Download or read book Nature Of Change Or The Law Of Unintended Consequences The An Introductory Text To Designing Complex Systems And Managing Change written by John Mansfield and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2010-03-22 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This absorbing book provides a broad introduction to the surprising nature of change, and explains how the Law of Unintended Consequences arises from the waves of change following one simple change. Change is a constant topic of discussion, whether be it on climate, politics, technology, or any of the many other changes in our lives. However, does anyone truly understand what change is?Over time, mankind has deliberately built social and technology based systems that are goal-directed — there are goals to achieve and requirements to be met. Building such systems is man's way of planning for the future, and these plans are based on predicting the behavior of the system and its environment, at specified times in the future. Unfortunately, in a truly complex social or technical environment, this planned predictability can break down into a morass of surprising and unexpected consequences. Such unpredictability stems from the propagation of the effects of change through the influence of one event on another.The Nature of Change explains in detail the mechanism of change and will serve as an introduction to complex systems, or as complementary reading for systems engineering. This textbook will be especially useful to professionals in system building or business change management, and to students studying systems in a variety of fields such as information technology, business, law and society./a
Download or read book The Nature of Change Or the Law of Unintended Consequences written by John Mansfield and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2010 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Introductory Text to Designing Complex Systems and Managing Change --
Download or read book The Nature of Change Or the Law of Unintended Consequences written by John Mansfield and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2010 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This absorbing book provides a broad introduction to the surprising nature of change, and explains how the Law of Unintended Consequences arises from the waves of change following one simple change. Change is a constant topic of discussion, whether be it on climate, politics, technology, or any of the many other changes in our lives. However, does anyone truly understand what change is? Over time, mankind has deliberately built social and technology based systems that are goal-directed there are goals to achieve and requirements to be met. Building such systems is man's way of planning for the future, and these plans are based on predicting the behavior of the system and its environment, at specified times in the future. Unfortunately, in a truly complex social or technical environment, this planned predictability can break down into a morass of surprising and unexpected consequences. Such unpredictability stems from the propagation of the effects of change through the influence of one event on another. The Nature of Change explains in detail the mechanism of change and will serve as an introduction to complex systems, or as complementary reading for systems engineering. This textbook will be especially useful to professionals in system building or business change management, and to students studying systems in a variety of fields such as information technology, business, law and society.
Download or read book Change Management written by James McCalman and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a classic in its field, the fourth edition of Change Management: A Guide to Effective Implementation continues to offer readers highly practical strategies and step-by-step guidance for applying different models of change in different organizational scenarios. New to the Fourth Edition: A third expert author, Sabina Siebert, bringing a background in sociology and cultural studies An improved structure that consolidates all the existing strengths of the previous editions and separates the book into three parts, beginning with chapters assessing ‘The Impact and Definition of Change’, ‘Implementation and Evaluation of Change’ and ending with a critical outlook in ‘Change Management – A Critical Perspective’ A wealth of new and richly detailed case studies with an international and cross-cultural scope that draw upon different organization types, environments and perspectives for a diverse and global understanding of the current field of change management Two additional chapters on leading change and organisational culture, offering unparalleled coverage of managing systems and processes, combined with increased emphasis on managing human issues. For students taking Change Management courses on Business and Management degrees, MBA′s, specialist masters and healthcare subjects.
Download or read book Embracing the Black Swan written by Khalil Dindarian and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our world is becoming ever more complex. Among the geopolitical and macroeconomic issues currently facing mankind, with serious ramifications for our future, are digitalization and technology, climate change, and globalization. Political upheaval, wars, natural disasters, economic recessions, and pandemics, have all had massive negative impacts on our society. In this new world, various governmental and organizational decisionmakers – including managers, international agencies, NGOs, political leaders, economists, science & technology innovators, and medical professionals – must all learn to anticipate and deal with these emergent risks, the integration of which, along with the management of ‘black swan’ events, has assumed paramount importance. This is the huge challenge now facing us. This book, aimed at both academics and practitioners, shows how a framework for resilience can be created to help modern organizations to not only survive but to thrive. The author considers some of the organizations and bodies that can be said to be highly resilient and examines how ‘Resilience Thinking’ affects different disciplines and environments. He addresses the question of how resilience works and how it is applied in practice. The relationship between resilience and other knowledge areas such as complexity theory, strategy, and risk management – from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives – is examined. Situations are identified where there is a particular need for resilience, and an overview of the best ways of implementing a resilience process is offered.
