‘100 YEARS OF STAFFORD BEER’

Invitation to join the project

Stafford Beer, the father of Organisational Cybernetics, would be 100 years old on the 25^th September 2026. To celebrate the 100^th birthday of Stafford, the Metaphorum Council has decided to undertake a 100 Year Anniversary project to celebrate Stafford’s life and his contributions to science, business and society.

The project includes:

1. Development of a video documentary called ‘A 100 Years of Stafford Beer: A documentary celebrating the visionary who fused science, art, and spirit to reimagine society’. To honour his extraordinary legacy, this documentary explores Stafford as both a brilliant scientist and a profoundly holistic human being — a man who integrated cybernetics, politics, art, spirituality, and nature into a single life. Through conversations with his closest collaborators, archival material, and visits to key places from his journey the video documentary will paint a vivid, playful, and deeply reflective portrait of a visionary whose ideas are more relevant today than ever. The steering committee includes Angela Espinosa, Jon Walker, Allenna Leonard, Vanilla Beer and Malik Radwan. We will interview selected people from his family, friends, collaborators, researchers and consultants, who have continued building up on his legacy. Invitees will receive a communication shortly explaining how to participate.

2. Simultaneously, we will invite all the Metaphorum community to join the celebration by self-producing clips with their individual testimonies on how Stafford’s thinking has influenced their personal and professional lives. We will announce shortly more details on both the video-documentary and the cloud of personal testimonies.

3. Organisation of our annual conference on the topic "A 100 Years of Stafford Beer". It will take place as close as possible to the 25^th September 2026, at a place yet to be confirmed. It will include 2 days of lively interactions among the participants, inspired by Stafford’s theories and tools.

4. Develop a Festschrift - an online edited book with contributions from invited authors to demonstrate the developments of his theories and practice since he passed away in 2002.

   • The Festschrift project will be co-edited by A. Espinosa, M. Schwaninger and J. Perez-Rios,

   • We will have editorial support from the Metaphorum Research Team (C. Osejo, P.P. Cardoso, J. Alves, S. Harwood, A. Fattoum and I. Sabir) .

   • We are now in the process of designing the book and inviting collaborators. Invited authors will receive the invitation and book’s design shortly.

5. Launch the new Metaphorum new journal ‘Organisational Systems’ (C. Osejo, K. Farrell, J. Walker and A. Espinosa - editorial team designing the journal) with a special issue on topics from the centenary conference.

6. Promote other conference streams & special issues with our cybernetic partners. We are inviting collaboration from other cybernetic and systems associations. So far Metaphorum has designed a stream for the American Society of Cybernetics conference in Brazil, in August 2026, led by Juliana Alves, on this topic. A more detailed invitation to participate will follow shortly.

We need volunteers to support us in this exciting project, in particular people with skills for:

• Video editing

• Crowd funding

• Book publishing

• Conference organisation

• Community development

• Web design and communications

Let us know you are interested in joining this project, and we’ll contact you shortly with more information.

Best regards,

Angela Espinosa, Jon Walker & Allenna Leonard (on behalf of the Metaphorum Council)