Relevant System Root Definition A System example essay topic

Introduction Strongly orientated around our beliefs my wife and I have decided to emigrate to another country that closer matches our current and future aspirations; beliefs & values; needs and wants ect. It is a mix of both hard and soft complexity and therefore requires a good balance of both. The personal context and beliefs may create certain paradoxes that will need accommodation and calibration through awareness of personality styles; monitoring and control; reflective techniques and a respectful use of approach relative to the contextualization driven by the situation. Duality of relative systems will be exhibited by the need of various levels of learning required by my wife in order for her to participate, enabling her to create and interpret diagrams and distinctions between terminology and alike. Overall our epistemology of how and what to measure and why to measure it are not yet known this confirmed my initial choice of approach. Beginning with the SSM approach I will embody the variety of tasks and issues that I would not have considered without using this approach.

Using this method, emergence and insight will lead me to iteration of my potential relevant systems, redefining my root definition giving congruence throughout the analysis. By making my beliefs, values and circumstance explicit magnitudes of belief and personality style will become clearer and therefore required accommodation accounted for. The relevant systems will be of a recursive dimension, having a very similar format - based on the initial stages of SSM - taking the method as far as I feel can be congruent with the situation. Qualification of approach relative to the emergence will give distinction between hard and soft complexity, driven by the situation the analysis will merge into HSM to enable an objective measurement of hard data.

This will be shown in the form of a multi criteria analysis and although its format will be based on hard data though the weighting and scores will lend them selves to our personally contextualized beliefs relative to our worldviews. The final stage would be to bring these two approaches together for a final analysis and further iteration and through, what is obvious now, visit the potential countries for participative needs for a taste of reality - here is where my project comes to a halt. Here I will attempt through reflective techniques to establish specifically my weaknesses and as this is a real life inquiry I will for my own purposes continue will the study and use it to enable my decision making process regarding emigration. Some reflection-before-action - Stage 0 (iteration in red) Questions.

Why am I doing this, what do I want from the inquiry? o To find a better place to live o To reduce uncertainty o To be able to make an informed choice based on our needs and wants o To learn from practice o Discovery o Increase epistemology and my wife's o Explore mine and my wife's beliefs o Accommodate and find congruence of our beliefs o Explore how our personality styles affect our decisions o Meaningful data. Who am I doing it for? o My wife and I and my children's future. What are my motivations? o Discontent with existing circumstances o Belief that UK society and our values are becoming incongruent SS Drugs, crime, and violence SS Too many immigrants scrounging from the state SS Refute or reinforce our beliefs o Government policy SS Health, services, and education SS economics o Poor climate in UK o Immigration o Cultural erosion o Pace of life. What approach and why? What plan is in my head? (driven by strong beliefs that there are other countries better than the UK). What are my biases?

Description of problem situation (iteration in red) My reason for detailing the root definition and CATWOE here is that this is more of an overall description of our perceived problem - below I will show recursion of root definition and CATWOE for each relevant system Root Definition A system owned, managed and operated by my wife and I, to identify a country mutually desirable. A country that we find congruent with our beliefs as the first stage of creating a better future for my family CATWOE Customers ~ My family & children Actors ~ My wife & I Transformation ~ locate a mutually desirable country Worldview ~ create a better future for my family Owners ~ My family Environment ~ poor / non -appreciation of EU laws; geological issues; cultural issues of other countries; climatic considerations through out Europe. Project Identity / Purpose As the root definition implies this is a 'system owned by my wife and I to purchase an affordable plot of land in a country identified as being mutually desirable' To summarise this is an initial investigation that forms part of a meta-investigation to move abroad with the intention to buy land that can be farmed viably to sustain my family in all it's food needs and eventually to become as self sufficient (renewable energy, recycling water etc., ) as possible and hopefully create a market for produce. The outcomes of the project will be a model that will enable both qualitative and quantitative comparison of our conceptualized framework of the UK. For the client (my wife), and myself the outcome will be a fuller appreciation of the implications of such a move / venture and a reduction in the uncertainty that it brings. From the above unstructured problem situation implied by the synoptic root definition and CATWOE above it is obvious that there is a strong need to identify an synoptic activity sequence to give me a general direction that is inline with the approach adopted, this is illustrated in figure 1 below.

Activity 1 A reflective framework was set out by the reflection before action / question detailed on page 2. This though was iterated on and emergent through 3 E's. Activity 2 This came in the form Gantt chart, a copy of which is below, again here it was iterated on as I progressed. Activity 3 ~ Rich Pictures, issues and tasks - Stage 1 a My rich picture (figure 2 below) gave me many insights as to the possible content of the situation and the possible relative systems this content would be modelled within. With some long and very difficult reflection - the feeling of being unproductive - I drafted many systems maps until I was finally happy with the sub sets I had created (figure 3 below). I find it difficult to call something finished and as a result I consciously began to set time limits on activities, reflecting before on issues like level of detail and defining the purpose on an individual task.

