Download Learning to act systemically

Learning to act systemically
Professor Raul Espejo
Director-General of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics
Keynote Address at the 9th Brazilian Systems Conference
Palmas, Tocantins, Brazil
22th October, 2013
This presentation will focus on learning how to overcome institutional fragmentation in the creation,
regulation and implementation of business and social policies. The challenge is seeing the systems
underpinning these policies. Developing this observational capacity helps diagnosing the structural
shortcomings of current policy situations; improved observations makes it possible their diagnosis
and this is a platform to design cohesive, viable, organisations. For learning to take place it is also
necessary the implementation of these designs. Indeed, it is through this implementation that
learning to act systemically may take place. Therefore, in addition to seeing systems, it is necessary
to transform fragmented resources into cohesive organisational systems. It is necessary to make
them happen.
Seeing systems is circularly connected with making systems happen. Making them happen is a
process of on-going problem solving, where individuals and organisations challenge policies at the
same time that agree about these policies. Problem solving in this context is an on-going learning
process where participants find ways of structuring the large complexities related to policy creation,
implementation and regulation. I will argue that all this requires strategies to manage situational
complexity. A hallmark of this management is people structuring problems (i.e. policies) in an ecosystem that is far more complex than they can deal with. It is beyond their collective capabilities and
therefore the challenge is enabling these capabilities to transform the collectives in problem solving
organisational systems.
To support a deeper appreciation of this problem solving and learning I will discuss a systemic
heuristic named ‘variety balance’ (Beer, 1979, Espejo and Reyes, 2011) to learn strategies for people
to balance among themselves their inherently different complexities and to balance the complexities
of organisational systems with their eco-systems. These are heuristics to learn to act systemically.
S. Beer, 1979, The Heart of Enterprise, Wiley, Chichester
R. Espejo and A. Reyes, 2011, Organizational Systems; Managing Complexity with the Viable System
Model, Springer, Heidelberg.