Back to Systems Practice USA Again

The previous post will be the last one on the SP UK course or OpenUniversity course on Mastering Systems Thinking in Practice for at least a while. There was a gap between the last post and the one previous of about a month. During that time, a second SP USA course was started, which is what I will be calling the Systems Practice: A Practical Approach to Move from Impossible to Impact, and am now finishing up with the fourth week.

While there was an overall philosophical disagreement with the SP UK course, there were a number of valuable insights gleaned from the course. There are also distinct differences in approach between SP UK and SP USA.

The lead instructor for the SP USA course is again Rob Ricigliano, (intro video). This time was not begun with immediately starting with mapping on one’s own as was the case the first time. That over-eagerness put me out of sync with the SP USA process and made any post critique problematic. The process, for the most part, worked well. The course was successfully passed, the other team members who saw the process to the end seemed happy with the results though there was also an issue for me of not having pushed far enough with the systems analysis.

The SP USA course, for the first time, helped bring everyone to a consensus on a potential approach to addressing homelessness in Portland, Oregon through food trucks to feed homeless living in camps and others unsheltered. An idea that was first considered in the Modeling the Last Mile to Feed the Homeless series during an Acumen Financial Modeling course.

The process followed by the team was generally in line with that put forward by the SP USA course. The independent but parallel path I took, along with helping with the SP USA processes, however, revealed potential issues further along. Throwing a wrench into the effort at the very end of what was a first time educational experience for everyone else did not seem a positive step. The question that could not be answered at the end was whether the outcome would have been different if I had followed the SP USA path more closely.

This time there will be no jumping the gun, sprinting ahead, or going off with completely separate explorations. So far, that intention has been followed, with perhaps some pushing interpretations of other's intentions, pretty closely. Hindsight though tells me the balance remains elusive.

Attempts, begun later than they should have, were made to join about six different groups. This time the objective was to be subordinate instead of taking the lead. Whichever team I could get on would decide the direction of the challenge chosen and I would do my best to support that vision.

MOSS, the last group, accepted making me one of a four member group with two of the members being associated with the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Dr. Steve Kennedy, Academic Director - MSc Global Business and Sustainability and Sander Fleuren, a Learning and Development Manager, work closely together.

Dr. Kennedy (Steve, using the egalitarian practice applied in the course) has provided the general direction for the endeavor, addressing plastic pollution in Bangkok Thailand. Also part of the team, Dohn Taylor from Australia, and recent addition, Shawn Ng with connections to Malaysia, East Africa, and Rome, Italy. This creates some challenges with communications which are all asynchronous being that we are in GMT+8, 2 in GMT+1, and GMT-8 time zones, and that we only communicated through the course.

With introductions made, the next step was letting my fellow teammates know of my previous participation in the course and of the intention to blog about the experience as is being done now.

Despite having some resources in the NCP Wiki, Environment and Sustainability, are not my primary focus and my general knowledge is limited. It is even more limited regards to the current state of Thailand though having lived there, as a member of the United States Air Force, during the time around 1975-76 when the US was turning bases over to the Thai government. Any impressions that were held from that time were quickly proven false during the early stages of the SP USA course. 

This relative lack of knowledge though helped test my own particular hypothesis explored through the Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking wiki page. That systems thinking can be used by a group in a civic setting to help develop a better understanding of a complex situation and addressing it. One that is better enough to make the necessary extra effort, and there is extra effort, worth the trouble. The challenge is to create a system practice that is efficient enough that it allows others to concentrate on effectiveness. 

This hypothesis was first developed in the post A Map for Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking and Kumu map Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.

The first assignment of the SP USA course was to present the system challenge to be addressed through a Complexity Spectrum, consisting of sets of spectrums made up of polar choices, to select one or somewhere between them.

