Systemic Innovation — Historical Roots and Contemporary Beginnings Article synopsis (still a rough draft), by Dino Karabeg Acknowledgement: The research and development described here continues the visionary work of Alexander, George, Kailash, Kathrin, Nam, Ockie, Stefan, Violeta, and others, in connection with ISSS57 Vietnam. Also the work of David Price, Fredrik Refsli, Jack Park, Mei Lin Fung, Sam Hahn and our other knowledge media colleagues. This article summarizes the ideas being developed and realized by all of us together. The ‘we’ narrating the article is intended to reflect this. This draft may become a starting point for one or several articles by multiple authors. Abstract: Extending the conventional repertoire of systems research to include systemic innovation (an approach to global challenges, systems research and innovation) is an incisive (precise, practical…) answer to the recent calls within the systems community to find its role and response to “the civilization on the crossroads”. The Systems Lab is a practical way to develop systemic innovation.

Introduction Extending the conventional repertoire of systems research to include systemic innovation is proposed here as an incisive (precise, practical…) answer to the recent calls within the systems community to find its role and response to “the civilization on the crossroads” [Ref: EMCSR2014, ISSS57]. This proposal has been conceived in the manner that was recommended — namely by “listening into what wants to emerge” in the systems community, and also wider, and then finding and highlighting common themes and synergies, and feeding them back into the system. We shall see that systemic innovation has been emerging in two research communities — systems sciences and knowledge media research and development — since the 1960s. Recent developments — such as CIEL, ELLabs, WELTribe and Think2Impact in the systems commnity, and Program for the Future, Global Sensemaking, DebateGraph and Knowledge

Federation in the knowledge media community — have led to a condition where all that is needed for systemic innovation to become reality is

an organizational space where researchers, developers and other experts and stakeholders can work and develop it together

a call to action, to energize this development and give it direction

The Systems Lab — the foundations of which have been laid during the EMCSR2014 and the IFSR Conversaton 2014 — will fulfill the first role; this article will take care of the second. In the three sections that follow we will

point briefly to the historical roots of systemic innovation in the two communities — not in the manner of historiography, but as a story introduction to this very idea, which at the same time honors some of our forefathers who developed it

illustrate some of the recent developments, within the specific communities that are now coming together in Systems Lab — as concrete material to begin building with

share future plans — what will or may be done in the Systems Lab, and how systemic innovation may develop in the immediate future

The Conclusion will summarize in what way exactly systemic innovation — and the Systems Lab that manifests it in practice — represent on the one side a natural extension of the meta­scientific vision that motivated von Bertalanffy, Wiener and others to initiate the systems movement, and on the other side a natural and agile way to make a difference that makes a difference with regard to the “the civilization on a crossroads”.

Historical Roots We introduce and motivate systemic innovation by tracing the development of creative insights of its two forefathers — system scientist Erich Jantsch, and knowledge media researcher and inventor Douglas or Doug Engelbart.

Erich Jantsch

It was no coincidence that Erich Jantsch was chosen to give the opening keynote at the first (inaugural) meeting of The Club of Rome, in Spring of 1968. For the OECD in Paris, where Alex King (who—together with Aurelio Peccei—conceived the idea of The Club) was the research director, Jantsch had just completed an extensive 400 page report about the strategies by which technologies were developed and introduced in different parts of the world. And the complex contemporary issues — which The Club of Rome was intended to unravel — obviously had to do with our inability to control the power of technology for a true betterment of our and our environment’s condition. Besides, Jantsch was a brilliant scientist. Having completed his Ph.D. dissertation in astrophysics already at the age of 22, he decided that he had “more important things to do”, and hence continued his career as a systems scientist, working on the interface between society and technology. (J1) The first of Erich Jantsch’s core insights we want to mention is that the “world problematique” as The Club of Rome called the compendium of our contemporary issues was a consequence of an inadequate innovation process (we attribute to this term here a general meaning “how we use our creativity to update our social and technological reality”), or better said that it needed to be seen and treated as such. Technology has the potential to both destroy us and help us thrive. To respond to this new situation, we need to become creative or innovate in a new way. (J2) The question that naturally followed was How should the technology — and the human systems directing its power — be developed? In the Autumn of 1968 Jantsch organized a conference in Bellagio, Italy, where some of the leading systems scientists (Beer, Forrester, Ozbekhan…) gathered to co­create an answer to this question. Jantsch subsequently edited the proceedings [REF]. The participants named their answer ‘planning’, and made it clear that this was not to be confused with conventional planning — already in the first pages of the proceedings, in the “Bellagio Declaration on Planning”: Social institutions face growing difficulties as a result of an ever increasing complexity which arises directly and indirectly from the development and assimilation of technology. [...] The need for planning is not generally recognised. Further, the pursuance of

orthodox planning is quite insufficient, in that it seldom does more than touch a system through changes of the variables. Planning must be concerned with the structural design of the system itself and involved in the formation of policy. [...] The need is to plan systems as a whole, to understand the totality of factors involved and to intervene in the structural design to achieve more integrated operation. All large, complex systems are capable of some degree of self­adaptation. But in the face of immense technological, political, social and economic stresses, they will have to develop new structures. This can easily lead to grave social disturbances if the adaptation is not deliberately planned, but merely allowed to happen. In the article “From Forecasting and Planning to Policy Sciences”, which he subsequently published in the newly established journal “Policy Sciences”, Jantsch outlined an innovation process that followed from the discussions in Bellagio (see Figure 1). (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: A Figure from Jantsch’s article outlining the ‘systemic innovation’ process for turning future concerns into systemic change and other impactful action. He called this new innovation process “systemic innovation”, and the corresponding way of acting “rational creative action” and even “human action model” — which is to be distinguished from the conventional “mechanistic model” where the internal organization is kept intact, and hence allowed to remain “independent of purpose”. The essential feature of “systemic innovation” is the use of a systemic “planning process”, where “forecasting” — to determine the future options and identify those desirable ones — is followed by system design and policy formation.

We may summarize Jantsch’s idea of “systemic innovation” (as a response to “the civilization on a crossroads”) as simply making our various systems — from the details of the technology, to the main structures of our society ‘alive’— i.e. capable of adapting and evolving. (J3) Next came the questions — Who, i.e. what institution, needed to initiate the development of systemic innovation? And — In what way should systemic innovation be performed, and institutionally organized? Jantsch decided that the university (as institution) needed to play a key role. And that to be able to respond to this role, the university itself would need to undergo a structural change:

“[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing society’s capability for continuous self­renewal. It may have to become a political institution, interacting with government and industry in the planning and designing of society’s systems, and controlling the outcomes of the introduction of technology into these systems. This new leadership role of the university should provide an integrated approach to world systems, particularly to the “joint systems” of society and technology” [REF].

The following year (1969), Jantsch spent a semester at MIT drafting a proposal about the future of the university, from which the above quotation was taken, and lobbying to bring this proposal to the attention of colleagues and the administration. The following two sentences from this report present a prospectus for systemic innovation in a nutshell:

The task is nothing less than to build a new society and new institutions for it. With technology having become the most powerful change agent in our society, decisive battles will be won or lost by the measure of how seriously we take the challenge of restructuring the “joint systems” of society and technology.... [REF]

In the report Jantsch saw the development of “system laboratories” — proposed earlier by Jay Forrester — as the key move in adapting the university to its new role:

The principal orientation of the activities of the new university will be toward socio­technological system engineering, in particular toward the planning and design of “joint systems” of society and technology [...]. The basic structure of the new university will focus on the interaction between three types of structural units: system laboratories for integrative system planning and design; function­oriented departments, organizing technologies by outcome­oriented categories (functions or missions of technology in the context of societal systems); and discipline­oriented departments as “custodians” of basic disciplines in the physical, life and social sciences.

