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Organizations are awash with complexity, yet decisions must be made in real time. This talk offers a practitioner-ready pathway from sense-making to coordinated action by reframing the classic “Thought–Knowledge–Action” triad onto the Viable System Model (VSM).
This talk integrates Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) with Miller’s Living Systems Theory by casting System 5 as the organization’s Decider as the locus of identity, value commitments, and final arbitration between present operations and future possibilities.
A central theme is disciplined trial-and-error: using the bathometer/prototype metaphor, we treat small, safe-to-fail probes as instruments that “sound the depth” of uncertainty before committing resources.
The proposed approach explicitly counters the risks of non-action and delayed action — common failure modes where the cost of waiting exceeds the cost of learning — by embedding pre-agreed thresholds, kill-rules, and escalation guardrails. The result is reduced decision latency, tighter alignment between identity and operations, and a repeatable loop that links what the system is (S5), knows (S4), and does (S1–3) through rapid prototyping.
Gandolfo Dominicci is Professor of Business Management - Dip. SEAS - University of Palermo, Italy. He is Co-founder, Scientific Director and Vice-President of the Business Systems Laboratory (BSLab). He is Executive Head and Director of Publications of the The Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research. He is also Editor in Chief of Systems Research and Behavioral Science; the International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing; and the International Journal of Markets and Business Systems. He was former Editor in Chief of Kybernetes, Business Systems Review; and of the International Journal of Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism.
He is also co-editor in chief and associate editor of other journals (International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, Business Process Management Journal, International Journal of Systems and Society (2013-2019)). He is an editorial Board Member of several other systems and cybernetic journals.
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