Harold Nelson
[30 years later, we asked Harold Nelson to revisit this article, written and published in Performance Improvement Quarterly in 1994—30 years ago. The article is included below. Eds.]
This article has turned out to be one of the more popular pieces I have written over the years. I have thought a lot more about what undisciplined means in the realm of systemic design. I have also developed more ideas about what I call “scholar-practitioner” roles, which are professional roles like design.
Original abstract
This paper introduces design, integrated with systems thinking, as a necessary if not sufficient means for meeting the challenge of how to create or recreate organizations and institutions which better serve the needs and desires of clients, customers and stakeholders in a rapidly changing world. Design is a dramatically different way of moving conceptual thinking into concrete action as contrasted to the scientific or artistic traditions which are primarily designed to describe or explain the natural or phenomenal world. The limits of problem solving strategies when applied to complex organizational change leave design as the strategy of choice. The designer’s role is animated by other expression rather than self expression. From within this role, designers engage in the task of creating the un-natural world by being un-disciplined using systems thinking and by being out-of-control as part of the creative process of design.
REFERENCE
Nelson, H.G. (1994), The Necessity of Being “Un-Disciplined” and “Out of Control”: Design Action and Systems Thinking. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 7: 22-29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1937-8327.1994.tb00634.x
Profile
Harold Nelson consults with public, private and military organizations on issues of systemic design competence. He is a visiting scholar in the School of Computer Science at the University of Montana and was the 2009-2010 Nierenberg Distinguished Professor of Design in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Harold was an occasional Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy and the Defense Analysis program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He was also an affiliated Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington and worked in research for the NSF-funded Centre for Learning in Informal and Formal Environments at the University of Washington, Stanford University and SRI.
Harold is a past president and trustee of the International Society for Systems Science, the co-founding Director and President of the Advanced Design Institute (ADi), and the owner of Harold G. Nelson LLC, Systemic Design. As a consultant, Dr Nelson has worked with non-profits and corporations, state and federal agencies, international governments, and the United Nations, and continues to work as an educator, consultant, and scholar on systemic organizational design. Dr Nelson was the head of, and faculty member in, the Graduate Programs in Whole Systems Design (WSD) at Antioch University. He received his PhD in The Design of Social Systems, graduating with distinction, from the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Master of Architecture degree from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor of Architecture from Montana State University and is a licensed architect in California.
In 2004, The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World received the Outstanding Book of the Year award. The 2nd edition by MIT Press was published in 2012.
Harold also contributed the first article for the Contexts journal with an invited essay in 2023. “Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix” helps place the footers and foundation into the field that has grown from design for complex scale and generations of systems thinking.
In 2023, Harold launched Systemic Design Master Classes.
The master classes in systemic design are designed to be catalysts in the development of shared understandings of what systemic design is, can be, and is desired to be—some common ground for the ‘place’ and ‘space’ to have generable conversations about the aim and outcome of systemic design education and practices—preparation and praxis.
These Master Classes are precursors to the establishment of a formal venue—a Center for Advanced Systemic Design and concomitant Systemic-Design ‘Flight’ School—for the capacitation of emerging systemic designers and their allies.
Downloaded from Academia.edu as a pre-read for this session.