President's Address: ISSS 45th Annual International Conference and Meeting
Being in Service: Lip Service? Room Service? Self Service? Protective or Military Service? Social or Public Service? Full Service?
Harold G. Nelson
President, Advanced Design Institute,
2442 NW Market St. #112
Seattle, WA, 98107
USA
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206.282.5994
Key Words: service, design, systems, systems designers
1. Introduction
Systems thinking, the systems approach, or systems science is inherently about understanding relationships. Two systemic relationships that I have been particularly interested in are related to each other in a critically important way. The first relationship of interest is the one between systems thinking and design action. Systems and design are two terms that are often conjoined, as in systems design. A fundamental characteristic of the relationship between the two, I believe, is that systems thinking is the logic of design.
The second relationship of interest is the one that is formed between systems designers and those who are members of the social systems in which systems practitioners obtain or assume agency. My overall interest at this time is in exploring the meta-relationship that links these two sets of relationships—systems design and social systems designers. This critical link, I believe, is that of service. This link is critical because it has a direct connection to human intention, ethics and purpose.
2. Service
My President’s Theme for the 45th annual ISSS conference (July 2001), Systems Science in Service to Humanity, is an acknowledgement of a significant facet of life in today's world. Currently, many of us in technically developed regions of the world are enjoying an increased standard of life, which we have obtained as a consequence of new scientific breakthroughs and technologic developments. Concomitant with this success however, there is a growing awareness regarding the impact that applied-science or technology has on our quality of life, way of life, or even the possibility of life. There is a growing universal concern regarding the apparent conflicts between growth or development and sustainability, between the interrelationships among businesses, governments and scientific interest groups and between the haves and have-nots, both economically and technologically. The list of concerns society has in relationship to the artifacts of science and technology is growing daily.
These concerns are the consequence, in part, of the traditional relationship between the activities of science and society. This relationship is exemplified by the motto for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair:
Science Finds
o
Industry Applies
o
Man Conforms
This relationship, as a type of service relationship, is very different from that identified with design however. It is a self-service relationship rather than an other-service relationship. In the discovery-driven culture of science, basic scientists ideally pursue their own curiosity and interests with the hope that society will find some utility in their discoveries or inventions. In the innovation-driven culture of applied science, the service of the technologist or engineer is more closely related to that associated with designers, but they, the applied scientists, are bound by the constraints of scientific traditions and methods that preempt their reach. Designers, especially systems designers, are not limited by the obligations of scientific method in the same way. This allows them to engage in a more inclusive or full service relationship—a covenant— with the lives and circumstances of influenced social systems, including consideration for ethical and esthetic values.
Science, however, provides a comfort zone for people in that it provides the stability and certainty of truths as facts, natural laws, and invariant principles overlaid on an unstable, complex and unpredictable world. Western science, as a form of collaborative inquiry, discerns that which can be considered to be generally or universally true. As such, it must logically be treated by researchers and the general public as an activity that is to be kept separate from the pollution of other belief systems or modes of inquiry. Systems thinkers, although good scientists, cannot sever or ignore their relationships however. Most especially, an interrelationship with the world’s many ways of engaging in inquiry and action. The systems approach is about relationship and systems thinkers must not only think about relationships but must be in relationship.
The types of relationships that systems thinkers ought to have with others have not been as carefully considered as have, for example, the theoretical and pragmatic explications of systems themselves. Systems thinking, as an inclusive form of inquiry and action, has been thought through, but with an emphasis on how to describe and explain systems primarily. In addition, an extensive amount of effort has been put into predicting and controlling the behavior of systems, whether natural or artificial. There is a problem with this focus, however, as it relates to the systemic relationships of service.
Description and explanation do not prescribe what actions ought to be taken, or what changes should be made in any particular situation. In addition, prediction and control do not justify the means or ends of actions and intentional changes. The insights gained through good systems science are necessary, but insufficient, for defining intentionality and purpose in human affairs. Systems scientists — those who describe and explain the relationships of things in the world — need to be in instrumental relationships with those who live or will live, in the world. That is, they ought to be in a service relationship
Significantly, service is a part of the ISSS tradition as stated in the Bylaws of the Society:
Article II: Purposes and Objectives
2.2 Objectives
Objective F. To encourage applications of systems thinking to solutions of specific problems; in particular, to help to focus research and promote efforts toward the service of humanity (my emphasis).
Bylaws; International Society for the Systems Sciences, 1997
Service is a word that has many meanings, even from a systems perspective. It has a sense of ennoblement at the same time that it has many negative connotations for the many reasons given by James Hillman below (Hillman 1995).
Service offends deep strata of human dignity. We may all want service, but who wants to give it? For service still means menial service (not banking, brokering, telephoning, teaching, installing, diagnosing or writing). The first trouble lies in the word, which invites in it cousins—serf, servile, servant, servitude, servility, all descendants from the common Latin ancestor, servus, slave. Service, as it is defined in our culture, is hardly empowering, or empowering only to those persons who can command service and the system for which we slave.
