A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities:The Legacy of Bela H. Banathy

A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities:The Legacy of Bela H. Banathy

Doctoral Candidacy Essay for the program of

Organizational Systems

Sherryl Stalinski, M.A.

Tucson, Arizona

April, 2005

Presented to

Dennis Jaffe, Ph.D.

A faculty member of

Saybrook Graduate School & Research Center

San Francisco CA

Candidacy Committee Approval: November, 2005

Dennis Jaffe, Ph.D.

Kathia Castro-Laszlo, Ph.D.

Allan Combs, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT

The systems view understands our social systems—including our organizational systems—as dynamic, open systems. By understanding the principles of all natural, open systems, organizational professionals can gain understanding of the characteristics that identify whether an open system can remain viable and sustainable over time, and more importantly, whether it can continue to grow and evolve in rapidly changing environments. Popular applications of systems thinking in Organizational Development practice have traditionally emphasized the complex and adaptive nature of open systems. This is evident in the work of popular management theorists and authors such as Russell Ackoff, Peter Senge, Peter Drucker and others. However, social systems scholar Bela H. Banathy (1996, 2000) proposed that our social systems don’t just need to adapt to change, they have the capacity—indeed the responsibility—to initiate and catalyze change towards more meaningful futures. Banathy’s work reflects the “soft systems methodologies” of Peter Checkland as well as the wisdom of current understanding in philosophy, ethics, evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology. Banathy’s work has been advanced by scholars such as Kathia & Alexander Laszlo, who specifically address the requirements for Evolutionary Systems Design. Banathy’s work serves as a bridge for the field of organizational development practice and the current evolutionary crisis calling for global social transformation. While providing a comparative review of systems literature and presenting an overview of systems principles from a variety of scholars, the hope of this work is to underscore the contributions of Dr. Banathy and the promise of positive, purposeful change that his work empowers.

Table of Contents

Introduction 4

The Systems View 4

The Systems View Complex 4

What is a Systems View? 6

Intelligent Systems, Human Systems 6

Cybernetics and 2nd Order Cybernetics: Intelligent Systems 7

The Human System: Individual and Collective. 8

Consciousness: The search for meaning. 8

Conscious Choice: To Be or Not to Be? 9

Culture. 10

The Ingredients & Dimensions of Culture 13

Death, taxes & culture. 14

Guiding Cultural Evolution 15

Developing Evolutionary Organizations 17

The Ways and Means of Healthy, Authentic Community 19

The Authentic Community: Synergy and wholeness. 20

Give me some feedback, please! 22

Influential Centers: Steward Leadership 25

Shall We Dance? 28

Vive la difference! 29

The Cybernetic Imperative: Learning how to learn 34

From Community to Culture: The Evolutionary Process 35

The Legacy of Bela H. Banathy 35

The Guiding Beacon 38

References 39

41

Introduction

Traditional applications of systems thinking in organizations have emphasized focus on complex feedback loops and “adaptive” systems. The idea of evolutionary systems, and the design of systems that evolve over time, introduced by Bela H. Banathy, Alexander Laszlo and Kathia Laszlo, however further add the wisdom that systems, including our human and organizational systems, don't just adapt to changing environments, they also can co-evolve with their environment. Organizations are starting to understand that change is not simply an event to “manage” and “get through” but an opportunity to guide transformation and create long-term viability. This focus on evolutionary capacity is especially relevant to our human cultures, which Banathy (2000) describes as complex, open systems, and more importantly, capable of evolving consciously and purposefully. The “evolutionary systems” perspective includes the basic principles of all complex, open systems, but additionally integrates relevant principles guiding intelligent (cybernetic) systems, and uniquely human qualities and capacities for culture, creativity and self-reflective consciousness and conscious choice. The result is a true marriage of Organizational Development and Systems Inquiry, which can inform and guide the development—or even an evolution of—Organizational Systems praxis. This essay seeks to highlight relative principles from systems research and how those principles could be applied to our unique human systems.

