fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Heart of Seattle is Battling COVID-19
Tags: On Demand Economy, Covid 19, Startup, Peer To Peer, Seattle

A bees point of view of Downtown Seattle during the COVID-19 Stay Home. Stay Safe lockdown.

Out There

I’m out there alone, deliveries to be done

On Seattle’s maze of gridlock mayhem

Been there before come winter or sun

To finish the job and get myself home

Out there enclosed in a sea of civilians

So many miles, three-quarters of two million

I miss you Seattle always out and about

When warnings are lifted, I want you back out

Sleepy drivers and tire burners

The Mercer Mess, the Renton curves

I miss all you cutters and late mergers

Oh, how you’ve made me swerve

I miss all you tailgaters, hair fixers and texters

All you flying by in a soon ending lane

The speeders, the crawlers

The quick lane changers

If I’m to be true, I once cursed your name

I am not made for distance

Or to mask my despair

We must all keep safe, it seems only fair

But please come back soon

I’m lonely out there

by Keith Dollahite — Director of Operations at HiveBoxx

Moving has come to a standstill during the COVID-19 in Seattle Washington.

Downtown is home to more than 330,000 jobs and 88,000 residents. The heart of the region, the economic engine, is now quiet. While downtown Seattle is at a near-standstill, we’re flattening the curve and doing what we can to battle #COVID19. The heart still beats strong and we’ll be ready for the comeback. #WeGotThisSeattle

Video owners: Downtown Seattle Association

Originally published by Downtown Seattle Association

The original video can be viewed here
Getting a Seat at the Table
By: Jennifer Karake
Tags: Writing, Afr, Skills, Startup, Passion

Getting a Seat at the Table

I clearly remember the days when the Impact Africa Network office was our dining table. Even though my sister and I were on holiday from boarding school, the worklike environment didn’t stop. From Monday to Friday, 6 men and women would come in, take seats at the table and get to work.

Every morning, Mark Orina, one of the Innovation Fellows, would be sitting there before anyone else showed up. He was my vision of pure commitment.

This soon became my daily routine; waking up, seeing Mark, avoiding eye contact, and eating breakfast in either my dad’s room or the room me and my sister share. I was living in quarantine before anyone else. I was never scared of them, it was just quite awkward, at least on my end. My sister agreed with me. #EntrepeneurDaughterStruggles

Then one day, none of them came. I woke up to find my dad having gone to ‘work’. He later told me of the new office they had down the street. So now, not only did I have no more strange acquaintances in my house, my sister and I had the whole house to ourselves. It felt as if my door had been open to new opportunities. I felt like I could finally be myself.

My dad had always envisioned us working with him. He had wanted me to help code, a previous hobby of mine, or do some writing for an article. Something productive. So he brought us to work.

This was the first time we ‘went to work’. I don’t know why I wasn’t wearing my glasses, though.

My sister and I constantly refused, saying that we were too young to work. We would much prefer to watch Youtube or Netflix, which we continued doing at the office. Being 12, I knew that none of my friends went with their parents to work. I’ve grown to see things in a different way. Which brings me to the present.

IAN has moved a second time since then, and have grown to a team of 22-strong. Well, 23 including myself.

I recently joined the PR&Communications department, now over a week ago. I work alongside many different people, including Damaris Kongin, who is currently mentoring me. I am now an editor for IAN’s blogging unit.

I’m excited to start working, especially in the editorial and writing unit, which I love doing. My dad believes that you are never too young to start developing skills and finding your passion. I’m starting to believe that too.

Look out for more great stuff to come from Team IAN. We have a LOT to share as we go about changing the African narrative!

Impact Africa Network is a non profit charitable entity US 501(C)3 EIN 83–2020331

We are seeking 500 champions willing to give $20 a month until December 2021.

Click on the link below to get to our donation page. Choose the ‘Give Monthly’ option and make an impact today. Leave us a comment while you are at it.

We also need mentors in; product dev/design, software engineering, digital marketing, finance, hr, legal, writing, PR & comms, and leadership. If interested, add that to your comment.
How we’re supporting our team amid Covid-19
By: Ismail Jeilani
Tags: Team, Corporate Culture, Startup, Social Good, Coronavirus

Without our team, Scoodle won’t be here. Here’s what we’re doing to make sure everyone who works for us is supported and protected amid the coronavirus outbreak.

We’re paying salaries early

Last weekend, our CEO Ismail sent this text to our team. Given the uncertainty, he wanted to do everything in his power to keep us feeling safe, happy and comfortable. 🙂

We’re giving our team time to help

We encourage our team to use their talents for good. That’s why we’ve given Rasheed, one of our engineers, time to build TrackTogether, a simple questionnaire to track the spread of coronavirus.

In its first three days, TrackTogether collected 6,000+ global responses. This data will make a real difference to medical research.