Download or read book Chaos and Nonlinear Psychology written by David Schuldberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pandemic, and our response to it, has shown how unpredictable, irrational, illogical, suddenly changing, and muddled human interactions can be in a time of crisis. How can we make sense of such confusing and baffling behavior? This book reveals how chaos and nonlinear dynamics can bring new understanding to everyday topics in social sciences. It brings together chapters from leaders at the intersection of psychology and chaos and complexity theories. Conceptual and user-friendly, it is built around six themes: 1) Seeing nonlinearity, 2) Finding patterns, 3) using Simple models, 4) Intervening nonlinearly, and 6) teaching a new Worldview. It takes no specialized study-although there is more sophisticated material and optional math for those wishing it. The techie will, in addition, find concepts and diagrams to ponder. The volume is engaging, at times startling-whether about the weather, Internet, organizations, family dynamics, health, evolution, or falling in love. It reveals how many social, personal, clinical, research, and life phenomena become understandable and can be modelled in the light of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (NDS) theory. It even offers a broadening worldview, happening already in other sciences, toward a more dynamic, interconnected, and evolving picture, including process-oriented appreciation of one's own experience. The book offers those in the field of psychology and the social sciences a stunning new perspective on human behaviour.
Download or read book United States Foreign Policy 1945 1968 written by Michael Wayne Santos and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1945 and 1968, the possibility of Mutual Assured Destruction led to a host of odd realities, including the creation of an affable cartoon turtle named Bert who taught millions of school children that nuclear war was survivable if they simply learned how to “duck and cover.” Meanwhile, fear of Communism played out against the backdrop of potential Armageddon to provide justification for a variety of covert operations involving regime change, political assassination, and sometimes bizarre plot twists. United States Foreign Policy 1945-1968: The Bomb, Spies, Stories, and Lies takes a fresh look at this complex, often confusing, and frequently farcical period in American and world history.
Download or read book Internet Science written by Samira El Yacoubi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Internet Science held in Perpignan, France, in December 2019. The 30 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers detail a multidisciplinary understanding of the development of the Internet as a societal and technological artefact which increasingly evolves with human societies.
Download or read book The Transformation of Social Work Education through Virtual Learning written by R. Paul Maiden and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past few years, numerous highly ranked, Tier 1 universities across the United States have embraced the development of advanced online degrees, a niche of secondary education long held by a small group of private, for-profit universities. Rapid advances in online learning technology, increasingly sophisticated, and easy to use ‘learning management systems’ and ‘anytime, anywhere access’ has dramatically increase the demand of individuals, mostly full time employed, working professionals. This volume addresses the dramatic changes that are occurring in social work pedagogy as more schools develop online programs. The University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak Peck School of Social Work launched their ‘Virtual Academic Center’ with a cohort of 80 online students. The program has now reached a ‘steady state’ of 2,200 ‘virtual’ students now representing two thirds of their MSW student population. Additionally, the school launched a doctorate of social work degree with a focus on leading and managing innovation, leading public discourse and management of large complex systems. This book essentially tells the ‘USC story’ with the challenges faced in embracing this new technology, teaching social work courses in an online environment, as well as pedagogical enhancements made by faculty in converting traditional campus based courses to the virtual environment.
Download or read book Resilience and Risk written by Igor Linkov and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the challenges associated with methodology and application of risk and resilience science and practice to address emerging threats in environmental, cyber, infrastructure and other domains. The book utilizes the collective expertise of scholars and experts in industry, government and academia in the new and emerging field of resilience in order to provide a more comprehensive and universal understanding of how resilience methodology can be applied in various disciplines and applications. This book advocates for a systems-driven view of resilience in applications ranging from cyber security to ecology to social action, and addresses resilience-based management in infrastructure, cyber, social domains and methodology and tools. Risk and Resilience has been written to open up a transparent dialog on resilience management for scientists and practitioners in all relevant academic disciplines and can be used as supplement in teaching risk assessment and management courses.
Download or read book Machines We Trust written by Marcello Pelillo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts from disciplines that range from computer science to philosophy consider the challenges of building AI systems that humans can trust. Artificial intelligence-based algorithms now marshal an astonishing range of our daily activities, from driving a car ("turn left in 400 yards") to making a purchase ("products recommended for you"). How can we design AI technologies that humans can trust, especially in such areas of application as law enforcement and the recruitment and hiring process? In this volume, experts from a range of disciplines discuss the ethical and social implications of the proliferation of AI systems, considering bias, transparency, and other issues. The contributors, offering perspectives from computer science, engineering, law, and philosophy, first lay out the terms of the discussion, considering the "ethical debts" of AI systems, the evolution of the AI field, and the problems of trust and trustworthiness in the context of AI. They go on to discuss specific ethical issues and present case studies of such applications as medicine and robotics, inviting us to shift the focus from the perspective of a "human-centered AI" to that of an "AI-decentered humanity." Finally, they consider the future of AI, arguing that, as we move toward a hybrid society of cohabiting humans and machines, AI technologies can become humanity's allies.
