A decade ago, I was going to so many in-person conferences that I had both a dedicated blog and Twitter account. These days, I attend rather less. No longer being on Twitter, and my conference blog long-ago being mothballed, I’m lacking a place to put reflections on events.

The purpose of this post isn’t even that, to be honest. I was just so blown away by Indy Johar’s presentation at the Systems Innovation Network conference today that I needed somewhere less ephemeral to put the notes that I managed to tap out with my thumb.

Don’t ask me questions about any of this. Not only am I still new to the whole world of systems thinking, but Indy seems to have a galaxy-level brain. Go and check out the Dark Matter Labs website.

Indy presenting at the conference

Situating the moment:

  1. Climate breakdown (not change, losing predictability and insurability - therefore access to capital markets)

  2. Mass multi-polar, multi-perspectival transition (different kinds of transitions in different parts of the world)

  3. Securitization of everything (pervasive in all of our conversations - everything driven by risk and security - energy, minerals, nutrient supplies)

Emergent term of ‘security economics’ changing market dynamics. ‘No transition without justice’ not simply a slogan, it’s important to be able to find a way forward (e.g. UBI or ‘universal basic nutrition’ experiments)

  1. Inequality and loss of solidarity

  2. Hugh interest rate environment - inflationary economic context. Going to see more shocks to the economic system.

Difficult to price the material economy because of volatility.

  1. Rise of environmental righy politics - localism, etc. will be co-opted by the far right. AfD / far-right of Conservative Party. Boundary words: who’s inside and outside the community.

Systems Practitioners shouldn’t use ‘community’ as too entangled. Be careful about language we’re giving power to.

  1. Labouring the transition - don’t have a labour force for the transition (great ideas, but can’t implement them).

Having to think about the constraints in the innovation landscape. Materially affecting our reality: UK can afford to build 14,000/year according to Paris Agreement carbon budget. Labour government has promised to build 350,000/year. Need to do things differently - open up new pathways (right to homes).

Persisting with illusions of infinite supply - instead we need to look at constraints because that’s where the innovation is.

  1. Flooding with information - c.f. McLuhan’s thought about confusing a system by flooding it with info. People just spot patterns.

Far right give you a meme to help you understand reality - they hijack a pattern analysis.

  1. Scale of the shift - only 7.2% of global economy is ‘circular’ and it’s declining. Need fundamental shifts in material economy.

  2. Volatility in the system massively increasing - energy costs, food costs

  3. New Allies - central banks, security services, intergenerational wealth, civil society. Need to have representatives from these types of organisations at this conference. New theories about asset ownership.

Westminster living in synthetic domain. Everyday politics to what we’re observing.

“Systems is about conversation not communication.” This means we can deal with more information than previously thought.

Security & Resilience of Systems

“Pre-emptive peace strikes” in places where there’s risk of systemic volatility.

Risk to whom? Rooted in assets and value, rooted in monetary frameworks. Preservation of power.

Uncrystalised risk in the system. If you put the risks on the balance sheets, the organisations aren’t solvent anymore. No longer viable. Collision and corruption therefore becomes a systemic risk - interested in survival.

(e.g. of Kristallnacht and insurance companies not paying for broken windows but instead paying ‘force majeure’ money to Nazi Party)

Explosion of sovereignties - more of an agentified world view. People don’t ‘assign’ their sovereignty to the state as they did in the past. Multitude of sovereignties.

Need to work beyond democratic renewal systems - legitimacy? “States are not the public”

Systems scaffolding - who owns the solution for portfolio (unless the system wants to implement, just remain as sticky notes). Need to work as system capabilities level.

Trans-systems work. Structural systems transformation.

Constraints - key shifter of innovation space.

‘Trap’ of the system boundary and the other. Need to build new language. Different dynamics to bounded models.

Systemic gap in price and value. Unpriced value in the system - going to be something that organised a lot of systems work (e.g. looking at single food product or wider systems level)

Deep Code failure at systems level. Language probel - use old world language which traps us. Also ‘property rights’ like to be challenged.

[Dark Matter iceberg graphic]

Building compound learning organisations and systems. Freedom and agency must lie in the actor for a system to be a system. That means learning. How do we build these?

Chief Learning Officers instead of CEOs. Coherence is formed not around risk but about capacity to learn. Higher overheads, but higher resilience and innovation capacities.

Crisis-driven system transitions. We’re going to live in a world where crises shatter Overton Windows. Emerging Theory of Change.

Big challenge is legitimacy. Mountains over mountains.

Single-point optimisation doesn’t work for an entangled planet. Need to focus on multi-point optimisation.

Multi-organisation organising. Contracting and coordination makes that difficult - what are the frameworks here?

Difficult for states to impose transition, needs to be negotiated.

System financing, structured economic systems, and para-colonizing financial capital. How do you move capital through a non-colonial lens? Capital is an extension of the dominion theory of the world.

‘System accelerators’

Intermediary agent-trust economy. How to build a different way to finance things. Turning energy meter into financial instrument? Public interest micro-trusts. Way of regulating the translation space. Weak signal.

Relationship with material economy - borrowing, not owning.

Freedom and systems - we need to build capacity for agents to be free (not in terms of market choice, but free in terms of being radically human). People and institutions feel trapped. Combined with volatility and uncertainty this creates fear.

First movers - food, material economy

We’re trying to make stuff circular that shouldn’t be. Biomaterial level? Needs to interact with nutrition system. Also river systems work (key fragility point)

Dark Matter Labs has new publication about portfolios - who owns them? New ways of organising to deal with portfolio allocation.

Problem of having the incumbents in the room when we’re talking about system transitions. 40% of the people who this issue will affect aren’t even born. Might be worth having empty seats to recognise this?

We don’t have data infrastructure - cities can’t calculate carbon emissions. Can’t just be ‘open data’ as requires security.

Operating in a deep war of values - e.g. billionaires willing to throw money at throttling the human race because they think this is the answer. Accelerating towards a ‘throttling event’. Very different perspectives on the table.

Our own governance - need integrity. Systemic question.

Financing the deep work - real issue, end up talking about surface level.

How do we move from communities of care based on fear (i.e. the far right) to communities of care based on love?