• Level of Understanding: 
• Well understood vs Not Understood 
• Engagement: 
• Consensus vs Diversity of Opinion 
• Environment: 
• Stable vs Dynamic 
• Self-contained vs Interconnected 
• Goals: 
• Small Scale vs Broad Change 
• Short-term vs Sustainable 

While relational Kumu mapping was curtailed at the start, there had been recent experimentation with Plectica which arguably fitted rather well with the first SP USA course assignment, in this instance, proving more helpful than Kumu. The configuration made possible with Plectica allowed me to create a map that reflected the Complexity Spectrum’s hierarchical nature and provided spaces for each of the members of the team to provide their individual input. Plectica has, unless you sign up for it, an interfering banner across the screen. Here are the results of the Complexity Spectrum in a narrative nutshell.

Plastic pollution and its impact on Bangkok

The level of understanding regarding plastic waste pollution was seen as high by team participants, although likely not consciously considered by most people having less of a general public awareness of the consequences of social and ecological functioning and the sources of the pollution. What may be less understood is the interaction of economic inequality and environmental degradation within communities.

The Diversity of Opinion regarding solutions to the issues is seen as high based in part on the diversity of opinion on what parts of the system need to be addressed, individual consumer buying habits, government interventions, or the market extracting rents but sourcing cleanup to the local communities, moving to a petroleum-free economy or creating a circular economy which processes at or near 100% efficiency or creating substitutes for the petroleum-based products.

Plastic pollution is seen as a highly connected problem to the local and global consumption and production systems. The root causes may be found outside of the locality - plastic being produced outside of Bangkok and transported into the city in the shape of products and packaging.

The problem is ever-changing, governments seeking a solution often pass the problem to someone else. These types of projects may gain momentum and a life of their own through community involvement, despite the government. When people decide to act government often plays catch-up.

The problem of plastic pollution in terms of the quantity of material flows is seen as relatively predictable. However, it was envisioned that the system has a high potential for self-organization and the emergence of new dynamics.

The project aims at small-scale operations making a sustained and broad change. The goal(s) of the social entrepreneur would be relatively small scale - considering perhaps impacts on the neighborhood or perhaps stopping pollution events of one particular input. However, if this can be somewhat replicated or incentivized by others to pursue the goal (potentially even the local administration) then a much broader scale change could be achieved. The change being sought in the reduction of plastic pollution seems broadly applicable, particularly if scaled up. Likely several steps will need to be taken with intervening objectives. These solutions need to be long-term and sustainable and infer a change to the system's purpose.

The Complexity Spectrum map also became the basis for an early systems concept map using first Plectica and later Kumu. As was stated above, some of these ideas would later be further tested or revised later in the process. I, in particular, learned a good deal more about plastic pollution in Asia and especially Thailand. More on those details will be provided in the next post.

Finding Pathways for Vehicles of Change

This blog post is going to break from the current Systems Practice focus (most recent post first) of the last two blog posts to update the newest resource additions to the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki. This time though it will also tie them to a location on the recently unveiled Kumu based NCP Wiki Map, that was rolled out over four blog posts and which now has a home on both the NCP blog and wiki. If this is the first time with the NCP Wiki Map then there is a tour which provides a general explanation. 

The NCP Wiki map seeks to develop connections or bridges across sectors. All of the updates in this post are part of or are in some way connected to the Places map but can be followed to Healthy Communities or to Community Ecology. 

It is the resources, available online, found in the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki that are the vehicles for change. The NCP Wiki Map connotes possible paths that could be taken. The posts of this blog are but one rationale or mental model for taken a particular path or using the suggested vehicles, one among many possible. 

The State of Placemaking 2016, brought more than 450 dedicated public space practitioners, and policymakers to chart the future of the placemaking movement structured around ten major issues that converge in public space,  referred to as “transformative agendas.” Placemaking, as a determining aspect of Places, can be seen as being most comprehensively defined by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS).  

In the NCP Wiki Places map, the circled Project for Public Spaces is seen as arising from Places and being related to the more general Community Places. (double clicking a circled element opens up wiki page, clicking “On Kumu Wiki Map” at top of a wiki page opens up the map). It is the wiki page Community Places that contains the blog posts, near the bottom of the page, seeking to define the developing NCP mental model for placemaking.