The substance of Jantsch’s proposal was to in effect reverse the conventional direction of innovation — where the academic researchers do what they do; their results are occasionally taken advantage of within technological and entrepreneurial developments—in accordance with the “market needs”; and the changes to social­systemic structures, if they happen at all, just simply emerge! As Jantsch explained already in the same report, his proposal did not find an open ear at MIT:

M.I.T. became an environment in which I felt the formulation of constructive ideas to give the university a much more active role in shaping the future was relevant and might find resonance. On the other hand, I was struck by the fact that concerned students and faculty members alike saw practically no alternative to individual and group action by scientists in trying to bring better sense to the introduction and management of science and technology into the context of society’s needs and ambitions. It appeared almost as if the institution of the university has become an empty and dispirited framework, which can no more hold and focus the creative energies springing from its community of students and faculty, and to engage in this battle for new purposes of science and technology — and to change in the process [...].

It was this relative non­concern over the role of the university as an institution which alarmed me more than the issues that were fervently debated. I was reminded of my first direct and intense contact with problems of the future of the university in my endless discussions with French students during their uprising a year ago, and of their inability to conceive of any but secondary and tertiary measures of university reform, satisfying some of their immediate and short­range ambitions for increased participation. There, the most seriously concerned students’ idea of a new university amounted to little else but a replica of the American university as it exists today — an idea which is challenged in this paper but not nearly enough by students and faculty members everywhere who are demanding university reform. The French students got their American­type university b3ecause they did not stretch their imagination far enough — in spite of the most famous graffitto of the Parisian May of 1968 — “L’imagination au pouvoir!” Will the American university also stagnate in its home country because of lack of imagination?

(J4) The last of Jantsch’s key insights we want to mention is that technological planning, including all rational deliberation and processes that might be associated with it, is indeed only one side of the systemic innovation coin. There is another one. Jantsch understood that planning needed to be complemented with what now may tend to be called “curating for emergence”. While the focus on the ‘planning’ side of this coin is on understanding the ‘boundary conditions’ that determine a situation and choosing a corresponding line of action through careful deliberation, the focus on its other side would be opposite — namely on removing boundaries and constraints, so that completely new ideas and action may emerge. The relationship between those two is of course dialectic; the capability to adapt and change directions (or policies) now needs to be carefully planned and designed into our institutions:

[O]ur whole institutional fabric functions with the explicit or implicit aim of keeping firmly to a given rigid policy. Governments everywhere are supposed to preserve constitutions; churches their respective religions; and political parties their ideologies; just as business is meant to serve economic growth,

and academia is expected to defend a particular model of science. [REF: Jantsch, Design for Evolution]

Jantsch did not stop there. He also understood that the evolutionary way of looking at the world — where the processes are directed in time i.e. not reversible — was an emerging approach to systems science, and indeed to science as a whole. The details of this “evolutionary paradigm” came to him gradually, during the 1970s, while he was living and working in Berkeley. The turning point was his encounter with Ilya Prigogine at UC Berkeley in 1972. In 1980 Jantsch organized a conference and authored two books on ‘evolutionary paradigm’, and passed away, 51 years old.

A Reflection about the Impact Jantsch dedicated his life and career to what was arguably on the top of a priority list of questions — namely What sort of creative processes, and what institutions, might enable us to develop and use the technology toward a true betterment of our and planetary condition? What real­world impact did this have? To answer this question too in a story­telling way, it may be interesting to notice that the same year Erich Jantsch passed away, Ronald Reagan became USAs 40th president on a strong agenda of de­regulation (“The government will not solve our problems; the government is our problem”). His agenda was precisely opposite from what Jantsch undertook to develop — no conscious intervention into the real­world governance, economy, innovation, university and other systems, but on the contrary — complete faith in “the market” and de­regulation of all sides of our governance, public life and economy. As the vignettes provided in the Appendix might illustrate, the same ideas about our themes have remained mainstream or orthodox until this day. In spite of the fact that already in 1948, in the final chapter of the first edition of his seminal Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener wrote:

There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the

United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market, the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end of a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor, and has thus earned the great reward with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple­minded theory. (...)

Wiener then proceeded to explain why this was the case, by combining real­world observations with results in game theory. Wiener wrote the above lines just a few years before further developments in game theory, which were later branded “prisoner’s dilemma”, showed how the kind of “rational choice” which “the market” approach to the evolution of social systems and technology would ideally rely on (i.e. where each of the players is optimizing own prospects) might lead to a condition that is worse­than­optimal for all players. More than a thousand research articles were published about the prisoner’s dilemma at the time. And yet— also their over­all message did not penetrate into the public sphere. The prisoner’s dilemma articles were written by mathematicians for mathematicians. An insight that the public might need is — To what degree might the systems that evolve and operate without the recourse to systemic thinking be sub­optimal (or ineffective or wasteful)? Which is just another way of asking To what degree might systemic innovation be beneficial, make a difference? We shall come back to this most central question below, in the section about Thrivability Strategy. But now we already have a hint — as we have just seen, our knowledge work (academic research, public informing...), while focusing on production and publication, and using technology to enhance production and publication, is creating a situation where the sheer volume of produced documents, rather than contributing to insight, is inhibiting the creation of insight. What percentage of the invested work and produced results may be wasted by not being brought to the awareness of the people and institutions to which the may make a difference? And isn’t this a natural place where our journey toward systemic sustainability might begin?

This is in any case what Wiener was trying to tell us, already in 1948! The quoted passage criticizing the blind faith in “the market” was mentioned only as an example, to illustrate the phenomenon to which the last chapter of Cybernetics titled “Information, Language, and Society” was dedicated, namely the fact that the global society was unable to make use of its large and rapidly growing volumes of information. Wiener mentioned Dr. Vannevar Bush as an advocate of a technological solution, and added that no technological aid alone can solve this problem, because suitable changes in the human system, i.e. in the organization of production and distribution of knowledge, are also needed:

Dr Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the case where two subjects have the same techniques and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest. [Cybernetics, p. 158].

We’ll return to this most interesting compendium of issues in a moment. But let us first summarize this part of our discussion thus: With student demonstrations in various parts of the world, and a variety of other events including the ones just described, the year 1968 may be considered as a year of global bifurcation, a year in which change seemed immanent. For a while our innovators and creators appeared to be leading the development in a certain direction, as we outlined above, but then the course radically changed. What ensued may be considered an experiment in social evolution through the trust in “the market” and de­regulation, an experiment which was “successfully” concluded in 2008 — by clearly showing where this manner of developing “the joint systems” of society and technology might lead us. Hence spontaneous evolution brought us to the next global bifurcation. Shall we be able to learn from history and do a better job this time?

Douglas Engelbart While in the late 1960s Erich Jantsch was seeking for someone that would begin to develop “the joint systems of society and technology” in a systemic way, Doug Engelbart was already far advanced in doing that, at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. What Doug needed, on the other hand, was someone who would understand — and help him communicate and manifest — the meaning and value of this line of work. During the 1970s these two men lived and worked across the San Francisco Bay from each other. As far as our probing could reach, Jantsch and Engelbart never met. It seems likely that they did not even know about each other. In now famous demo, on December 9, 1968, at the time when Jantsch was editing the Bellagio conference proceedings and beginning to look into creating a system laboratory, Doug’s system laboratory showcased the personal and networked computing as we know it today, with the mouse, windows, interactive editing, hyperlinks, computer network, email... The vision that motivated Doug, however, was much larger and still unrealized. And the roots of this vision reach back to that same Dr. Vannevar Bush’s article that Wiener was talking about. (In a longer story, to be told in Thrivability Strategy, you may imagine Engelbart as a novice navy radar technician in a wooden cabin in the Philippines erected on four pillars, in 1947, reading Vannevar Bush’s article “As We May Think” — an event which would later change Engelbart’s life, and the history of computing.) The exact context in which this article was written is relevant to our story; here is how this was summarized by the editor of “Atlantic Monthly” where Bush’s article was published in July 1945:

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.

