60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and 1st Policy Congress 

This award invites papers that address contemporary challenges in ways that advance understanding of how collective intelligence and collective impact (1) foster emergence, thrivability, and systemic wellbeing.  

The Margaret Mead Memorial Award was established in 2013 to commemorate the memory of the first woman to serve as President of the ISSS (at a time when it was called the International Society for General Systems Research – ISGSR – in 1972).  

Margaret Mead was involved with the society since it was first established as the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1956.  At that meeting, she admonished the newly formed society to apply systems principles to itself as an organization,

"with the aim of fostering a more collaborative and inclusive organizational structure."(2)  

Her work with indigenous – or more properly, autochthonous – peoples the world overemphasized the role of the individual in the collective, and the role of the collective as an enabler for the flourishing of the individual.  Deeply committed to social process, Mead's view of systems was fundamentally relational.  

Sir Ken Robinson notes that 

"human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability, and the heart of our challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence."(3)  

It is in this spirit of relational intelligence, drawing on the type of systemic consciousness so well embodied by Margaret Mead, that this award has been established.  Whereas the other two Student Paper Awards both celebrate the vision for inspired systemic thought, being, and action as embodied and manifest through the efforts of individuals such as Sir Geoffrey Vickers and Anatol Rapoport, the Margaret Mead Memorial Award recognizes contributions to systems experience, thinking, design, and action that empower individuals in communities, and in so doing, empower communities as purposeful systems in their own right.

​References:

(1) Kania, J. and Kramer, M. (2013). Embracing Emergence: How Collective Impact Addresses Complexity, Stanford Social Innovation Review – online at http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/embracing_emergence_how_collective_impact_addresses_complexity  [sourced 10 February 2013].

(2) Hammond, D. (2003). The Science of Synthesis, University Press of Colorado, Boulder CO, USA, p. 249.

(3) Robinson, Ken (2010).  Bring on the learning revolution! TED Talk – online at http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html [sourced 10 February 2013].