While the global geo-political and economic environment is becoming increasingly stressed by wars, the catastrophic impacts of climate change, and social upheaval, social organisations need to learn how to consolidate their resilience. Maintaining their financial viability, improving their sustainability, and contributing to social and environmental well-being requires increasing efforts.

Resilience, the capacity to adapt, innovate and thrive amidst uncertainty while maintaining core values, is essential for long-term viability and sustainability. Exploring new paths for developing organisational resilience is a must, but there are not yet many proven approaches to achieve it.

However, as artificial intelligence is becoming central to decision-making, organisations face an existential challenge: how to avoid the extremes of stagnation and chaos. More than ever, there is a growing paradox between providing autonomy to social agents to develop their own potentials and creating a coherent and cohesive context to allow organisations to thrive and develop.

Cybernetics is the mother science of both systemic approaches to management, like the Viable System Model, and of technological sciences like artificial intelligence. This conference explores how cybernetic principles, particularly Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) and Team Syntegrity (TS), offer a comprehensive framework which can serve as the bridge between these two extremes: on one hand we observe unsustainable and vulnerable organisations, struggling to develop resilience and co-evolve sustainably with their niches.

On the other hand, corporations and profit oriented organisations are now incorporating the latest technologies like artificial intelligence to increase their decision-making capabilities, but risk losing control or diminishing human agency.

Learning from innovations in VSM and TS theory and praxis, participants will gain insights into steering through complexity effectively, creating systems that empower humans while leveraging the potential of intelligent agents. We aim to provide a balanced mix of theory, practice and interaction, ensuring participants leave with actionable insights and a deeper understanding of cybernetic approaches to organizational design. The methodology for the conference will focus on creating a rich space for networking and white space conversations.

Our conference approach

Following our very successful conference in Berlin, we want to keep the spirit of creating an interactive experience where presentations and opportunities to exchange ideas and interact are nicely balanced. Our methodological pillars:

• This will be a hybrid conference: both face-to-face and with on-line participation.
• During the conference, we will make sure we include time for thorough dialogue with the participants in each session, and in the breaks.
• We will invite you to present your ideas in creative ways and to engage the other participants – through poster presentations, pre-recorded videos (like a provocation to a rich debate) – and when convenient, short but engaging slideshow presentations.
• At the online marketplace before the conference, the participants will vote on the best presentations. The top 3 will be on stage as a plenary (1 hour each) in the main room, one each day. All the others will be in break-out rooms (the duration of each talk will be 40 mins approximately – t.b.c.).
• You may also be creative in the way of presenting, e.g. by doing a game, a play, … the choice is yours!

 

Selection criteria

• SUBMIT YOUR PRESENTATION / ABSTRACT
• How is your presentation related to “Humans at risk? Steering towards Agency and Resilience in the Age of Alien Intelligence and Instability.
• What are the top insights/ideas/messages that you want to share?
• How do you want to engage with the participants in your session?

Timeline

Starting Call for Participation: March 13^th 2025
Closing Call for Participation: June 20^th 2025
Confirmation of acceptance: 2 weeks after submitting an abstract

Publications

Independent on whether your presentation is selected during the conference, academic papers developing further the topic presented at the conference are welcomed! We will produce a special issue in Systems Research and Behavioural Sciences journal with the best papers from the conference (details to be announced shortly). There will be a 6 month period to complete the paper after the conference, including inputs from the conference’s conversations.