James Hillman
In education one studies the liberal arts, not the servile arts, a representative and enduring division of mind from body, as well as the aversion to submissive relationships rather than command relationships. Service is perceived as putting ones self in an inferior role at the beck and call of demands from above or below — depending on your world view. These may be systemic service relationships but they are without much appeal to anyone except martyrs or those who willingly sacrifice their own self-interest for the benefit of others. However, service can be seen in a more positive and immensely more appealing light. There are other systemic service relationships that do not require self-sacrifice or martyrdom.
One such form of service can be described as the self-referential relationship of self-serving—in the best sense of the word. In the search for truth (scientific, artistic or religious) one serves one's own purposes. Artists express their own feelings, emotions and insights; scientists follow their own curiosity and professional interests — both of which are important foundations of personal and academic freedom.
Another form of service—other-serving—is different in kind. It is not about helping, fixing, or changing the 'other' however (Remen 1996).
Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not a relationship between equals….Service is a relationship between equals….Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving, like healing is mutual. There is no debt.
Naomi Remen
This form of service is based on a systemic relationship of mutuality and dignity. This type of service is distinct from helping, which by its very nature creates a unilateral relationship. In a helping relationship, all power and resources reside in a dominant role –—the helper — leaving the 'other' in a position of helplessness or with a feeling of being indebted. In a relationship where there is an equal exchange of value, of equivalence, there is no inequity, inferiority, domination, debt incurred, or unilateral control.
Exploring more fully this latter form of service, as an intentional relationship between systems thinkers and 'others', is extremely important for the health, legitimacy and success of the systems movement and organizations such as ISSS. My hope is that the 45th annual conference, with the theme of service, will have made a contribution to that dialogue.
3. Personal Background in Service
My own interest in the idea of service, I am sure, had its roots in my having grown up in a traditional community in rural Montana, a state in the Western United States. The frontier era of European settlement still echoed in the region where friends were neighbors and neighbors were friends (mostly). Everyone served one another’s interests, informally filling in, for the moment, the services that would later become institutionalized through professional or governmental agency.
My interest in service has had a long gestation period. My youthful preoccupation with art, sports and old cars were redirected along a dramatic new trajectory during my high school years because of the Soviet Union’s successful launch, in 1957, of an orbiting satellite with, what for me, was the strange sounding name, Sputnik. Authorities quickly gave science and engineering curriculums priority, in order to help assure a win in the technology race between East and West during the Cold War. My classmates and I were all introduced to a more scientific and technical oriented high school curriculum as a consequence.
After graduating from high school I joined the U.S. Navy. There I was given the opportunity to become a guided missile technician. I received intense training in basic electrical engineering, electronics, aerodynamics, test equipment and special weapons. My training consumed nearly two years of concentrated effort altogether, giving me a substantial grounding in technological skills and a concomitant technical perspective. During this period I was introduced, by a friend, to some of the more exciting advanced technology being developed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) including the Moon Lander, computers the size of tie tacks and cameras that could see through walls.
The seminal experience of being on board a guided missile frigate, manning a battle station, where I was positioned literally inside a computer system that controlled weapons of immense power and destruction, triggered some reflective thinking on my part about the relationship of technology and technical people like myself. Technologies that were created to respond to human needs based on concerns that ran the gamut from hope to fear; moon landers to missiles. As my technical military experience progressed I became even more interested in the relationship of technology and society. I was interested in not only the how of technology but the why. That is, I was becoming interested in how technology really served the best interests of all of us.
As a consequence of my experience of success, educationally, in the military, I felt confident about becoming a professional and entered Montana State University to become an architectural engineer. My long suppressed passion for art redirected my professional goals shortly after entering the university and I switched my academic major to architecture, a profession famed for demanding both art and science. My professional training and career in architecture was designed to focus on providing a professional service.
This straightforward intention turned out to be much more complicated in reality however. The business of being a professional was always a compromise. The idealistic desire to only do good and no harm, while at the same time dealing with politics, economics and other less noble aspects of human nature, always left me dissatisfied with the inevitable trade-off. In any project or program, certain people’s interests were being served, but to the detriment of others. In addition, many social and natural systems were being dis-served as a consequence of not having the legal status of being a legal, powerful or paying client.
My growing frustration with these ongoing compromises was somewhat ameliorated when, during my graduate studies in architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, I came to know a professor of management science who was unlike anyone I had studied with up to that time. This professor of management science, C. West Churchman, was a systems philosopher with an uncompromising interest in the ethics of science, especially applied science. When I first met him, he was the Director of the Center for Management Science located in the Haas Business School at U.C. Berkeley. His famous Tuesday noon seminars attracted students from across the campus, across the country and even from around the world. On any day, I could find myself sitting next to a Nobel Laureate, a visiting international scholar or prominent governmental official who were also attending his seminar.
