In this Newsletter:

• the invitation to the Practitioners Webinar (November 12th) with correct links.
• Reminder of next week's Webinar (November the 19th) by Paul Pangaro

Practitioners Webinar with Mike Jones:

• 12. November 2025, 17:00 - 18:30 London time
• click here: Webinar Page: https://metaphorum.org/webinar/vsm-and-an-emergent-approach-to-strategy

We have now fixed the links (we hope!).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Most strategies fail not because the plan was wrong, but because the organisationwas built for control, not adaptation.

In this talk, Mike challenges the idea that strategy is a fixed aspiration ordocument to be implemented.

Drawing on his work with senior leaders and insights from systems thinking, he explores how structure shapes behaviour, how observation must come beforeaspiration, and why strategy must be lived, not declared.

Using the Viable System Model as a lens, Mike shows how organisations candesign for adaptability and coherence instead of alignment and compliance.

Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of how to build strategy as a living capability – one that manoeuvres, learns, and holds its course when realityrefuses to cooperate.

General Webinar with Paul Pangaro:

• 19. November 2025, 17:00 - 18:30 London time
• click here: Webinar Page: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/metaphorum1/1945468

Recently the world was shaken by the COVID-19 epidemic. Consequences include the irrefutable recognition of countless pandemics—pan meaning all and demos meaning people joined collectively by common geography or any binding constraint. So many massive ills were at last conceded, spanning technology as well as biology, fomenting social tragedies through racism, social inequalities, and wars, while creating natural tragedies with climate change and for the ecosystem. Even before that transitional 2020 moment, Cybernetics, while much neglected, had been called out as something to revive, to teach, to practice, to help a world gone wild. Now five years later, can Cybernetics hold those hints of redemption—to offer what other disciplines or rituals or frameworks cannot? This paper traces recent efforts to create a responsive and durable locus for Cybernetics on a university campus, in a format to serve the needs of student-scholars, whose passion for addressing wicked challenges was not yet matched by resources or collaborations fitting the scale of the confrontation or depth of their commitment.

A Laboratory for Cybernetics, founded within the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offers foundational materials, emergent digital resources, and a nascent networking and collaborating platform to match students with inworld practitioners, while maintaining focus on the student’s worldview and interests. This constitutes a praxis for approaching complex adaptive systems, offering a proposal for how Cybernetics and wicked challenges may dance together—but with a twist. How might we incubate Cybernetics as its own living response to the wicked challenges of today? Can a laboratory instigate a world-wide experiment to advance what is possible for addressing wicked challenges? Can we flip the script of “gain of function” research—evolving “genetic” material to increase capacity, here for the greater good—by amplifying the capabilities of Cybernetics through collective “praxis-sourcing”—the gathering and application of concepts and materials, models and methods, networking and collaborating, without barriers of disciplines, geographies, or generations?

The paper closes with a call to action to the world-wide community as catalyst for today’s conversations at a new scale of audacity for creating an open-source, anti-wicked praxis of Cybernetics in response to the pandemics of our time.

Paul Pangaro, PhD

Director, Laboratory for Cybernetics, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

Visiting Scholar, School of Architecture & School of Design, CMU

President, American Society for Cybernetics