Warning – this post is an abandoned draft, been overtaken by later dialogue & posts. It remains with all my ROUGH notes from the conference appended, but the headings and drafts are now subsumed into other writing.
I attended the STSP2026 conference at Hull Centre for Systems Studies (CSS), 24th to 26th March 2026, sponsored by Hull University, by Systems and Complexity in Organisation (SCiO), by the Operations Research Society (ORS) and by the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR).
I’ve reported from previous International Society for Systems Sciences (ISSS) conferences (Washington, DC and Birmingham, UK) and from previous Annual Mike Jackson Lectures at Hull CSS, but in fact I only attended this conference at relatively short notice. I was looking out for the 2026 Annual MJ lecture and spotted they’d organised a whole 3-day conference around it. I was one of over 300 delegates!
Impressive for starters.
I already posted some “reflections” to LinkedIn, which is where the largest professional “Systems Thinking” network resides, whichever groups we are individually affiliated with. The following is an edited and extended version of that reflection, with additional philosophical points (and some “meta” thoughts about the event and organisation).
[My rough contemporary notes are appended below and will be progressively deleted here as I cover them in the body of the post, or not.]
Of Elephants and Icebergs
Reflections on on STSP2026 at Hull CSS
It was heartening to see the buzz created by the Systems Thinking Systems Practice 2026 conference, there in person and on LinkedIn afterwards. Congratulations to all the organisers and participants, and the impressive facilities and services that Hull University Business School, Centre for Systems Studies brings to the party.
Old friends, new faces and, for me, some prior acquaintances seen for the first time in our systems thinking context. Impressed in particular by a younger diverse range of practitioners talking the language AND with real success stories to tell, particularly in UK public sector environments, not primarily an international academic context.
Language and Dichotomies (all distinctions are binary > Onion Skins 3-layers : 3,4,5,7 layer models / approaches
Ubiquity and Obliquity
Memes and Metaphors
Systems and Complexity
Debunking and Rehabilitation
Epistemology and Ontology
Thinking about Thinking
“There is no effin’ elephant” (or F in elePHant) meant the Anglo-Saxon language from the stage got borderline at times. Speakers licensed by the language of previous presenters, meant the ‘effin morphed into literally “f*cking” this, that and the other, and bullsh*t into plain old “sh*t” which at least served to illustrate the passions in play. I’m no prude, but I was cringing at the idea of what audiences of another culture (eg the US) might make of it.
The serious original message, from Mike Jackson in response ubiquitous references to the story of the blind monks reporting on their first experiences of an elephant
that old tired metaphors may have their use as conversation-starters, but have serious real-world limits and downsides, distractions, even blockages to enlightened “interventions”. There is no “real” elephant. The elephant in the room is of course an iceberg, and actually, there’s no iceberg either … we need to stop flogging dead horses.
Message from the top, with several distinct lineages after Macy1946, we are not short of heroes, theories and methods and evolved variants since. The methodology wars are behind us, and it’s about deepening understanding and pragmatic approaches to applying and choosing between the wealth of resources available to us. We don’t need to be re-inventing any wheels and we don’t need to be waiting for permission or for better definitions. Most understanding comes from doing and from dialogue.
That said, in a conference with up to 11 parallel streams at times, no one of us grey-bearded old white-guys (blind monks?) can claim to have seen the whole (elephant?) so I can only give you my perspective 🙂
Systems Thinking Systems Practice as a statement – with no prepositions or punctuation – is a call for reflexive thinking. Applying systems thinking to ourselves, to our thinking and doing. Despite some impatient practitioners happy to decry philosophical thinking as wishy-washy twaddle – or even bullsh*t see language above – of entertainment value only, I’m unashamedly in the “think before you think” box, fittingly in Stafford Beer’s centenary year. Even, especially, whilst planning and doing, we have to continue to think and talk about our thinking and doing. Thinkers or doers, we need each other.
I will no doubt blog some deeper (philosophical!) reflections on ubiquity and obliquity and more. Dr Mike C Jackson OBE , John Challoner
[Pedantry alert – yes I know, the F-word probably isn’t Anglo-Saxon.]