We’re still hiring

We want our team to feel secure. They’re incredibly smart and talented, and they have a home at Scoodle. We want them to feel that, so we’ve decided not to make changes to our hiring plans. We still plan to build a great company in education, and we can only do that by continuing to build a great team. We’re currently reviewing applications for our new Community Manager role.

Every Scoodle employee is still with us, and we want to keep it that way!

What else can we do to help? Let us know at ask@scoodle.co.uk.
Coworking is COVID-19’s Newest Victim. It Won’t Survive.
By: Jeremy Bamberg
Tags: Covid 19, Coworking, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Coronavirus

So, what’s next?

The current model of coworking may be dying, but this should not be viewed negatively. A new reincarnate will emerge; stronger, refined, and polished for current market needs.

Think back to the early days of online music companies like Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, and others. Those businesses may have failed, but they paved the way for innovations in VoIP and streaming, readying the market for firms like Skype, Spotify, and other disruptive players.

This era of coworking has brought valuable lessons, also paving the way for a much-needed disruption in the real estate industry. Some key takeaways from the past decade of growth in the industry:

Clients want flexibility, but not in the form of memberships or desks. Flexibility is greatly desired by companies, but an appropriate business model must be attached to it. Providers will likely shift away from price per person (or desk) to more traditional commercial real estate models.

Community might be king, but don’t go overboard with the bullshit bingo. The current crisis sheds light on the marketing tactics used by providers to attract clients. The actions of brands in the upcoming weeks will separate those truly focused on impact from the hypocrites.

Open floor office layouts will remain, but will drastically change. Less space per worker has allowed companies to reduce rent costs, but coworking companies have taken this to an extreme over the past years. In a post COVID-19 time we will see a greater focus on health and safety in the office, with an efficient, but appropriate, allocation of space per person in office layouts.

The shift towards an asset-light franchising model is smart — but it’s not a silver bullet. 2019 was the year industry players took a page out of the Silicon Valley “blitzscale” playbook, and began to shift towards an asset-light model. The current environment displays that even this model does not justify a growth at all costs business philosophy.

Coworking companies are in the business of real estate, not tech. It’s finally time for the industry to realize its underlying business. While tech companies can scale fast and sell out quickly, big brands in the shared workspace sector must be in it for the long run.
Brand Alignment Study: Call For Research Participants
By: David Akermanis
Tags: Systems Thinking, Branding, Organizational Change, Management And Leadership, Brand Strategy

What’s This Research All About?

Last year I wrote a quick overview of the idea that sparked this study:

Business leaders generally acknowledge the idea that brand crosses organizational boundaries. However, they are then often very ad-hoc about how they manage its impact across functions, or manage the impact of functions on the brand itself.

I am interested in exploring three questions:

Are specific ways of aligning organizations around their brand better than others? What are the strengths and weaknesses of specific approaches? What concrete steps can organizations take to better align themselves and promote positive brand outcomes?

What’s Involved?

To begin with, a 60-minute phone call or video conference to start mapping out your brand and organization. During this conversation the goal will be to understand what organizational functions shape, or are shaped by your brand.

Then, 3-5(ish) cross-functional conversations with colleagues throughout your organization to gather more insights and sharpen the map of your organization.

What’s In It For You?

After the conversations above, we’ll have a wrap-up call to review a map of your brand and organization.

These maps will be designed to provide a clear picture of functions within your org and how they work together to help or hinder your brand.

Like how a good physiotherapist helps you understand the interrelated and underlying causes of your lower back pain, the idea with these maps is they’ll help you examine your brand at a system-level instead of as an isolated asset or function within your org.

(My lower back pain is related to tight hips by the way, which is ultimately triggered by the way my feet arch).

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

As a participant in the study I’ll also provide you with a complete summary of my research, including the final report with accompanying maps of other organizations that have participated.
Do systems exist?
By: Benjamin P. Taylor
Tags: Systems Thinking, Metarationality, Cybernetics, Complexity

to understand is to know what to do

As soon as you really think about it, boundaries dissolve, connections appear. Everything is nebulous.

…sounds a bit woo-woo? *Of course* systems exist — we interact with them all the time, and we can model and understand them. Not always, not every time, but reliably and with great predictability. Systems engineers got people to the moon. There are deep, underlying laws of our universe. We don’t call these boundaries into being magically by the power of our brainboxes — yet…

We also know that our view can change. Paradigm shifts actually happen. Something we misunderstood resolves into clarity.

So. There’s no definitive system in the world — it depends how you see a situation. But something is ‘real’, something constraints our possibilities in specific ways.

The problem is the question.

