings or other community challenges.  

Greater use of design thinking could scale from improving individual user interface with a particular app to helping to implement larger scalable, community-based, collaborative efforts such as Collective Impact or The Next Systems Project by deeply understanding the needs of the community. Another developing premise is that design thinking can help navigate the maze of complex ‘wicked’ challenges facing our communities. The Acumen/IDEO course comes closer to achieving those goals.

Important lessons were still taken from the Design Thinking Action Lab. The Stanford University d-school approach cited in Incorporating Design Thinking into New Community Paradigms emphasized the importance of drilling down to the individual.

Design Thinking demonstrates that there is an important difference between designing for individuals as the average of a class or for a group of individuals and instead designing for one specific individual. The later is more aligned with a human-centered design or user-centered design perspective by emphasizing a deeper understanding of problems from the perspective of different stakeholders, not as a member of a class or a category, but as a unique individual. It can be applied in this way to the creation of innovative products, services and processes.

Looking for extreme users can also help provide insight in understanding the experiences of people at the statistical edges, “(P)eople who are in extreme positions one way or the other are exhibiting needs more acutely than the average person,” according to Andrew Haeg, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University. 

The Knight Digital Media Center believes that design thinking can develop better solutions for community organizations, especially foundations, and community media. This perspective can be extended, according to the Knight article, “Can design thinking power better solutions for community foundations?”, to small groups of people by diving deep with them to really understand their day-to-day behavior, their context, how they feel, what they do and how, instead of talking with a scientifically representative sample. 

The Incourage Community Foundation’s initial goal was working with the community of Wisconsin Rapids on developing new ways of listening, talking and interacting, so as to encourage a culture ripe for self-organizing and collective action. The impact of their work with residents was increased through incorporating adaptive skills and design thinking. Applying adaptive skills prepared the ground so that a human-centered design approach created deep roots helping to transform the people and the culture of the place where they worked and lived. Design thinking can help community foundations frame the question, “How might we craft information solutions that meet the deepest needs of our community?” 

If Design Thinking could be implemented in a community setting it then could perhaps develop into a needed skill by community development workers in the public and private sectors but not on its own. It needs to be integrated with other approaches to community building and change. The primary bias for this blog has been towards systems thinking and more recently, Collective Impact. While it might seem that design thinking is being relegated to a secondary role it has, I believe, the potential to be a significant catalyst.

Since October of last year, this blog began, with A Map for Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking, a more concerted effort of proposing models, such as Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking map, integrating systems thinking with a system of deliberative and participatory or direct democratic community governance. These maps are made up of Causal Loop Diagrams, involving feedback within the system in question.

Within that map, the role of "Civic and Community Groups" is envisioned as being the juncture between the two foundational reinforcing loops R1 Deliberative  Democratic Dialogue and  "R2 Working with Systems Thinking”. This would involve working with "Systems Thinking Facilitators" and other community government "Staff" on the development of specific proposals for projects, programs or policies which would come from the community or from selected or assigned leadership in the community. The actual creation of the projects, programs or policies should require the use of design thinking.  This, it can be argued, would support both the implementation of systems thinking in a complex and participatory mode within Jackson’s SOSM Framework. It could also assist in integrating Community Groups into a system of Community Based Virtual Systemic Inquiry. 

There are capacities that are important in both systems thinking and design thinking, including the importance of mindsets, whether the seven mindsets of the IDEO approach to design thinking or the foundational mindset of the system thinking iceberg. This might mean that design thinking could help in overcoming, though likely not eliminate, the inherent and sometimes conflicting dichotomy between hard and soft system thinking approaches, (approaches which can be seen in the general tendencies of people) as was discussed in A Map for a Pathway to New Community Paradigms. It could also be helpful, if it follows IDEO’s balanced pragmatism, with overcoming potential stumbling blocks with working with community activists that might arise if there isn’t a set discipline to walk the space between stifling creativity and becoming too attached to an idea that isn’t going anywhere,.

The community impact of design thinking could also be extended further. Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms asserts that communities should add artistic thinking to design thinking and systems thinking as means of generating public involvement and community innovation. These three types of thinking can be seen as being both independent and integrated at the same time. 

Design thinking could help ensure that artistically inspired endeavors properly focus on important community needs and systems thinking could help in understanding the impact on the larger environments. Ideas such as those found in the Debunking 10 Myths of Innovation by Richard Evans, President, EMCARTS INC could contribute insights that could be of great benefit to communities. 

A number of other organizations have been able to tie an artistic mindset to community related concerns. They could then work to better integrate the talents of artists and cultural organizations toward helping people engage in civic and community life.  Animating Democracy, a project of Americans for the Arts helps to identify, develop, and advocate for public and private sector policies, practices, funding, and initiatives that advance the role of the arts in fostering citizen participation and social change. Art VULUPS does so with geography, environmental science, land use planning, sustainability, art and creativity concepts.