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Previously on Psybertron:
Previous MJ Lectures
Previous ISSS Conferences
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ROUGH Notes – as much my thoughts as quotes of speakers:
Hull STSP Conference (24/26 March)
Mike Burrows
VSM as a 3 space model.
Beer’s model is genius!
Basic shape / nature.
Details don’t need “definition”
Ben Taylor
Systems Practice is Humanism after Sartre
Vague / Abstract
2nd order perspective
“A pattern we are enacting, a boundary we have drawn.”
Capacity to learn and adapt.
Learning loops. Triple loop.
Another “5 worlds” VSM interpretation.
Carla Owen
“Animal Free Research UK”
Steady state system returns after disturbance. But new gov policy.
(Very credible)
Even big gov policy disturbance can spring back to old steady state, without concerted sustained commitment. (Reminds me of sex / gender ruling?)
Charity strategy and branding.
Donald Schon!!!
Ashby’s variety!
Increasing complexity increases ability to absorb greater variability of inputs.
Ellen Lewis & Juanita Alvarado
Exeter and Birmingham both Hull CSS alumni
Mapping as in drawing box and relationship diagrams. Producing a map view.
Coherence (in a map view) makes players and relationships visible but doesn’t imply truth or reality. (Or any other diagram.)
Visibility is double edged.
[GAP / missed 3]
Sophia Bird
Welsh Public Health (healthy weight)
9 step… Obesity as a Systems Issue.
It’s all about engagement and that’s all about (recognising) relationships.
Anti-junk food and ad placement campaigns
Active buy-in and trusted relationships, again.
GLP1 already affecting supermarkets and fast foods (Inc portion sizes)
Weight loss drugs, already having big effect, but so many doubts about sustainable effects and unintended side effects. No whole system view yet.
Framing and language.
Recognising “alignment” for collaboration not enforcing agreement to same shared projects and aims. Latter forces more abstract language. Devil a angels need to recognise both, “thinking” at distinct levels.
Amir Sharif
Congruence (as opposed to alignment) but same as above.
Much more ST level.
Can’t stop thinking if you’re in ST
Designing system intervention projects.
Used AI for help visualising, presentation and summarising.
Mapping! Again! As creating a system diagram, creating a systematic map of participants and relationships.
Forsyte systems map. And sticky tool.
Language same but different.
Systems workshops!
Most people not systems thinkers? Disagree!
Louis Klein
Systems research in itself and for itself.
(Meta systems thinking. Meta thinking about systems
Systems thinking about systems thinking. Reflexive, second order.)
Language of systems become ubiquitous even if real understanding hasn’t
Language, talking to constituencies outside the specialist field.
Me too, my more than science, orthodox, nuances.
Mike Jackson – informal early evening session over a pint
-don’t reinvent wheels / know history.
Wiener / Bogdanov / Beer / Checkland / Ackoff.
Are all heroes necessarily geniuses? No but Beer might be.
[To come:
Day 2
Austen 9:15 MJ Critical Systems Thinking and Practice
Kingsley 13:30 MJ / RG Panel
Eliot 16:00 PH / DS Methodologies/ Philosophies
Middleton 18:00 MJ Lecture
Day 3
Kingsley 09:00 Keynotes
Kingsley Front 11:30 Health]
Mike Jackson
Habermas death.
Checkland mentor at Lancaster
Primitive representation of systems ideas, epistemology & ontology, style & tone
Alternative list of concepts – but not a referential language between world and words.
No effing elephant (with anatomical parts)
Borges (and Foucault) Chinese encyclopaedia of animals quite different.
Semantic holism.
Checkland SSM
Relationships between conceptual objects, not real objects. It is the cognitive system that fixes meaning. Not DSRP?
Is this my epistemological ontology?
Systems exist in our conceptual model of the world not in the world itself. Even that’s not quite right – elaborate later.
Wilson on generic models?
Mike advocate of plurality of models.
Arrogance and hubris.
There can be no generically applicable model.