We’re inside a loop of understanding. It makes sense to act as if the world is real, when it makes sense. But as soon as we believe that our understanding *is* the reality, we’re heading for trouble. It’s not that ‘the map is not the territory’ — every time we think we know the territory, it’s just another map.
Simplicity, Systems Thinking, Network Effects, Governance
By: Jonathan Bean
Tags: Systems Thinking, Sustainability, Governance

Simplicity, Systems Thinking, Network Effects, Governance

The solution to all the chaos of crypto communities and of Society will need to be something simple that works with human nature as it is. Some may say we need to change human nature through education. Education can be effective, but a simple technological solution can work to adapt ourselves to a more sustainable system. We need something like rules you propose or in other words, we can do something like adding to the system a set of incentives that will reward ethical and sustainable lifestyles and behaviors. This is the theory supporting my model for making crowd sourced incentives for living sustainably and ethically. This is Sustainy.org

“Evil prevails when good men do nothing.”

Humans would rather choose death rather than taking the responsibility of being free. We live in a world where people are rewarded for exploiting others. Change the incentives and change the system, (“Social Physics” Pentland). Once we accept that human nature is flawed we work to patch it up to compensate. Let's accept that people are greedy and will be greedy, now we can change the incentives so that we can use greed to cause people to do good. The hive (collective) is not the sum of the parts, it is the network of interactions among the parts (“Thinking in Systems” Donella Meadows.)

I think meritocracy and holocracy and cooptocracy can be manifested by adding simple systems that account for and reward good behavior, as facebook simply added a system for people to interact socially.
Importance of drawing Ecosystem Actors and their data/decision flow
By: Jyotirmaya Mahapatra
Tags: Contextual Inquiry, Systems Thinking, Theactofux, User Experience, User Research

I started by drawing out the entire compensation review cycle of the organization. This helped us plan the recruitment for the interviews. In the first few interviews, we found out that it is very difficult for the participant to externalize their role in the entire ecosystem. Thus we decided to use the same compensation cycle diagram as an aid for the following interviews. None of the participants were having knowledge about the dependencies in the system and roles defined for other profiles down the workflow. The aid helped participant’s clearly articulate their expectations from the system while playing different roles at a different point in time.

The similar approach helped us analyze our interview data. In this case, we drew the data or decision flow map for every actor in the system. As we switched the roles of every actor from a ‘recommender’ to an ‘approver’, we ended up listing down two scenarios each. These scenarios helped us list down the different requirements of the system.

Snapshot from the Data/Decision flow diagram

Example Scenario: Thomas works as a Sr. Mgr in the XYZ department. He manages a total of 4 employees including Jennifer (Mgr). And, Jennifer manages 5 other employees who work under her supervision. While Thomas has to recommend all the employees working under him, his additional role is also to approve or reject all the recommendations made by Jennifer.

Role switches:

Thomas Page as a Recommender Thomas Page as an Approver

The findings from the research and requirements were later used to design a Compensation review application. And the list of all the needs (requirements) was used to validate our design accordingly.
Have you found the “One Thing”? I have. Lots of them.
By: Rob Worth
Tags: Systems Thinking, Complexity, Learning, Purpose, One Thing

I’d found it. The One Thing. It was Microsoft Access.

Yes! No laughing at the back. Microsoft Access.

In 1997, I’d been working as a financial analyst at Chase Manhattan for three months. Every day I had to grapple with 64 Excel spreadsheets. Some were linked and some you had to copy and paste the data from one to the other. They always broke. It took ten hours to magic up figures that had errors every day. It was a nightmare until my boss’s boss dumped one of those three-inch-thick books on my desk and said, “Fancy learning Access?”

So I did. Three months later, I had one shiny new Access database, five spreadsheets, and I could publish accurate figures in two hours.

So now I’d found my One Thing. That was it. Search over.

But then I discovered VBA. Then Oracle. Then Java. Then Extreme Programming. Then Agile. Then W. Edwards Deming. Then Lean. Then Systems Thinking. Then the Viable System Model. Then Complexity. Then Editing. Then Publishing.

Did I miss any? Yes, lots. There were dozens more One Things along the way.

Now I have discovered a new One Thing.

There is no one thing. There is just another step on the path. But whereas before, scaling one peak would lead to seeing the next. I now realise that there is a whole mountain range. Some peaks are near, some far. Some lit by a bright sunbeam, some shrouded in mist.

I have abandoned my search for the One Thing. But I still get a little blip of joy when I spy another mountain to climb. It’s visiting the groups on all their mountains, learning from them and making connections that are my Many Things now.
23 Questions: The Creative World, The Uncertain Present & The Quantum Future
By: Khalila Mbowe
Tags: Systems Thinking, Innovation, Creative Economy, Africa, Creativity

23 Questions: The Creative World, The Uncertain Present & The Quantum Future

Africa’s creative industry is a 42 billion $ industry (Or somewhere around that) yet many creatives live in poverty, fueled by unemployment, underemployment; more often than not are settling for ill-employment and underpayment of their products and services.

