A personal view of system sustainability for ISSS-2016
Dear ISSS members and Conference participants,
As we approach the 60th ISSS conference this July I want to give my personal view about the wonderful program that has been assembled through the hard work of many dozens of people – a convergence of some of the best organizations and individuals dedicated to architecting true, transformational change toward a sustainable civilization on Earth.
We are genuinely at the right time and place to connect with like minds across disciplines and ideologies on some of the greatest systemic challenges of our time, and maybe of all times in human history. Never before has humanity been faced with the challenge of global dominance, placing us, a nascent and inexperienced species, in the driver’s seat of planetary evolution, which has run itself for 4.5 billion years. Now the future is literally in our hands – which till the soil, make the technology, build our environment, and care for life. We must find the right guidance for those actions, and I am convinced that no group is more qualified than ISSS and its affiliates to do that.
At this conference we will look at four dimensions of system sustainability; which, stated simply, is about what principles, designs, dynamics, and components are needed for a system to regenerate itself in an evolutionary environment. The sustainability concept itself is undergoing a shift from a strategic policy definition based on human survival, to a scientific concept that can be used to heal current pathologies and even move into more symbiotic and innovative ways of healthy living. Armed with a scientific concept of system sustainability, we might also consider systems we do not want to be sustained, such as war that has plagued regions of our planet, in some cases for 1200 years. What is it that perpetuates systemic pathologies? What is it that establishes systemic health and prosperity?
When we ask what makes a system sustainable, or not, we emphasize choice within a larger domain than human desires. This ultimately supports traditional objectives centered on human needs and human development goals, but in a much better way than defining those needs according to current ways of meeting them. We are emerging from a Century that grappled with a huge psychological shift. That shift was from the certainty of mechanistic processes that could be captured in technology, to the realization of uncertainty in non-technological systems, which made living, social, cognitive, and intelligent systems seem intractable. This realization was initially dis-empowering; leading to predictions of chaos, disharmony, environmental collapse, and an inevitability of conflict necessitating political control. In the current Century, however, we will be discovering that uncertainty itself is a limited perspective; that we are actually dealing with complexity comprising choice. The difference is that uncertainty sees what is not possible in precise forms of understanding and prediction or control – which was initially disappointing: Whereas complexity explains uncertainty as the simultaneous existence of many alternatives that are options for the future. This gives us a rather grand choice; to be limited by what we do not know and to accept fate, blind of our own role in it; or to realize the simultaneous power and responsibility we actually have to create the future. It means that by relying only on what we are used to, we will be limited by imprecision; but that by embracing creative and innovative opportunities, our options, even as a species, may be unbounded.
If you are willing to consider the future as neither certain nor uncertain, but as complex – calling us to participate in it – then join us at ISSS-2016 for a ground-breaking New Century dialogue. We have an amazing alignment of experts who will speak on multiple dimensions of socio-ecological complexity, and a process of workshop discussions intended to reach four outcome goals. First among those goals is an agenda for Systems Literacy education to empower our brightest students and professionals to explore the opportunities opening up before us in ethics, governance (including science and policy leadership), technology, and society. Supporting that goal, we will be evaluating a range of traditional and non-traditional methodologies, considering their diverse applications and needs for understanding and managing natural and human systems. Thirdly, we will continue the ISSS’s 60-year quest to make unified sense of that diversity in the form of General System Theories, an interest that has gained new momentum in systems thinking in recent years. Finally, we will deliberate perspectives in culture, ethics, and civil policy forming the highest contextual levels of our thinking – the formative ‘umbrella’ under which choices are made that will determine the future of this hyper-complex system comprising Earth and Humanity.
See you at ISSS-2016.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. John J. Kineman,
President, International Society for the Systems Sciences, 2015-16