Concomitant with the completion of my Master of Architecture degree in the School of Environmental Design at U. C. Berkeley and my passing of the California architectural licensing exam, I was accepted into the Ad Hoc Ph.D. program administered by the U.C. Berkeley Dean of Graduate Studies. My graduate committee consisted of West Churchman, Ph.D. (systems philosophy); Leonard Duhl, M.D.(urban psychology); Ira Heyman, L.L.D. (law and U.C.B. Chancellor); Joseph Esherick, RA (Chair of the Department of Architecture) and Arnold Schultz Ph.D. (ecology). I had been able to convince the Academic Senate, with the help of my committee members, that my area of interest did not fit into any existing Ph.D. program on campus.
Following West’s suggestion, I titled my area of study Social Systems Design. My research and field work, at the Lawrence Berkeley Research Laboratory, focused on formulating and making a value distribution assessment of large-scale resource development projects, specifically, the development of geothermal energy in Northern California. This focus came out of my interest in, and experience of, boomtowns in the American West. The essence of this form of project assessment, a dis-aggregation assessment, was to determine whom, specifically, was being negatively or positively impacted by particular resource development activities and in what way they were being impacted. This was in contrast to the dominant assessment processes that were formulated to make a determination of the aggregate costs and benefits of development programs that would be used to justify difficult political decisions.
The impetus for developing and engaging in value distribution assessments came from a corollary of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, to treat people as an end in themselves and never as a means only (Kant). It was my clearest introduction to the process of bringing abstract reflective thought into the world of pragmatic action. It was also my introduction to a more systemic approach to the interrelationships between professionals and their clients, surrogate clients, decision makers, stake holders, producers, and others (including nature and future generations). This was the foundation of an approach to change and development that was based on a transparent understanding of who was being served, in what ways, and who was not being served.
My continuing interest in service, design and systems has resulted in my most recent project which is writing, in collaboration with a Swedish colleague, Prof. Erik Stolterman, a book that is an integrative composition of these and related systems design ideas. Within the context of writing the book I have had the opportunity to reflect on design from a systems perspective and on systems from a design perspective. In a related activity, I have been involved in co-founding, with Erik Stolterman and Robert Sandusky, The Advanced Design Institute (ADi). For me the ideas and intentions are the same for the book and for ADi that is to focus on service as a systemic relationship integral to systems design.
4. Systems Design
I have been schooled in systems from several key perspectives, all distinct from one another yet all in the same family. The perspectives are: 1) the science of systems, 2) a systems view of science, 3) systems praxis, 4) systems thinking, 5) the systems approach and 6) systems design. Systems design for me embodies all the other approaches to systems . I find the emergent properties that spring from the combination of the traditions of design and systems thinking to be powerful with immense utility.
Design, from a systems perspective, has an interesting history that is not the typical history of design found in textbooks and journals of design. Design is often considered to be a fairly recent outgrowth of the industrial revolution. Design, from this point of view, grew out of the craft tradition and, conjoined with the ability to conceptualize artifacts abstractly, became the embodiment of material culture. There is a deeper history of design however, one that has had a discontinuous evolution.
Design, as a tradition, is uniquely distinct from science and art. Fundamental principles of design, in the Western philosophic tradition, were separated from one another during the Socratic era. Philosophy is a compound word composed of the Greek root words philo (love) and sophia (wisdom). In the pre-Socratic era of Greek philosophy, sophia meant the wise or knowing hand. Reflection and action were an integrated whole. Sophia was split, however, during the time of the greatest of Greek thinkers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Wisdom became knowledge of first principles, focusing on reflective thought only. The knowing hand, from a craft and production orientation, was relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy in Greece society as exemplified in Plato’s Republic. The differentiation between theory (Gr. theoria) and practical or technical knowledge (Gr. phronesis and techne) reinforced the disunion of sophia. It was augmented further by the growing separation between the Greek concepts of archein (know why) and prattein (know how). These distinctions have remained enduring specious polarities in Western culture. For example, labor and management, academic and artisan, leader and follower, are some of the more abiding oppositional separations we find embedded in today’s social systems.
From a systems thinking perspective, there are no creditable reasons to continue to maintain these divisions. This is especially true when inquiry and action are integrated by way of a systems design perspective. Sophia needs to be reintegrated systemically, in order to assure that systems science and systems praxis are not treated as just another set of polarities in the Western tradition. This is important because systems thinking, as the logic of design, is needed to bear on issues of composition, holism and teleological assemblies, rather than exclusively on description and explanation. Reweaving the frayed and broken intellectual threads of sophia into a whole pattern, is a necessary first step for systems design to become an effective alternative to business as usual. In order to facilitate this, my colleagues and I established ADi not only to reconstitute sophia, but to study and test related systems design principles as well. This includes the study of systems design as a teleological process built on the interrelationship of service.