Artistic thinking can help reach deeper insights, generate more ideas and seep into the community's fabric so that its influence becomes one more of dispersion within a complex community system rather than a transfer of information from one institution to another. An artistic perspective should not be left to the end though but made foundational in community design through design thinking, systems thinking and other approaches to achieve Collective Impact through new community paradigms.

Serendipitous Events Lead to Emerging Possibilities

A little bit more than another month has passed since the last blog post. The time though was spent in an engaging manner. As the title of this post alludes, a couple of serendipitous events have allowed for the further exploration, using Kumu relational mapping, of the potential effects of incorporating systems thinking into systems of community governance that integrated democratic processes that included both participatory and deliberative aspects, opening the potential for emerging possibilities. While the phrase, “potential for emerging possibilities” may have a new-age ring to it, the pathway to it endeavored to be rational and as empirical as it could be. It involved multiple, sometimes even conflicting perspectives that needed to be synthesized.

This journey of exploration started over a year ago with Better Deliberative and Participatory Democratic Community Based Governance through Systems Thinking and the InsightMaker model Participatory Democracy with Systems Thinking. The model was improved with Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking, a relational map created with Kumu, which was featured in the blog post A Map for Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking. The previous blog post had begun to study community-based Virtual Systemic Inquiry, intended to provide a means of collaborative communication in developing a systemic approach to community challenges or wicked problems, and had been connected to the first two reinforcing causal loops of the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking relational map.

There were though recognized limitations, which were discussed in Direct Democracy and System Thinking Map - Some Potholes on the Journey. Among those discussed was the need for an enhancement of deeper participation by stakeholders, the further consolidation between systems thinking and direct democracy involving a dual-track related to soft approaches and dynamic approaches to systems thinking, each serving different purposes and that it would need to be designed, as Vivien Twyford had discussed, as a means of Recognizing and Responding to Complexity. It could involve extensive use of the Internet, as would Virtual Systemic Inquiry, (GPS for New Community Paradigms?) in support of the previously established principle for the use of online communities to encourage direct democracy for on-the-ground communities. None of this could be tested in any sense, only theorized about.

Then the first serendipitous event occurred. Part of the improvement of the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking relational map was including the concepts of What Are Dialogue & Deliberation? from the Resource Center of the NCDD or National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. Near the end of last year, the NCDD went through a process that involved the identification of existing strategies and co-creation of new strategies to promote the NCDD’s mission of encouraging dialogue and deliberation. The process was done online using Codigital, an online program that provides, “evolutionary algorithm controls and coordinates the inputs of multiple participants in real-time to generate focused, optimized collaborative output.” by which ideas were generated, developed through editing, voted on and then ranked. A simple explanation of the process can be found here, a more in-depth one here.

Participation, in addition to expressing one’s own views on matters of importance, provided the opportunity to create a simulation of an online group voting process which was done with the Kumu relational map Using Systems Thinking as a Bridge between Democratic Issues and Democratic Principles, which was featured in a related blog post and discussed further in the last blog post Bridging Differences in Approaches through Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.

This allowed for further examination of the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking relational map, in particular, the reinforcing loops of R3 Group Facilitation for Systems Thinking, as well as R4 Maintains Respect for Individuals and Time and R5 Group Development Systems Thinking. These loops focus on either the element Dialogue Facilitation or the element Perceived & Defined Meaningfulness of Deliberation. It is where these loops meet that the incorporation of dialogue and deliberation as essential elements of democracy can be realized.

It also allowed some thought experimentation on moving from the more basically abstract ideas generated by the NCDD/Codigital approach to areas of application, to connecting ideas together for strategic application to begin overcoming what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton called the Knowing-Doing Gap.

However, while the individual online interactions comprising the Codigital vote ranking process were real-world based, the interactions making up the simulations comprising the Using Systems Thinking as a Bridge between Democratic Issues and Democratic Principles relational map were not but rather an abstraction.

Then the second event occurred, making the combination of the two events serendipitous, at least if one is on this current path of inquiry. The opportunity arose to participate in an online discussion that arose out of some of the issues generally dealt with in the actual NCDD Codigital voting project (Download the NCDD/Codigital report here). This meant that the interactions were going to be real in real-time.

The online discussion in question was "Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation" aka "DandDTrans," a community of inquiry and action regarding the role that dialogue and deliberation can play in addressing the mega-crises of our time. The discussions were held using the online program Hackpad, which is designed to “take collaborative notes, share data and files, and use comments to share your thoughts in real-time or asynchronously” (it was subsequently changed to Dropbox Paper) and involved three different modes of dialogic process, World Cafe, Bohm Dialogues and Open Space Technology that took place through MaestroConference and other means.

