Metaphorum Conference 2025

While the global geo-political and economic environment is becoming increasingly stressed by wars, catastrophic impacts of climate change, and social upheaval, social organisations need to learn how to further their resilience. Maintaining their financial viability, improving their sustainability, and contributing to social and environmental wellbeing 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, as yet, many proven approaches to achieve it.

On the other side, as intelligent systems are 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 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 extremes.

On one side we observe unsustainable and vulnerable organisations, unable to develop resilience and co-evolve sustainably with their niches. On the other side, 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.

Through the VSM (Voable System Model) and TS (Team Sytegrity), we will uncover how to design adaptive, purpose-driven systems that balance autonomy and cohesion while keeping the human element central. 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. With a focus on actionable insights and interdisciplinary perspectives, the conference aims to contribute to innovative frameworks and practical solutions for addressing the pressing resilience and socio-technical challenges of the 21st century.

Participants will gain insights into steering through complexity effectively, creating systems that empower humans while leveraging the potential of intelligent agents. The methodology for the conference will focus on creating a rich space for networking and white space conversations.

The agenda and approach will purposefully create opportunities to foster organic discussions, reflecting the principles of shared whitespace and creativity.

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