Designing Freedom Together

Roger Duck works mostly as a consultant through his own business, drawing on systemic ideas to help people learn together to take effective action. In recent years his work has focused on processes of change and transition in organisations, and the wider systems in which they operate. He is motivated to humanise the way we organise, and he has been particularly influenced by Stafford Beer’s thinking. He has consulted to a wide range of public and private sector organisations, especially in relation to transport, energy and telecommunications, working as a facilitator, researcher and innovator to support processes of change. He has been Director of Professional Development for SCiO (Systems and Complexity in Organisation). He served on the steering group of Great Britain’s Future Power System Architecture (FPSA) project (phase 2). He also has experience in local community development through his association with the International Futures Forum (IFF) which led him to co-found an experiment in relationship-building for community wellbeing. He is certified by the International Bateson Institute (IBI) as a warm data host. He and Jane Searles published an article called Designing Freedom Together in 2021, describing a case study of enabling collaborative exploration of transformational systemic change. He can be reached at roger.duck@mapsar.co.uk.

Jane Searles has been continuously developing a systemic modelling approach based on co-design workshops over the last 30 years, in the role of systemic architect. The basic method was developed originally within International Computers Ltd which was an amalgamation of UK Computer Companies in the 1960s, and later in Fujitsu which took over ICL. The modelling approach was originated by Graham Pratten as a business process oriented approach to software architecture design. Jane adapted this approach in the early 1990s to address whole systems, which had customers / citizens at their heart and focussed on people and effective teamwork (and enabling technology where useful). Having been introduced to the Viable System Model in the early 1990s, Jane found that both approaches could usefully be combined to address transformative change towards a visionary future where citizens are central, using the systemic modelling approach to question deeply help assumptions about the way things were done, before proceeding to a systemic transition architecture, comprising multiple VSMs playing roles in an overall system. The approach uses the VSM, in design mode, to structure models of coherent systems which span organisational boundaries and deliver on customer needs. She used this approach, for example, in modelling the overall Criminal Justice System, and the contribution of Magistrates Courts and of Probation to this system as a coherent whole. Jane was the Membership secretary and Board secretary for SCiO for many years, where she first met Roger, and they have been collaborating using and developing this approach over the last 10 years. They have worked together on a community project, ‘Thriving in Fife’ with International Futures Forum (IFF) and have previously used the approach outlined to model an aspirational UK power system which addresses the issues facing communities, industry and commerce and our planet. They have recently published ‘designing freedom together’ which focusses on systemic modelling work done prior to developing systemic designs based on VSM principles. Jane can be reached on: jane.searles@btinternet.com.