The most direct Kumu connection to the "DandDTrans," community though was Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation Community. This provided a rich picture/concept map of the intentional transformational process to take a complex world through to what was seen as "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible."

The process, including particularly relevant components, was mapped out through the Kumu project DDST Community with the relational map, Bridging Creating and Transforming the Future.

The title came from laying out and comparing the pathways that could potentially be created by following two different approaches, hard or soft, to systems thinking as classified by Michael Jackson's System of Systems Methodologies and discussed in Systems Thinking - Sailing through Wicked Problems on Complex Seas (unfortunately, SystemsWiki is no longer in existence).

There has been a bias towards hard or dynamic approaches to systems thinking, represented by the Creating the Future pathway, usually implemented with the intention of understanding or diagnosing problems and solving them. The "Transforming the Future" pathway involved the newly learned possibility for softer more participative approaches to systems thinking including Appreciative Inquiry, Ideal Design, and other soft system methodologies. Both the Creating the Future pathway and the Transforming the Future pathway was delved into more deeply revealing how they developed. Going back to the relational map, Bridging Creating and Transforming the Future showed the two paths together and reveal where they intersected and diverged which was at Complexity. Complexity appeared to be the juncture at which the two pathways can be bridged or where obstacles could arise creating tolls to further progress.

The conclusion arrived at is that efforts to create the future can be weakened if not enough is done to engage stakeholders in the process. Enough does not mean whitewashed attempts at community engagement but meaningful and at times deep engagement. At the same time, efforts to transform the future, while idealistic in their endeavor must still coalesce and be implemented in an effective and efficient manner. Together, both must work at making the complexity of wicked problems more coherent to those being tasked with the challenge of addressing them. The challenge will invariably involve the entire community to be successful.

As written in the narrative of the map, finding pathways to create these bridges will undoubtedly mean further journeying along the lines of exploration opened by the Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation Community and others, especially those who participated in the process and provided a number of different resources. The attempt was made to map out this dynamic process through a DDST Hackpads Map. It is another experiment and is and likely to be under construction for some time.

Participation in the DDST community was far more geared towards the soft side of systems thinking, to a far greater extent than I had experienced before. In some instances, it approached areas that I am unable to determine whether I consider them to be firmly within the boundaries of systems thinking or not. Most likely they are but I have yet to determine for myself, exactly how?

This involved my fairly recent introduction to the work of Christopher Alexander, the author of A Pattern Language. My initial impression was that he had developed another "soft systems" thinking approach which was rather compatible with design thinking. Further exposure made it clear that while the later could still be true, the former assumption was not, at least it is nowhere near that simple. Alexander’s methods or principles though do provide a means for very open, participatory processes for finding emerging possibilities. For the "DandDTrans," community this was done Group Works Card of the Evening! conversations involving selected Pattern Cards from the Group Works Pattern Language Deck.

These issues though will be left for future blog posts.

Systems Thinking as a Bridge between Democratic Issues and Democratic Principles

This blog post is on experimenting with ideas through a new Kumu relational map, “Using Systems Thinking as a Bridge between Democratic Issues and Democratic Principles” which could be placed within the process described by the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking relational map in the last two blog posts.

Involving, in particular, the reinforcing loops of R3 Group Facilitation for Systems Thinking, as well as R4 Maintains Respect for Individuals and Time and R5 Group Development Systems Thinking from the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking map. These loops focus on either the element Dialogue Facilitation or the element Perceived & Defined Meaningfulness of Deliberation. It is where these loops meet that the incorporation of dialogue and deliberation as essential elements of democracy can be realized.

Follow up discussions within LinkedIn, particularly the groups for Community Engagement and the Enabling a Better Tomorrow: A Systems Learning Community encouraged a broader perspective. Those involved in Community Engagement agreed with the possibility of including soft systems thinking approaches, such as Appreciative Inquiry to what could be called a creative condition for the generation of ideas or content. Those involved in Systems Thinking were more aligned with the approach of being capable of providing context to the ideas and potentially being able to provide causality through harder based methodologies such as Systems Dynamics.

The “Using Systems Thinking as a Bridge between Democratic Issues and Democratic Principles map is designed to simulate the potential outcomes from multiple and diverse group interactions involved in a direct democracy form of community governance supported by systems thinking.

The map tracks the parallel simulation of the virtual group interaction by four groups, each made up of 46 to 72 individuals, (some could belong to more than one group) addressing one of four sets of issues, based on a Codigital project (details) and initiated at the 2014 the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) conference in Washington DC, October 17 - 19, 2014, which dealt with the identification of existing strategies and co-creation of new strategies to promote the NCDD’s mission of encouraging dialogue and deliberation.