Here is a series of questions I believe we should be critically asking ourselves if we are serious about preparing the continent for the next decade… I will attempt to answer each one in months to come… #StayTuned

In a moment of Freedom and Surrender

Maswali Matamu (Poetic Questioning — Read them as though you are singing to a melody in your head. I will sink better. Trust me! ;-)):

How can we facilitate a process where artists are intentionally engaged in contributing to the socio-economic development agenda? How can we spark transformation in the arts industry whereby artists are driven to engage in associating their success with the subsequent success of their communities? How do we build a collaborative arts and culture ecosystem such that the success of one area of the value chain directly leads to success in other areas? Are artists in all forms of arts sought after to be involved and/or contribute to the decision-making processes about development agendas? How can artists progressively collaborate to foster and take advantage of opportunities for personal as well as intentional community development?

Break: Okay take a breath from the singing
From Print to Digital: Making Over a Million Archived Photos Searchable
By: The Nyt Open Team
Tags: Systems Thinking, Code, Photography, Technology, Database

A block away from the hustle and bustle of Times Square in New York City, buried three floors below street level, lies The New York Times archive. The archive is housed in a sprawling room that is packed with hundreds of steel filing cabinets and cardboard boxes, each containing news clippings, encyclopaedias, photographs and other archival material.

Started in the late 1800s, the archive first served as a collection of news clippings about newsworthy events and people. In the late 1960s, it was merged with a photo library managed by The Times’s art department. The archive (which is sometimes referred to as “the morgue”) now contains tens of millions of news clippings and an estimated five million printed photographs.

Many of these historical documents are available only in print form, however in 2018, The Times embarked on a project — as part of a technology and advertising collaboration with Google — to preserve the photographs in the collection and store them digitally. A team of technicians manually scan about 1,000 photographs per day into a server, and in July, 2019, they scanned their one millionth photograph.

Many of these photographs have found a new life in stories produced by The Times’s archival storytelling project, Past Tense.

With a digital photographic archive now at over a million scans, we needed to build an asset management system that allows Times journalists to search and browse through the photos in the archive from their laptops.

A digital system inspired by the archive

To architect our asset management system, we drew inspiration from the archive itself. The organization strategy in the physical archive is loosely similar to the Dewey decimal system, where an index references the location of photos associated with a subject.

The archive contains well over 700,000 index cards that are alphabetically sorted by subject from A. Cappella Chapel Choir to ZZ Top. Each index card contains the location of the folder in which the corresponding collection of photos can be found. Occasionally, a subject is divided into subtopics with multiple references to different folders.

As an example, an index card about Amelia Earhart is further broken down into multiple subtopics, such as portraits, individual snapshots and European receptions.

An index card indicating where to find photos of Amelia Earhart.

If we were to be interested in European Receptions, we would find the folder labeled “4794-L-8.”

Some folder covers may contain additional text that provides a high-level description about the collection of photos found within the folder; this text is especially useful when it’s the only text associated with a photo.

The front cover of a folder containing photos of Amelia Earhart.

The backs of individual photos usually contain contextual data, such as stamps of publication dates and folder names, handwritten notes, crop marks and taped news clippings indicating publication.
The Natural Order in Organizations
By: Systemic Leadership
Tags: Systems Thinking, Organisational Health, Organizationaldevelopment, Management, Organizational Health

“We are free to choose our actions, but we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.”

Stephen R. Covey

Nature has at its very core intelligent design. Nothing in nature exists for itself. Everything is in a permanent interdependent relationship with other elements from the eco-system. The fine balance that supports life as we know it is maintained by a set of invisible laws. Moment by moment these forces call for the organic adaptation of systems (take the weather for example).

The “what” that we observe about systems are the dynamic movements that maintain wholeness and balance.

When observing these dynamics, we start noticing that living systems have two innate directions of movement — one is towards Preservation / Survival and one is towards Evolution / Individuation. The movements living systems make towards “preservation” and “evolution” are immune to morality, to our socially constructed ideas of right or wrong. The system dynamics are governed by principles that maintain wholeness and balance at whatever the cost. Peter M. Senge has the most beautiful quote to reflect this: “We are neither victims nor perpetrators; we are simply human beings controlled by forces that we have yet to understand”.

Why should this matter to us as leaders? Whenever we use personal morality or organizational norms of belonging as reference systems, we sometimes take decisions that artificially separate the world in “what is right” / “what is allowed” and “what is not right” /”what is not allowed”. The split in the field of collective consciousness triggers further imbalances — repeating patterns and difficult dynamics. Symptoms like the high turnover of employees, burnouts, conflicts are signposts of the system maintaining wholeness and balance at whatever the cost.

Probably the highest hidden cost in organizations is motivation. Difficult dynamics undermine the sense of a safe belonging and people’s energy will be drawn towards Survival patterns. When that happens, we are less able to observe new data, process it and make decisions that support a healthy adaptation of our organization to the reason it exists in the first place — to serve something outside of itself.