Download or read book Institutional Literacies written by Stuart A. Selber and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Information technologies have become central to all functions of higher education, including writing and communications departments. Understanding how academic IT professionals make decisions, manage projects, and interact with academic departments is key for the faculty, administrators, and staff in those departments. To aid in this understanding, Stuart Selber spent two years embedded in Penn State's Teaching and Learning with Technology unit. His book offers new insights into the practices, attitudes, and assumptions of academic IT professionals and argues that composition faculty should collaborate more closely and engage more deeply with IT staff as composition technology projects are planned, implemented, and expanded. To help them do so, the book offers a three-part heuristic, reflecting the reality that academic IT units are complex and multilayered, with historical, spatial, and textual dimensions"--
Download or read book Florida Law Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Systems Thinking For Social Change written by David Peter Stroh and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "David Stroh has produced an elegant and cogent guide to what works. Research with early learners is showing that children are natural systems thinkers. This book will help to resuscitate these intuitive capabilities and strengthen them in the fire of facing our toughest problems."—Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline Concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning—for everyone! Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation. How do these unintended consequences come about and how can we avoid them? By applying conventional thinking to complex social problems, we often perpetuate the very problems we try so hard to solve, but it is possible to think differently, and get different results. Systems Thinking for Social Change enables readers to contribute more effectively to society by helping them understand what systems thinking is and why it is so important in their work. It also gives concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without becoming a technical expert. Systems thinking leader David Stroh walks readers through techniques he has used to help people improve their efforts on complex problems like: ending homelessness improving public health strengthening education designing a system for early childhood development protecting child welfare developing rural economies facilitating the reentry of formerly incarcerated people into society resolving identity-based conflicts and more! The result is a highly readable, effective guide to understanding systems and using that knowledge to get the results you want.
Download or read book Global Environmental Change written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1991-02-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global environmental change often seems to be the most carefully examined issue of our time. Yet understanding the human sideâ€"human causes of and responses to environmental changeâ€"has not yet received sustained attention. Global Environmental Change offers a strategy for combining the efforts of natural and social scientists to better understand how our actions influence global change and how global change influences us. The volume is accessible to the nonscientist and provides a wide range of examples and case studies. It explores how the attitudes and actions of individuals, governments, and organizations intertwine to leave their mark on the health of the planet. The book focuses on establishing a framework for this new field of study, identifying problems that must be overcome if we are to deepen our understanding of the human dimensions of global change, presenting conclusions and recommendations.
Download or read book The Structuring of Organizations written by Henry Mintzberg and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synthesizes the empirical literature on organizationalstructuring to answer the question of how organizations structure themselves --how they resolve needed coordination and division of labor. Organizationalstructuring is defined as the sum total of the ways in which an organizationdivides and coordinates its labor into distinct tasks. Further analysis of theresearch literature is neededin order to builda conceptualframework that will fill in the significant gap left by not connecting adescription of structure to its context: how an organization actuallyfunctions. The results of the synthesis are five basic configurations (the SimpleStructure, the Machine Bureaucracy, the Professional Bureaucracy, theDivisionalized Form, and the Adhocracy) that serve as the fundamental elementsof structure in an organization. Five basic parts of the contemporaryorganization (the operating core, the strategic apex, the middle line, thetechnostructure, and the support staff), and five theories of how it functions(i.e., as a system characterized by formal authority, regulated flows, informalcommunication, work constellations, and ad hoc decision processes) aretheorized. Organizations function in complex and varying ways, due to differing flows -including flows of authority, work material, information, and decisionprocesses. These flows depend on the age, size, and environment of theorganization; additionally, technology plays a key role because of itsimportance in structuring the operating core. Finally, design parameters aredescribed - based on the above five basic parts and five theories - that areused as a means of coordination and division of labor in designingorganizational structures, in order to establish stable patterns of behavior.(CJC).
Download or read book The Dynamics of Change written by Francis Stickland and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an insight into the nature of change and transition. Considers which principles govern change, what structural features and processes define it and whether there are any forces which drive and shape change. Examines a variety of change phenomena in the natural and physical world, and how they apply to our understanding of change within organizations.
