Why Logosofia for an assault on situational complexity?
Date: 1 February 2023, 13.30 - 15.00 (Online)
Zoom Link
Situational complexity is a phenomenon that emerges when groups of stakeholders congregate to address wicked problems. It emerges as the combined effect of three distinct observational complexities. The seminar will discuss the role of the Logosofia software platform, which has been developed to support the methodology of Structured Dialogic Design (SDD), in launching an efficient, effective, and ephemeral assault on situational complexity. SDD is a problem structuring approach that integrates proposed policy options from multiple stakeholders into a model that all the stakeholders can commit to implementing.
Alexander N. Christakis has served as the President of the International Society for Systems Sciences in 2002. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton and Yale Universities. He has taught social systems design in several universities in the USA. He has written several books on the management of complexity and published numerous papers in peer reviewed journals.
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When Our Institutions Go Awry:
The Use of Boundary Critique to Evaluate and Improve Public Policy and Administration
Date: 24 May 2023, 13.30 - 15.00
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The research that David Lilley will present is part of a quest to understand why health, wellbeing, and equity are not being prioritised in public policy and administration, and to develop means of responding to this situation. It draws on the redevelopment of a large Australian public housing estate as a case study.
Werner Ulrich’s Critical Systems Heuristics was adapted to create the Human Systems Coherence Framework, a tool for identifying and critically examining the boundaries of individual policies and projects, as well as their interrelationships. It was used as the basis for conducting interviews with project stakeholders (n=27), analysing project documents (n=4), and analysing proximal and distal public policies (n=28). The emphasis was on identifying the actual rather than stated purpose of the redevelopment project, assessing the coherence between purpose and other project boundaries (internal coherence), and assessing coherence with other policies and projects (external coherence).
Although unstated in official accounts of the redevelopment project, its actual purpose was assessed to be the generation of surplus funds to maintain the housing agency’s operations, and a reduction in the agency’s maintenance liability, in a climate of little to no Treasury funding. Low levels of internal and external coherence were observed regarding social and other explicitly-stated objectives, while high levels of coherence were observed with regard to the actual objectives. High levels of coherence with external policies and projects provides evidence that the project is part of a broader phenomenon, rather than being an isolated case.
Stakeholder recommendations and demands for change were assessed as focusing on instruments and settings rather than purpose, thus limiting them to reformational rather than transformational change. They were also found to lack internal and external coherence, thus limiting their persuasiveness, any strength that may be gained through collaborative effort, and their likely impact should they be adopted.
Templates and tools for engaging in boundary critique and transformational change will be presented, together with recommendations for their use in effecting change in challenging public policy and administration contexts.
About the Speaker
David has spent over 20 years working on place-based initiatives intended to improve outcomes for disadvantaged individuals and communities, in roles spanning the public, private, for-purpose, and university sectors. This has included positions as Manager of Social Planning, Research, and Evaluation for the renewal of public housing estates in New South Wales, Australia; the founding Director of an early childhood collective impact project in Western Sydney; the Deputy Director of the Health Equity Research and Development Unit in Sydney Local Health District; and a variety of consulting roles. He is concerned about the decline of citizen-centric public policy and administration, accompanied by increases in instrumentalism, managerialism and market mechanisms.