What’s at stake? Organizational health is the cost for “systems ignorance” — the organizations become more fragile as we are less able to develop useful ways of acting as a response to change. The less we can foster environments that spark synergies that serve the purpose, the more we are at risk of becoming obsolete.

—

We are a community of Systemic Practitioners that support entrepreneurs and leaders create learning savvy organizational environments. www.systemicleadership.co

Join us on www.systemicleadership.co or https://www.facebook.com/leadershipsistemic/

#systemicleadership #thewholeinshight #systemicawareness #systemicthinking
The OS Revolution
By: Adam V.K. Apricot
Tags: Systems Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, System Architecture, Observations, Operating Systems

An Operating System is a matter of self-awareness. Its Architecture is fundamentally dependent on the best practices for self-control, and so its Design is a form of Governance.

Since the Self is Not Artificial and it cannot be Defined through its Diverse Objective Appearances, Operating Systems offer a Fluid Form of Governance, and we can easily witness their Disrupt Evolution in the Hardware and Software Realms.

A Source is the Bones of an OS. Like in the Human Body, the DNA is an Autonomous Database of Intelligence. All kinds of Bio-Interfaces — like the Human Cells, which are the Building Blocks of our Body — are Autonomous by Design.

Dentritic Human Cell

Bio-Interfaces achieve Autonomy through a 5-fold division of Responsibilities. Each of them is Essential for the Viability of the System, and even if they can be seen as Survival Mechanisms, they carry an even more Profound Meaning behind their Existence.

Bio-Interfaces can also be studied further as Viable System Models.

The Truth is that All Operating Systems have One Source, and as a Conscious Design Scientist, I choose to fight all Misconceptions concerning our Humane Identity through the Release of the Bones of One Operating System of Governance which is Compliant with the Natural Order of Things.
System Design — How to maintain order of messages in event driven system
By: Ravi Bhushan Mishra
Tags: Systems Thinking, Distributed Systems, Event Driven Architecture, Design Thinking

One of most difficult challenge is that how to scale out when ordering of messages are important to you. There might me multiple instance of services are running. Or there might be case where single instance of server tries to process message through multiple threads to increase throughput.

Imagine that same instance of service is reading from same point-to-point channel and sender send three events in below order.

OrderCreated

OrderUpdated

OrderCancelled

A simplistic solution to implement this would be deliver messages to different receivers

From above we can see that these need to be processed in order. There is chance that OrderCancelled is processed before OrderCreated for same order.

A common solution used by modern message brokers like Kafka and AWS Kinesis is to used partitioned (sharded) channels. Let’s understand how it works.

A partitioned channel is set of two or more than two channels which behaves like single channel.

Sender sends a shard key in message’s header which is typically an arbitrary string or sequences of bytes. Message broker uses a shard key to assign messages to a shard/partition. For simplicity let’s assume that it generate hash-code of it and then calculates modulo of it with number of shard/partition.

Messaging broker groups together multiple instances of receiver and treats them as same logical receiver. Apache Kafka for example uses term consumer group . Message broker assign each shards to single receiver. It reassigns shard when receiver starts or shuts down.

In this example each order event has orderId has shard key. Each event for particular order will be published to same shard which is read by single consumer instance . As result these messages are guaranteed to be processed in order.
Today’s Computers: Junk Boards
By: Ilexa Yardley
Tags: Systems Thinking, Blockchain Technology, Circular Theory, System, Information Architecture

Future Computers: Universal System Architecture

Photo by S Sjöberg on Unsplash

Today’s computers can be considered ‘junk boards’ as compared to future computers which will be based on this ‘Universal System Architecture:’

USA

Circular-Linear Relationship

Where a junk board mimics a city(scape), many different ‘buildings’ (architectures) (operations), in a circular-linear relationship with, a unified architecture:

Many Architectures

One Architecture

That is, no matter the ‘architecture,’ they all depend on ‘one’ ‘zero’ and ‘one’ ‘one.’ (Giving us the decimal system in a circular-linear relationship with the binary system.)

One Zero One One (Binary) (Decimal)

So, we arrive at a ‘city’ of ‘diversity’ (a junk board) because it is impossible to have a circumference without a diameter (the arithmetic numbers ‘one’ and ‘two.’)

One

Two

Universal System Architecture

Meaning, the background state, is not the ‘board,’ but, rather the diagram above (a universal system architecture).

Thus, to make our existing ‘computers’ (and microprocessors) more efficient (effective) (elegant), we can re-think the logarithms that support a zero and a one.

That is zero log one is zero (a string of zeroes) and one log zero is one (a string of ones). Where one is dependent on zero and, always, vice versa. (It is impossible to have a string of zeroes without a string of ones (and, again, always, vice versa)).

And this is because it is impossible to have a circumference without a diameter (as the diagram shows) (as the diagram proves).