Action research NOT science.
CST is
Semantic holism
Multiple partial views.
Multiple approaches accepting ethical decisions within.
Dave in the room.
Petter Ogland & Gary Evans
Expensive label on empty can
Brunsson! Hypocrisy
Graeber! Bullshit jobs
Pro Taylorism – scientific management (in sports too)
Servant leadership – bottom up hierarchy
Alogrithms!!!
Anti hierarchical!!!
AAaagghh!!
Jenny
EPIC explore produce intervene check
Requisite diversity is quite small and arbitrary.
The 5 perspectives
Mechanical
Organismic
Interrelationships
Purposeful
Societal / Environmental
Chris Kelly with EPIC intro from Mike
Confirms tongue in cheek application only to the ideal case.
Based on solid established philosophical views (and equivalent methods) that have “proved useful”.
INCOSE used EPIC checklist and starter questions.
Chris knowledge and explanation. Ackoff
Mehran
Nationwide Building Soc & Cranfield.
Security is the socio-technical system NOT the threat detection sw function.
Daniell Wilden
Supply chain plus ST
“Spectrum of the Whole”
Need both reduction analysis AND holistic abstract synthesis.
CAS(T) language.
Simon MacCormac – SCiO
EPIC Ideal – Mike intro again
P is produce strategy / approach / plan
E is explore from those 5 perspectives
Taleb?
There is no effing elephant.
Simon “the road to Hull” – with good intentions
Hull is the c of g of complex systems
Whole lifecycle is intervention
4 or 7 step cycle approach. More explicit.
SSM like
Stakeholder engagement at all stages.
Learning loops with secondary loops at any stage.
Clustering Identifying Elaborating drawing out implementing.
Planning more important than the plan. Dynamic continuously refined plan.
“People” don’t resist change. They resist coercion. Systems do however. They are homeostatic, they’re Complex Adaptive Systems.
More learning model.
Pragmatist. EPIC is inherently critical.
Holism / Reduction more about direction than location – RELATIVELY hi/lo levels of assembly and abstraction.
Intervention is a bad word. Implies coming between rather than coming together. Insertion? Integration?
The mechanistic perspective has so many disciplines locked-in. Aristotelian objective logical (scientific approach to) causality in designing solutions rather than human participation in evolving activities.
Cross discipline, human and technical.
Intersubjectivity in space and behaviour.
Apprentice > practice, x/or > academe.
Afternoon Panel – Mike, Patrick, Roelien, Alison
Patrick is president elect of IIIS
Multi perspective thinking.
About relationships first.
Response to complexity and uncertainty.
Elephant isn’t “changeable”
No elephant, no iceberg either.
An arrogance.
The elephant in the room is what we are trying to elucidate.
Simple way to simplify point out the conversation about multiple perspectives.
After that it’s not subtle enough.
So useful introductory metaphor but misleads about the objective reality of “things”.
[Very British language … “Effing” “F*cking” “Bollocks” a field the British used to lead in Checkland and Beer days.]
People ARE (their) relationships.
Complexity is the number and diversity of perspectives. Roelien.
Categorisation not helpful! Patrick
Structural, perceptual or dynamic complexity.
135 / 142 Dylan story. Arbitrary numbers of potential categories or class members. Really about useful “ways of engaging” ways of “making sense”.
My “good fences” adage – AGAIN
Taxonomic ontologies naturally hierarchical.
Systems laws? None in general.
All responses essentially pragmatic – some general laws or principles are useful. Utility in the “grammar”.
Generally more or less applicable principles (not laws). Useful, yes.
ST a calling for Roelien. Always practice, even for an “academic”. Mike too.
Using systems language without deep understanding. Skimming off the easy bits. Arm-waving?
We need a quality filter of practice via thinking.
Patrick. We can model how ideas propagate. Something we understand.
Balance. When efficiency optimisation profitability productivity are in focus, at what expense of human values, systems relationships etc
Demand has exploded.
More general “education” needed. Not just specialist and transdisciplinary thinker and practitioner training. Whole customer constituencies need educating to some level, essentials but with simpler use of language.
