01_01_Start
Stafford's Work

Designing Conversations for Variety

November 4, 2022

Content

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. This approach distinguishes the classes of conversation that must reach agreement to coordinate the action of an organization. Of course, these conversations must pay attention to variety. 

Pangaro will present this model of “designing conversations for variety” and propose how it maps to the VSM, where it may offer additional resilience. The goal of the presentation is to engage the participation of the attendees and to draw connections between the VSM and this conversation model, in hopes of illuminating both.

Dr Paul Pangaro

Paul Pangaro is president of the American Society for Cybernetics. His career spans research, consulting, startups, and education. Before his current role as Visiting Scholar in the School of Architecture and the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, he was Professor of the Practice in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute on the same campus. He has worked with and within startups in New York and Silicon Valley, in product and technology roles.

His past consulting clients include Du Pont, Nokia, Samsung, Instituto Itaú Cultural (São Paulo), Ogilvy & Mather, and PoetryFoundation.org. His writing explicates “designing for conversation” from his research and implementations of software and organizational processes. His B.S. in Humanities/Computer Science is from MIT and his Ph.D. in Cybernetics with Gordon Pask is from Brunel University. His work can be found at http://pangaro.com/.

Recent Webinars



08.10.2024

Organizing success critical tasks in a production plant with the Viable System Model


Judith Hennemann

A Practice Application of VSM …



02.10.2024

VSM & Ethics


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.


Topologies of Prediction

04.09.2024

The Topologies of Prediction: Management, Cybernetics, and Artificial Intelligence


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.

Scroll to Top