Continuing with most of my new writing on Substack at https://psybertron.substack.com/ but still making updates and linking notes here.
HOUSEKEEPING
Four updates at Substack since I last rounded-up here in August.
- Values Into Action
– a “review” of Mark Carney’s 2021 book “Values” - And Old Story
– a “review” of Arundhati Roy’s 2025 memoir “Mother Mary Comes to Me” - Sign of the Times?
– a recap on “illusionism” in the sciences & philosophies of consciousness & free-will, prompted by a hit on an older piece. - Technology Driven Economy
– a riff on where so-called AI might be leading us, prompted by Dave Snowden referring to Brian Arthur’s talk to the Adam Smith Institute’s “New Enlightenment 2026 Conference”.
PREAMBLE
After a few days away walking in the (English) Lakes, I was at the SCiO “SysPrac2026” conference in Cranfield Uni, Monday and Tuesday this week.
As ever, I have lots of notes from individual sessions, which I won’t spend any time making presentable here, just some overall impressions taken away.
Large event ~200 attendees, and great facilities & service quality for conference sessions, large and small and for the catering. (Only minor downside was the “Cranfield Management Development Centre” accommodation / dining space and the “Vincent Building” conference facility were at opposite ends of the campus, even though the former also had extensive conference facilities?)
Great facilities, but the facilitators in the main / larger hall in particular should probably have done better with the sound level. Also, a tendency for the key officers / members of the SCiO to start off on first name terms with each other, presuming everyone knew who they were, without each introducing themselves. That said, great diversity of membership, majority women and a younger generation evident to replace the old guard.
I was in lurking (listening and learning) mode, no direct participation this time, same as the Hull CSS conference earlier this year. Many old and new faces, and several specific new topic contacts to follow-up. That counts as success for my own research and writing.
What I was put in mind of, is how many different overlapping / complementary groups there are in this space with varying degrees of collaboration. Some are just networks on platforms like LinkedIn or WordPress blogs, some are free-emailing lists, some are low-overhead membership and some are proper corporate / professional and or academic institutions, and some special interest combinations of all of these. Below are a few where I’ve had at least some interaction:
The IFSR (Institute for Systems Research) is set up as a coordinating umbrella organisation whose members and affiliates are many of those other organisations, 20 of which are listed.
The LinkedIn (Systems Thinking Network) has 50,000 individual members, many of whom are also members of one or more of the other groups.
The SCiO (Systems and Complexity in Organisation) is cheap and cheerful as well as professional, with ~600 members and ~1500 subscribers.
The ISSS (International Society for the Systems Sciences) is another smaller group with ~160 members.
INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) has ~27,000 paid-up members and is the most corporate of the professional organisations.
SysCOI (Systems Community of Inquiry) is an open source blog sharing links to pretty much all and every resource published under the auspices of any of the other groups.
CSS (Centre for Systems Studies) at Hull University (not to be confused with Hull students union Computer Science Society).
Cynefin – Dave Snowden’s management consulting vehicle, much referenced by other practitioners mostly, but not always, positively. (Over the years, Dave has a fully elaborated definition of that Welsh word he used to name his entity. Perhaps controversially, I think of it translating the existing word Cynefin to “comfort zone” – in the sense it’s the environment our thinking inhabits quiet naturally, comfortably, even though we can never fully understand it or why.)
ASC (American Society for Cybernetics)
UKSS (UK Systems Society)
OR (Operations Research Society)
Metaphorum (Organisational Cybernetics of Stafford Beer)
Школа системного менеджмента (Russian School of Systems Management) founded by Anatoly Levenchuk when the Russian Chapter of INCOSE lost its US affiliation.
And any number of other leadership, management and government interest groups and academic schools …
Some for Systems, some for Complexity.
Some for Thinking generally, some for Science more narrowly, some for Engineering(*) even more narrowly, some for Research, some for Cybernetics (Organisation, Management and Governance).
