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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. 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.
My presentation intends to illustrate one different view on the cybernetical history of humankind that is emerging in the natural sciences, not to assume any answer but to inspire more exploratory questions. Why did humankind create such a moral and ec …
Foreshadowing the disasters of the Anthropocene, in the late 1960s Gregory Bateson developed a cybernetic analysis of the environmental crisis which was then starting to be recognised. He argued that its roots lay in dualist fantasies of control of nat …
We are usually unaware that language imposes constraints on how we perceive, think and act, even as it is central to all that we do. What language enables is clearly apparent: all the cultures, technologies and designs we humans have created are ground …
We will begin the discussions on the VSM and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAO)s, one of the topics agreed on at our last Metaphorum Conference in Manchester to develop ‘Special Interest Groups’ on topics of interest to our community. It will …
An introduction to the new training and certification programme of Metaphorum
Curator and researcher Bassam El Baroni will present and discuss ‘Cybersyn 1973 / 2023’ an animated video he co-created in 2021 that delves into the question: How can we reimagine the artefactual Cybersyn for our hyper-financialized times? Curator and …
This webinar will explore several aspects of the large-scale communications platform outlined briefly at the 2023 Metaphorum Conference, including the vision that led to its creation, the problems already identified over a number of years that mot …
(or anything else big scale) as a Commons: a Work in Progress
(and the Cybernetics OF the Digital Transition) Organisations that seek to survive and thrive need to address the substantial challenges of recognising and capturing the value of digital capabilities. Cybernetics, especially as applied to organisations …
In this contribution Raul relates Cybersyn’s vision to a democracy, beyond its current denomination closer to a capitalist democracy. Cybersyn’s vision was that of a world of communications and information in real time, a world of conversation spaces t …
Half a century ago, South America was on the cutting edge of contesting the power of multinational companies in the sphere of telecommunications. More than that, a distinct blend of radical economics, cybernetics, and democratic politics led to the art …
Stafford designed Syntegration based on the architectonics of the icosahedron. He invented it to mitigate the enormous homeostatic disequilibrium between S3 and S4. He chose the icosahedron because he accepted Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller’s assertion tha …
How to enhance business platforms using the Viable System Model (VSM) in order to face the current and future complexity business challenges Along the past 10 years, many successful business models have been oriented towards the development of business …
In 1968, General Juan Velasco Alvarado’s Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (RGAF), brought deep social and economic reforms in Peru. Among some of its most important reforms, the RGAF nationalized strategic resources companies (such as oil, …
The leading question for this webinar is: “What can we do to enhance the applicability of the Viable System Model and Management Cybernetics?” Ten ideas will be presented to explore opportunities to take research, education, and application in practic …
There are countless challenges to managing complex organizations, including the need to design its processes with variety explicitly in mind. Of course, one approach is the VSM. In this session a complementary approach is proposed, and critique invited …
The session focuses on the dialogical dimension of collaborative action. It is argued that within each of the five systems of Stafford Beer, collaborative coherence is characterized by asymmetry. Every team experience downward momentum, which pushes de …
It is proposed that evolutionary processes in living units are fundamentally relational, and that they correlate with waste management or no required variety rather than entropy. The conservation of the culture-nature relationship that emerges as ecopo …
This webinar will present a recent paper from the authors, which tells the story of developing, collaboratively, a visionary whole system transition architecture within a UK regional transport context in 2021. It is writ- ten, in the first person, by t …
The receptive simplicity in the heart of complexity and a compassionate, regenerative, and creative community life
In this presentation, we will comment on using a framework to help quickly diagnose any organization’s viability or provide the guidelines for its design. We will describe some specific tools and software that may help in those tasks with some examples …
The ongoing case of the protesters in Colombia and the weaponization of systemic tools
Prof Yolles will offer a takeaway from his recent book (with M.I.Fink), with emphasis in Social Agency in Organisational Cybernetics. The book explains psychological, socio-political and organisational change in multidisciplinary settings. It shows how …
Fragmentation is one of the main characteristics of modernity. Divide and conquer, tends to be the main heuristic to tackle complex problems. It has been a quite successful strategy to develop science and foster technology. However, at the same time it …
This webinar will present some ideas of how VSM can help achieve sustainability at the corporate and organizational levels. First, corporate sustainability will be examined using a systems approach, as well as its business case. Then two ways VSM could …
An organisation — company, NGO, government department — is always understood to have an identity but how this is described is very variable and how it is handled in VSM sometimes curious. Finance, marketing, HR et cetera approach it differently. Seve …
The management of coronavirus is usually viewed and commented on from an epidemiological, virological or economic perspective. We will demonstrate that the organisational dimension is equally important in this context. It is too often neglected. In a s …
The VSM is rarely applied at a level of behaviour in specific situations – what is done, what is said, how it is framed. What is missing in incomplete contracts, the last mile of execution where the usual tools of organising do not apply. This preferen …
Democracy in the West, with the United States as a recent example, is under threat due to its antiquated protocols and practices. Its Constitution, while innovative at the time, was written at the very start of the Industrial Revolution when communicat …
An online, complexity management and communications tool The Participatory Workspace (PWS) is a post-Cartesian management and communications tool for organisations and networks, which streamlines the contributions of their members. It facilitates under …
Reflections from the COVID19 Pandemic In this seminar I will offer a brief introduction to Espinosa & Walker’s approach to sustainable self-governance. In particular, I will use this approach to reflect on the Covid-19 pandemic, and reflect on t …
This webinar is addressed to Metaphorum, a gathering of persons who celebrate Stafford Beer’s application of cybernetic principles to organisations and social systems. My exploration of systems thinking is composed of an equal fascination with two utte …
In this webinar Igor will address the introduction of AI technology in an organisation, proposing a systemic examination of structures, interactions and goals redefinitions related with introducing AI to the processes.
In this webinar, Martin will speak about how managers respond to the introduction of the VSM, and how he approaches a VSM consulting project with a client, let’s say with a company of 3’000 employees in the building industry. He will also pose some que …
The Enterprise Complexity ModelAn Extension of the Viable System Model for Emerging Organisational Forms
As long ago as 1992, I pointed to a battle for the ‘soul of the VSM’ between advocates of positivist, structuralist, and interpretive theoretical positions. It is clear that, as a model, the VSM can be put to different uses according to the philosophic …
“The amazing thing that needs to be investigated is cultural stability, whenever and wherever it is found.” Douglas (1985: xxii) Abstract: In this Webinar Jonathan will propose a redrawing of the VSM that synthesises the concepts of autopoiesis, Luhman …
In logical terms, the utterance “this is complex” is equivalent to the acknowledgment of ignorance of the observer. This observation is relevant to all situations, beginning from daily life and ending with applications of complexity science in all area …
Though Ross Ashby is often seen as the consolidator of a field founded by Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch, in this webinar we are going to learn a different history of cybernetics, one that predates the institutionalization of cybernetic movement i …
Riverine systems (also called watersheds or catchment basins) consist of interactions among geological features, plant and animal communities, water (precipitation, groundwater, lakes, wetlands, and flowing water), and human activities. These systems a …
It has been said that Stafford Beer was 50 years ahead of his time. In this webinar Steve Morlidge will reflect on the relevance of the VSM from the perspective of someone dedicated to helping finance practitioners half a century distant after the firs …