For many years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. ­ The Editor

Let us pause a moment to digest this message: Think of a man who had such a profound ability to see what sort of ideas and discoveries may need to come together so that best effects could be achieved, that the WW2 scientific effort (or to dramatize further “the continued existence of the free world”) might have been entrusted to him. Think of this man looking at our post­war situation and pointing to a single key issue that needed to be focused on and resolved. Here is how he introduced his proposal: Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. [...] The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present­day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square­rigged ships. (E1) The first of Doug’s insights we want to mention emerged as early as in 1951, when he was 26 and thinking, for three months, how to give a direction to the rest of his life. Having already decided that he was going to maximize the benefit his life would have for the mankind, Doug was wondering in what way exactly he might do that. Although Doug was not formally a systems scientist (from his writings we may see that he, however, did read and understand systems science), his thinking at that moment was distinctly systemic:

I remembered reading about the people that would go in and lick malaria in an area, and then the population would grow so fast and the people didn't take care of the ecology, and so pretty soon they were starving again, because they not only couldn't feed themselves, but the soil was eroding so fast that the productivity of the land was going to go down. So it's a case that the side effects didn't produce what you thought the direct benefits would. I began to realize it's a very complex world. [...] So then I put it together that the product of these two factors, complexity and urgency, are the measure for human organizations or institutions. The complexity/urgency factor had transcended what humans can cope with. It suddenly flashed that if you could do something to improve human capability to deal with that, then you'd really contribute something basic. That just resonated. Then it unfolded rapidly. I think it was just within an hour that I had the image of sitting at a big CRT screen with all kinds of symbols, new and different symbols, not restricted to our old ones. The computer could be manipulating, and you could be operating all kinds of things to drive the computer. The engineering was easy to do; you could harness any kind of a lever or knob, or buttons, or switches, you wanted to, and the computer could sense them, and do something with it.

So Doug’s first insight we want to mention was that not only our ability to organize and share and draw meaning from our vast volumes of information (the priority of which Bush was pointing out), but more broadly the task of structuring and coordinating knowledge work — and thus enabling us to understand and handle issues — could be immensely facilitated through a suitable development of networked digital computer technology. (It is remarkable that Doug was able to envision this already in 1951!). Here is how he later recalled this insight:

Many years ago, I dreamed that people were talking seriously about the potential of harnessing a technological and social nervous system to improve the IQ of our various organizations. What if, suddenly, in an evolutionary sense, we evolved a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organisms? Then I dreamed that we got strategic and began to form cooperative alliances of organizations, employing advanced networked computer tools and methods to develop and apply new collective knowledge.

All the information technology that was developed in Doug’s laboratory (...) was intended to be only building blocks in the pursuit of this much larger vision! (E2) The question that naturally followed was the same that Jantsch had to face — How (i.e. based on what ideas and criteria, and by what methods) should (to use Jantsch’s expression) “joint systems of society and technology” be developed? On what foundation, and in what way, may we be able to avoid endlessly repeating old patterns of usage, and reproducing old systemic solutions, however obsolete or dysfunctional they might be? Even when our situation demands different systemic and behavioral patterns, and our technology enables them? Doug published his “conceptual framework” in his 1962 report “Augmenting Human Intellect”, which subsequently oriented his work. While the title of this report in which he gave his answers was “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”, its extent was quite a bit larger. Doug was talking about augmenting not only human intellect, but about augmenting (both individual and collective) capabilities of any kind. So imagine a ‘non­augmented human’ as having no tools, no culture, no language... Then imagine all those and other things added as “an augmentation system”, which serves to augment the imaginary bare human’s individual and collective capabilities. Furthermore, Doug envisioned our capabilities as existing in a hierarchy, where higher­order capabilities depended on lower­level ones, so that the whole thing was a network or a ‘capability infrastructure’. (To see this more concretely, think of the capability to drive a car, which depended on an obvious hierarchy of technologies, but also changes in the human system such as traffic regulation etc., but also developing simple tools such as rear­view mirror, and the ability to use it etc.; Or think about the ability to record ideas, and the pencil and paper as tools… )

Figure 2: Engelbart’s own slide, showing the “whole augmentation system” as consisting of the human system and tool system. Hence human capabilities depend on complex combinations of other capabilities, and ultimately on a complex combination of various elements of “the human system” and “the tool system”. Doug never tired of emphasizing that the human system and the tool system need to be developed together. Hence although his underlying conceptual framework was different from the “planning” of Jantsch and others, the result was ultimately the same — systemic innovation, conceived as concerted developments in the human and the tool system. Doug conceived several ways in which “the whole augmentation system” was to be applied. One of them was to think, when a situation changes, — what sort of capabilities are now critical? From here one continues to identify and produce the technological means that may be needed. And of course — what changes in the human systems, what human abilities may be needed? When Doug asked this question in early 1960s, then “augmenting our collective IQ” (understood as our collective ability to understand and handle new situations) naturally emerged as a task that deserves priority. Hence “collective intelligence” or “collective IQ” remained attached to Doug’s name (among the minority of people who understood that he was not primarily a technology inventor; most people still seem to remember him as “the inventor of the computer mouse”, which was perhaps his most trivial

contribution). It is worth emphasizing in this context that Doug’s main focus was not the collective intelligence as such, but to go back to the basic capability infrastructure as foundation, and on that basis develop and use technology to “augment the human capabilities”, both individual and collective (instead of creating technology merely to replace or facilitate what we the people are doing already). Another way to practice “augmentation” was to think, when the technology changes — What capabilities may now be effectively augmented? What other technology may be needed? What changes in the human system…? The “collective intelligence” or “collective IQ” naturally emerged as the intersection of the above two lines of approach: Our situation required that we develop the capability to understand and resolve complex issues together, to grasp complex situations and respond adequately — in a collective sense; and this was what the digital computer technology could enable — provided that it be developed and used in a suitable way. (E3) Doug’s next question was again the same as Jantsch’s — Who, and in what way, would develop the augmentation paradigm — and more generally, the re­creation of human and technological systems? And Doug’s answer was again different than Jantsch’s. Part of the reason was that Doug was already a technologist, or made himself to be one. Furthermore, Doug already knew from experience (first at UC Berkeley, and then from talking with the faculty at Stanford) that the university — in its contemporary form in any case — was not going to be an answer. Doug already had a team of technologists. And yet the question was — in what way can socio—technical systems be developed? Notice the difficulty: While digital technology could simply be developed by creating silicon chips and programming computers, the socio­technical systems cannot be programmed in this way (think, for example, about the challenge of ‘programming’ how the academic research is socially organized...). The name Doug gave to his answer was bootstrapping. The idea is, simply, that people creating the system are being the first user group in the system. While they program the technology, they ‘program’ the human system first by becoming that human system, and then through self­organization.

Bootstrapping is used in two subtly different connotations: (i) as a way to physically implement systems, that resolves the key challenge — the people developing the system also become the system; (2) as a strategy for ‘exponential’ augmentation of key capabilities through positive feedback (to couple ‘exponential’ increase in problem complexity) — where the people developing augmentation systems augment their own capabilities by using their own tools and techniques. When Doug needed to brand and package his ideas, to be communicated and either implemented or left to posterity (which was a primary task of his Bootstrap Institute and Bootstrap Alliance), the name he gave them was “Bootstrap Paradigm”. It was all along obvious to Doug that he was constructing a paradigm. By giving this paradigm name “Bootstrap Paradigm”, Doug clearly signaled that he saw ‘bootstrapping’ as essential. (E4) The fourth of Doug’s insights we want to mention was closely related to Jantsch’s fourth insight. It is clear that a structural change in any of the major human systems, however necessary it might be, cannot simply be constructed and implemented in the system:

we don’t know and should not know what the result should be (or else we short­circuit the creative process and create hindrances to evolution)

we have no way of restructuring the system Hence the key is again “design for evolution” or “curating for emergence”. With this goal in mind Doug developed a series of technologies, of which the familiar mouse, windows, hypermedia, computer networks... were examples; but also a number of yet widely adopted or known ones. An example of this latter was the Open Hyperdocument System (OHS). The OHS may easily be understood by comparing it with what is actually in use — namely the conventional WYSIWIG systems such as the familiar Microsoft Word. Those systems are clearly the result of asking “what do people already do that can be facilitated or automated by technology”, and arriving at “writing conventional documents” as an answer. Doug, however, clearly saw that the digital technology provided an opportunity to depart from those patterns, by creating, or (emphatically) co­creating completely different kinds of