As a graduate student, I was made aware of a particularly unique relationship between service and systems design while preparing a presentation for a design seminar at U.C. Berkeley. This seminar, started by West Churchman and other U.C. B. faculty, was open to anyone from across the campus, including the National Research Laboratories—the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory—managed by the University of California. As an architect I assumed I had the concept of design in a headlock. I was startled to find that people designed experiments, programs, policies, and curriculum in addition to the traditional material artifacts of physical design like architecture, urban design, and other, allied environmental design fields. I was also surprised to learn that these others knew a lot about design even when different from my own.
My formal contribution to the seminar, entitled the "Evil of Design", tried to make the point that, according to many definitions of evil including some of the very earliest, design was evil by definition. One meaning of evil that particularly intrigued me was that of agency without community. This, as it turned out, became one of the seminal issues of design in the latter decades of the twentieth century and continues unattenuated into the twenty-first century. Change, wrought by individuals acting out of their own desires rather than the desires of the members of the social system being intervened in, is treated as suspect in modern considerations of democracy. The desire to have our individual desires attended to and integrated into collective action, conforming to the common good, seems to be a universal hope, even if not very realistic.
5. Limits to Reason
Reason, as a guide for the development and implementation of programs of intervention and change in social systems, historically took away much of the fear of the arbitrariness of irrational agency. Science became the guarantor of choice, for justifying decisions made on behalf of the collective, because objective truth was not dependent on egalitarian principles. Reason and science were looked to, to secure improvement in the human condition. But the hegemony of science in the past several decades has illuminated the limits to reason when it comes to policies of intervention in human activity systems (Churchman 1968). The expectations for unequivocal improvement, in the quality of life for every human, through the agency of science and reason, have proven impossible to meet.
Two standard assumptions from the past are far too simple to be productive guides to today’s complex science policy: That socially optimal outcomes will result from the amalgamation of the results of individual scientific projects, and that science always benefits humanity.
Michael M. Crow, Executive Vice Provost,
Prof. of Science policy, Columbia University
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
March/ 9, 2001
Science has been unequaled in its ability to describe and explain the natural world. The trouble is that description and explanation do not prescribe action, change or design in human affairs. People within businesses and governmental agencies continue to decry the growing volumes of studies that never make a difference or lead to improvement, but only add to the burden of storage space in their offices.
Applied science has been exceptional in its ability to predict and control scientific events. The trouble is that prediction and control do not justify action, change or development of designs. An example of this can be found in a recently published review of a study of the Great Plains region of the United States.
More than 60 percent of the counties in the Great Plans lost population in the last 10 years. An area equal to the size of the original Louisiana Purchase, nearly 900,000 square miles, now has so few people that it meets the 19th century Census Bureau definition of frontier, with six people or fewer per square mile. And within that area, a large swath of land has slipped even further, to a category the government once defined as vacant.
…108 years after Frederick Jackson Turner suggested that the American frontier was closed, with the buffalo herds wiped out and native populations down to a few tribes – that there are now more Indians and bison on the Plains than at any time since the late 1870s.
Timothy Egan, New York Times
San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 2001
The facts presented above are taken from reports consisting of data, maps and quantitative descriptions that describe and explain the conditions of the Great Plains at the beginning of the 21st Century in great detail. This comprehensive description does not give any inference as to what intervention ought to be taken however. Whether the area should be repopulated with a new Homestead Act or turned into a Buffalo Commons cannot be determined from the descriptive and explanative data. The fact that the only population increasing in the region is Native American does not justify any particular action either. The authority of analytic thinking is necessary, but insufficient, in the determination of what ought to be desirable as an outcome of intentional intervention. Only a designerly dialogue based on the relationship of service can determine desirable outcomes.
Social systems design, because it is animated through the relationship of service, is a tradition of inquiry and action that unites agency and community. The intention of social systems design—its aim—is to benefit humanity. It integrates the particular with the general and universal. It is dependent on the existence of diversity and is the essence of a form of democracy that is not based on arithmetic operations.
Service, from the perspective of agency and community, is doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right people, for the right reasons, in the right proportion, using the right resources. Service is also, doing all of the above with the right people. That is, systems design is a collaboration, a conspiracy (i.e. a breathing together) among diverse types of people, particularly the stakeholders. The term with is important in this context because systems thinkers sometimes use systems, as an organizing principle by which large scale models of change are developed for the good of the whole, without contractual agency—without covenant.
These systems models when imposed on the real world alienate anyone who has not been an intimate, collaborative, participant in the creation of the model and a guaranteed beneficiary. This is one of the primary reasons that systems thinkers are often viewed with suspicion by those outside of the systems movement. I am reminded of the comments of a Chilean graduate student when I was asking him about the dramatic changes his country had been through in the past decades; from extreme left to the extreme right politically. His reply was that: "Politicians forget people like to change but that they don’t like being changed." People desire to be served by change agents. It is through the relationship of service that designers work with people to bring about their own change rather than have it imposed on them from the outside for what ever reason, good, bad or indifferent.