The ideas were generated, developed through editing, voted on and then ranked by a process developed by Codigital which through an “evolutionary algorithm controls and coordinates the inputs of multiple participants in real time to generate focused, optimized collaborative output.” A simple explanation can be found here, a more in-depth one here.

The appendix of the later, featuring what is termed a Fitness Landscape, was particularly interesting as a reminder of a set of lectures on Problem Solving and Innovation by Professor Scott E. Page, who has been featured before on this blog.

Participation for the purpose of generating the map occurred between October 20 to November 7, 2014. The map did not seek to replicate the Codigital system but instead to simulate the competition of ideas in a group setting.

The common factors were the ideas created through the NCDD process and the randomly generated pair-wise voting choices generated by the Codigital system. The difference between Codigital and the map was that for the map the vote between two ideas was recorded as both a yes vote and a no vote with yes being assigned 1 and no being assigned -1. The votes for each idea were then cumulated over the duration of the project. The result of the randomly generated up or down voting meant pushing ideas accordingly, some acutely in one direction, others bounced back and forth.

The map's final outcomes then did not match the Codigital final outcomes. The map, admittedly, had a bias for ideas in the NCDD online deliberation that I supported and a relative bias against the ideas that I had submitted, as I couldn't vote on the later.

The generated pairings did not always come from the same categories of issue and it did not seem that all pairing were made available suggesting that Codigital's algorithm used some form of sampling.

Regardless of the algorithm or methodology used, all ranking systems need to address certain concerns which are more a matter of the inherent mathematical nature of the universe rather than the rational or ethical nature of humans. One such issue is the creation of a winner through a Condorcet Paradox explained here by Professor Scott E. Page, which could give the designer of a voting mechanism a great deal of latitude.

The ideas generated by Codigital were then taken through four stages of development explained in more detail in the map. One, generation of a map of the ideas for each issue with each then assigned to a particular focus, Community, Civic, Organizational or Individual. Two, the recombination of ideas from specific areas of focus across the four issues into new maps. Three, the prioritization of those issues. Four, the creation of Kumu cluster maps to discover new relationships.

Perhaps a bit ironically considering the nature of this post but not unexpectedly, two of my submitted systems thinking based ideas did not survive the Codigital process.

"What are the structural barriers in our democratic systems? Is there a real or perceptual difference between structural barriers (static) and systemic bottlenecks (dynamic)? What are the sources and what are the points of leverage?” and "Use systems thinking and relational mapping to generate, develop and evaluate community intervention ideas for selection derived from soft systems thinking such as Appreciative Inquiry.”

Some of my suggested edits also did not make it. One failed suggestion was to replace the “and have fun.” at the end of, "Get creative and innovate, with new types of public space -- local places where a diversity of citizens can meet, bump into one another, share what is important and meaningful to them, and have fun!" with ...'Work with Project for Public Places http://www.pps.org.'

The point is that there was enough opportunity for input, competing ideas, along with some randomness (at least perceptually) and uncertainty to assert a claim that the process could mirror an actual, in reality messy, process. Mirror but not truly replicate, focusing only on certain parts from certain angles.

To be more functional, the map would have to be made capable of aggregating and potentially recombining input from a large number of participants rather than just one which raises the potential for greater complexity.

The Codigital process featured relatively little or only restricted dialogue and deliberation through group editing though the larger NCDD process did have online dialogues going on in other venues. The map obviously had in reality, none.

In the early stages of the Codigital process, there were a number of examples of what could be called pet projects and pet peeves, some quite good but not necessarily strategic in nature. Later, the ideas were more frequently of a broader nature of concern or focus and the input from others started to reveal different though perhaps not fully explicit choices in directions.

One such choice was to the degree that NCDD would focus its energies on established political power such as city councils as opposed to outside city hall and within the community itself. Optimally, it should be both but as this blog has continually argued many times there are city halls whose political power is entrenched. Another choice in a direction that seemed to be suggested was whether NCDD should maintain it focus on the principles of dialogue and deliberation, which is for the most part absent from our current political discourse, and focus more on particular political outcomes.

Would it be possible to find a meaningful ‘why’ that could then be translated into a ‘how’ perhaps through systems thinking causal loop diagram models? These types of questions were not addressed to any extent in the Codigital process and only alluded to in the map but are necessary to get over what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton named the Knowing-Doing Gap.

Of interest is the question whether it would be possible to combine the map with a Codigital-like process along with a Virtual Systemic Inquiry process and what sort of influence this might have on the dialogue and deliberation process if participants not only saw the ranking of ideas (aside - not sure a competition among participants is the most optimal means of evaluation) but then also saw visually how it related to other ideas and the principles that were driving the ideas on a continually updated basis.