Place as Social and Economic Engine was one of the first wiki bridge pages and an early basis for developing a mental model for NCP as defined by blog posts listed at the bottom of the wiki page. It was so named, again as an extension of the correction to the same erroneous presumption underlying placemaking, that the strata of the geographic community below the businesses, city hall politics and those residents connected with city hall were of secondary value. While in truth, it is the created physical attributes of a place that are the dynamic foundation or engine of the community’s social and economic generation.

Place as Social and Economic Engine is the home for Strong Towns, who introduced the newest addition VERDUNITY, a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. They started VERDUNITY  because they realized that elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. This was a disruption in their way of thinking, of their mental models. They are now working on changing other people’s mental models of how they think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. More will be said about VERDUNITY in a future post.

Place as Social and Economic Engine on the NCP Wiki Map is seen as a bridge between Place and Economics (access between Places and Economics via a link is in the narrative section to the left). 

The newest addition to Planning the Urban Landscape is New Urban Mechanics, a network of civic innovation offices that explore how new technology, designs, and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all. It could have arguably been put under Community Change Agencies but personal choice and only personal was that these programs were more closely related to the existing underlying physical, placemaking, and political infrastructure of a community. The related blog posts, again listed at the bottom of the wiki page, provide some perspectives on a past effort in Los Angeles history to redefine the larger urban landscape. 

Planning the Urban Landscape approaches Places from a broader perspective looking not from the build up of smaller changes over time but the accumulation of those changes overall. It is seen as a bridge between Places and Community Ecology. 

Under the wiki page Healthy Cities is the recent addition of Bridging Health & Community, an extension of  the previously listed Creating Health Collaborative which aims to transform how we approach health so that it goes beyond institutional healthcare and public health to include fostering community agency, strengthening the field of practice that bridges those in the health sector and those who foster community agency helping to establish the critical link between a community's ability to make purposeful choices and its health. Being able to measure differences in life expectancy by income across areas and then to identify strategies to improve health outcomes for low-income Americans would be a useful ability. Health Inequality Project uses big data to help accomplish this.

The bridge from Places to Healthy Cities, under the Healthy Communities map, is Planning for Healthy Communities. It could also be an element in the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and the Art and Healthy Communities map. Two specially constructed maps that put together a path that incorporated elements that are often placed in silos and considered distinct and separate. 

Taking a higher altitude perspective, the Wiki Bridges Map connects all the New Community Paradigm sectors, including Places, Healthy Communities, and Community Ecology, together. 

A closer look at the pathway for Places indicates that at under the current New Community Paradigm configuration, Healthy Communities and Places are well integrated together but Community Ecology is somewhat isolated. 

Could Bridging Health & Community and Creating Health Collaborative under Healthy Cities be integrated with New Urban Mechanics under Planning the Urban Landscape and extended from Places to Community Ecology integrating the two together more closely?

There are also other deeper pathways that could utilize the online resources found in the NCP Wiki. Under Project for Public Places (click the URL or double click the circled element to open the wiki page) is Agenda Spotlight: Placemaking and Health - Project for Public Spaces.

There is growing evidence showing that place impacts people’s health on multiple scales. From obesity and chronic disease to depression, social isolation, and increased exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants, the world faces very different health challenges today than it has in the past, and many of these challenges are directly related to how our public spaces are designed and operated.

It could be an important component of the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and naturally be expanded to be encompassed by Community Ecology. How it is used could be determined in a number of different ways depending upon the needs of a particular community. 

It is believed though it has not been adequately examined that finding specific potential pathways for the utilization of online resources will greatly help in the development of new community paradigms. 

