small group discussion

This evening our group discussed the article, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" by Horst W. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. I found it interesting that this article is a modification of a paper written in 1969 and then published in 1973. I suppose this speaks to its continued relevance in 2011.

Having been a school teacher I was interested in the idea of professionals in social services acquiring "professional competencies". This is demonstrated by my teaching license and other fields such as social work would have the same thing. We put so much weight on these titles and then are surprised when social services don't get performed to the degree we expect.

Our expectations and the systems we have created are great for our imagined homogeneous societies but only create more problems our mixed, pluralistic societies.

Challenges to contemorary problem solving: 1) the true ability to distinguish between what is happening and what we want to happen 2) expanding system boundaries 3) understanding complexities of open societal systems

Systems is just a metaphor for us to categorize our world. We should be careful how we use that metaphor because in reality there are no boundaries.

In our discussion a connection was made in the Rittell article with the concept of "leverage points" in Meadows book of "Thinking in Systems". Rittell suggests that identifying "problem centers" and "where and how we should intervene" is not as easy as we think it should be. Could these problem centers be leverage points in Meadow's book? Meadow's talks about the difficulty of identifying leverage points - they sometimes are more difficult to find and don't react to our actions the way we would think they do.

Leverage points and peacebuilding:

We made quick associations between leverage points and entry points into a conflict. Discussed whether they are the same or not. Maybe entry points help us find leverage points. thought of leverage points as stock that has a force behind it - example: if knowledge is a stock in a system and increasing that knowledge would drastically change the dynamic of a conflict, maybe the knowledge is a type of information leverage point. An entry point of for increasing that knowledge could be anyone of the two parties that are interested in increasing their knowledge for the sake of peacebuilding.