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By Gerrit Van Wyk. The following is a series of propositions about complexity, social complexity, and the complexity behind how I arrived at these propositions. Introduction Complexity Social complexity

By Gerrit Van Wyk Blogs are a more recent social artifact, and as such, take on many shapes and forms. They are mostly short, and focused on a single topic, which in my case, creates significant problems for both reader and writer. They are popular because they are short, which satisfies the social need for

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Some define systems as entities consisting of interactions between multiple components, from which properties emerge that are more than the sum of the parts, for as long as the components and interactions remain relatively stable. From another perspective, the same definition describes complex phenomena. There are multiple components, that interact, the

By Gerrit Van Wyk. A blog about facilitated workshops, and an article about social engineering I recently read, connect in an intriguing way. The blog makes the point facilitated workshops are common, and indirectly aim to control how people act to make them predictable. To do so they often use engineered jargon, or tools of

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Felix the flying frog. There is a story about a man named Clarence, who had a pet frog named Felix, and decided he could make some money if he could make Felix fly. Felix pointed out he didn’t look anything like a bird, but Clarence decided that could be overcome with

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Getting one’s work published today is different from what it used to be. Many consider self-publishing a vanity project, and pay little attention to self-published works, but that used to be the norm for writers like Kant, Wittgenstein, and so on. The shift to publication companies created an environment of barriers

By Gerrit Van Wyk. The grid Flood and Jackson use for Total System Intervention (TSI), unintentionally exposes a major dilemma system thinking faces. The basic premise is the different systems methodologies work best in specific contexts, hence if you know the context, you can plug in the most appropriate methodology and solve the problem. The

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Flood and Jackson created a grid for grouping problem contexts in the 1990’s, with one axis representing the nature of reality, or systems, consisting of simple (closed) or complex (open) systems, and the other, social relationships divided into unitary, or what I’ll call shared interests and agreement, pluralist, or compatible interests

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Peter Checkland and coworkers designed a method of inquiry called Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). They realized problems associated with human activity tend to be vague, hard to describe, are complex, and the only way to approach them is to involve people in a conversation. To me, SSM is a set of

By Gerrit Van Wyk “We need a kind of thinking that reconnects that which is disjointed and compartmentalized, that respects diversity as it recognizes unity, and that tries to discern interdependencies. We need a radical thinking (which gets to the root of problems), a multidimensional thinking, and an organizational or systemic thinking”. Edgar Morin. Edgar