The Failed Olmsted 1930 LA Plan points to Complex Challenges for Today and Opportunities for Disruption Tomorrow

In the last post written on attending ‘A Place for Us: Re-imagining and Reclaiming’,' lessons learned from the past regarding the process behind the failed 1930 Los Angeles Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches Plan of the Olmsted Brothers, were discussed. This post will attempt to bring some of those lessons up to the present by connecting concepts previously considered on these pages with the concrete examples provided by history.

One lesson in particular is that even if there are surface similarities between then and now, this does not mean that the underlying premises and perspectives, or agendas are the same.  We sometimes pick the lessons from history or criticize mistakes of the past to fit our own current agendas. There are some aspects of popular initiated community building and development though that do seem to stay the same. Los Angeles in 1930 had its Hollywood stars has it has today and businessmen on the Chamber of Commerce could be swayed as they can today. Los Angeles had cars back then, more cars than most cities, and was concerned about water.  However, what they saw and what we see as the fundamental challenges and the visionary goals are very different.  This is not to point out that they were wrong but that they had different system wide challenges and came up with a different set of solutions based on the knowledge and resources that they had.  Although the perspectives and approaches may change, Los Angeles, as a community defined by geography, history and natural resources, is still continually trying to redefine, even create itself anew. 

Besides looking at the past, the panel for the ‘A Place for Us: Re-imagining and Reclaiming’ discussion also provided more abstract but still useful perspectives on the continual regeneration of cities over time. Cities overall, William Deverell pointed out, provide for the most efficient utilization of resources on a per capita basis and succeed far better as social engines compared to other versions of built community. Two newly learned and important metrics in the organizing of humans within a constrained geography were urban metabolism and friction of distance. A closer look at urban metabolism is provided by this slide presentation by Stephanie Pincetl and Paul Bunje of UCLA.   

While these are not the type of numbers that would be included in a city’s end of year report, they do help in the configuration of placemaking on a broader scale to optimize community ecology.  Community ecology is chosen as a more appropriate term, rather than the word environment, because it can be associated with a greater biological orientation to the concept of community and the process of relating to the environment. Placemaking, according to the Metropolitan Planning Council of Chicago, “is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.” 

This effort, in its initial stages, saw placemaking as dealing with the built environment but from an interactive social perspective by which the built environment became the canvas upon which the creativity of the community was manifested, and was in turn also transformed by that creativity to the point at which the canvas became the art. 

The use of these terms serves to define the system of community as one of adaptive complexity. Under a complex adaptive system we can assume that there are elements making up the neighborhoods that in turn make up the city that is part of the region.  It is at the level of elements that design thinking has its focus, that disruptive innovation seeks the job-to-be-done and that, as the moderator Claudia Jurmain challenged the panel, supports Paola Antonelli’s assertion that design allows for the negotiation of change.

We, as a rule, though create artificial systems of complicated mechanistic algorithms imposed by top down management in an attempt to control the complex systems of nature or those arising through our interactions with nature or which then subsequently result.  The business world is already coming to the realization that the complex challenges of the twenty-first century cannot be addressed through twentieth century means of imposing solutions.  The public sector is though, in many cases, falling behind. 

The 1930 Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches Plan was based on the aspirations of the community of Los Angeles or at least that part of the community that had aspirations. This is different from the norm according to Tom Gilmore of Gilmore & Associates, who during the panel discussion asserted that most substantial forms of community transformation were based on some form of crisis.  This is aspiration that emerged through what is considered by this blog as a complex system of community.  Certain creative elements or a vanguard within the community saw a need to make the future more coherent. The actual creation of the 1930 Plan though was done through what can be imagined as being the complicated application of algorithms gathered and developed by the Olmsted Brothers over their impressive career.  They also incorporated local expertise of the territory and fauna but they did not seek general public input maintaining strong top down control over the process. 

The Olmsted's were also savvy enough to know though that the politics of the Plan had to be addressed before hand.  The community likely thought that it had but did not realize how, what this blog terms as ‘entrenched‘, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce or its inner sanctum was, allowing it to be the bottleneck that killed the efforts of the vanguard of the larger community.  