6. Kinds of Service
The kind of activities that constitute service are not clearly determined even in formal Service Learning programs at universities or in professional organizations. One way to distinguish among different types of service that I have found useful is through the categories of service of: 1) lip service, 2) room service, 3) self service, 4) protective or military service, 5) social or public service, and 6) full service. This is not meant to be a definitive list, but only one that provides some insight into the complexity and richness of the concept of service.
Lip Service
Words serve people. Words and ideas move people. Armies cannot move people in the way that words do. Cultures have formed and reformed around the words of thoughtful or charismatic people. Words are powerful. For example, universities and the press are the natural targets of any tyrant attempting to control populations of people. Words are so powerful that people often put themselves at risk, even the risk of death, for the sake of words, their own and others.
Words and ideas were easy to come by and easy to express to others when I was a university student. There might have been some small risk of confrontation or political retribution, but nothing compared to what I found when I worked in other countries. When I first went to a Southeast Asian country to work as a consultant I met colleagues whom, in their lives as students and now as professionals, chose their words and ideas with great care. They had friends who had paid the ultimate price for their own beliefs and they were aware that they may be asked to make the same sacrifice. I found the same thing in other countries I visited or worked in and was compelled to look deep into my own words to find the core of what I was willing to pay lip service to. There is a special kind of courage possessed by my friends and colleagues in these countries that I have continued to desire for myself.
Rhetoric, of course, is the art of using words for persuasion. The lip service of rhetoric can be either noble or base. Through rhetoric, people can be persuaded to believe or act in ways that benefit them. Ways that they would not otherwise have been aware. They are well served by rhetoric in this way. But there is the other side of rhetoric that is a dis-service. Using rhetoric you can tell people what you want them to hear or you can tell people only what they want to hear. Neither way serving their best interests.
The danger in lip service is the deception of empty words. Empty words, in the form of broken promises, broken vows, broken treaties etc., are destructive of the spirit of the persons tricked by fast talk and the deceit of falsehoods. Empty words, masquerading as real service are insincere and disingenuous if not outright lies. Empty words have the power to make relationships hollow and easily shattered.
Room Service
The servant leader is exemplary of the best of room service. A leader, by definition, has power and authority along with, one hopes, some mix of common sense and vision. What could be better than someone with that kind of capacity being in a service relationship with yourself. It is like having the best of a great concierge and a successful CEO at your beck and call. One can go about one’s business in one’s own sphere of influence with the knowledge that, what ever is reasonably needed, will be attended to by a powerful and skilled person in a unilateral relationship. Nothing is expected in return. The hallmark of this kind of service is that, those who provide it are endowed with humility and self sacrifice.
The facilitator is a less powerful provider of room service. Facilitators enable things to happen on behalf of those being served but often with a hint of manipulation. Manipulation can be an acceptable, necessary, even valuable part of service, if it is made transparent to the one being serviced. The danger is when facilitation denies that there is anything other than mere facilitation going on. Mere facilitators are like objective observers who claim their presence and methods of observation have no affect on what is going on.
The corruption of room service occures when it becomes the domain of the supplier. When it is used to service someone’s needs and addictions, in the seclusion of their own domain, it becomes a type of service that acts as a form of negative feedback—reinforcing destructive behavior. No judgment can be brought against this type of service because, in this form, it wasn’t designed to take into account what is good for those being served and what isn’t. It is only designed to deliver the goods.
Self-service
Individual expression is the hallmark of self-service, of helping yourself. This form of service is strongly linked to the notion of basic, inalienable human rights that form the foundation of many modern constitutions. The rights of the individual have formed the basis for the emancipation of minorities from policies and behaviors of dominance and control. It is fundamental to such institutional traditions as academic freedom. It is at the heart of professional interests in the arts and sciences, where individuals determine their own priorities and objectives within their professional careers, based on what personal interests they want to serve and have served.
The difficulty with this particular form of service is that it is not very systemic. Individual agents are treated as if isolated from all others. There are no emergent entities like families, teams, communities, societies, or cultures. There are no linking relationships like that between parent and child, husband and wife or person and place. Individuals are engaged in the exercise of rights that do not have relationships of mutuality or accountability built in. Any individual can pursue their own interests to the exclusion of all else supported by this doctrine of self-service. The neodarwinian model of the free market is based on the freedom of individuals to pursue any legal courses of action they desire with their only concern to be the surviving fittest.
When self-service devolves into self-centeredness, there is no ancillary systemic concern for others, even removing the self-serving forms of collaboration used to assure individual rights. Self-centered-service can be especially destructive because of the tendency to further isolate and alienate the self from others.
Protective or Military Service
Not everyone can look out for himself or herself: the infant, the powerless, the infirm, the vulnerable, the naive, the timid, the ill, the unfortunate. Often they need protecting, This protection comes through the type of service epitomized as courage in the form of protective service. It is not a service based on reckless, death-denying heroic courage, but a courage of authentic engagement with the full knowledge of consequences. People manifest protective courage in many ways. Protective service has been formalized into specific professions such as fire fighting, police work and emergency service work. The beneficial attributes of these forms of service are consonant with one another. Along with the benefits however there are often concerns.