documents, via entirely new social processes. The OHS was carefully designed to enable this sort of evolution. A hyperdocument is not a document in a conventional sense, but a large realm of multimedia possibilities, which can easily be combined with one another according to the purpose and the audience. What makes them ‘hyper’ is that each hyperdocument is indeed a hierarchy of documents, providing distinct views, both brief high­level and the more detailed low­level ones, which a user of reader can explore at will. While a conventional document is just a document, the OHS is a way to enable a radical restructuring of both the concept and structure of the document, and the procedures by which it is developed, by creating suitable technology. The Dynamic Knowledge Repository (DKR) is another Doug’s technical idea, designed to enable the kind of evolution in the human systems that is, as we have seen, overdue. Think of it as an embodiment of a ‘collective mind’, where all that is done is recorded; and where social processes are developed enabling people to share knowledge, think together, be notified when knowledge relevant to their task is developed, and invited to build on it and develop the ideas further. The Networked Improvement Community or NIC belongs to the same category. A NIC is a community improving the practice of anything by using the ‘collective intelligence’ tools such as the DKR and the OHS. The NICs naturally exist in a hierarchy. A higher­level or C­level NIC is naturally implemented as the NIC of NICs — it is the NIC where the improvement capabilities, i.e. the nuts and bolts of a NIC infrastructure, are developed.

A Reflection about the Impact Famously, Doug was:

impressively successful; his Wikipedia page provides a long list of highest awards, including the Presidential Medal (...) and the Turing Award (roughly equivalent to the Nobel Prize in Computing)

dissatisfied with his accomplishments, and feeling not understood

The reason for Doug’s notorious “you just don’t get it” was, I believe, a simple difference in perception: While Doug was creating a

paradigm, the people around him tried to understand his ideas as things or inventions — by fitting them into the existing paradigm (the usual way we humans create meaning). But those things and inventions in a paradigm are only placeholders, only variables pointing to relationships, which are the true substance of the paradigm (as x and y might only represent abstract roles in x = 2y). In a paradigm the things are yet to be developed, and Doug was producing initial instances to show the way. But those instances, Doug’s inventions, were adopted only when they could be turned into something that already fitted into the existing human systems, and the ways of doing things. During the last several decades of his life, Doug’s focus was on finding a place in the world ­ a community, a consortium of organizations… ­ where the Bootstrap Paradigm could be bootstrapped… This was the reason why initially the Bootstrap Institute led to Bootstrap Alliance — it was supposed to become that, the first NIC of NICs, to bootstrap systemic innovation. This never happened. And Doug never gave up. A most telling instances of this pattern are the “Bootstrap Dialogs”, televised at Stanford University Studios in 2008. Doug was already diagnosed with Alsheimers, and four days worth of dialogs were recorded in which Doug was joined by Jeff Rulifson and his daughter Christinac, his two closest collaborators, to record his final message to the world. Mostly Christina and Jeff spoke, summarizing Doug’s ideas. And when Doug would be invited to speak, he would typically say something to the effect “Wow, this will really need to be done! Can’t we find someone who would begin it? Who could this be?” Doug was making these utterances always with lots of emotion. Here are some examples: * examples. Doug passed away on July 2, 2013, leaving us this challenge.

Contemporary beginnings As before, the idea is not to be extensive or inclusive, but to illustrate the kind of things that may be combined, and much further

developed through the practice of systemic innovation, by showing examples that are already in place. If this article is considered as a strategy proposal, as it has been suggested, then what is presented here may be seen as the pieces that are already on the board, ready to be placed in relationships with one another and to enable ‘moves’ to improve our position on the board. While the pieces are discussed in this section, the planned initial ‘moves’ will be discussed in the next one.

Developments in Systems Sciences While Doug and his collaborators were looking for a place and a way to begin or as he would have preferred to say it bootstrap self­organization in knowledge work, this development was already taking place. And moreover, it was taking place at the point within the global knowledge work where it can most naturally begin to grow, and then scale and have a global impact — namely in the systems community! There are several reasons why global ‘bootstrapping’ might most naturally begin within and by the systems community:

the community profoundly aware of the need for systemic innovation, and for bootstrapping it; and indeed already doing that

has messages that the systems community owns can transform systemic practice; indeed its most basic intended gift to the world, its systemic purpose — namely to make the rest of the world aware of systems, and to foster systemic thinking and acting — is exactly the missing link that can trigger the chain of events leading to systemic innovation development

the systems community has the knowledge needed for developing the practice of systemic innovation — a small sample of which we have already seen

Alexander Laszlo, who was in 2013 at the focal point of this development, was living and working within driving distance from Doug.

Drawing much of his inspiration from Jantsch, Alexander was at the time President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, developing (as each president does) the society’s yearly conference, ISSS57 in Vietnam. So this is where our story begins. (S1) Collective Intelligence Enhancement Lab (CIEL). This is quite precisely a realization of Doug’s dream — an academic community beginning to self­organize to become collectively intelligent. The idea was conceived by George Pór, and he gave credit to Doug Engelbart… in his presentation. While the importance of CIEL as initial prototype and precedent cannot be overstated, the implementation was basic, and the reception was limited. George, Cathrin Ananda, … The precedent has been made (an academic community self­organizing to evolve collective intelligence capability); the systems community has been sensitized to this way of working, and the terrain is now ripe for it to continue. (S2) Cat Ba ­ Hai Phong governance prototype. The reason why ISSS57 was in Vietnam was that this was the site of another key prototype. This one was systems science­based governance of a whole region. The development began five years earlier, when Prof. Ockie Bosch from Adelaide AU was asked by UNESCO to develop a systemic intervention model for the Cat Ba region in Haiphong. The kind of problems addressed were for ex. fish farms ­ polluting the environment, ca. ½ may be sustained… But what do you do with the people? This is only the beginning. The 7­step process for comprehensive regional (systemic) change, including governance and economy ­ the first being bringing all the stakeholders together, putting everyone’s mental model of the situation down, combining those and finding the leverage point — how the situation may be transformed, so that no undesired side effects emerge? Ockie however soon realized that focusing on Cat Ba alone would not work, that the economy of the whole region needed to be worked with. A fortunate coincidence was that the regional leadership, with Dr. Nguyen Van Thanh on top, was highly educated and receptive to his ideas.

At the point when we met in Haiphong City, the region was governed by a combination of systems scientific and political structures. Indeed the whole thing was combined. In the newly formed ISSS chapter of Vietnam, the political leaders formed a significant part. (S3) Global Evolutionary Learning Lab (GELLabs). Ockie’s ideas did not stop there. The idea now was to (in Doug’s terminology) consider the Haiphong project as a NIC (or in Ockie’s terminology as an ‘evolutionary learning lab’ or ELL), and develop a NIC of NICs on top of that — which would then enable the projects practicing the methodlogy to learn from one another, and to evolve the best practice together. (S4) World Evolutionary Learning Tribe (WELTribe). Ockie focused the ELLabs on the seven­step method. There is, however, another possibility… To see it, it is best to think of what we are talking about as bootstrapping systemic innovation within the systems community — to make it capable of being present in the world, and making a difference. The scheme of WELTribe is then that there are two worlds meeting in it — the world of systems sciences, and the world of initiatives where change is taking place. The goal of WELTribe is to join those two worlds, and to allow mutual learning to happen. This joining is, more precisely, of two kinds. One is to simply join the initiatives. Think of them as the sites of (systemic) change. The idea is to develop the capabilities for those initiatives to know about each other and learn about each other. Hence this is again the NIC of NICs idea, here implemented as a way for the change initiatives to learn from each other; and to develop the tools and procedures for this learning. We’ll say more about this below. The other ‘joining’ is between the change initiatives and the systems sciences (the academic community). Here the communication is two­way: The systems community is present, observing and learning from those initiatives; and then feeding back into them, patterns that are emerging, enriched by systemic insights developed through the history of the systems sciences. Hence the whole WELTribe becomes systems science’s ‘arm’ in the systemic change initiatives — or systemic innovation in actual practice.