String of Zeroes

String of Ones

String of Zeroes and Ones

Thus, we have now designed (provided) the architecture for a universal block-chain. Where, again a block and a chain are dependent on the diagram (a continually conserved circle).

Core Architecture: Nature

Conservation of the Circle is the core, and, thus, the only, dynamic in Nature (the diagram is the most basic architecture of Nature) (responsible for junk boards) (responsible for the streamlining of junk boards) (explanation for blockchain technology).

Continue with: Is Reality a Hash Graph?. Yep. Figure it out for your ‘self.’ | by Ilexa Yardley | The Circular Theory | Jun, 2021 | Medium
Bring on the ‘wet and warm’ indicators of system wellbeing
By: Elsie Maio
Tags: Systems Thinking, Governance, Purpose, Metamodernism, Business Strategy

Corporate America’s relative metrics of ESG risk are pushing us off an absolute cliff

Humans are suffering so much that we’re beginning to revolt, in subtle as well as violent ways. That old bugaboo, ‘The Trust Gap’ between civil society and its institutions, has flipped into a Cynicism Index. So many are so alienated and demoralized by the failure of the power centers to steward their most basic, human needs that a sense of collective betrayal is not surprising.

Whether it’s child-sexual-predation institutionalized by the Church fathers for decades; or drinking water, air and food tainted with toxic material manufactured as byproducts of the fossil fuel juggernaut; or lower-than-living-wages that force adults in households to work two to three jobs at a time; or the entrancing drumbeat of false gods like GDP and stock market chyrons that drive US people to work the longest hours without vacations, childcare, and adequate healthcare; or white supremacy so deeply engrained in the culture it is abhorrent to uncover in oneself and abominable for the oppressed to endure any longer.

And there’s more coming. Just ask your local meteorologist. Or strongman.

So how to explain the flaccid response of the power centers to these real and present dangers? Perhaps it’s just habit. Or hubris. After all, for 20 years, businesses for example have been branding themselves with the halo of ‘sustainability’; turns out it was their own sustainability they had in mind all along. Not much of a surprise when the shareowner is the one actor who really counts — except for the blatant nature of that public deception.

In its latest attempt at responsiveness, in August 2019 USA business ‘refined its statement of purpose’. But almost two years later, big business is still measuring progress in terms of itself: how ‘less bad’ one company is than the other, and relative to history. You’d think the house was not on fire. I had a conversation with David Brancaccio on national public radio about this last week, triggered by JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon’s recent Letter to Shareholders. (Here’s a link to the show that aired, plus a longer transcript.)

Seems to me if the power structure were responsive to its authentic purpose it would measure its progress against the dynamic wellbeing of humans and the rest of the living system. Derivative metrics aren’t working so well in the real, wet and warm world. And while they’re at it, give marketers a break; let our creatives tell us the truth.

(For more ways to align with metamodern-, whole system leadership, check out: this chestnut in the Journal of Business Ethics; my newest essay on Congruence: A Board and Marketing Alliance, in the 2020 book Empower Us! From crisis to strategic harmony, by Ira Kaufman and Velimir Srica, pp 244–245; and, Nora Bateson’s Warm Data is a step toward the ‘Wet and Warm’ indicators I’m calling for.)
HEALTH SYSTEM - DOES THAT EVEN EXIST ?
By: Raakkhee Singhi
Tags: Systems Thinking, Cycling, Health, Running, Food

HEALTH SYSTEM - DOES THAT EVEN EXIST ?

Year 2014. I was weighing 82 kgs.

I had aching feet , knee pain, migraine,wheezing.

Life felt heavy and dragged.

At 42, why was I so miserable.

Why couldn’t I get proper guidance from elders around me ? Neither did I have the knowhow.

I tried all.

Exercises, diets, running, cycling, swimming.

I wanted to loose weight desperately.

I wanted to be healthy.



Finally it happened.

Slow and sure !!

I want to go far and wide in the world to share this. I have been working with more than 100 clients as a certified health designer last 6 years.

How did this happen ?

SIMPLE.

I only ate food what my body was comfortable with. And I did gentle exercises.

Sounds easy. However, it is not.

So, I made a system. I laid out the principles. I broke it down into steps. I made it easy for people. I made yummm recipes.

i realised all outcomes should go through natural and effortless process.

WHY ?

As this lasts for life.

One should understand her body, the cravings she has, what food suits her, daily habits and brain-food relation.

why depend on someone for health ?



They say we are what we eat.

Are we emotional eaters ?

Do we look for comfort foods ?



And we eat mindlessly, we end up with diabetes, anomaly in blood pressure, bad cholesterol deposits.



These and other lifestyle diseases have become so common nowadays. So common, that they become a part of our lounge conversation.

This struck hard on me and I decided NO I don't want to live this way.

I got the knowledge.

I applied to myself.

I transformed.

And then I created the system so that others do not take the hard way.

I took charge of it.

I wondered deeply that people without the knowledge and action would only make the world a obese and sick place.

