Systems Thinking: Recursion for Reconfiguration and Re-conceptualization

In the beginning, this learning platform, consisting of this blog, the related wiki, mindmap and diigo group, was to be designed so that it incorporated three principles.

First, it is targeted toward someone without experience and only minimal knowledge of economic or community development. Someone who is just getting the notion that they could make a better and more fully livable community and wants to start taking the necessary steps to do so, at least in the ideal sense.  Getting to that level of simplicity through the inherent complexity defining the involved challenges is an ongoing endeavor.

Second, this site will seek to help write the rules so that the new paradigms for communities can be chosen rather than imposed. It may be more of a matter of finding ways to break the old rules without losing everything but it definitely takes new systematic ways of thinking.

Third, part of the motivation to start this blog was to explore means of collaboration in public arenas, not only within specific focused public arenas but also across different arenas and more importantly incorporating a policy of expanded inclusiveness while maintaining project or program effectiveness. While there are still no real world examples of new community paradigms being implemented, the resources required to begin making them are readily available so the work continues.

This has been both an experimental and exploratory effort. It has also been a matter of recursion, consistently taking steps backwards to drill deeper into ideas, reconfigure concepts and re-conceptualize different systems. Each newly discovered resource whether it be an organization, movement, piece of knowledge, or application often necessitated going back and recalibrating the relationship of all of the pieces to the whole in a systematic way. The inclusion of Systems Thinking is seen as a means of improving this process.

The last blog post on New Community Paradigms Thinking Requires Systems Thinking initiated an overhaul of the New Community Paradigms Systems Mindmap clarifying the hierarchy and definitions of the various cross connections.  Some of those connections were dropped, reinvented or redefined. Possibilities for the future were also discovered with connections of Systems Thinking to Governance by Community and Policy Creation.

More specific to the concept of Systems Thinking as a component of Community Management and Technology was an updating of the resources at the Systems Thinking Approaches wiki-page. While the majority of the resources come from the Systems Thinking World Wiki, a new organization Systems Thinking Collaborative was added as a resource and two related articles that help make the case, as well as explain the difficulty, in making Systems Thinking an important component of new community paradigms were also included.

What is systems thinking? (Part I, Part II & Part III) « quantum shifting

Solving Wicked Problems: Using Systems Thinking in Design | Design on GOOD

 A number of Systems Thinking related applications are also included.

• Insight Maker
• Support the continued evolution and use of this FREE web based multi-user modeling & simulation environment. 

• NCDD Resource Center » Debategraph
• You can learn more about the Core Principles for Public Engagement and the process used to create them at at the NCDD wiki-page. 

• New Community Paradigms Systems Mapping by TheBrain.com

Systems Thinking could be a valuable collaborative tool for direct deliberative democratic discourse and less adversarial in nature than our current form of local politics.  It could also help in focusing on solutions rather than positions, assisting in addressing many of the technical based challenges, e.g. traffic, other infrastructure and budgets we face.

In regards to paradigm shifts, this effort has the audacity to propose that paradigm shifts within the governance of our communities is what is needed.  It is still a fledgling argument but believed to be a worthwhile one for a few reasons.  

First, we are now aware of Thomas Kuhn’s insight from "The Nature of Scientific Revolutions" where he indicated it to be a waste of time and energy to convey new paradigms to the current generation, being better to convey new paradigms to the next generation and writing off the current generation.  We are not stuck with it as before.  We should cognitively be able to anticipate that there will be paradigm shifts.  

Second, we have been living through a number of paradigm shifts with the World Wide Web and other transformations with more anticipated.  

Third, we are not going to truly address many of our challenges, particularly in the fields of economic development or community building by merely recycling old ideas. We need fundamental change that reconfigures and re-conceptualizes our overall approach.  There are numerous innovative ideas addressing extensive challenges out there but they need a means of integrating them into a manageable  process without the interference of political egos. (Means one still needs a way to overcome the political egos, working on it).

Systems Thinking will, no doubt, be more of a problematic paradigm shift in thinking for many people.  Peer effect models suggest that not everyone in a community though would have to be an expert to make it useful.  Some would only have to be comfortable with it, with those with expertise of various degrees helping with facilitation. It would have to be integrated into various academic fields such as public administration better over time but I suspect that that it could provide a greater opportunity for learning and be more self-reinforcing in a community environment.  There will always be some unwilling or uninitiated but they are not the real problem, which is instead those with a continuing stake in the old paradigms. 

Another cobblestone in the road.

Community Governance - Third Path to City Government

Last month this blog featured posts on community governance, both from the perspective of governance through community, which involves community members coming together to deliberate and make decisions, and governance by community, which involves the means of implementing those decisions administratively.  These were admittedly idealistic states that needed to be strived toward.  How to achieve that will be one of the continuing focuses of this blog.  For this to happen requires a move away from current entrenched forms of closed city government to more open forms of community governance.