(S5) Think2Impact platform. It started as Ockie’s way to scale his work (the number of initiatives grew so much that he and Nam spend half of their time flying). And it turned into something much more — a platform interfacing the systems sciences with the rest of the world. The point is to think (systemically) in order to impact. So here we see Doug’s dream beginning to come true — at ISSS57 Vietnam, just a couple of weeks after he passed away! As we have seen, this bootstrapping was happening in a place in the global knowledge work where it might most naturally grow, and spread, and scale. (S6) Change the Game Initiative. An “open innovation hub” — whose goal is “societal change through innovation”

Developments in Knowledge Media R&D The development of social media, Wikipedia, Twitter, open science, open government (...) shows that knowledge media have become an enabler, even a driver for social­systemic change. The prototypes listed below are drawn from a restricted sample — the group we have been collaborating with (which is growing larger as we speak). The intention is not to provide a survey, but only an illustration — of the kind of projects that may be undertaken, or developed further in a much more thorough way, in the transdiscipline that will be hosted by the Systems Lab. I was recruited into the above developments by a lucky coincidence. It so happened that while the ISSS was having its 56 in San Jose, where Alexander Laszlo was inaugurated into the role of ISSS President and the above development was beginning, I was giving the talk about The Game­Changing Game (see below) at the Bay Area Future Salon in Palo Alto. Dr. Louis Klein, a prominent member of the systems community and “an internationally recognized expert in the field of systemic change management” showed up at my talk, and approached me afterwards by saying “I will connect you with some people”.

While it was of course inviting to join the CIEL and other developments by contributing directly, I felt strongly the potential of initiating or ‘bootstrapping’ something quite a bit larger, and therefore that I could contribute a lot more in a facilitator ­ connector role. A year later I began my talk at the ISSS57 by “I am here to build a bridge — between this community and its activities and interests, and the knowledge media R&D community, within which I have been working.” (REF: blog post, article). I talked briefly about Jantsch and Engelbart, and about the possibilities that would have open up had they met and collaborated — and about the contemporary opportunities that may be unleashed by bringing the systems sciences and the knowledge media research and development together. I hope that the projects listed below — most of which are living and developing prototypes — will give you a clear idea why. But first this historical note. In 2008, the year of global bifurcation, four knowledge­work organizations and initiatives were established:

Program for the Future, a Silicon Valley­based global initiative to continue and complete Doug Engelbart’s work and vision

DebateGraph—which has subsequently grown to be the premier ‘collective intelligence’ or collective sensemaking platform,

Global Sensemaking, a community of knowledge media researchers and developers, people developing social processes and technology for ‘collective sensemaking’ (understanding issues by combining and discussing relevant ideas, views and points of reference onine) such as — and including — DebateGraph

Knowledge Federation — a community developing the theory and practice of exactly what Vannevar Bush was advocating

It has turned out that all along subsets of the same community of people populated and were active in those four initiatives. And more and more we have been coming together and working together. It is those people that were now bridged with the systems community. What follows is a brief account of some of the prototypes, to be built with. (K1) The Game­Changing Game is a generic procedure for systemic innovation, completed at the Knowledge Federation Workshop Palo Alto 2012, and subsequently launched at the Bay Area Future Salon. The

Game is played in real­life, by ‘playing’ one’s ‘career game’ in a game­changing way (through systemic innovation). There are two categories of players: The A­player are students, entrepreneurs, or generally people in transient phases in life; the Z­players are professors, investors, or generally people in power position; their role is to enable the A­players to ‘play’ in a game­changing way (i.e. by changing systems, instead of adapting to the existing ones). The Club of Zagreb, a re­design of The Club of Rome, was initiated in 2012, to focus the efforts to improve the contemporary human condition on systemic innovation via The Game­Changing Game. (K2) DebateGraph is an online platform dedicated to fulfilling the mentioned indictment by Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener (to focus efforts on knowledge organization and sharing). Methodologically, Debategraph was based on Horst Rittel’s “issue­based information systems”. Relevant documents, positions, insights… relevant to an issue are gathered and organized through crowdsourcing; you may think of it as ‘the Wikipedia for relationships’. With CNN, the White House, the UK Prime Minister's Office, The Independent, and the UK Foreign Office as clients, and millions of users worldwide, DebateGraph is at the forefront of real­world knowledge work systemic change. One night very late, During the Knowledge Federation Workshop Barcelona 2011 in the lobby of our hotel, David Price (co­founder of DebateGraph) was telling me how Peter Baldwin (the other co­founder), while he was a cabinet minister in Australian government, saw how rarely the issues are truly understood in political debate; and decided to do something about it. Peter retired from politics, bought himself a house in Australian Highlands, learned how to program the computer and… I asked David “How is it possible that a man who is a self­made programmer could create such a well­designed and successful platform?” David answered “Peter is a genius”. (K3) Thrivability Strategy is a book in the making, which asks and answers the questions “Is global thriving still possible?” and “What do we need to do to get there?” (see the Prolog) by introducing systemic innovation by presenting more stories and more sides than we did here. Although this manuscript is still being written, we mention it here as a placeholder for a strategically central piece — information (viral, accessible, sticky, shocking…) that can engage and inflame popular political, ethical, entrepreneurial… passions and sensibilities, by exhibiting the condition of our systems and — the

other side of the systemic innovation coin — the immense opportunities for positive change—and personal and institutional achievement—that can be unleashed by being creative and innovative in a systemic way. We have been developing this theme through a series of sketches:

Chapter 4 (the password is “Dubrovnik”) of the book manuscript “Informing Must be Designed” suitably recreates the conventional political agenda, by exploring the question “Now that we have democracy in politics and free choice on the market — have we reached the solution of the perennial search for a just social system? Or is there still something large and basic that we may find out, and re­create?

The Welcome map of The Game­Changing Game, where the participants are invited to choose between one of eight uncommonly high goals (such as “solve global problems”, “make a fortune in business” and “save lives and reduce suffering”; and the Vision Quest module where it is shown why those and other similar feats are made accessible through systemic innovation

Lecture Toward a Scientific Understanding and Solution of Problems, where systemic innovation is introduced as a ‘scientific’ (meaningful, rational, up­to­date…) approach to problems of any kind, and the large contemporary issues in particular — by developing an analogy between societal institutions and organ systems in an organism, and showing in plastic and palpable terms in what sort of conditions those societal ‘organ systems’ really are (how can we expect to sustain our ‘societal organism’ with that sort of ‘anatomy’ and ‘physiology’!?)

Blog post Ode to Self­Organization — Part One presents a fictional story­telling vision of the transition to sustainable / thriving world through development of systemic innovation

This article This whole opus may be used to motivate betting (in business, politics, research, making the world a better place…) on systemic innovation as ‘the innovation for the 21st century’. (K4) The Community of Impact. So what’s been keeping us from making a turn? What is keeping us from thriving? Through a series of experiences, culminating at the Knowledge Federation 2012 workshop in Dubrovnik — we noticed a recurring pattern, where at our meetings good plans and prototypes are made,

and then everyone returns home to the business as usual. Sam Hahn (co­founder of Program for the Future), David Price (co­founder of DebateGraph and of Global Sensemaking) and myself (co­founder of Knowledge Federation) decided to have daily dialogs on Skype, to see if we may begin to evolve a remedy. The result has been The Community of Impact, whose tools and techniques — while already concrete — are of course expected to evolve, and indeed continuously. More precisely, the task we have undertaken was to “bootstrap the theory, practice and ethos of collaborative systemic innovation for the well­being of all”, by developing:

(trust, bonds, sincerety, and thereby) a community ethos among ourselves that may scale to a healthy and strong ‘community of impact’

tools, processes and projects One of the core ideas with which we are working is weaving a transparent and consciously motivated web of relationships between people, goals and projects — through the practice of “communication and commitment to collaborate” or CCC writing, and making the resulting alignments visible online (this function is currently implemented by using DebateGraph). Since the hindrances to impact we have undertaken to overcome — and the opportunities for systemic impact that may thereby be unleashed — are much larger than what is commonly appreciated, and central to the theme of this essay, allow me to briefly explore them in a reflection.