Identifying my perceiver style through signals I have learned to identify like worrying about neatness and if I have missed something moving it toward the judgment pole in an effort to keep inline with my plan - accommodation was required. I found it quite difficult to keep track of the changes to the plan and activity sequence and tended to ignore them to my own detriment - time scales got all out of control and I began to get in a mess - I needed a method for my method - things began to come together, though in a scary and very divergent manner. My strong skew towards the perceiver pole (MBTI) seems to keep me ploughing through hoping I would get to the high ground. This systems map seemed to allow a mental divergence which was a relief. Fig. 1 Synoptic Activity Sequence Model to create system to identify a country that is mutually desirable to my wife and I. (iterations in red) Rich picture Systems map fig 3 Relevant Systems - Stage 1 b From the rich picture and systems map I formulated relevant systems. Due to low level of mine and my wife's epistemologies relative to the relevant systems there was the need for a lot of discussion and research.

Here I new I would waste time as most of my searching would be done on the World Wide Web, to help control this (reflection-before-action) I drafted a search tracker (see appendix 1), part of one of my 3 E's. I needed to confirm that I / we were not unusual in any way in selecting what we had as relevant systems, for this we formulated a simple questionnaire (see appendix 2) having 20 candidates form various backgrounds to take part - the finding were generally congruent with ours the systems we had chose to model. Figure 4 below - method diagram 1 outlines what was needed to do - practically an appreciative system which leads to the ability to model the influences and their magnitude of our family. Each of the relevant systems detailed in figure 4 - method diagram 1 - were treated as mini SSM in duality with learning model, there is far too much to include here but get a general feel appendix 3 shows the recursive dimensions that were applied to each of the relevant systems. Root Definitions - Stage 2.

Conceptual Models - Stage 3 Appendix 3 illustrates root definitions CATWOE creation for each relevant system along with and some very useful 3 E's, also you will see more specific rich pictures, systems maps and influence diagrams We arrived at criteria that was qualitative and which would become part of our personal belief system relative to our needs, wants and worldview / values. What also emerged was the fact that we could not make a decision to move to another country on beliefs etc alone. Now we had established what was important to us as a family we needed to quantify as many of the qualitative as possible and at the same time I needed to make my wife aware of what, how and why I was about to change the approach, for the time being the SSM was on hold... Method dia 1 -fig 4 The integration of HSM into the inquiry The necessity for adopting the hard approach was explained above and my approach in practice is detailed in appendix 4. Here again the reflection-before-action ion page 2 was reflected on and I kept in mind the need for meaningful data.

My reflection was also turn to the HSM approach - this was not my preferred approach - and a revision of the conceptual model that represent it. Referring to the HSM model in appendix 4: . Activity A - the problem was a need for objective data to refute on confirm our beliefs or at least identify need for accommodations ect... Activity B - I discussed the needs with my wife and we created a potential system definition...

Activity C - there was no need for an in depth definition of the problem we had generally covered what our problem was - we needed confirmation through sourcing as much real data as possible. Stage 1 - our current state was where we were up in the SSM part of the inquiry, which in essence was that we knew our beliefs; we had found the magnitudes of influence, and what influences affected our family most and through the various diagramming we had all the content attributes we were liable to need to create a quantitatively measurable model... Stage 2 - Our perceived future state was that of an relatively easy to use quantitative model that would assist us in the decision making process from an objective perspective that also enabled some of our beliefs to be incorporated... Stage 3 - The hows to get there, due to our need and my epistemology of hard type models leads me to believe that an MCA would be the best fit... Stage 4 - I will know when I have got there when I have metrics that can used harmoniously with other countries, that is a level of measurable congruence. This was done through lengthy data searching on the to establish such metrics and by rigorous iteration of the desired metrics - again another learning model.

Stage 5 - this in reality can only be achieved through participation and further use of the model with countries that I believe to be extremes against our beliefs. In appendix 5 I have included a completed MCA for the UK for the 5 high level characteristics and the attributes my wife and I found to be of relevance to our decision - again this is as far as I have managed to get. Conclusion, further work and reflection In order to complete the inquiry I need to bring both SSM and HSM together and do further iteration as to the overall relevance of the data and full utilization of the approach to satisfy both myself and the method - I feel what I have began is a bit of a methodology. Concentration and practical reflection of the 3 E's I have detailed in both the SSM and HSM. My preferred style is very hard to accommodate and I never do well on time limits / dead lines - I am working on that again through conscious use of 3 E's.

Further to this I would like to bring the 5 main characteristics together and iterate intensely how the affect each other from different levels - moving the boundaries and then introduce VSM once I had mastered the model in The personal context has not involved many stakeholders but the stakeholders involved (see appendix 6) are affected to quite a high degree. This choice of a situation is my preferred style, though this was not a conscious decision. I really enjoy systems and wish I had more time and a less hectic life style utilize it, next year I will be able to use my skills to help me with S 216 environmental Science - thanks for your support.