Week Twelve Blog

How might you use the motion picture lens best to analyze a system? Are there some systems that lend themselves better to this for analysis than others? What examples can you give? Is this a depiction mode that you like or that makes sense to you vs. the first two we learned and you have applied?

The motion picture model of Banathy is the complete guide book for analyzing a system. It is obviously complex because of indefinite number of components in this system analysis. It is hard to cover everything in different time. It is super complex to monitor a system’s activities over time but motion picture model helps identifying system’s trends and behaviour in an iterative way. This model how a system operates, its input processing, transformation, output processing, and system guidance such as feedback, adjustment and change. It helps developing a continuous interaction with ever changing society, and establish coordination with societal systems that are relevant to the system.

Based on my knowledge and understanding from analyzing two different micro-and meso-systems it will be very hard to analyze a small system using this model. It may be useful in micro-system analysis only to find the relationship of a micro-system to a meso- or macro-system. I believe this model is better for the macro-systems to analyze. Educational system, health system etc are good examples for analyzing using this model. Unlike structure/function model analyze a system in a specific time this model is useful to identify the system behavior as a pattern or cyclic way over a long period of time. The depiction strategies are good in this model which organizes everything in a logical manner to analyze the system easily. The process makes adjustments and corrects for differences between the actual and desired output or changes the system itself. At this moment I am not as familiar as this model so it is hard to say whether it is the best model to analyze a HAS/EAS.

I think this model is more comprehensive that other two models. The micro-system analysis using System-Environment model was hard to analyze and meso-system analysis was easier that the micro-system analysis. The motion-picture model guides to analyze a system over time so it is hard to limit the analysis a much larger system than other two systems. The inputs, transformation, outputs, and system guidance and management give the specific blueprint to analyze a meta-system. Each process has several internal process to analyze. So it is very detail to analysis process. Feedback through system guidance and management process the outputs are identified for making adjustments for improving the system.  The limitation of this model to me is that it is easy to forget many smaller things that is important in system analysis such as any micro-system that might be critical in a macro-system. This process model helps a meta-system for long term adjustment and improve the efficiency of the system. As time passes I am getting more interested to learn system thinking and system analysis. It was very dry and confusing to me as this is the first time I have come across this topic but more I read the more I enjoy about it. Especially all the class activities we are using it in our real life experience and that makes it more enjoyable. I would admit that after I have enrolled this course I no longer see any system with my own lens the same way I saw before. It opened my eyes to a new world that I now enjoy more.

 

Week Eleven Blog

Reflect on Mindwalk and what they were saying about the interconnections among all things, the mechanical vs. the organic view of systems, and other relevant topics.

Mindwalk movie is a philosophical deep conversation among three characters, a physicist, a politician, and a poet about system thinking. The whole movie was shot in Mont Saint Michel. It was bit boring most of the part. I was able to connect the movie with system thinking in 82th minutes and I enjoyed the last 25 minutes of the 1 hour 48 minutes long movie.  It was hard to comprehend about interconnectedness among all things in the first half of the movie but later part in the movie it was cleared to me. I liked how Sonia explain the different systemic view of a tree as Cartesian view versus systemic view. The poet Thomas Harriman asked the physicist Sonia what is life and she answered that “the essence of life is self-organization”. But I think life is more than just self-organization. We can’t compare human life with matters. If we used the word creation then there is a creator exists whether we see or not. I do see the interconnectedness of all thing in our ecosystems, the organisms, the trees, the mountain, the oceans, the solar systems, human, animals, and the whole universe. This amazing interconnectedness is the reminder of a superpower who organize and control the interconnectedness of all things out of our sight whom the people of faith recognize as God.

Systems theory knowledge helps us think deeper about anything we see and hear. I see Sonia as a pessimistic. She took her out of the holistic approach of systems thinking. She does not even think about her connection as part of a human system activity. Just thinking is not going solve the problem unless use it for a solution. We can’t solve the whole world’s problem alone but if we all share to solve some problem that is better than just thinking without doing nothing. In this aspect I like politician Jack whom I found pragmatic. Even though some of my classmates think politician just talk and do nothing then who solve the problem? If we don’t involve ourselves in political process how can we expect change and make the politician more accountable? If we just hate politician then we are on the the side of Sonia. We are the problem we if do not offer the solution. I do thing holistic approach of anything is better than short-cut method. If a doctor treats a patient just by looking at one symptom without taking holistic approach to collect other history of related symptoms then the cure will be for short term. So, we we see the world as living organisms then we need think about how everything is interconnected in this world and we need to take part in the systems to do our part to preserve the nature system without much disruption.