One example, which highlights the extremes between benefits of, and concerns about, this type of service, is that of militarized service, formed in response to the felt need for large scale protection and defense. This type of service, the one associated with the warrior, has too often been misused politically and is therefore often vilified. Pacifists, peace activists, the strong and independent, those who feel perfectly capable of looking out for themselves and their own interests, reject military service as the preferred form of protective service. It is however one of the most quintessential forms of protective service, even while being the most controversial.
Military service is the most structured and visible institutionalized form of service. It is the form that receives the most attention, both good and bad. Military service is essential to the well being of citizens of sovereign states and evokes virtues of excellence, honor and duty in those who serve. To have served honorably in the military is a reason for an individual to feel a deep sense of accomplishment and pride.
Uncertainty comes because of niggling concerns about collateral damages that occur inevitably in the course of protecting and defending. The balance tips away from uncertainty to concern when the apologist makes the case that the ends justifying the means. Military service is not designed intrinsically to distinguish between good ends and bad ends. The potential for the misuse of military service arises when warriors are used to force rather than protect and defend. When people are not doing what those who aspire to total control want them to do, they are often forced into compliance or made to suffer the consequences, including death. In this case, military service is being misappropriated and misused in the service of the ego rather than protective service.
The apparent efficiency and effectiveness of the power of militarized service, misapplied in this way, attract those outside the professional domains of protective service. For example the self-serving behavior of idealists, with personalized models of how social systems ought to be re-formed, often use the means and methods of forced compliance, as a perversion of protective service, to short circuit authentic service relationships with which they are impatient.
Social or Public Service
Caring and altruism are epitomized as social or public service. It is the type of service that is focused on helping and benefiting everyone in ways that contribute to the common good. The focus on service to the common good assures those decisions and choices, made at the individual level, contribute to the benefit of the whole. It also militates against some of the damage done by actions that are focused on the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. The common good is an ideal that is sometimes eroded by the well intentioned approach to social or public service that is bent on fixing. Fixing begins to exclude the reciprocity of the idea of service and represents a more unilateral approach to service. The common good is not merely a state in which nothing is broken or out of place. It is a process of value exchange and the maintenance of individual dignity while contributing to the best interests of the collective life.
Closely related to fixing, but with more feeling of attachment, is mothering, which can both be comforting and soothing yet which can easily begin to smother if not mediated with, a letting go and standing back from, those being served. If feelings are absent this relationship can become one of patronization. The worse case emerges when patronizing becomes a form of husbandry—a farming of people. Caring and tending for the flock, for their own good, making sure their collective needs are met without their having to take any responsibility for their own well being—i.e. managed caring.
Full Service
Full service is the inclusion of the best of the diverse types of service mentioned above in the right proportion for any particular situation. This relationship is a relationship of mutuality and complexity, a conspiracy of empathy and creative struggle. It is a contract between equals where all have a voice, and where listening is of equal importance. Full service provides not only for the common good but evokes uncommon good as well. Recipients of this service relationship find themselves pleasantly surprised by the recognition of their own implicit desires in the outcome of this relationship of agency. The outcome of full service is adequate, essential and significant to the well being of the clients and stakeholders.
The most important part of full service is that there is a full accountability and responsibility in being an agent and in being the one served. Service is a complex web of interrelationships that tie diverse individuals together as a social system with all the qualities of a system attendant, including emergence. Successfully creating and maintaining this full service focused type of relationship in social systems allows us, as systems thinkers, to participate fully, as intentional agents, in the ongoing genesis of the world.
REFERENCES
Churchman, C. W. (1968). Challenge to Reason. New York, NY, McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Hillman, J. (1995). Kinds of Power; a Guide to its Intelligent Uses. New York, NY, Currency Doubleday.
Kant, I. (1787). The Critique of Pure Practical Reason.
Remen, R. N. (1996). "In the Service of Life." Noetic Science Review (summer).
ISSS Incoming President’s Address, Toronto:
Continuing the Traditions of ISSS- Systems Science in the Service of Humanity
Introduction
The society, founded in 1954 by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, and Anatol Rapoport as the Society for General Systems Research (SGSR), was created in reaction to the growing disparity between reductionist science and their own scientific understanding of the real world as based on relationships, interrelationships and emergent qualities. Their intention was to integrate different fields of study in the same way that the concept of consilience strives to unify all rational knowledge. Because of this, a role that has been unfairly attributed to ISSS and other systems organizations in the past is one of striving for control and totalization yet this is clearly not the intention of the Society. This misunderstanding however reveals a root concern for global consequences due to localized actions as well as issues of power and authority in contexts of diversity. This tension between global systems and locally autonomous systems will be one of the focuses of the ISSS conference in South Africa next year.