SO WHAT?
The common interest is in better systemic understanding of how the world works through human organisations. The better we understand how the world really works, the better we can organise ourselves to act for better future outcomes. With so many seemingly existential poly-crises and/or meta-crisis to concern us, there is increasing clamour – there has to be a better way – all the way from personal lifestyle through every human organisation to local, national and supra-national government and development.
One way or another these better understanding and decision-making considerations lead us to government and governance more generally. Democracy or the next best thing, not forgetting how we decide what is “better” anyway?
Given the scale and urgency facing us, there is a strong recent focus in the activities of these interest groups on practical implementation and engagement with those institutions that most directly influence our collective governance.
- The Hull CSS 2026 conference in March this year was entitled “Systems Thinking Systems Practice” bridging the gap between theory and practice.
- The ISSS 2026 conference in June was themed “Elevating Systems Science to Address Humanity’s Greatest Challenges” followed by “Reimagining our World Systemically – From Problematique to Purposeful Action“
- The SciO 2026 conference earlier this week was advertised as a follow-on from the Hull CSS event explicitly entitled “Systems Practice (SysPrac)“.
A Better Way? – the periodic re-imagining of the world as a better place is as old as philosophical literature itself, from Plato’s Republic via Utopian literature arising from the ages of enlightenment and revolution (Thomas More, Karl Marx, Aleksander Bogdanov, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, H G Wells, etc.) and the post-war world-in-crisis soul-searching of The Vienna Circle (after WW1) and The Macy Conferences (after WW2). It’s worth understanding the history of what these thinkers hoped a better future might be AND how it might be achieved, quite independently from the mistakes made by those thoughts and by those empowered to implement them.
There really is a better way to be had if we put our minds to it.
Systemic Thinking? – the use of the value neutral terms “systems thinking” has stuck in recent years, but it is quite frankly exactly what had been termed Cybernetics (quite literally, governance) by Norbert Wiener following those Macy conferences. (I’ve personally chosen to spell it Psyber-netics to reinforce the living human psychology intent of the original “cyber” term, so distorted in highly successful electro-mechanical and electronic usage in the decades since.)
Theory into Practice? – with the scale and interconnected complexity of the “crises” facing us, there is a perfectly rational desire, and good reason, to get on with it. To avoid analysis paralysis, to avoid the perfect as the enemy of good enough, etc, to put any one or a pragmatic, heuristic, combination of the multiple methodologies available into action. It’s the rational choice because predictability of real outcomes is severely restricted when dealing with genuine complexity. Predictability is limited to the kinds of processes that will happen at various levels of abstraction and not to specific outcomes. Ready, fire, aim means action produces early results that can be used to learn and adjust future actions sooner. (Ironically, very close to the WW2 weapons guidance thinking that originally produced Cybernetics. *)
Best Practice for Thinking? – whilst moving to practical action sooner is perfectly rational we do well to remember that our better way includes better ways of thinking too. We need to learn to improve our thinking as well as our actions. We need best / better practice(s) for thinking as well as best practice methodologies. The ambiguous lack of punctuation in the “Systems Thinking Systems Practice” title of the March conference reminds us to apply systems thinking to our systems thinking practices. To take our own medicine.
As part of better systems thinking practices, my own focus is unashamedly at those levels of abstraction above practical application, where it has maximum explanatory understanding and predictive power. It’s what both Levenchuk’s “Systems Thinking 2020 – there is ALWAYS thinking to be done over and above actual project planning to act” – and the higher loops of multi-loop organisational learning architectures, are about. The different architectural layers are not optional. Our thinking is part of the real world. We mustn’t flatten the abstract thinking out of our specific plans to act.
I’m here to defend that better abstract thinking.
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That “So What?” essay section above will be brought forward into the Psybertron Substack – and elaborated with another draft already started there.
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(*) As I often point out “engineering” has its roots in ingenuity anyway, the ingenious ways people responded to the need for better engines of war.
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