Entrenched power should be operationally defined as it is arguably the biggest obstacle to optimizing the system. The term ‘entrenched’ for New Community Paradigms, usually found as ‘entrenched’ city halls, refers to political institutions, usually local, that through an evolution of community culture have created subsystems of political and economic power that become entrenched regardless of any form of democratic intervention.  Surface changes of exchanging one clique of politicians for another might occur but there is no longer any real broad based democratic participation in the mode of the top tiers of Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation.  The label ‘entrenched’ was used to make such entities analogous to incumbent business entities that through their own successes had become myopic in their understanding of their own market and failed to see or appreciate the impact of competitors being empowered through disruptive innovation. Entrenched cities are not similarly successful, often quite the opposite, but they are myopic and they restrict or squander resources to hold on to power and often a past in which they had greater status.  New Community Paradigms is exploring whether disruptive innovation can, in some form, be applied to the public sector. 

Entrenched city halls and their like have been a target for this effort from its start.  It has also been said before that not all city halls are entrenched. That, however, is not enough. What should also be made clear is that if a city is not entrenched then it may likely be ‘adaptive,' as in existing as a manifestation of a complex adaptive system.  How adaptive would still be a question, adaptive enough to maintain the system until the environment changed too drastically or adaptive enough to recreate the system?  Furthermore, no community is wholly at any one particular stage.

The larger community or system had developed what was likely a complex resolution to meet a community need but without getting formal, explicit democratic agreement from the majority of the community.  It found a seemingly effective means of addressing that challenge which would have been likely adopted by the larger community if the opportunity had arisen. This system or community, however, had no means of addressing the entrenched power of the few members of the LA Chamber board once they turned on the Plan.  Another 'if' question for the future is whether getting formal and explicit democratic approval for the Plan from the larger community before and during its creation would have also derailed implementation of the Plan, not up or down approval but the crafting of the plan to the same level of widely accepted excellence. 

Another new area of exploration for this blog has been systems thinking. Communities are systems and it becomes increasingly difficult to meet new challenges facing these community systems. This is not “The System” of secret, behind closed doors political power and chicanery, but the larger, ‘living’ complex social system which encompasses civil society and economics extending from the local to the global.  This system endeavors to create components of itself through self organization and agent intervention that ideally functions to meet the ‘metabolic’ needs of the community effectively, efficiently and sustainably while meeting a desire for greater democratization by its residents while trying to get past the bottlenecks often created by that other “the system” of entrenched political and economic power.  These three components of the system can move in and out of conflict, usually because of different agent agendas, making the system potentially chaotic. 

A conflict or disfunction between entrenched power and greater community democratization or even between entrenched power with a truly well functioning system could be understood and appreciated.  A potential conflict between a well functioning system and community democratization might not be so obvious and its resolution not so apparent. Adding an entrenched entity to this last configuration only makes it, well more complex. However, even if entrenched power is successfully addressed, there is still a potential (though expectably resolvable) conflict between creating a well functioning system that addresses wicked challenges and full community democratization that could move the system back to control by entrenched powers. 

Innovation Through Community; Innovation By Community

One of the underlying concepts running through this endeavor to create New Community Paradigms has been the concept of innovation. It has been alluded to a number of times and it has been an implicit component of this effort. It has not been dealt with explicitly or directly though. This blog began by exploring newly discovered arenas for understanding how we build communities, such as placemaking, community ecology, economic gardening, and radical community engagement to obtain a better understanding of them. Especially with community, considerable time was spent considering different means of community governance, whether by city hall through community, by community without city hall, or community in opposition to city hall. It also began exploring different approaches to these areas of concern including systems thinking and design thinking.

Innovation has recently been connected with community engagement and community empowerment. Innovation has also been connected with complexity. The focus has been on the hurdles to innovation, one being complexity, but made far worse by being entangled in an entrenched system of politically controlled bureaucratic institutions. The focus has also been on seeking avenues for community innovation by embracing complexity through the community itself. There is a proposed dynamic relationship between complexity, community and innovation.