Think of Ford and the other automobile factories a century ago as an attempt to innovate at the level of the whole (transportation) system (to substitute the automobile for the horse as the personal means of transportation). Their success opened up enormously large opportunities for success in a variety of other lines of business (oil drilling, gasoline stations, road building, automobile insurance… it worth noticing that for ex. in 1980 all fortune five companies we either oil or automobile producers); and viceversa — automobile producers could not have succeeded without all those other business being aligned (initially of course in some minimal degree).

Systemic impact depends on (re­)alignment. But systemic impact is also hindered by alignment — with the existing systemic solutions and structures. As we all know from experience — to be successful, we need to fit in! Add to this the most interesting fact that most of our alignment is not conscious but through ‘socialization’ (our socialization indeed is alignment) and therefore pre­conscious, and you will have a good idea of what seems to be the main hindrance to systemic innovation. As everything else in this creative sandbox, Community of Impact is only a placeholder, a beginning, and an invitation — to evolve a specific line of activity together. (K5) Knowledge Federation has self­organized as a transdiscipline developing the agenda that Bush, Wiener and Engelbart advocated, mainly through systemic innovation projects. At the Knowledge Federation workshop organized within the Triple Helix IX Conference at Stanford University, the transdisciplinary organization developed and practiced by Knowledge Federation was introduced as ‘an enabler of systemic innovation’. (K6) BCN2011 Good Journalism Prototype (see also this Prezi) is a public informing (design) prototype. A number of characteristics distinguish this journalism prototype from the conventional journalism:

it’s democratic — direct voice is given to the people (‘the crowd’); news can be acquired by pull not only push (readers can subscribe to the kinds of information they want to follow); and most importantly — readers are empowered to see and resolve their issues in a systemic way

empowers systemic innovation — experts are engaged to identify the systemic causes of perceived problems, explain them clearly and accessibly, and identify points and strategies of systemic intervention

it’s a living (evolving) system — a transdiscipline is developed around the prototype to update it continuously; by participating in this transdiscipline, scientists who have relevant insights (what might be wrong with journalism; how it might be improved, for ex. by using a new enabling technology) can render them not only in academic articles, but also directly, through systemic change

The Knowledge Federation Workshop Barcelona 2011, where this prototype was drafted, was itself a prototype of systemic innovation in a specific area (journalism), through transdisciplinary collaboration of field experts with knowledge media researchers, collective intelligence experts and other stakeholders. (K7)Knowledge Gardening is an extension and implementation of Doug’s Dynamic Knowledge Repository idea, combined with some core ideas from Topic Mapping — developed by Jack Park. TopicSpaces is a Knowledge Gardening platform in development. (K8) TNC Prototype shows how an academic result — when it brings insights that have relevance well beyond the academic field where it originated — may be federated, i.e.

translated into accessible language — by representing the practically most relevant insights by an accessible, in this case phenomenological model; linking the elements of the model with sections in the article and, when needed, adding explanatory recorded interviews with the author; in effect — by transforming the conventional research article into a multimedia object providing insights on several levels, and allowing for the verification of high­level (practical, widely accessible) insights based on low­level (technical) ones

placed online; linked with other related insights; made accessible to criticism and comments; made known and available to institutions, communities and people to whom it may make a difference

brought into the public sphere through a combination of public dialog and media action

The TNC Prototype also serves as a showcase for knowledge federation research, showing how a variety of knowledge­work tools and technologies (in this case Compendium, Cohere, video, Acrobat Professional) may be combined together to create new knowledge­work processes, and systemic solutions. (K9) Learning Health Systems is an application frontier where knowledge federation is being successfully applied. It is important to add the Health Futures initiative by the US Dept of Defense within the group of "experiments" or components for Engelbart's ideas because the health futures initiative was an evolutionary step towards the Systems Lab in several ways.

Health futures initiative ­ HFI (a think tank of experts engaging with senior leaders in DoD) was intended to incorporate Networked Improvement Communities ­ Mei Lin Fung was engaged in the effort from 2009­2013 in order to bring that component into the initiative. Over the course of the past 5 years, HFI had cross membership with PFTF (Mei Lin, Eileen Clegg), KF (Jack Park, David Price, Mei Lin), Debategraph (David Price, Mei Lin, Eileen Clegg, Jack Park) and Global Sensemaking (Jack Park, Michael Knowles ­ was was introduced into the project by Jeff Conklin). The outcomes to date have lead to real world beginings of networked improvement communities with intention and purpose of improving health within the members of the communities (not limited to geography) Breakthrough Collaboratives for Health, which outlines a nexus of practical experiments in community interwoven with research institutions and public policy and decision making, resource allocation by public, private and not for profit institutions. ­ The community as a learning system for health ­ report by the US Institute of Medicine ­ Emerging interest by research funding in the US on the concept of the community as a learning system (NSF, NIH) The latest, strong impetus for systems labs are triggered by a series of breakdowns in health economics, health technologies and the healthcare paradigm in the US of unsustainably high costs for unacceptably low outcomes and terribly social impact (50% of bankruptcies in the US are due to medical costs). In 2014, two cabinet secretaries has resigned due to not understanding the operational impact of systemic change in health science, health technologies and social­behavioral­economic factors. The White House has issued a report May 29 2014 "Systems Engineering can Improve Healthcare" The need for performance measures that effectively tie inputs to outcomes can be much better addressed by new tools in accounting (activity based costing) and finance (balanced scorecard) ­ both of which are now coming much more vividly into the mainstream consciousness, because current immature Profit and Loss accounting measures are not leading to the outcomes that are needed by society's corporations, government, not for profits and public institutions.

Induct Software, a corporate stakeholder in Knowledge Federation, has been working on the forefront of applying information technology and open innovation to develop health and healthcare networks. (K10) Program for the Future Challenge. At the 45th anniversary of The Demo, the Program for the Future launched at GooglePlex in Mountain View launched the challenge — to understand Doug’s work, and to create 2018 Demo, that would have similar impact on the development in this century as Doug’s 1968 Demo had on the Silicon Valley ones. To issue the call we joined two points: Alan Key’s “What will th3e Silicon Valley do…” and Doug’s (to Sam Hahn): 3.6% was developed. The challenge is to set a new direction for development of IT. A quest. The opportunity is to attract the Silicon Valley players into the systemic innovation game. Google? Google lecture, for which this article is a sketch. Also a template of how to begin systemic innovation in a domain (...) (K10) Systemic Innovation Course. This course both teaches systemic innovation, and aims to be a state­of­the­art project applying systemic innovation to education. What is being developed is a radical re­design of the conventional university course model — around a course that teaches systemic innovation. Here are some of its more innovative patterns:

the course operates as a design project where the students and the faculty together co­design the course and its learning materials for the next­generation students

the students are empowered to design, rather than simply adopt, the system in which they live and work; the course begins by the students and the faculty co­designing the course and its curriculum, based on the previous­year’s recommendations; it ends by creating recommendations for the coming year

the course is federated internationally; it is co­created by international experts and students — and offered to learners worldwide

learning is flexible both regarding what is learned, and the time and space of learning

Systemically, education is evolution (autopoiesis); we re­create the world with every new generation of students. The question is whether we re­create a rigid and dying world, or a world capable of renewal and change? This course systematically recreates the conventional educational patterns to create an education for a living society. This model has been evolving through a series of prototypes:

University of Oslo Information Design course, see Chapter 3 in this article

University of Oslo Socio­Semantic Web and Knowledge Federation course, see the course description and lecture schedule with learning resources

Inter­University Centre Dubrovnik course Systemic Innovation for Collective Creativity designed and offered by Knowledge Federation

University of Oslo course Doug Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution — The Program for the Future, see the course description and the lecture schedule with learning resources

(K12) Design epistemology and polyscopy. A purposeful, creative and academically solid departure from the habitual knowledge­work practices may need to begin by rebuilding the foundations. The foundations for knowledge work need to rebuilt also for intrinsic, academic or epistemological reasons. A prototype new foundations is described in the article Design Epistemology; a prototype informing is drafted in the book manuscript Informing Must Be Designed.