To be influential, do, even by stealth, learn from doing, gain organisational credibility as a consequence.
[DAVE considering things debunked, labelled bullshit – dissing them. Missing the essential value that was (still is) there, but was compromised by too zealous focus or emphasis.]
Methods and Philosophy session
Big subjects squeezed into short slots.
Fractal Consulting Patrick and Gavin
Perceptual, Structural, Dynamic complexity latter, faster change more timeslices matter. Order chaos spectra on those 3 axes.
Stabilising the unstable, destabilisation stuck systems.
Mike epistemological, Patrick ontological.
Uses mapping as I do.
Complex, Messes, Wicked.
A way in to diverse busy people.
Many principles (laws) diagrams.
Not just diversity of views, but even individuals not recognising which view they are taking – Janus effect.
Phillipe Vanderbroek?
Multilingual understanding
Stengers. Slow (small s) science.
Disconnect in western Anglophone science.
Aristotle Vs Whitehead.
Vignette. Stones and blackberries.
Horace sapere aude – dare to know (empirically) … Taste in Stengers
A becoming.
Imagination by practise.
5 modes (Inc erotic)
Affordances for action research.
Dave
Agrees with Phillipe except for (evil) Manichean aspect of Neoplatonism
Speed of social media outstrips institutional response possibilities.
Asymmetric restriction in institutions.
Continuous symbolic narrative capture. Not linguistic reports.
Group sizes. Demes and macro demes.
Explicitness is always gamed. Obliquity and granularity. Emergence from micro interactions at scale.
Estuarine stuff.
Panopticon effect?
Citizens assemblies better ad hoc and on the fly. (Explicit can be gamed.)
Belgian guy. Impressive.
Carl, Roger and Geoff
….
Geoff. “Systems don’t exist.”
Roger Jones ex ICI Teesside.
Problems with VSM levels 5 to 1 top down, bottom up.
Need IDEF
Need deep smarts.
Philosophy as Twaddle! As rot! A world of entertainment?
Koestler art, humour and science are the same.
Buzzing blooming confusion
stprism.idok.me
MJ Lecture
Sir John Kay
Obliquity and Radical Uncertainty
Teaching of hard quants vs soft skills – same as my MBA
Agreed BoK
Practice
Ethics
Models as thinking tools not accurate representations of the real world scenarios.
Business schools must win intellectual credibility, money will follow.
Last day
John Seddon
Productivity- his usual stuff zzzz
Fcking fall fing sht
LLM OK on bounded data sets.
AI otherwise naff.
Vanguard.
Angela
More Stafford Beer (centenary this year)
Time in India and Nepal Lama influence.
VSM
Chile Cybersyn
Think before you think.
Poetry and Art
Now Syntegrity and Metaphorum
Patrick Fractal Organisation
Mike Critical
Hyper-complex.
Kim Warren
SDL.re/AIshowITS
Automation and control tested using System Dynamics applying engineering control theory to socio-economic systems aafter Forrester
Q – John c Doyle human psycho-physio optimisation sweet spots?
Staff are just numbers here, nothing about what staff actually do or behave.
A – no, beyond my pay grade! Important that we do (and can) also model human behaviours and attributes.
Q- different timescales for different parts of the system. Same same.
Gillian Harrison – Transport & Systems Dynamics
Zeitgeist – intense interest everywhere right now. Pivotal moment for ST
No single definition, but intuitive nascent understanding in anyone asked, professional ST or otherwise. We are all natural systems thinkers
Value more than buzzwords
Reading written papers, not talking to presentation content.
Organisation, people and emotions.
SD, VSM and SSM (ST)
Very Good !!!
We don’t need any new gurus. We have enough content to get on with pragmatically.
NEXT
“Lauren’s session.”
Wider case studies of Systems Thinking in public health.
Lauren’s team, (Jess?) Sport England partner, (man) team member / analyst. About encouraging greater physical activity in East Yorks residents (Withernsea initial place) try pretty much any and all methods available (6 listed) and learn in use.