I fail to understand why people do not use technique and tools to take charge of their health.

Surely, a gap exists.

And I am filling this.



System works.

A system designed with precision and from deep understanding.

Lets start.

I am your Health Designer.

I help you redesign your health - from the roots, from the ancient wisdom, by elements of nature.

As you go steady with me, you would be effortlessly stepping in a lifestyle - healthy, fit, lean, energetic, glamorous.

You would effortlessly form a new gamut of habits leading to longevity and reverse ageing

There is just one question you would ask yourself "Why did I not live this life before ?"

Connect with me !

www.magically-fit.com

Follow me on Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/pg/MagicallyFit.RS/events/?ref=page_internal

Follow me on Instagram- I’m on Instagram as @wildfitrakheesinghi https://www.instagram.com/invites/contact/?i=115zont4m9f0p&utm_content=6g8xiou

Connect on linkedin — https://www.linkedin.com/in/rakhee-singhi-7b791718b
A simple (but long)run-through of the Systems Changers programme
By: Cassie Robinson.
Tags: Systems Thinking, Social Change, Complexity, Systems Change, Design

We are 5 months in to the Systems Changers programme with the Children’s Society and Lankelly Chase and there will be more posts to come about the learning from that, but as the programme evolves and is adapted for different contexts I thought it might be valuable to write a post that simply lays out the programme in it’s simplest form* — as it was, when we first designed it, back in 2014 (delivered in 2015).

The programme was initially designed for frontline workers working in organisations trying to change the systems that perpetuate severe and multiple disadvantage. It was designed to be a 6 month programme, with 10–12 participants. The ambition was that it could always be used in other contexts — with all the different people working in those systems — from commissioners and policy makers through to middle managers and local citizens.

The premise of the programme was to take & deploy a systemic lens for change by…

Acknowledging the Sectors that have less power & voice

Making the invisible, visible

Building systems’ adaptive capacity

And in 2018 we edited and adapted the design principles.

The design principles as they were in early 2018.

The programme has always used the three lens’ as shown below — to build a literacy in plural perspectives and holding both the micro and macro view.

The programme has always emphasised the middle space visualised below. It has some aspects of a personal development programme, but that is not what it is. In the same way it isn’t an incubator or accelerator programme fixated on solutions. In fact we always said that if people left their jobs after taking part in the programme, we had failed. The programme is about surfacing, nourishing and directing the wisdom (insights) from the frontline to influence change. It was always a challenge to hold this space — people on the frontline like springing in to action and are great “do-er’s” and problem solvers.

And the focus was always on the collective insights (intelligence and wisdom) of the group as much as on each frontline workers individual journey and experience. What does the collective know that the individual can’t? How can a collective sense-making across a system be useful in generating new insights? It’s why the programme was originally designed to be made up of people working in different places and parts of the system.

The programme broadly follows the stages below, although it is not linear — the mapping, testing, reflecting and adapting are all continuous.
Team Lumos : a study on student suicides in India
By: Anshul Agrawal
Tags: Systems Thinking, Mental Health, Amani Institute, Mental Health Awareness, Oxford University

Hello there, we are Team Lumos hoping to represent The Amani Institute and India at Map The System Challenge held by Oxford University.

Map the System is a global competition that challenges you to think differently about social and environmental change.

At Team Lumos we have chosen to explore student suicides in India.

Why this topic?

India has the highest rates of youth suicide in the world

India is the largest nation with the worlds youngest population

Rates of death by suicide in the student population has been increasing

Death by suicide has affected members of our team

Given the stigma surrounding mental health and suicides in particular we thought it would be good to understand what the contributing factors are and what the gaps in the solutions are

If you would like to help us, please get some college students to fill in the survey here

If you are an expert in this field, or have a solution that you think would benefit, please do connect and we can set up time to chat!

You can contact us by email at lumos.mapthesystem2020@gmail.com

Here are the people behind Team Lumos

Anshul Agarwal

Bhairavi Prakash

Maya Narayan

Neeraja Kulkarni

Thushara Ravindranath

#Mentalhealth #systemsthinking #youthsuicide #mapthesystem
How to fail at 10,000 push ups in a 14 day quarantine
By: Barron Hanson
Tags: Systems Thinking, Push Ups, Goals, Hotel Quarantine, 10000 Push Ups

How to fail at 10,000 push ups in a 14 day quarantine Barron Hanson Feb 7·2 min read

Goals suck.

The easiest way to fail at a goal of 10,000 push-ups in a 14 day quarantine is to try and do 10,000 push-ups in 14 day quarantine. I attempted this and around day 10 and 6500 push-ups in my right shoulder stopped working.

After last week’s article about preferences my mum asked me about goals. She said “if we don’t have goals how can we achieve anything?” I thought about this and realised that goals are much like preferences. If we miss them we are disappointed. Worse still if we achieve them maybe we didn’t aim high enough. Why was I attached to the idea of doing 10,000 push-ups? Which ultimately caused me to injure myself.

