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== Annual Meeting ==

The 2008 Annual Meeting,  held in Memphis, Tennessee, USA October 15 through October 18, 2008, was a learning event filled with energy, inspiration, and renewal for those who attended.  The meeting was framed around our learning model of Inspiration – Internalization – Integration, beginning with the initial session announcing and showcasing the technology of our new website (a WIKI), to the closing discussions about STS and Health Care.  

As has been our practice in the last few years, a pre-meeting session entitled “The Elders Speak” was led by Eli Berniker, Ph.D.  Eli’s vast experience in STS, as well as other disciplines such as engineering, brought a rich flavor to this session as he shared his own lessons about STS and implications for future practice with the gathered group.

The theme for our 2008 meeting was “New Horizons for STS:  The Language and Learning of Networked, Complex Systems.”   A speed networking exercise was used as a meeting opener to exemplify such systems and their impact on people.  As one member commented after experiencing the exercise, it “… left me both energized by all the new contacts, while at the same time dissatisfied with the confusion, speed, and briefness of contact.  This left me with an image of what people experience – good and bad – in today’s organizations.”

Stu Winby brought us a case study about a large state healthcare provider whose strategic objective was to become a world-class healthcare organization with a national presence as measured by national-based standards and metrics.  From this example, the importance of deliberation design in new organization forms was reinforced, although simple deliberation models from our past do not appear to fit complex networked organizations well, and we need to shift from single intervention, closed-loop design to organizing on a continuous basis.

Adrienne Seal helped us see this new environment, too, in her discussion of how Clorox is currently focused on the issue of scalability in designing its internal Human Resources Organization for improved operation in an increasingly complex global environment.  Again, the growing complexity of the system appears to demand more complexity in design and design approaches.

Bert Painter led a challenging discussion of new organization forms that demand differences in the way we consider design work.  He suggested that businesses are becoming “globally integrated ecosystems” with the fastest growing work in complex, tacit interaction jobs.  The ensuing discussion suggested that in relationship-based work and work systems such as these, our best efforts to design have the potential to create greater flexibility and adaptability.  At the same time, they can have the opposite impact in what may appear to be ‘temporary’ organizations organized by project rather than by clear organizing rules.  So there is a greater need than ever to carefully align innovation for adaptability with mission and goals.

An arresting example of where STS practitioners, and others, can learn from other disciplines was brought to us by Kevin Boyle and Mary Marschall.  Their discussion of organizational anthropology showed clearly that the social and cultural dynamics of organizations present an enormous hurdle as well as resources for defining high quality and high performing organizations.  The bellwether for our learning came from an exercise that began with small group discussions of our own work (closed information loops), moved to our creations of graphic representations of the history of STS, and ended with those images documented on cell-phone video and uploaded to YouTube (a wide-open information loop)! 
 
We also took time to consider the Roundtable as a 'live case,' sharing observations and strategies for the continued growth and sustainability of this international, voluntary learning community.

A focus on health care on Saturday brought us insights to the implications for organizations of the context of health care practice today, and reconfirmed that this is an arena ripe for STS application.  From these discussions, a new interest group has emerged within the Roundtable, one that will proactively engage in a line of inquiry and investigation for the future of STS and Health Care.

We invite all who attended to add their thoughts and learnings to the [[Memphis Learning Journal]].