Systems Lab The Systems Lab is a virtual place, currently envisioned to be placed within the Think2Impact platform, where knowledge media researchers and developers will team up with systems scientists and other stakeholders, to develop or as we call it 'bootstrap' systemic solutions — first for the systems community, and later also beyond.

Or — to continue our story line — where contemporary and future Jantschs and Engelbarts will be able to meet and work together. So suppose that Jantsch and Engelbart did meet; what would have they told each other? What could they have achieved together that none of them was able to achieve alone? Let me try…

Erich: But Doug, this is just wonderful! Think that all this time I’ve been looking for someone on the technology side to begin to innovate systemically. And that all this time you’ve been doing exactly that — and right here in my neighborhood! Doug: Of course, Eric! I don’t think I could’ve done what I did even in technology in any other way. How else could I depart from the conception of what computers and computing were at the time (as they developed for military/scientific number crunching)... and truly innovate? The ‘augmentation of human capabilities’, which has guided my innovation work from the very beginning, was really just another name for ‘systemic thinking’ as I understand this term. “Systemic thinking” is, as I see it, exactly what it takes to make innovation develop in a positive direction!

Eric: I know, Doug. That is exactly why I became a systems scientist. I saw that systems thinking is the key to making a shift, to “changing the world” in the natural way, namely through the kind of innovation that truly improves our lives and condition. Doug: It is, isn’t it. But somehow fostering systemic thinking is not easy. It seems to me that the way the society works, and we people in it, is for most of us just simply ‘reality’; it is something we think with — by placing ideas into its context; it is not something we can think about. Erich: Indeed — that’s what I have been experiencing myself. What makes me feel funny is that I am a systems scientist; and helping people see systems, understand systems and change systems, i.e. helping people think systemically — that is our systemic reason for existence! But I haven’t been able to come across! Not even to my colleagues here at Berkeley!

Doug: Neither have I, Eric! We are all victims of a paradox: We communicate by writing. But writing no longer helps — until we learn how to organize and make sense of and communicate what’s being written! This is what Vannevar Bush wrote years ago — and that’s what inspired me to work in this direction. Erich: But what else can we do? Doug: Have you thought of bootstrapping? Erich: I guess not. What is it? Doug: Instead of telling people what they should do — more precisely, instead of committing our ideas about what the people out there should do to academic articles, which are not read by those people — why don’t we just simply begin systemic innovation and systemic change here, amongst ourselves? Eric: Surely, Doug, that sounds like a reasonable way to begin with. We can surely do that. The problem I still see is — how does this scale? I mean — how can something that you and I and our lab is doing turn into shared, common practice in other sciences? Not to speak about the governance, and banking...? How can we change institutions out there? Doug: Bootstrapping is like lifting yourself by your own bootstraps. It’s what computers do when they start running — they first run a small built­in program that reads a bit larger program, which then reads the whole operating system from the disk. The idea of bootstrapping as I am using this term is to initiate among ourselves the kind of transformation that can lead to the transformation in the entire larger system. All my work has been about augmenting our collective capabilities. The idea now is that we simply begin to self­organize, with the help of technology, to augment our ability to influence other systems… Our ability to show systems to the people out there to begin with. You know, I’ve been dreaming about that — a real­world academic community to begin to bootstrap systemic solutions. And what could be a more natural choice for this community than the community of systems scientists? Eric: Wow, Doug, But this is a most beautiful coincidence! Of course — that’s what we need to do.. Isn’t what you are

talking about exactly “design for evolution” — the approach I’ve been developing and advocating in recent years? I mean — we can’t go in and change the systems out there; but we can design things that can impact the evolution of the systems out there — and that’s what we must do!

And that is what the Systems Lab will be doing. Metaphorically, the Systems Lab may be thought of as an organ beginning to evolve in the midst of the systems community, to give it the capability to re­create its own knowledge­work tools and systemic organization—and thereby also the capability to re­create the knowledge­work tools and systemic organization of the larger community. Hence we may imagine the Systems Lab as a place in the global organism where the restructuring of this organism — to suit the ‘needs’ of the moment, including the challenges that need to be responded to, the state­of­the­art in systems science and the available information and other technology — is about to begin. This article will complement the Systems Lab by extending a call to action — and providing suitable background, thus fueling attention and energy into this undertaking. We envision practicing the way of working where we focus on several systemic prototypes, and forming a transdiscipline around each of them, to evolve it and update it continuously — and at the same time develop and exchange insights about systemic innovation itself. Each of the prototypes will then naturally be a NIC ­ for some specific area. The Systems Lab will operate as a NIC of NICs. There are several prototypes to be taken up. (SL1) The Systems Lab and the Think2Impact. There is hardly a distinction, because the Systems Lab will begin to operate as a community within Think2Impact; by designing itself, it will be producing recommendations for the design of Think2Impact. Since Think2Impact is envisioned as the interface between the systems community and the rest of the world, this will then be a natural way to bring knowledge media R&D and systems science ideas to bear upon the design of the ‘speech and action organs’ or the systems community, to enable it to have a say in rebuilding the systems within and beyond itself.

(SL2) GELLabs and WELTools. With systems community now reaching out toward the world to directly influence systemic change (read “have impact”) — GELLabs and WELTools emerge as two sides of the same coin, or the Yin and the Yang of this undertaking: GELLabs corresponding roughly to the ‘planning’ side of Jantsch’s systemic innovation, while WELTools will be ‘curating for emergence’ by listening, interconnecting and linking the initiatives. At the same time, in Doug’s vocabulary, both will be operating by following the NIC of NICs pattern. Hence this will be an opportunity to create a NIC of NICs whose task is to connect the systems community with the change happening outside, and help it evolve and learn its means to influence change (have impact). (SL3) CIEL and Hermes — again two sides of the same coin knowledge production within the systems community; CIEL bootstrapping new ways of learning and communicating within the systems community, making the community collectively intelligent (this being powered by new media and systems, changing continuously, representing always the state of the art…); Hermes bootstrapping ways for the systems community to co­create key agile world­changing messages, and to place them into politics and the public sphere. See the strategy developed for Hermes. (SL4) Other projects. In addition to the ones already described, we are now beginning the project Authentic Hercegovina — which is a many­sided intervention into the economy and culture of a region; developing a state­of­the­art in architectural & cultural revitalization; a new model of tourism… and corporate business model. From the point of view of the PFTF Challenge, Systems Lab becomes a 2018 demo candidate par excellence; as such then draws further attention of corporate stakeholders (Google? Google talk…) bringing into being exactly those components of Doug’s vision that were not able to manifest during his time.

Concluding remarks So what is systemic innovation? This question may be answered in two subtly different ways.

The first is to talk about ‘scaling’ innovation — to the level of large and basic societal systems (governance, economy, finance, science, education, public informing…), as we did in [REF]. As we have seen, this sort of innovation is an informed or reasonable response to ‘global issues’ or to the contemporary problematique. But it is also more: If we think about innovation as the kind of changes in technology and in the way we do things that make work more effective and efficient, and thereby save time and effort, then it is conceivable (see (Sxx), the Thrivability Strategy story above) that innovation at the level of the systems to which we give our daily work — to turn it into socially useful effects — could be the most fruitful area for innovation. Given that, as Doug has envisioned and demonstrated, the new information technology is a natural enabler for this sort of innovation, systemic innovation has potential to become the innovation for the 21st century, and for the Information Age — just as the innovation at the level of things (the airplane, the washing machine, the television…) has marked the progress in the 20th century, and the Industrial Age.

For similar reasons, systemic innovation interpreted in this way also merits to be perceived as the democracy for the 21st century, as Bela Banathy observed: I have become increasingly convinced that even if people fully develop their potential, they cannot give direction to their lives, they cannot forge their destiny, they cannot take charge of their future—unless they also develop competence to take part directly and authentically in the design of the systems in which they live and work, and reclaim their right to do so. This is what true empowerment is about.