Direct Democracy and System Thinking Map - Some Potholes on the Journey

The previous blog post featured a relational map combining, Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking, which made a reasonably sound argument that such a system of governance could be possible, someday. 

It has been suggested before that systems thinking could serve as a scaffolding for efforts at direct democracy. More recently, from the other side of the coin, it was argued that the implementation of a systems thinking process could derive benefit from means of participatory democracy through deeper participation by stakeholders. This extends that argument to a community setting.

There are, however, limitations to both the model and to the actual proposed system being represented that need to be recognized and addressed before any of that will ever happen.

First, as for the model or map, the George Box principle still applies, "All models (or maps) are wrong, Some models are useful.” It is not intended to be a complete representation of reality. The advantage is that we can change and hopefully improve the model far more readily. One such update has been made.

The "Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking" relational map now incorporates the concept, as discussed in "Systems Thinking - Sailing through Wicked Problems on Complex Seas” post, of the consolidation between systems thinking and direct democracy involving  a dual track approach related to systems thinking, a soft approach and a dynamic approach, each serving different purposes. 

Soft Systems Methods, such as Appreciative Inquiry, Idealized Design, and Soft Systems Methodology, could be employed for purposes of exploration and understanding in connection with reinforcing loop R1 “Deliberative Democratic Dialogue”, to obtain a compatible vision. These methods are useful for exploratory purposes to attain a greater understanding and potentially draft a compatible approach to the wicked problem, treating the issue as a question of epistemology, as in what can we know or find out about the world?

Dynamic Systems Methods are typically employed for improving goal seeking and viability once a compatible or finally determined upon vision has been obtained. The hard or dynamic system takes a more ontological approach. Systems Dynamics, in particular, can be seen in contrast to more general, often relatively qualitative modeling systems, as a rigorous methodology employing the development and use of formal computer models. These methods would be more involved in the prototype development of systems thinking models for the purpose of future community intervention and would occur in reinforcing loop R2 "Working with Systems Thinking" through the collaboration between the "Systems Thinking Facilitator”, "Staff" and "Civic and Community Groups”. 

The R3 “Group Facilitation for Systems Thinking” reinforcing loop sees the two different systems thinking methodological approaches begun in R1 (Soft Systems) and R2 (Dynamics Systems) begin interacting together.

The flow of process within R5 "Group Development Systems Thinking" leads both through "Facilitated Systems Thinking Learning" and "Employment of Systems Thinking Models and Methods" is seen as leading to greater "Understanding of Systems Thinking" which when combined with enhanced R4 “Maintains Respect  for Individuals and Time” reinforces the entire system.

The actual R6 “Implementation of  Systems Thinking  Intervention” within the community would be a result of "Outcomes and Decisions" arising from "Perceived and Defined Meaningfulness of Deliberation". 

The second issue, it is based on a world that doesn’t yet exist. It implicitly presumes that systems thinking has become an integral part of the K-12 school curriculum as envisioned by the Waters Foundation and that dialogue and deliberation are the principal tools for community governance and not campaigning and debate. It goes beyond the current institutional based concept of democracy, which is seen as often being entrenched and moves instead toward a more community based direct democracy. 

There are other limitations to the model. In terms of a working reality, the map assumes only smooth sailing. In truth, the system could break down at each stage of the process and feedback to debilitate the entire system. It should also be appreciated that not only something can go wrong at each step of the actual process, necessitating a thorough review and response but that each step is important in its own right and is not merely a stepping stone to a final outcome. It does not provide for the actual creation of the infrastructure necessary to make such a system possible. It also does not look to any elements or processes outside the proposed system which could interfere with the implementation and continued existence of such a system which are present in our current system. Finally, it does not offer a process or program as for how to disrupt that existing system so that the system envisioned by this relational map could be put in place. 

Even with all these constraints, the effort is still worthwhile in seeking new avenues for community governance. This blog leans towards raising theoretical questions or lines of inquiry, providing its own wrestled with insights, as well as those of others with more knowledge, and pointing to available resources, though not necessarily in that order.

For further future development, the model defined by the relational map and the system of governance it proposes to represent also needs to recognize that there would still be an aspect of persuasion, both positive and negative. Some models or systems are built to be inspirationally (or manipulatively) persuasive rather than logically or rationally convincing. Both inspiration and rationality though are important if we want long term and sustainable impact. Understanding social networking influences would also be important.

It would need to be designed, as Vivien Twyford recently discussed, as means of Recognizing and Responding to Complexity.  It could involve extensive use of the Internet, as would Virtual Systemic Inquiry, in mutual support of the previously proposed use of online communities to encourage direct democracy for on-the-ground communities. It would, however, still carry the caution to run the technology; don't let the technology run you.