It reminded me of a book written by Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) called “How to fail at almost everything and still win big.” There is a chapter about systems vs goals.

Systems thinkers constantly make tweaks to systems in their lives which allows for constant gradual improvement. Goals are secondary to the systems. Goals are more like benchmarks. You could say that everyone who achieves a goal has systems to get there. Goal oriented people are either hitting or missing their goals, reducing current happiness. While systems people succeed every time they use their system.

If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule you follow each week. If you’re a runner, your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month. If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a million dollar business. Your system is your sales and marketing process.

In my case of the push-ups I should have made push-ups as part of a balanced work out and built up the muscles around my shoulders over time. I should have been a person who does push-ups not someone who can do 10,000 push-ups. Trying to do 10,000 push-ups is a dumb goal. Systems trump goals every time. Systems create lasting habits.

As I type this with my sore shoulder I leave you with a question. What goal do you have in mind that could be flipped into a system?

Your friend Barron.
2 Years, 28% Less Homelessness
By: Andrew Hening
Tags: Systems Thinking, Homelessness, Housing, Bay Area, Homeless

“Homelessness is solvable.” While I once could only hope that was truth, today I know it’s a fact.

I have spent almost nine years working on housing and homelessness in the Bay Area. Across the nine Bay Area counties, 30,000 people are currently homeless. Almost 2/3 are unsheltered.

I have spent the last six years working in Marin County, a wealthy, progressive and environmentally-minded community just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Marin has the 7th highest per capita rate of homelessness in the entire country.

Despite the seeming enormity of the challenge, from 2017 to 2019, we reduced long-term, chronic homelessness in Marin County by 28%.

To be clear, homelessness is a symptom. It is the result of a breakdown in a lot of other systems — the housing market, the labor market, recovery services, mental health services, systemic racism. In this way, I like to say that homelessness is like a bathtub. People “flow” to the streets from these upstream causes. We see the “stock” of people who have lost their housing but have yet to regain it.

On top of this inflow, there is a whole additional layer of systemic challenges that prevent “outflow” to permanent housing — local jurisdictions’ unwillingness to invest in solutions, misguided investments from philanthropy and other funders, an erosion of social cohesion, etc.

Attempting to synthesize these various diagnoses, a few years ago I wrote an op-ed that opened with “Homelessness is the most complex social challenge we face. The causes are varied, the prescriptions are polarizing, and our perceptions of the issues and those experiencing them are shaped by profoundly personal worldviews.”

While I still believe that’s true, I’ve come to realize that with the right strategy and the right team, any complex system can be changed. In Marin, we didn’t always know what we were doing, but we maintained a steadfast commitment to the goal of ending chronic homelessness. From that goal, we have built a powerful new system that is helping us achieve that vision.

The strategy we’ve implemented in Marin County could easily be scaled to other communities. Over the coming months and years, I am embarking on a mission to do just that. We built an amazing coalition in Marin, and we can do the same thing across the country. I hope you’ll join the team!
What is a compassionate design practice?
By: Vinay Kumar Mysore
Tags: Systems Thinking, Design, Social Innovation, Mindfulness

Designers spend a lot of time being ‘not sure yet’ about things they consider to be very important. A group of us have arrived together at an important hunch, which we are now chasing. Here is our current thinking. See if some of these speculations resonate, and let us know what you think too.

> An endeavor to move designers from systems thinking to systems sensing, and to cultivate compassion: a capacity to hold human paradoxes with care and without judgement.

This definition is derived from the work of the Society for Organizational Learning, the Centre for Systems Awareness at MIT, and the work of Peter Senge. And here we apply that definition of compassion to design.

> An embrace of the reflexivity inherent in contemporary design practice, and the development of a corresponding designerly skill.

Compassion is a necessary component of design. It extends further than traditional design skills and is a way by which to embrace and engage in the subjectivity intrinsic to a design process.

> An embodied aesthetic anchoring designers in reflection and awareness as they confront complex, contradictory, interconnected and interdependent systems. (climate change, human migration, substance abuse…)

We believe that a practice of compassion helps better equip designers to approach and engage with problems that are classically defined as “wicked” and involve an evolving diversity of stakeholders, needs and challenges.

> An attitude cultivating vulnerability, sensitivity and interconnectivity when we engage in collaborative design processes.

Compassionate design brings with it an acknowledgement of the power and privilege inherent within the field and its application.

Our current design problematic:

How might we as designers cultivate a practice of compassion to improve the caliber and quality of our work? What are the ways by which we can integrate a compassionate design practice into our endeavors and build futures as collectively resonant as they are socially resilient?

We believe that a compassionate design practice is a necessary component of contemporary design action. We’d love to hear your thoughts: compassionatedesignpractice@gmail.com