The Society is becoming more successful at demonstrating to colleagues in traditional disciplines and to the public at large that systems thinking provides an important and essential understanding of the world in all of its interrelated complexity. The evolving challenge now is to understand how to utilize the insights gained from systems scholarship in broader social realms. As a consequence, one of the enduring contemporary roles that ISSS has taken on is that of service and the one that I want to continue supporting during my tenure as President of ISSS. The role of service has been an explicit theme for several past presidents including C. West Churchman, Bela H. Banathy and our most recent president, Peter Corning. Progress in this area is essential for the continued success of the Society in the future.
Acknowledgments and Thanks
I would like to thank Peter Corning for the exceptional job he has done as President in putting together not only the 44th Annual Meeting of the ISSS but the World congress of the Systems Sciences here in Toronto as well. It has been an exceptional gathering of scientists and scholars from diverse systems organizations from around the world. I would also like to thank Helmut Burkhardt and his staff from Ryerson Polytechnic University for their hard work in pulling everything together here on campus in support of the conference attendees and activities. I want to thank Jennifer Wilby and Janet K. Allen for their suberb work in publishing the Proceedings of the World Congress and the ISSS 2000 together plus all their invaluable staff work prior to and during the conference.
2001 Conference Announcements
I would like to invite you to attend the 45th international conference to be held at the University of Stellenbosch in Stellenbosch, South Africa July 8th through the 13th 2001 entitled Africa and the Emerging World System – Unity, Diversity, Humanity –. This will be an opportunity to meet new colleagues from diverse and proud cultures who represent rich historical traditions. The conference will include activities at distributed sites in China, Canada, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Peru and the United States. I would like to introduce the local organizers of the conference in South Africa, Dr. Cornie Groenewald, professor at the University of Stellenbosch and the organizing chair and Martine Dodds, executive officer. Please be sure and take a copy of the brochure they have developed that contains important preliminary information.
I invite you to consider submitting papers for this conference especially with a focus on the theme of service that I will discuss in greater detail later. The two questions I want to pose for the conference that emerge from the general theme of Systems Science in the Service of Humanity are:
1. How can the systemic relationship of service serve an emerging understanding of development that is both global and local?
2. How can systems scientists, scholars and practitioners serve on behalf of others?
But first I would like to discuss some focus issues that emerged for me during the past few days of the conference. I believe these focus issues ought to become part of an ongoing dialogue within ISSS and invite others to suggest ways for this to happen in a manner that assures action items will emerge in time to be presented at the conference in Africa.
Focus Issues From Conference Sessions
1. Women and Other Under-Represented Populations in ISSS
One of the key issues that emerged during the Congress and ISSS Conference concerned not what was happening but what was not happening. It was clear that there were not enough women making presentations and in organizational positions of leadership. It is important to determine why this has occurred and how ISSS can facilitate more balanced programs in the future in terms of gender participation. There is also a need to develop ways to become more representative of the diversity of populations that exist around the world. This will be especially critical for ISSS as it plans for its next conference in Africa. It was also clear that there were not enough students participating actively in the conference. Students are not only important to the future of ISSS but are important to the health and energy of the Society today.
2. Intellectual Skunk Works
A topic that came up during the Past President’s Roundtable discussion, which I had the honor of chairing, was a valuable reminder of the role that ISSS has played historically in providing a context for scholars whose ideas were well ahead of their time. The discussion brought out examples of now-famous thinkers and their ideas that were 20 to 30 years ahead of their time when ISSS was the only professional society willing to give them a forum from which to be heard and published. I believe that it is important for ISSS to remain an intellectual skunk works for new ideas of excellence, especially as we struggle with the issue of defining and confining the field of systems to clearly delineated domains and concepts.
3. Unity in Diversity – i.e. SIG’s and the Society
A second issue that arose during the roundtable dealt with the perennial issue of unity in diversity as represented by the SIG’s. Although SIG stands for Special Integration Group, rather than Special Interest Group which is common in other professional organizations, there is an ongoing tension between the purpose of ISSS to find common ground among diverse thinkers and the need for individuals to find an intellectual home in domains of interest populated by colleagues with shared intellectual concerns. I believe it is important that this issue be looked at in greater depth in order to find a way to accommodate diversity in unity and unity in diversity.
4. Quality – Rigor and Relevance
A third issue which emerged during the roundtable discussion was about an ongoing concern in ISSS which is the quality of papers and presentations. Quality standards similar to other professional groups such as AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) were suggested as benchmarks. There was a feeling among some Past Presidents that standards of scientific rigor in papers accepted for publishing and for presentation at conferences were not consistent. I believe that this is another issue that ISSS needs to look at in greater depth but not in isolation from the issue of relevance. The challenge for ISSS is to support ideas and individuals who bring both rigor and relevance into their work. Issues of relevance such as ethics and justice must be an equal measure of quality with scientific rigor.