The Systems View

The Systems View Complex

From the beginning, the systems sciences have been a trans-disciplinary effort. The first to formally publish a “Theory of General Systems” was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a biologist. Joined by an economist, a psychologist and a mathematician, the International Federation for Systems Research was established to unify science, and to make the various disciplines of science meaningful to each other, and more beneficial to humanity (Banathy, 1996; Flood, 1999; Checkland, 1993). By design, the systems sciences are not a new, separate discipline but rather a rigorous inquiry that seeks to integrate a variety of perspectives and disciplines.

“Systems Thinking” is a worldview based on the perspective of the systems sciences, which seeks to understand interconnectedness, complexity and wholeness of components of systems in specific relationship to each other. But systems thinking is not only constructivist, as pointed out by Kathia Laszlo (1999) who notes that systems thinking embraces the values of reductionist science by understanding the parts, and the constructivist perspectives which seek to understand wholes, and more so, the understanding of the complex relationships that enable ‘parts’ to become ‘wholes.’

Banathy proposed that in addition to the cultures of science and humanities, that systems thinking can spur a third culture of ‘design.’ Ackoff (1999) suggested the merging of science and the humanities into a discipline he calls the ‘scianities:”

Systems science and technology constitute one aspect of systems thinking, but the humanities and arts make up the other. The fact that design plays such a large part in the systemic treatment of problems makes it apparent that art has a major role in it as well. Ethics and aesthetics are integral aspects of evaluating systems. […] the systems approach involves the pursuit of truth (science) and its effective use (technology), plenty (economics), the good (ethics and morality), and beauty and fun (aesthetics). To compare systems methodology with that of any of the so-called ‘hard’ disciplines—for example, physics—is to misunderstand the nature of systems. The worry is not that the systems approach is not scientific in the sense which physics or chemistry or biology is, but that some try to make it scientific in that sense. To the extent they succeed, they destroy it (p 537).

It is equally important to note the contributions from the diverse and complex field of systems inquiry. The understanding of the details of complex interrelations has become the domain of what are often termed the ‘hard systems’ theorists. From Jay Forrester’s systems dynamics to Senge’s ‘Fifth Discipline,’ the focus is on the complexity of interactions and interrelations within and among complex systems. Elsewhere in the spectrum, the “soft systems” theorists focus more on the patterns of those interrelations in order to apply them more in terms of the ‘emergent whole’ that a system is. Theorists involved in technology and information systems utilize the ‘hard systems’ concepts to design and manage information technologies, and educators, philosophers and those involved in the human sciences usually opt for the soft systems methodologies to address problems in unpredictable social systems. In the spirit of the transdisciplinary nature of the systems sciences, each “sub-perspective” offers its own unique wisdom and understanding of our lives and our universe. To describe each of these perspectives separately can be likened to trying to describe a diamond by describing each of its facets independently. It is in their collective state that the brilliance of the new sciences shines.

What is a Systems View?

The systems view understands our social systems as dynamic, open systems. By understanding the principles of all natural, open systems, we can gain understanding of the characteristics that identify whether an open system can remain viable and sustainable over time. This increased consciousness can then guide our awareness to not only new understandings of the nature of our social systems, but possibilities for creating them into the type of systems we want, and catalyzing change towards more meaningful futures.

Some of the key characteristics of, and principles which govern any open system’s ability to sustain itself include:

·  the need to get its energy from the environments in which it exists in order to sustain and fuel growth;

·  the creation of an emergent whole (the effect of synergy) through meaningful, right relationship of components;

·  the necessary dynamics of appropriate action such as feedback loops;

·  the increase of stability and ‘wholeness’ (indivisibility) by increasing diversity and specialization and putting them in appropriate complex arrangement or relationship;

·  and the presence of centralizing forces which trigger and create growth.

Intelligent Systems, Human Systems

In addition to the principles that apply to all open systems, researchers have identified qualities found in the most complex, evolved systems: the capacity to learn and self-regulate. Human systems demonstrate even more unique qualities: the phenomenon of self-reflective consciousness, the capacity for conscious choice, the most advanced capacity for creativity and the emergence of human culture. I often refer to these uniquely human qualities of consciousness, choice, creativity and culture as the four Cs of human systems, a simple cognitive construct that can help organizational professionals and business leaders easily remember the characteristics that set our social systems apart. This reminder is important for business and organizational leaders, especially when modeling process systems based on more widely applied dynamic systems approaches.

