About the Webinar
The webinar closes with a call to action to the world-wide community as catalyst for today’s conversations at a new scale of audacity for creating an open-source, anti-wicked praxis of Cybernetics in response to the pandemics of our time.
This talk will discuss a 3-year study of a radical German cola company named Premium Collective (PK), who make decisions through consensus decision-making remotely on an online platform. There are many fascinating and unique qualities to PK, but my discussion will focus on the role of productive disagreement in their decision-making and self-governance. This concept will explicate not only PK’s democratic practices but will reveal lessons about variety engineering as it manifests in participatory democracies.
The concept of disagreement, adapted from the work of French Philosopher Jacques Rancière, will reveal that the process of ‘counting’ variety in a complex social system is not an objective or disinterested task, but a political, discursive process which can be recounted anew by those who participate in their own self-governance.
About James
Dr James Fox studied his MA in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex in 2015 and completed his PhD thesis in 2023 at Essex, where he studied the relationship between organisational cybernetics and participatory organisations, especially focusing on the Viable Systems Model (VSM). Since then he's worked on several research projects and become an associate lecturer on the University of Exeter's Systems Thinking Practitioner Apprenticeship.
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