There would be a need for mechanisms for when optimal solutions could not be attained and some form of compromise or otherwise determined final outcome, including not taking an action, would need to be implemented. 

It should also be recognized as the course instructor Gene Bellinger has suggested, "Given the same set of facts different people come to different conclusions... because? And isn't it the because we should seek to understand? A systems perspective should enable us to do that... shouldn't it?" 

The answer is yes, we should seek to understand the 'because' and a systems perspective should enable us to do that but that doesn't address a community's need for a resolution. It could help eliminate personal and perhaps irrational biases from community decisions as Google is attempting with their hiring practices. I am basically a liberal but if this proposed system of governance was implemented in a community that was authentically of a tea party, libertarian philosophy then that outlook should be reflected if this system is truly democratic at a community level.

One can also expand upon this question and have it address the asserted audacious step of Enabling a Better Tomorrow. This endeavor, though idealistic in destination and often contrary to standard institutional government thinking, contains, (we won't say, 'concrete'), meaningful examples found in the New Community Paradigms Wiki, both in terms of process and results, from different approaches to community governance.

Recently, this blog has taken pains to distance itself from what is seen as the overused and misused metaphor of 'concrete' and to stop running away from the absolute necessity of abstract thinking. Absolute necessity may seem overblown but abstract thinking is seen as being at the heart of systems thinking. Even though the word concrete will no longer be used unless speaking of driveways or such, we still need to start talking about making things real. Something can be considered real if it is connected in a meaningful way with what is considered to be of importance. The hurdle is successfully asserting that it is possible to change the present and create the future through such connections.  A systematic approach to community governance through systems thinking generally, and Virtual Systemic Inquiry specifically, could be considered real if it can be meaningfully applied to New Community Paradigms and other similar efforts.

A Map for Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking

This blog consistently repeats itself, making a point of connecting to and building up from previously established material. This time some of the material used to assert concepts presented in the last post will be used again but from a different perspective. This series of blog posts, inspired by the STW/STiA Systems Thinking Certification course, has approached the material from a number of different angles and perspectives which invariably overlap.

1. Working, as an individual, to study systems - segments 1-4.
2. Working as an individual (consultant) with a group - segments 5-8.
3. Working as a member of a group or community on systemic inquiry (Virtual Systemic Inquiry if Web 2.0 is heavily depended upon) - segment 9 pts 1.

In this post, we continue moving closer to:

1. Global - working as an integral part of a larger network or community - segment 9 pts 2 & 3, segments 10 & 11 and finally Certification.

Under this current scenario, an imaginary community has adopted the principles of both direct deliberative democracy and participatory democracy,  as well as that of systems thinking, and is endeavoring to converge them all together. The hypothesis is that systems thinking can assist in this convergence, recognizing that this would be a fundamental change which could justify the use of the word paradigm within the title, Pathways to New Community Paradigms. This relationship is illustrated in the Kumu relational map Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.

The use of the word ‘both’ is applicable because some see deliberative forms of democracy being at odds with participatory forms of democracy. Diana C. Mutz made this argument in her book, "Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy”. This is arguably true within the competitive based system of electoral manipulations so often manifested in our current system. Others though see the possibility of converging both deliberative and participatory democracy together and moving towards a new model of radical democracy. Lorenzo Cini does so in his paper "Between Participation and Deliberation: Toward a New Standard for Assessing Democracy?”

The previous blog post used the "Community Based Virtual Systemic Inquiry"  Kumu map to create a platform for the interaction between members of a Virtual Systemic Inquiry team, an imagined New Community Paradigms team, coming together with internal community groups and outside advocacy groups to form a Community Based VSI team. There could be a number of these Community Based VSI teams possibly focusing on different areas of concern to the community, not to city hall, to the community because the concerns would arise directly from the community. The basic idea behind the New Community Paradigms Facebook Connections wiki-page is to provide resources for connection to different advocacy groups. In this scenario, of our own devising, the infrastructure of government has been defined directly by the community and not by any form of entrenched institutional political power.

Civic Community, in the last blog post, was defined as the interaction of civil society with the institutional infrastructure of government. Civil society, as has been previously asserted by "Civil society as a platform for new community paradigms” and "Community paradigms as a set of community relations” is the true basis for a democratic form of government, not institutions. 

Established an ad hoc community groups along with the involvement of community members, in general, comprise the makeup of this Civic Community. It is from this originating point that two paths are taken involving systems thinking.

The Community Based VSI team begins with R1 Deliberative Democratic Dialogue. The R1  Deliberative Democratic Dialogue also designates the first reinforcing loop of a larger related Kumu map Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.  The two loops reinforcing loops of the Community VSI (structure) map are tied in with the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking map. 

