|
Hi I'm Victor MacGill from Dunedin, New Zealand and just joined up. I am very interested in social complexity and have been for about ten years now. I am not a part of any academic institution, but rather work as a Probation officer. I have a complexity website at http://complexity.orcon.net.nz and a personal site at www.vmacgill.net. I'm getting about 50 visits a day on my complexity site, I am pretty happy about. My biggest difficulty is a lack of a mentor to guide me and point out errors in my understanding of complexity, so I hope being a part of this group will help in part at least in this regard. While I believe I have worked hard to maintain the correctness of the information on my site, it lack a critical examination to check that I am presenting complexity correctly. It is very much designed to be simple and for people without a background in complexity (largely influenced by my own lack of detailed technical knowledge). Working full-time as a Probation Officer means I don't have anywhere near the time I would like to devote to understanding and using complexity. I am at present applying for a position as senior probation officer, which would give me more of a management role where there might be room to promote complexity principles. After attending the ANZSYS conference and attending a Cynefin workshop I returned and offered to give a one-day workshop to Probation using complexity principles to look at our organisation, how it is run, and develop some strategies for the future. I am waiting for approval for runnning the day, which I think is still several months off. There is a power point presentation available through my orcon site above I have prepared for it to outline complexity principles. This is interesting in terms of the discussion at the moment about how explicit to be about revealing the underlying ideas behind complexity rather than just using them. If anyone has the time to look at the powerpoint presentation and had critical advice, especially in regards to accuracy (see my comment about mentors) It would be greatly appreciated. I would be happy to share the other ideas I have for presenting in more detail for anyone interested, basically the morning is spent investigating individuals hopes, dreams, strengths, weakness including some narrative fairy story based work (see my personal site) then the presentation, so people see how the organisation can be examined the same way as an individual, this leads to developing strategies for the organisation and building commitment for change. I am very interested in Carol's system for teaching the principles of complexity and would really like more informstion of the detail if that were possible, it looks really great. I had also been thinking of using emails before and after to ask critical questions which would link to the learning cycle concepts as needing time for the whole cycle, but it is great to see a whole methodology worked out. Cheers Victor MacGill |