Even though the whole movie was dominated with only one media verbal it would have been easy if there were some pictorial or diagramical use of some of the complex systems thinking aspects were analyzed. The dialogue among three characters tried to give the message about mechanistic vs organic views of all components’ interconnectedness in the living world. It fascinates me how a physicist turned himself into a system thinker and explained such a nice way about organic world’s view and forgot about the blessings of machines in human life. Is it practically avoidable in this era of technology revolution? I personally think we can’t avoid the Cartesian approach of mechanistic view of the world in systems thinking. Over all I liked the movie and all three characters were well developed.

Week Ten Blog Part 1 and 2

Part 1. Reflect on an instance in which you have tried to make some form of systemic change in your own life, work, or other system. It could be an instance where someone else started a systemic change process and you were part of the group being changed. Tell me what it was, how it went, and how you feel about it. What did you learn from the experience?

I have been involved several systems changes during my 15 years of professional career. I will share the experience of my involvement in the last systems change at my current work place. I was given the leadership responsibility of a tough system change of a university where people have been using a in house custom made  web-based application for information sharing which they called “Courses Website”. It was a bit shocking for me to know that they never heard of a learning management system as being part of a university system where other system university uses the learning management system (LMS) widely in their campus. I have realized during the implementation of LMS why this university clients were kept aside from taking advantage of using the system’s LMS instead of using the in house system which is not an efficient system at all.

I have  experience working with people from different professional background and this is the first time I am dealing with people from medical profession. I was confident that I am familiar with health sector people from my earlier job at one of the top health science university in the nation but I was not aware of this specific group of people which I do not want to label and did not have the chance to work with. This group of people was the toughest to change and still after five years later with 2 LMS implementation I find them not enthusiastic about it. They just reply on their assistant rather than taking their own responsibility as an instructor. This could be they do not have enough time to involve in this aspect as they have other services beyond teaching. This could be there is no motivation in teaching from the hierarchy. Or, this may be one of the failure that I need to work with to bring change in their attitude toward LMS and other technology tools implementation in this environment.

Now, I know I did do system analysis during my involvement of all technologies implementation process in my career. I formed a committee with members from each schools withing the university and met with them separately from my other team which I build with IT departments and the system’s university in other campus.  I started my campaign. I start meeting with each individual department faculty and staff and started studying and observing their personality that later I used to recruit them as pioneer in this change process.  And most importantly the custom system was not an LMS that was just an FTP based file sharing process. Without bringing the custom system I was just focusing on the advantages of using an LMS for their instructional purposes. The strategies worked. I implemented the new LMS within 6 months for the first time.

The things that I did not like during the system change is the meta system’s action for those who used to manage the in house built custom system. I found some of them are no longer here. I was watching the change powerless and felt bit unhappy. My boss’s boss started massive restructuring in her territory without thinking much of a systems thinking and systems analysis. Like I mentioned before some systems change affected me too within two years. I found myself moving from office to office 3 times within 3 years but was able to continue my services till now. After 4 years later I found out that the person who was doing all these systems changes that caused the system becomes less efficient and less effective are no longer here. Finally, the higher level systems agents realized it and let the person go.  I have learned the most valuable experienced during my tenure here and now I am ready to move next level of my career. My leadership style would be transformational rather authoritative. If i am not successful that is okay because I think some times we have to accept failure for common good. I do not want the good that brings harms to others in general.

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Part 2. Think about the project you just did. Was it how you wanted it to come out? What did you learn from the process, your interactions with peers, etc. Free form this a bit and talk about what interested you about your system and what you might have missed without examining the myriad systems surrounding the one you were focused on here.

The project that I finished is about a meso-systems analysis. I felt it was bit easier than the micro-systems analysis. Both micro-and meso-systems analysis were done using Banathy’s two lenses, System-Environment and Structure/Functions models. The analysis using system-environment model was very tough as I did not have clear understanding about system analysis. But the last project which was meso-system analysis using function/structure was easy to define the system image, identify purpose and systems specification, identify the functions of the system, determine the components of the system that will carry out the functions, and define the structure of the system and its relationships among various parts. This structure/functions gave the specific guidelines that was very helpful to analysis the meso-system analysis.

I felt having more freedom to analyze a meso-system than that of a micro-system. Micro-system analysis was restricted to me in terms of limitation of considering a fixed static single point of time. It was hard to identify the purpose and also make recommendations. Where as meso-systems analysis was over a period of time that made it easy to offer comprehensive recommendations. I believe it will be more perfect in meta-system level analysis to make over all recommendations after analyzing to improve a system’s effectiveness response to its changes. Banathy’s list of questions guided to organize and identify functions of elements in the systems. The important thing I learned from Banathy’s model is how to identify components, their relationships, and used these info to create mind maps.