The original intent of this effort remains to establish a foothold in society and especially in local communities for the creation of something new, original and important in community governance. It is to come up with a process of creating and bringing together novel ideas in such a manner that they have a meaningful affect on community and on society. It goes beyond seeking to improve what is already existing by doing them better. Instead it looks for ways of doing things differently by rethinking how we use our community resources, all resources available to the community not just those provided by government. This is an approach tailored to fit the definition of innovation put forth by Wikipedia.

There have been though a number of examples of those striving for innovation in diverse and multiple arenas provided through the New Community Paradigms wiki. Innovation in Governance features the HBR Insight Center: Knock Down Barriers to Innovation to help identify innovation obstacles that have been hiding in plain sight and show surprising ways to overcome them. Examples of innovation also include those involved through community governance, including the Kettering Foundation: What Does It Take for Democracy to Work as It Should? and the Involve Foundation. Community change agencies seek to embrace innovation, such as Innovation in the UK - Nesta and the Centre for Civil Society which through social innovation seeks the empowerment of ordinary people and strengthening of civil society. (This effort often goes beyond our own shores to find new ideas)

Communities working to establish livable and healthy communities may do so through efforts such as Philips – Looking beyond solutions to create meaningful innovation, or can work to create environmentally sustainable communities in cooperation with organizations like the HUD Sustainable Communities Resource Center which assists in fostering local innovation.

In the economic development arena KnowYourRegion.org through the U.S. Economic Development Administration, explores regional and local approaches to business innovation and competitiveness across the United States. Also enhancing economic and business development are Small Business Innovation Research, and Innovation in American Regions: Tools for Economic Development.

Through the idea that communities manifest place as both economic and social engines, organizations such as Strong Towns can seek to take innovative approaches. CEOs for Cities provides “a civic lab of today's urban leaders catalyzing a movement to advance the next generation of great American cities to excel in the areas most critical to urban success: talent, connections, innovation and distinctiveness.”

Innovation sought in the social realm and public sector can occur at different levels with for example the APTA (American Public Transportation Association) working to strengthen and improve public transportation through advocacy, innovation and information sharing at a national level, while organizations such as the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation can contribute to the creation of the Model Design Manual for Living Streets for local implementation.

Even community arts can seek to embrace innovation through organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports “artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities”, or BGL Architecture, which through the BGL Team was involved in “expanding beyond art and using design public programs, experiments, and installation to explore how the interventions and innovations that decentralize, decelerate, localize, and democratize communities can reinvent urbanity...”.

Undoubtedly, many of these claims of innovation could be questioned even attacked or discounted as lacking or self-serving marketing, particularly those made by government institutions. These are still though available resources and innovation calls for the better use of resources to generate and utilize any resulting novel ideas in beneficial ways.

The objective is still to provide these as potential resources that are not to be seen as the exclusive property of government institutions but rather redefined as being for the benefit of anyone seeking to remake their community, whether that be as a source of information, or of advocacy or of direct action. Now begins the additional task of determining how to use them in a comprehensive manner.

There is still something missing though. The ability to be innovative in concept is not enough if it cannot be implemented because of the structural problems with our current form of local institutional governments. This means not only implementing the change being sought but also disrupting the system working to stop that change. Most attempts have been to first innovate and then hope the disruption will be far reaching having a substantial affect on our system of community governance. Unfortunately, the innovations in community governance or community building and development implemented so far have been what are termed sustaining innovations, so that while beneficial have had little to no affect on redefining the larger system. It only makes sense to work within the system if the system is working for you. If it is not or is only ostensibly doing so then deeper changes at a paradigm level may be needed. It is not a viable option, however, to first attempt to impose disruption and then implement innovation afterwards. A way needs to be found by which the innovation and disruption occur simultaneously, that shifts the balance of influence through a process of innovation that entrenched institutions of government have minimal means to stop.