Metaphorum

Beyond Theory: Exploring the Practical Synergy of VSM and AI
2024-11-12 16:00 - 17:30 UTC | Metaphorum Webinar
Beyond Theory: Exploring the Practical Synergy of VSM and AI”
Panos Panagiotakopoulos, PhD
Tuesday November the 12th, 4:00- 5:30 pm (UK wintertime)
This hands-on webinar will introduce the Viable System Model (VSM) as a framework to understand and harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) within organizations.
We’ll examine practical use cases across VSM’s five systems through interactive demos and discussions.
Rather than theory, this session will focus on real-world applications, showing how VSM can enhance the effective integration of AI in an organization and significantly improve its viability. ,Additionally, we’ll explore how AI can support VSM training and deepen understanding, making it easier for participants to apply VSM concepts in business contexts.

Organizing success critical tasks in a production plant with the Viable System Model
2024-10-08 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London)
A Practice Application of VSM
Judith Hennemann
The talk will give insights in process and results of a 2-day-workshop in one of our production plants.
In my presentation, I will focus on the methodology of the workshop in the first place, especially with regards to alternating VSM teaching and application phases during the workshop.
I will also explain how we met challenges that occurred during the analysis.
The request to the facilitator was – based on the strategic relevance and a variety of difficult conditions for the plant – to define crucial roles that ensure a resilient setup of this production plant.
The concept needed to be scalable to similar plants in our global setting. A cross functional project had already been launched in order to support the performance of the plant.
The plant in focus is embedded in a complex matrix of regional, technical and functional structures and requirements.
You will see how the nesting of the organization made it difficult to identify the boundaries of the System in Focus, and how flexible usage of recursion levels helped us to avoid paralysis by analysis.
I will walk you through three major steps of our workshop:

First, the check of organizational setup and manageability of the operations.
Second, the collection of challenges that the operations and their management are facing, including environmental influences and dependencies between operations.
Third, the definition of corresponding roles, competencies and practices to ensure a stable and resilient operation of the plant.

You will take away my recommendation for templates from the VSM Coach training and on visualization and communication of the results to the senior management, and general lessons learned.
Please understand that I “blurred” all the specific results. This is about the process, not the results.
I am looking forward to our discussion.

VSM & Ethics
2024-10-02 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London) | Metaphorum Webinar
Stephen Harwood
Technology is Janus-faced with it having both a good and a dark side, this highlighting the ethics domain. This has implications for the implementation of technology in general. Extending the notion of technology implementation as one form of managed change, these implications extend to how we handle change, especially change in complex situations. More

Berlin 2024 Conference – Creativity and Viability
2024-09-16 - 2024-09-17 | The Change Hub, Germany
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The Metaphorum 2024 Conference is set to take place in Berlin, Germany. This will be a two-day event from Monday September 16th to Tuesday September 17th.

This year’s conference theme centres around the role of creativity in sustaining viability. The primary conference activities are scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, to be held at The Change Hub, an innovative space dedicated to creating sustainable transformation and social impact.

In keeping with the theme of the conference, this will be an innovative experience, unlike any other Metaphorum conference you have attended.

Learn more

The Topologies of Prediction: Management, Cybernetics, and Artificial Intelligence
2024-09-04 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London) | Metaphorum Webinar
Mark Johnson
AI’s recent advances mean that it is now a fundamental constituent of the environment for all of us, and the challenge for organisations is to adapt to it. This entails a deeper understanding of what the technology is, and this in turn invites a reinspection of cybernetic theory.
Participate through this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82647039399?pwd=[REDACTED]

Practitioners Webinar: From systems to entrepreneurial ecosystemic organizations. Exploring Haier’s RenDanHeYi.
2024-06-26 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London) | Metaphorum Webinar
Emanuele Quintarelli will introduce RenDanHeYi, a truly decentralized organization concept.
After that, he and Krishan Mathis will explore in an interactive way how these concepts relate to the Viable System Model, and look for parallels and differences.
Abstract:
How can a global manufacturer with tens of thousands of employees not just survive but thrive in turbulent times? Guided by its CEO philosopher, the Chinese white goods appliance leader went through four decades of strategy, business, and organizational reinvention, rewriting everything we knew about management.

Webinar: The heart of the 4th industrial revolution in the brain of Viable System Model.
2024-06-05 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London) | Metaphorum Webinar
Content

Sketches from Stafford Beer’s legacy
Stafford Beer stands out for his role as the first developer of models for the diagnosis and intervention of human organizations within industry and the public sector. However his work was greater than that. The goal of the present webinar is to develop the hypothesis that the legacy of Stafford Beer raises the first intuitions related to the foundations of what today is called the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, the fundamentals of our contemporary world.
To achieve this, let us first define precisely an industrial revolution. What are its elements and layers? How its evolution is characterized? Then, we will take Stafford Beer’s experience in the Cybersyn project, as a first attempt to promote a popular national cyberculture, in particular focusing on Cyberfolk.
Many of Beer and his team’s reflections on the effective incorporation of people into the project considered prototypes for measuring audiences in real time. They took into consideration content moderation in mass media and cultural products for the promotion of a new relationship with technology. These were articulated in the “5 principles for good government”, a guide designed by Beer that consisted of the description of five elementary situations in which technology served to enable agile social articulation based on the common good.
This view of the common good is especially critical in the main political and sociocultural dilemmas that form part of todays debates regarding the future of ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the concept of cyberculture remains anchored in a view based on a narrow accelerationist notion of the contemporary social order. This view conceive technological development as a fixed line in the speed of change and not as its direction. This has led us to think that it is more likely that machines will become conscious and dominate us than that we can develop a concept and technological practice of social control based on collaboration.

Speaker
Rodrigo Fernández Albornoz

Rodrigo Fernández Albornoz is a Senior Data Scientist at Globant – Data & AI Studio, Academic Coordinator and Professor of the Data Science Diploma at University of Santiago, Faculty of Management and Economics, and collaborator of Management Analytics & Data Science Research Center (MAD-Sc) at Technic University Federico Santa María, Department of Economics. Specialist in management and team development for data intensive projects, statistical modelling and natural language processing in the industry, public sector and academic research.
Independent researcher and professor in Philosophy and History of Technology, in particular the industrial revolution processes, information theory and technologies, and experimental movements and vanguards in the field of poetic and esthetics of music. Since 2021 is funding of “Banca de Helechos” (@bancadehelechos), a Chilean publishing project of contemporary poetry and collaborates with the Foundation for the Interdisciplinary Development of Science, Technology and the Arts (DICTA), a NGO dedicated with a special focus on interdisciplinary, with the purpose of generating cultural media from projects related to science, technology and arts (www.dicta.cl)