This begins the construction of a dynamic system that is maintained because there exist feedbacks from an element or an entity or entities within the system that maintains their continuing existences, subsystems of reinforcing loops which build upon each other. Your car battery helps start your car, which when running uses your alternator to help recharge the battery to start your car again. There are limits, we sometimes need to replace batteries, alternators or even cars but the entire system remains viable for long, extended periods with care. 

The elements making up the R1 Deliberative Democratic Dialogue loop have been presented before through a "Better Deliberative and Participatory Democratic Community Based Governance through Systems Thinking”. This was an earlier attempt to incorporate principles of systems thinking into a system of direct deliberative and participatory community-based governance through an Insight Maker systems thinking model, Participatory Democracy with Systems Thinking.   

In both the Insight Maker model and Kumu map, the interaction of elements consists of adopting principles of Direct Deliberative and Participatory Democracy, Respect for Individuals and Their Time, Civic & Community Groups and Civic Community, all of which are seen as reinforcing one another. The other essential element is Dialogue Facilitation which was changed from Discussion Facilitation to better reflect the insights of the NCDD.

This continues a focus on community governance assisted with Web 2.0 resources from the early stages of this effort with "Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities” along with other related resources found under the "People’s Governance in California” and "Community Governance” wiki-pages.

The second reinforcing loop is "R2 Working with Systems Thinking". The common element between the first two reinforcing loops which diverge to parallel tracks is "Civic and Community Groups" who can work with both  "Systems Thinking Facilitators" and with community government "Staff". This would involve the development of specific proposals for projects, program or policies either from the community or from selected or assigned leadership of the community.  The principles of Design Thinking would very likely be in play here. 

The utilization of systems thinking with community governance is a transformational process so having someone or some organization to help guide that process is seen as being important. New Community Paradigms also does not envision the elimination of public sector employees, only a change in their relationship with the community.

With the next reinforcing loop "R3 Group Facilitation for Systems Thinking” we leave the Community VSI (structure) map and reside solely in the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking map, unfolding it as we advance.

The new elements involved, along with the elements of the first two reinforcing loops begin to come together to converge on two particular elements, Dialogue Facilitation and Perceived and Defined Meaningfulness of Deliberation (different from dialogue). The goal is to go far beyond merely giving people an opportunity to have their chance to speak on an issue. How does the community as a whole come up with viable, sustainable solutions while continuing to respect the principles of direct deliberative and participatory democracy as well as individuals and their time? Some of the elements that are suggested to influence this are Stays on Track along the Deliberative Democratic Dialogue track and Defined Intent along the Working with Systems Thinking track. 

The next loop "R4 Maintains Respect for Individuals & Time” is a general system reinforcing loop directly asserting the result arising from the interaction of both tracks and previous reinforcing loops while also establishing a required focus to maintain those interactions. 

"R5 Group Development Systems Thinking” focuses more on the Working with Systems Thinking track. Facilitated System Thinking Learning positively influences Understanding of Systems Thinking which in turn contributes to Perceived and Defined Meaningfulness of Deliberation making the Employment of ST (systems thinking) Models and Methods more likely, again reinforcing the Understanding of Systems Thinking. 

The final reinforcing loop is "R6 Implementation of Systems Thinking Interventions” At some point, after all the discussion, debates, dialogues and deliberations a final Decision or Outcome is determined by the community calling for the implementation of some Systemic Intervention. Whether or not these do what they were designed to do determines the number of Successful Interventions and if it Creates a Better Community. It also influences the Perceived Utility of Systems Thinking which in turn influences the Perceived and Defined Meaningfulness of Deliberations and the likelihood of future Systemic Interventions. 

This is not, however, the whole story. 

NCP + VSI = A Potential Path for Meaningful Community Change

In recent posts, the need and development of Virtual Systemic Inquiry or VSI as a means of collaborative team effort has been made through participation in the STW/STiA Systems Thinking Certification course in developing Systems Thinking as a potential resource as part of a Community's Management and Technology.

The goal now is to extend the concept into a larger community context developing a flexible system that incorporates a broader-based Community VSI approach (Kumu map) integrating the concerns of on-the-ground, community-based groups and the community-at-large and begins the process of establishing new community paradigms.

The VSI concept has similarities to a program featured back in 2009 through a blog supporting the Millennium Development Goals. The ICCO, an interchurch organization for development cooperation working towards a world without poverty and injustice that allows people to live in dignity and well-being, had developed a similarly structured platform. The ICCO Alliance, its partners and sponsors were focusing on the ground efforts in aid relief, seeking to extend their reach and effectiveness by using Web 2.0 tools, do-gooders looking for help from the computer geeks. The result then was a platform named ComPart (Communications Partnership), since then they have opted for their own internal Portal with the needed features built in.