(Bela Banathy, Designing Social Systems in a Changing World)

The second interpretation is only a touch broader and also more natural — it is that systemic innovation is simply innovation that is systemic — that is, motivated and oriented by systemic thinking, instead of ‘linear’, ‘cause­and­effect’ type of goals, or by relying on the market. As we have seen, systemic innovation interpreted in this way is the essence of the vision that Eric Jantsch had for the development of technology:

The expression “joint systems of society and technology” is especially worth reflecting on. Systemic innovation according to Jantsch includes but is not limited to the task of recreating institutions; it may well also be pure technological innovation, provided that it is motivated and done in a systemic way. — what is needed to turn technological, social­systemic and all other innovation into an asset, not a liability. Interpreted in this way, systemic innovation is simply systemic thinking brought into practice; applied in matters where it will make the greatest positive difference. But isn’t this exactly the social role of the systems sciences, and more broadly of the systems movement? Isn’t that the very vision that we have inherited from von Bertalanffy, Wiener and other great forefathers, which it is our privilege and mission to put into practice? Systemic innovation is indeed quite precisely just a name we are giving to the state of affairs where the systems sciences and the systems movement have had the impact they can and need to have. So what’s been keeping us from fulfilling it? Why have the calls to action issued by Jantsch, and Egelbart, and Banathy — and of so many other giants on whose shoulders we are attempting to stand — not been answered? I believe that the answer is that systemic innovation is not something that we the people can just simply do. This new set of values, principles of action and responsibilities — to take charge and be creative and proactive on a new level — is something we now need to evolve:

We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity, and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.

(Banathy: Guided Evolution of Society—A Systems View”) It feels reassuring that ‘evolutionary learning’ is now such a prevalent theme in the systems community, that it should be no surprise if our role will be to champion it and lead it in the larger community. How exactly should we do that? What precisely should be our next step? What will be the difference that makes a difference? As we have pointed out, the academic business as usual won’t be enough. Indeed, as long as we continue to obey to our existing socialization, and confine our repertoire of action to writing books and articles — even writing books about conscious evolution, and even me writing this article about systemic innovation — we are still only talking about guided systemic evolution, but we are not actually doing that! So it is again reassuring to see the next step already written on the walls of the systems community. Here it is (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Being the systems you want to see in the world — the idea whose time has come. This photo ideographically points to the essence of the proposal extended in this paper. It is interesting to observe, in the context of our historical narrative, that this — being the systems we want to see in the world

— corresponds rather precisely with Doug Engelbart’s ‘bootstrap strategy’ and ‘bootstrap paradigm.’ It is quite precisely what he was hoping to see happen. But there is of course more in the message of this writing than this simple practical step. What this is calling us to do is to change our self­perception — from being conventional academics, to being a system within a system, and then self­organizing as it may best suit this role. To see what this might mean, concretely, In conventional research, we aim to create new results, something that has not yet been published. A good result is technical — uses all the machinery, conceptual, mathematical — of systems sciences. And it’s done when it’s published. So we create a new system — where the challenge is just about opposite: We need to be able to put together insights that are so basic to the systems community that one could be embarassed even mentioning them in its midst; and then to render them in a language (visual, metaphorical, story­like…) that is accessible and attractive to everyone. And more broadly, then, to create a communication infrastructure that both creates such messages, and places them strategically into the public sphere. As we have seen, this sort of system has already been planned for development within the Systems Lab. Is this legitimate? What might this action mean in the conventional academic scheme of things of systems sciences? How can we relate to it in the conventional paradigm? In what way do we need to understand this? In what remains I put the scenario together briefly by fitting it to a familiar template — the ‘new paradigm’. Donella Meadows has famously identified “the ability to“power to transcend paradigms” as the most effective way to intervene in a system. And Thomas Kuhn has identified new paradigms as the most creative interventions into academic systems, which both eliminate anomalies and open up whole new frontiers to research.

The act of ‘being the systems’, and the corresponding self­perception and value matrix — is the beginning of a new paradigm. To see this, let us revisit briefly Thomas Kuhn’s account of a textbook example, the template, the Coernican Revolution (* this might be unnecessary, tedious? Or at least must be shortened *)...

In 1953, Nicholas Copernicus proposed to increase the accuracy and simplicity of astronomical theory by transferring to the sun many astronomical functions previously attributed to the earth. Before his proposal the earth had been the fixed center about which astronomers computed the motions of stars and planets. A century later the sun had, at least in astronomy, replaced the earth as the center of planetary motions, and the earth had lost its unique astronomical status, becoming one of a number of moving planets. Many of modern astronomy’s principal achievements depend upon this transposition. A reform in the fundamental concepts of astronomy is therefore the first of the Copernican Revolution’s meanings. Astronomical Reform is not, however, the Revolution’s only meaning. Other radical alterations in man’s understanding of nature rapidly followed the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus in 1943. Many of these innovations, which culminated a century and a half later in the Newtonian conception of the universe, were unanticipated by­products of Copernicus’ astronomical theory. Copernicus suggested the earth’s motion in an effort to improve the techniques used in predicting the astronomical positions of celestial bodies. For other sciences his suggestion simply raised new problems, and until these were solved the astronomer’s concept of the universe was incompatible with that of other scientists. During the seventeenth century, the reconciliation of these other sciences with Copernican astronomy was an important cause of the general intellectual ferment now known as the scientific revolution. [...] Even its consequences for science do not exhaust the Revolution’s meaning. [...] Initiated as a narrowly technical, highly mathematical revision of classical astronomy, the Copernican theory became one focus for the tremendous controversies in religion, in philosophy, and in social theory,

which, during the two centuries following the discovery of America, set the tenor of the modern mind.

So here too, we have a practical issue — impact of systems sciences, the paradox or anomaly of non­impact, and the Systems Lab and corresponding evolution, ‘being the systems’ as action. Small and doable. (FOOTNOTE: There is a point where the analogy breaks down: this new paradigm is not supposed to replace the existing one; only to complement it and augment it, by giving visibility and impact to its results. As Kuhn would have said it, the two paradigms are ‘incommensurable’.) But let us take this one step, legitimize this new self­perception and see its consequences develop. In Academia. And in society.

References TBA

Appendix I To what degree is systemic thinking part of our public awareness and policy? The following three vignettes might provide an illustration. Vignette 1: 2013 Norwegian elections by Leo Ajkic — a snapshot showing how the young voters in Norway are advised to (follow what appears to be the academic orthodoxy and) pick an issue that is for them most important, and vote for the party that best represents this issue. Leo asks, and is explicitly re­assured, that the resulting policy will be the one that is best for everyone. Vignette 2: Undermining the Green policy in 2013 Norwegian elections — a very brief vignette reminding us how little room there is for systemic understanding of issues in contemporary political debate. Vignette 3: Bill Gates in Norway. The background for this story is that the enormous wealth that ended up in the hands of the few during

the past decades may also be (systemically) good news — because some of this wealth (unlike the conventional academic funding) can now be freely invested into creative world­changing projects.

When last year Bill Gates visited Norway, he got lots of publicity in Norwegian media — as ‘the wealthiest man on the planet’, who is at the same time a great benefactor. In the daily news program on Norwegian TV Gates is asked in what way is his foundation investing into solutions to contemporary issues. “We are attacking problems one by one”, he explained, “Beginning from the ones where we can realistically make a difference. Our current focus is on polio, because we are close to eradicating it completely. Once that is done, we’ll move on to the next problem.” As you might know, Norway is an oil­rich country; but also a country of nature­loving, well­intentioned people. So after Gates, Jens Stoltenberg who was then the President of Norway appears on the screen. “We too want to contribute to the solutions to world issues,” says Stoltenberg. “But we haven’t really done the thinking about how to do that. Bill has. And Bill is a smart man. So we too will be donating our money to his fund.” The collaboration continues with the new government — and Gates receives still more publicity.