5. Leadership – Systems Thinkers in Leadership Positions
Another issue that stood out for me among many presentations was captured by the theme of Russell Ackoff’s paper, "doing the right things right." This is the seminal challenge of the issue of leadership. For me the emergent issue is not one of how systems thinkers can influence leadership in organizations, governments and NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations) through their compelling systems logic. For me the issue is how systems thinkers become leaders themselves. How do they transition from advising to serving? I believe that the issue of service is key to facilitating systems thinkers as leaders. Good leadership is not hierarchical but rather depends on the development of relationships among those serving and those being served. These relationships are made explicit in the form of contracts that are best formed through a systems approach. I would like to now discuss in greater depth the issue of service since it is the theme I have chosen as President of ISSS for the 45th annual conference.
Service
1. Congruence of behavior with systems ideas
The challenge for systems thinkers is to act congruently with espoused systems ideas. If one wishes to be influential as a change agent it is important to remember that actions speak louder than words or in the words of an American poet:
"I can’t hear what your saying because your actions speak so loud!"
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fundamental concepts like open systems behavior, lead to key questions of how ISSS can act so as to maintain open boundaries with the global socio-economic environment it is embedded in; how an open exchange is maintained with diverse groups of people who do not share the systems tradition of inquiry, but who can benefit from its insights. The idea of unity leads to the question of how reflection and action can be integrated through a systems approach rather than separated into different, distinct, and often competing domains of inquiry versus action. The systems concept of relationship also leads to fundamental questions about how systems scientists and practitioners relate to others who are not members of the systems science community, but are the focus of the systems change agent’s intention. Because, description and explanation alone do not prescribe action and prediction and control do not alone justify action, it is necessary for systems thinkers and practitioners to create systemic relationships with those who desire change in their lives, but do not like being changed. This relationship, in the form of service on behalf of the other, is one that needs to be explored as a means for systems thinkers as leaders to act systemically and responsibly with full accountability for the consequences of their work whether intended or unintended.
2. Reintegration of Sophia
Philosophy is a compound word formed from two Greek terms, philo – love for- and sophia – wisdom. Thus philosophy is the love of wisdom. In the pre-Socratic era of Greek history sophia or wisdom was defined as the knowing hand. Thinking and acting or making were not divided into separate domains. But, during the Socratic period and as a consequence through all later periods of Western thought up to today, those who thought about things were put at the top of the hierarchy of important types of people while those who made things fell to the bottom of this hierarchy. This split in sophia is reflected in many of the polarities of modern life where we still live with the consequences. We have clear polarities between workers and managers, between idealists and realists, between researchers and practitioners— and the list goes on. From a systems perspective there is no logical reason for this split. Reflection and action need to be an integrated whole if systems ideas are to be congruent with systems behavior.
3. Systemic Relationships of Systems Thinkers to the Rest of the World
Systems thinkers live and work in a world populated by people who see and experience the world in very different ways most of whom are not from a systems science tradition. Yet from a systems perspective we are all part of the interconnected social systems we inhabit. Systems thinkers, in the spirit of congruence with systems ideas, need to form relationships of interconnectedness with these others who are often the focus of systems change agents who claim agency without community. The relationship I want to focus on is that of service from a systems perspective. Forming a service relationship is forming a social system with all the interconnected and emergent qualities of any complex system. It is a ‘conspiracy’ i.e. a breathing together of divergent individuals who by their differences define the rich potential of the social system.
4. Service as a Systemic Relationship
"People like to change, they just don’t like being changed"
Chilean Student
Being in service does not mean being a servant or subservient. It does not mean acting as an expert or a mere facilitator on behalf of someone else’s needs. Service is not about helping people create what they already know they want or imposing predetermined idealized solutions onto unique particular situations. The success of service can be best determined when those being served experience the surprise of self recognition in what emerges out of their interaction with systems thinkers, who have attended to broader systemic concerns while serving particular autonomous interests.
Service that is not servitude treats the others as an equal. This does not mean the same as being similar, as in categories of social science, or equivalent, as in egalitarianism, but equal in terms of the right to have anyone’s desiderata become the seed for purposeful change. Service is distinct from helping, which by its nature creates a unilateral relationship. In this type of relationship all power and resources reside in a dominant role. Leaving the other in a position of being helpless and indebted:
Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not a relationship between equals….Service is a relationship between equals….Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving, like healing is mutual. There is no debt.
Rachel Naomi Remen (1996)
Service is a relationship of mutuality and diversity allowing those with excellent skills and abilities to work on behalf of those who are pressing to express their humanity in ways which honor their uniqueness in a world of increasing globalization.
5. Conference Theme for 2001
The theme for the 45th annual conference therefore is this:
Systems Science in the Service of Humanity:
Africa and the Emerging World System – Unity, Diversity, Humanity –
With the concomitant questions of:
1) How can Service Serve Development?
2) How can Systems Thinkers Serve?
Thank you for coming today and I very much look forward to being your President for the coming year.