The two common major styles of city government found today, strong-mayor and council-manager, were featured in two articles, which appeared during the same month in the Washington Examiner, contrasting the supposed strengths of each.   

The first article by Stephen D. Eide, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Center for State and Local Leadership, is “Manhattan Moment: Only politicians can save us now” and the other is “In defense of city managers” which Robert J. O'Neill, Jr., the Executive Director of the International City/County Management Association wrote in response.  

Eide explains that under a council-manager form of government, a professional administrator runs the city government. He or she is, however, not elected by voters but appointed by a city council.  Under the strong-mayor government, the mayor, is elected by the people and directs the city's administration while serving as the city's political head.  

As can be deduced from the titles of the two articles, Eide makes the case that communities have come to depend too much on professional administrative staff and that they would be better off if they would instead turn to politicians to overcome the challenges that they face. O’Neill takes the opposite tact coming to the defense of city managers and other public sector administrators by warning “that pitting strong political leadership against professional local government management as a solution is misguided”. 

Eide makes the argument that when a crisis does arise, “political leadership is needed much more than professional expertise”.  Eide points out “Mayors can make case for their vision directly to the public, through elections and initiatives.  City managers' capacity for political leadership is limited. They can't offend the elected officials who act as their bosses”.  

O’Neill asserts that what is of prime importance is “efficiency of administration” using as the basis for his counter argument the article "Smarter, Faster, Cheaper," by David Edwards who reported that “what determines how efficiently a city deploys resources is management, and that communities with the council-manager form of government are nearly 10 percent more efficient than those with strong mayoral forms of government”.

The real crux of the argument for Eide is a desire to address what Eide calls the “fiscal and administrative inflexibility caused by unreasonable union contracts and the unsustainable costs of public-employee benefits”.  The solution according to Eide is to follow the example of San Diego that with the support of a 2/3 voter majority passed Proposition B which was designed to eliminate defined-benefit pensions for all new nonpublic safety employees and save taxpayers nearly $1 billion.  According to Eide, the San Diego passage of Proposition B could not have happened if the change from council-manager to strong-mayor had not been made.  

This is not meant however to be an argument as to whether this is fair or not or whether it is the proper course of action as it is seen as being unavoidable.  This trend, as will be discussed in future posts, will continue changing the nature of public sector employment.  

What is being questioned is whether people could have the type of communities that they can imagine if they were fully empowered with the necessary resources and not turned off or discouraged from community participation? 

Eide focuses on a single policy decision, cutting public sector employee overall compensation and argues that it is better to bet on politicians to get the public to buy into it than to bet on public administrators to get the policy implemented.  

It does not, however, do anything to directly address his concern that “budgets are rising, but productivity and the quality of city services are not”.  The primary driver of community governance becomes a matter of cost rather than of value. Residents are defined as consumers of government services not as citizens.  Seeking better quality service through only cost cutting without finding means of enhancing those services through new means of innovation simply results in commodification where less is done with less and community needs go unmet. Draconian measures maybe possible under a political fix, such as finding ways to cut costs by reducing overall public sector employment compensation but they do not address issues of continued sustainable community governance.  What can happen instead is a constant winner take all pendulum swing from one side to the other or the disenfranchisement of a portion of the community.  

Eide and O’Neill may both distinguish between politics and administration, giving each a different level of primacy, but both fail to make a distinction for the creation of a community vision and setting of policy to implement that vision which is different from using a political approach to decide among policy choices and from the administration of that policy.    

One approach focuses on the effectiveness of politically motivated measures without much regard made for what happens after they are implemented as long as the correct position of  political power is taken and the other approach focuses on the efficiency of administration without much regard made to how effective the policy in question may be.  Each seemingly leaves the other side of that equation to the its counterpart.  Both could claim to have the best of intentions in mind but still assign only a passive role to the community which is either to be sold to or managed.  Both systems of government focus more of their energy into making sure the current system and its players stay in place than addressing the needs of the community. 

With regards to professional staff, I can agree that we should resist what Eide calls the urge to "trust the experts", at least not to trust them indiscriminately.  I can’t agree though that only politicians, whom Eide himself admits are to blame for much of the trouble American cities are in today, are the only ones that can save us now.  A guiding principle of new community paradigms is that not only should a more substantial role be taken on by the community itself, it is also now more possible than ever before.

Eide claim that the professional is not as accountable to the populous as the politician also falls flat, as it is the politicians who appoint the administrators with the power to fire them and even though residents only get to hold the politicians accountable every four years.  

The framework O’Neill suggests for our cities to be successful does begin to meet a new community paradigms standard though with a change in emphasis to focus first on:

• A strategy for representing and engaging every segment of the community
• A commitment to transparent and ethical government 

A new community paradigms approach still recognizes the importance of:

• Strong political community leadership 
• Strong policy development
• A relentless focus on execution and results

O’Neill says that, “Under any form, the citizenry must be involved in their local governments and select the best possible local elected officials possible. “  No argument as far as it goes but, new community paradigms asserts that we now have the ability to go even further and have a more direct say in real time about how our communities are formed and developed through direct community governance. 

Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK

The Economic Intelligence Unit, which did the research on Liveable cities | BUSINESS RESEARCH for the Philips Company, also did research on complexity in the business world (featured here at the Pathways to New Community Paradigms Wiki) focusing on the shift businesses are going through on a global basis, transitioning from the industrial age to the information age. This is seen as a change evolving from being formal structured bureaucratic rule bound organizations based on policies and processes to ones more based on a networks of collaboration among individuals. The key word is transformation in terms of cause but the key result is complexity.  It was the conclusion of the Economic Intelligence Unit that this is one of the major challenges for businesses in the twenty-first century.

Can the same be said of public institutions and if so are they up to the challenge? People are more likely to think of government as being more bureaucratic than business, but there may not be an internal recognition by government institutions for the need to change which means that without outside influence it will never come. With businesses it comes down to adapting to ensure a chance to survive, for local governments it may come down to maintaining the politically convenient status quo and an opportunity for needed change that is ignored.

This challenge can also apply to community-based governance by members of the community. This is the biggest challenge to an effort to create new community paradigms for a community.  The members of the community will either depend upon information which is feed to them by City Hall and interact through a process that is largely defined by City Hall or it will develop its own resources and uses its influence to guide City Hall.

There has been an unstated assumption throughout the posts of this blog that City Hall has failed to adequately address the need for an economically and environmentally sustainable and livable community. That is obviously not going to be true for all cities and the degree to which it is will be different from city to city.  In some cases the effort will find a willing partner and the collaboration will create a new more expansive form of community governance.  In other cases there will be push back from the incumbent institutional government.  The key issue is whether City Hall truly represents the community as a whole or only special interests or privileged key community members.  If it is the later, then there are pathways that can be taken to weaken and subsequently disrupt that control in a sustained and innovative manner.   These will be explored in the future.

In deciding to form one's own community paradigms, it is very important to keep in mind that complexity is different than complicated. Transversing government institutions themselves will be complicated but the issues they deal with are instead complex.  Embracing complexity as a pathway to new community paradigms can lead to an actual greater simplicity in dealing with the community challenges. This aspect of community paradigms will need to be revisited but for now here is a short TED video by Eric Berlow: How complexity leads to simplicity.

Community groups organized around a principle of community paradigms have some advantages over entrenched incumbent city governments.  The move to globally networked connections is easier for individuals working in community groups than for governments. This still leaves though a number of questions that will need to be addressed.

Do our existing political organizational structures bring an increased level of complexity for community members who have to navigate them to the same degree as what the report spoke to for businesses? According to the report, a majority of firms have an inherent organizational structure that may be adding to the complexity faced by the organization. If the same is true for our governmental institutions or the political processes supporting those institutions, how is this to be addressed?

Of particular significance, the report says that the challenges of complexity cannot be addressed from a top down approach for businesses, calling for the empowerment of employees. How much more applicable is this then to the empowerment of citizens centered on a common communal task or community principle through a process of direct deliberative democracy?

The report recognizes that the single biggest cause of business complexity is greater expectation by the customer. This also applies to the public sector as people often see themselves as consumers of government service rather than having any meaningful role in its planning or policy determination. This blog takes and encourages an alternative perspective.

So far this blog has had three posts to talk about community paradigms and creating livable cities and it has only touched the surface of these issues. Ok, we are talking about creating communities or more to the point finding ways of changing the paradigms that define our communities. We are talking about what we want our communities to provide us including a proactively healthy place to live and not one that just doesn't kill us too quickly. We also talked about how economics will play a significant role in defining how we bring this about.  All of this means talking about how we change our current form of local community governance.

We alluded to other components of creating new community paradigms though we didn't speak about them explicitly. One is the role of usually non-governmental or quasi-governmental organizations that work to redefine one aspect or another towards creating community paradigms. A number of these are currently listed in the right hand column of this blog under PARTICIPATION, PLANNING & POLICY. These will be replaced over time by the new Pathways to New Community Paradigms Wiki.

These are resources that can be utilized in creating new community paradigms. We have also featured online tools that can be used to create change. One example was Healthy City at www.healthycity.org, another was the Vimeo video which explained How to use Healthy City California. These components work together as these organizations are accessible online and are the ones who created the community based tools that can be used by anyone willing to put in the effort. A number of other online community-based tools are listed on the right hand column of this blog under TECHTOOLS FOR GOVERNANCE.

Another important question is whether these technical solutions are really fostering community inclusion effectively? Businesses are focusing on technological solutions to tackle complexity but for businesses though technology in itself is not seen as one of the major sources of complexity. How this works for community-based governance still needs to be explored more fully. This leaves us with the still pressing question that will be the continuing focus of this blog. In a complex world where and how do we find opportunities to create value as and for our communities?