Cybernetics and 2nd Order Cybernetics: Intelligent Systems

Cyberneticians have closely studied successful self-regulating organisms as systems capable of learning in order to efficiently remain stable and grow. Morgan (1998) described that

To self-regulate, learning systems must be able to

1. Sense, monitor and scan significant aspects of their environment,

2. Relate this information to the operating norms that guide system behavior

3. Detect significant deviations from these norms, and

4. Initiate corrective action when discrepancies are detected.

If these four conditions are satisfied, a continuous process of information exchange is created between a system and its environment, allowing the system to monitor changes and initiate appropriate responses. In this way, the system can operate in an intelligent, self-regulating manner (Morgan, 1998, pp. 77-78).

The most complex and evolved open systems (such as humans and their social systems) have added to this capacity the ability to question the value of their learning itself. Humans uniquely possess the ability of questioning the value of our values (Banathy, 1996; Laszlo, 1996; Morgan; 1998). Additionally, we have the ability to question the operating norms and our ways of doing and being which are based on those values. The additional process of questioning whether operating norms are appropriate is a critical ingredient of successful, sustainable learning resulting in continued growth and increased sustainability. Failure to consciously engage in continual “double-loop learning” (Argyris, 2001; Senge, 1990) can not only affect our organizations’ and communities’ ability to grow and transform, it could potentially affect our ability to even maintain their stability and viability.

The Human System: Individual and Collective.

In its most elemental form, a human activity system can be defined as a single person doing something with other components of their immediate systems environment, for instance, a person riding a bike. Checkland (1993) noted that sets of human activities related to each other are commonly observed as ‘wholes.’ Often these activities are conducted within and even because of the physical systems humans themselves have designed, for instance a transportation system or a health system is observed as a whole entity comprised of both its designed infrastructure and the human activities that take place within and because of them. But Checkland also pointed out that these systems are fundamentally different from natural systems in one crucial way: human systems and human designed systems could be other than what they are. Natural systems, without human intervention, could not. What seems like an overly simplistic definition of what differentiates the human system results in the very complexity that makes our social systems impossible to comprehend and predict using traditional scientific methods. Sociology, as a traditional scientific methodology demands total observer uninvolvement, and unfortunately that has proven to be an unrealistic goal. Added to that is the fact that social systems are human constructs and human choices are at best unpredictable, the most sociology has been able to offer are likelihoods and probabilities for predicting future behavior of social systems (Checkland, 1993; Babbie 1977).

Consciousness: The search for meaning.

By being self-reflective and conscious humans, we create our ‘meaning’ and understanding of the world and our place in it. Our purposeful behavior can be conscious (even if it is not always so). As pointed out by Checkland, always we have the choice of at least two alternative futures, and our choices are guided by our understanding of the consequences of those alternative futures. If freedom of choice is the inevitable consequence of self-reflective consciousness, then the creation of meaning is the resulting necessity of that freedom. Everything about the evolution of human history has been the result of how we have answered the perennial questions arising from our conscious awareness: who are we and why are we here? These answers have influenced our worldviews, defined our values and given us the meaningful framework from which we have based our behavior choices (Banathy, 1996, 2000; Checkland, 1993; Laszlo, 1996).

Frankl (1984) called the failure to find or create meaning in one’s life the “existential vacuum.” Besides losing the security of ‘animal instincts’ that guide behavior, Frankl reflected that in the twentieth century, many cultural traditions also began to lose their impact to guide behavior.

No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism) (p. 128).

So dependent are we on meaning that Checkland argued we will tend to make new information fit into the ‘meaning’ and reality of life we already possess rather than changing our worldview and definition of reality because of the new information, as illustrated earlier in the allegory of Plato’s Cave. We value those things that support our understanding of the world and give meaning to our place in it and devalue those things that don’t. This created meaning, which shapes our values, helps us deal with the endless choices we face each day. These values are passed down, often implicitly, through generations and sometimes explicitly through verbal and written language. As a result, culture emerges in our human systems that further guide both our individual and collective choices.