Add your events, feeds, calendars, source locations – and download individual or whole-site calendar entries

https://transduction.systems/events

(part of The Necessary Tangle, inspired by Nick Ananin’s systems thinking events map)

Local government can’t manage complexity one service, target, or programme at a time. This paper by Manuel Riemer and colleagues offers a useful account of what ‘systemic management’ might mean in practice.

It describes cities as service ecosystems: nested within wider systems, made through relationships between many interdependent actors, socially governed, and continually emerging. From that, the authors identify three requirements for management:

• integrative – working across organisational and policy boundaries, noticing interdependence, and attending to consequences elsewhere in the system;

• collective – sharing power, involving the people who shape outcomes, and treating local government as convener and participant rather than controller-in-chief;

• adaptive – looking for early signals, experimenting, learning rapidly, and changing plans as conditions change.

None of this is entirely new. The paper itself draws on Beer, Argyris and Schön, Senge, Ostrom, Human Learning Systems, resilience theory, and several other traditions.

But it puts the argument together well, and makes it unusually concrete for local government. Flexible budgeting. Participatory governance. Measures which expose unintended consequences. Cross-disciplinary teams. Plans treated as revisable commitments, not stone tablets produced for the committee cycle.

The difficulty, of course, is that conventional management persists for reasons. Funding is divided into programmes. Accountability is pushed down organisational tubes. Performance systems reward what can be attributed and counted. Power is protected. Failure may be praised in innovation workshops and punished in actual careers.

So the question isn’t merely how to give managers better systemic practices, it’s how to alter the conditions which keep selecting against them.

‘Systemic Management Practices—Enabling Local Governments to Adapt in Response to Complexity’:

https://doi.org/10.3390/world6020072

---

Abstract

Local governments are increasingly navigating accelerating change and escalating complexity caused by interconnected crises, commonly referred to as a global polycrisis. These crises, including climate change, lack of affordable housing, declining mental health, and geopolitical instability, both shape and are shaped by local conditions. Cities face growing pressure to equitably provide services that are responsive to evolving community needs while contending with the systemic nature of contemporary challenges. However, local governments are often constrained by conventional management frameworks and practices that do not match the complexity of today’s challenges. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore how systems science can be leveraged to define and characterize a transformative new type of management designed to enable local governments to more adequately address emerging complexity. To this end, the authors review the literature on contemporary management practice and explore how management for local government can be reframed in alignment with the insights from systems science, using a service ecosystem lens. The findings point to a needed shift toward systemic management practices that are integrative, collective, and adaptive. The authors illustrate the practical relevance of these three characteristics and conclude with recommendations for research, policy, and practice aimed at building the institutional capabilities required to transition toward systemic management frameworks and practices that match the complexity of the polycrisis.

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/6/2/72

“Norbert Wiener compiled a short list of selected readings on cybernetics in 1952, then an updated short bibliography of cybernetics in 1956”

Credit: Sean Menion, @TheUnjournaling
https://x.com/TheUnjournaling/status/2096060216882139638

Selected readings on Cybernetics

Ashby, W. R. ‘The Behavioral Properties of Systems in Equilibrium.’ American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 59 (1946), 682–6.

Brillouin, L. ‘Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics.’ American Scientist, Vol. 37 (Oct. 1949), 554–568.

Conference on Cybernetics. Transactions of the Sixth Conference on Cybernetics. March 24–25, 1949. New York, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.

Cybernetics. Transactions of the Seventh Conference on Cybernetics. March 23–24, 1950. Heinz von Foerster, Ed. New York, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.

Fano, R. M. The Transmission of Information. M.I.T. Research Laboratory of Electronics. Technical Report No. 65. Part II. Technical Report No. 149.

Weaver, Warren. ‘Science and Complexity,’ American Scientist, Vol. 36, No. 4, 536–544.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics. Cambridge, Mass. Technology Press. 1948.

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. Boston, 1950; London, Eyre and Spottiswoode.

Prepared for:
Mr. Henry Guttmann
30, Brondesbury Park
London, N.W. 6

March 21, 1952

A short bibliography of cybernetics

Ashby, W. Ross, Design for a Brain, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York (Chapman & Hall, Ltd., London), 1952.