Back then this approach was in line with the more academic ideas behind concepts on the Integration of Collaborative Information Systems in Web 2.0 (pdf), but from a pragmatic field operative perspective, it was a matter of needing to communicate and collaborate with other aid organizations separated by continents. The inclusion of a VSI approach maintains the virtual component and adds a systemic inquiry component, potentially providing greater leverage for addressing wicked challenges. The expansion into a community setting puts the process into the hands of those most affected and closest to the problems.

Community-based VSI would promote extended engagement by the community to address seemingly intractable problems. As discussed in “Still Looking for Non-Experts to Create New Community Innovations? Look outside City Hall", the ‘public’ or ‘community’ is not an extension of city hall or the studio audience for city council meetings. The public or the community is more properly classified under civil society which can be understood, as can community paradigms, as a set of community relations. This makes it a complex system as opposed to a more complicated one that could be successfully manipulated through management by a few at city hall.

The direction suggested by Della Rucker was to more fully utilize the community's resources. Della believes that “(We) have an enormous supply of non-experts who can, approach challenges with a clean lens, bringing together diverse experiences, knowledge and opportunities. We call them the Public. They know stuff. They’ve done stuff. ” This requires expanding beyond the usual cadre of public sector professionals and finding new avenues for people-powered innovation through the inclusion of whom Charles Leadbeater calls pro-amateurs into a process of Enabling Generative Interactions and Integrating Interactions as discussed in the last blog post.

There is a need then to connect to the community but at a deeper level. A metaphor that has been applied is endowing communities with a soul, undoubtedly a more abstract concept not captured by most standard government metrics. “Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms”, one of the earlier posts for this blog, had not only a poetic perspective but an economic basis with a positive impact on the community.

It does not require top-down complicated oriented leadership from city hall to attach people to their community as was demonstrated by the study's focus on Long Beach, California which reflected that neither the economy nor the perception of local leadership was a key driver in attaching its residents to their community. Good economics and finance are essential to the sustainability of a city but they are not the soul of the community and do not make up all of that community's wealth. The objective then is to be more adept at capturing the community's insight, wisdom and wealth assisted through community-based VSI which could be a means of establishing new community paradigms.

As might be expected from the preambles of the New Community Paradigms wiki and blog, the establishment of such a New Community Paradigms VSI team would be designed to have access to online resources and advocacy communities, using those resources to write new rules for their community that are chosen directly by the community itself rather than imposed by entrenched institutions. The reality is that such a team has not as of yet come into existence. This effort started off as a set of conceptual inquiries examining a series of 'why not' propositions, basically subsumed under the question, "Why not a different form of community governance?" and so far has remained conceptual.

The proposed NCP/VSI team could be seen as an internally based community Virtual Systemic Inquiry team, made up of a certain number of diverse community members, who could be expanded upon to collaboratively incorporate others both inside and outside the community.

Community members could be part of the local NCP/VSI team and be connected to other local community groups, be working with outside advocacy organizations, having connections with or as an expert, either professional or pro-amateur, with an outside Virtual System Inquiry team serving as go-betweens between the outside VSI team and their own Community-Based NCP/VSI team (Kumu map).

These groups could also work with both a Systems Thinking Facilitator and with community government staff. The use of systems thinking with community governance would be a transformational process so the utilization of someone or some organization help guide that process until participants are more comfortable is seen as important. City staff would still be seen as responsible for assisting in realizing the goals established through community sponsored studies or strategic plans.

Another alternative means of integrated community interaction and establishing a framework for deliberative and participatory democracy was suggested by the World Future Society in an article Building and Connecting Communities, in their Futurist magazine, was a "Mobile Networked Governance for the Creative Molecular Economy, to serve as an avenue through which community building ideas, originating from the community”.

The blog post, The Problem with the Future is Getting There and It will need Disruptive Innovation, raised some philosophical issues with the overall article. Disagreement with an unstated or unexamined assumption that we will be able to passively transition from a materialistic economy into a transformational society as a matter of inevitable evolution rather than purposeful decisions and disagreement with putting the community into a passive role, either implicitly or indirectly by omission. New community paradigms does not presume to merely develop citizens into a “Future Forward Workforce” as if they were a passive commodity. Any redefinition of economic development through community building will have to involve the community, not as passive recipients but as active creators.

Predicting the future is hazardous enough, but claiming the future will be delivered gift-wrapped with a bow, no assembly needed or that it is a foregone conclusion, merely accept the new world order, calls for looking for alternatives to use in the creation of new paradigms for our communities. Systems thinking is one possible resource as systems thinking's primary purpose is to enhance understanding and connection, not prediction.

A process of Community Based Virtual Systemic Inquiry could be potentially seen as a catalyst for a community-based system of deliberative and participatory democracy facilitated by systems thinking. This will be discussed in more detail in the next post.