Peer interactions were useful. I strongly believe interactions is a good teaching strategy. I will use it if I choose to be an instructor if not I will recommend who are instructors to use it. It has been very helpful to this class to understand and clear any complex idea through interactions between instructor and students and peer interactions. Some students exchange task two for peer feedback and it was tremendously helpful to get the feedback in improving the task. One of the smart students shared how the student analyzed a meso-systems thinking it as micro-system. It was a big lesson to learn how complex is complex thinking. I though I was the only person who was struggling in this class but peer instructions helped clearing lots of misconceptions and helped improving the understanding of many complex things.

My interest to this system become deeper because I am analyzing my own micro-and meso-systems. The meso-systems was the Center for Innovative Learning where I work and I have been seeing its evolution for last five years.  I have been physically and emotionally attached to its evolution since its inception. The Center for Learning & Development was established in 2010 with the goals of faculty training and development to improve students learning outcomes. For some mysterious reasons the systemic changes started and after two years another center has been created by the name of Center for Online Education in 2012. Then again in 2014 both centers merged together with a new name Center for Innovative Learning. During this five years periods lots of things happened which are now I know as systemic changes. I was not aware of how system changes affect its components and effectiveness of the system. Lots of things I did not understand before I took this class. Now, I am able to connect and understand because of my knowledge about systemic thinking and systems change that I learned from this class. Actually I was interested to learn about the systems design and analysis due to witnessing these events in my career that motivated me to take this class. I am glad I have learn some new things that will be helpful in my future professional career.

Reference

Banathy, B. H. (1973). The functions/structure model. In Developing a systems view of education: The systems-model approach (pp. 59–97). Salinas, CA: Intersystems Publications.

Week Nine Blog

Malott, M.E. and Nartinez, W.S. (2006).  Addressing organizational complexity: A behavioural systems analysis application to higher education. International Journal of Psychology, 41 (6), 559-570.

This paper describes a change initiative of a higher education in Mexico by applying a behavioral system analysis approach. The analysis shows how behavior analysts can alter the behavior of individuals by manipulating behavioral contingencies. Organizational change is more complex than specific behavior change because organization analysis involves many components. A behavioral entity comprises actions of a single individual or group. An organization such as a university involves greater complexity that includes “1. Interlocking behavioral contingencies of many faculty, students, staff, and administrators and their interaction with external system’s members such as government officials, unions etc.; 2. Insignificant impact of a single behavior of an individual on overall output of the organization; 3. Aggregate products; and 4. unique dynamic configurations of behavioral contingencies of multiple individuals” (Malott and Martinez, 2006, p. 559). So, a behavior and an organization involve different units of analysis.  This study attempted to describe how the organizational complexity study can guide change strategies.

Mexican government has been struggling to reduce the people’s illiteracy rate. The government has taken an initiative to raise the educational level of their school teachers up to at least BA degree from a 3 year certificate of technical education. In order to accomplish this target the government has established the National pedagogy University of Veracruz (UPV) in 1980. After twenty years of service the university presented significant problem that threatened its long-term survival. Low productivity, declining enrollment, and outdated programs have caused it to go under considerable transformation. The behavioral systems engineering model (Malott, 2003) has been applied to improve the change.

Changing organization is like engineering (Gilbert, 1996). Like building a bridge, behavioral system analysis also involves scientific principles of behavior, their unique application as each organization is different. “A behavioral contingency is to organizational change like a drop of water is to an ocean (Malott and Martinez, 2006, p. 560)”. The organizational complexity analysis is essential in planning change and in identifying targets which justify resource utilization. This study used three types of complexity-environmental, hierarchical, and component to determine the change plan (Glenn and Malott, 2004).

In environmental complexity analysis they identified variables that are relevant to change are population characteristics, economic conditions, federal and state regulations, labor unions, and elected governments. The hierarchical complexity includes macro-system’s environmental variables , and educational system such as pre-schools, secondary, technical and higher education and their dynamic relationship with government, industry, and family. The component complexity which is determined by the number of elements that constitute an organization. Component complexity is important to develop effective interventions that that is survivable in a dynamic environment of an organization. The analysis found enrollment in BA program in 1980 was 7000 which declined to 5000 in 2000, and 2324 in 2004.

The analysis found that high proportion of young and rural population who are living under high level of poverty, government excessive regulation over administrative processes, high illiteracy rate, high drop-out in primary school children, decreasing demand for specific programs, and inefficient and ineffective administrative process. The complexity study helped to identify these variables that are critical in the design of effective intervention. Four change initiatives were identified from the analysis of complexity-“1. Incorporation of adult literacy training at the macro-system level; 2. Adding various options to thesis requirement to increase graduation rate; 3. Development of new programs to increase enrollment; and 4. Re-engineering of the student-centered administrative processes” (Malott and Martinez, 2006, p. 567).