Bell, D. A., Information Theory and its Engineering Applications, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, 1953.

Berkeley, E. C., Giant Brains, or Machines That Think, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1949.

Brillouin, L., Science and Information Theory, Academic Press, New York, 1956.

de Broglie, L., ‘La Cybernétique,’ report of Conference in Paris, 1951, published by Rev. opt. (165 rue de Sèvres, Paris).

Cherry, C., On Human Communication, The Technology Press of M.I.T. & John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, (Chapman & Hall, Ltd., London), 1957.

Conferences on Cybernetics, Transactions, 7th (1950) to 10th (1953), Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York.

Gabor, D., Lectures on Communication Theory, published by M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass., 1951.

Goldman, S., Information Theory, Constable & Co., Ltd., London, 1953.

Hebb, D. O., The Organization of Behavior, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, (Chapman & Hall, Ltd., London), 1949.

de Latil, P., Thinking by Machine, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1956, translated from La Pensée Artificielle, Librairie Gallimard, Paris, 1953.

Locke, W. N., and A. D. Booth, Machine Translation of Languages, The Technology Press, M.I.T., and John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York, 1955.

Macmillan, R. H., An Introduction to the Theory of Control, Cambridge University Press, London, 1951.

Morse, P. M., and G. E. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1951.

Proceedings Second London Symposium on Applications of Communication Theory, London, 1952, Butterworth Scientific Publication, London, 1953.

Shannon, C. E., and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1949; published earlier in Bell System Tech. J., 27, 1948, pp. 379 and 623.

Walter, G., The Living Brain, Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd., London, 1953.

Wiener, N., Cybernetics, The Technology Press, M.I.T. and John Wiley & Sons, (Hermann et Cie., Paris), New York, 1948.

Wiener, N., The Human Use of Human Beings, The Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1950 and Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York, 1954.

Woodward, P. M., Probability and Information Theory with Application to Radar, Pergamon Press, Ltd., London, 1953.

---

And (credit: Sean Menion, @TheUnjournaling https://x.com/TheUnjournaling/status/2096062602728161423)

Norbert Wiener’s bibliography of popular treatments of cybernetics, c. 1951

Popular Treatments (culled from The Readers’ Guide…)

‘Brain is a Machine,’ Newsweek, Nov. 15, 1948.

‘In Man’s Image,’ Time, Dec. 27, 1948.

‘Machine in Man’s Image,’ Sat. Review, Jan. 8, 1949.

‘Brain is a Machine,’ Science Digest, Feb. 1949.

‘Machines that Think,’ Business Week, Feb. 19, 1949.

C. Eisenhart, ‘Cybernetics, a New Discipline,’ Science, Apr. 22, 1949.

J. B. Thurston, Review of Cybernetics, The Sat. Rev., Apr. 23, 1949.

J. D. Trimmer, ‘Instrumentation and Cybernetics,’ Scientific Monthly, Nov. 1949.

‘Thinking Machine,’ Time, Jan. 23, 1950.

A. Standen, ‘Mind and/or Machine,’ Commonweal, May 27, 1950.

Mark Starr, Review of The Human Use of Human Beings, The Sat. Review, Aug. 19, 1950.

Irwin Edman, ‘Mind in Matter,’ New Yorker, Oct. 14, 1950.

‘Feed back to Idiocy,’ Time, Jan. 8, 1951.

Current Biography, March 1951.

‘If Robots Run the Works,’ J. K. Lagemann, Nation’s Business, March 1951.

Popular Treatments by Wiener:

‘World of Robot Brains,’ Science Digest, Sept. 1949.

‘Electric Brains with Feelings,’ Science Digest, Sept. 1949.

‘Too Big for Private Enterprise,’ Nation, May 20, 1950.

‘Too Damn Close,’ Atlantic Monthly, July 1950.

‘How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,’ with Karl Deutsch, Giorgio de Santillana, etc., Life, Dec. 18, 1950.

The typescript also contains several struck-through duplicate or superseded entries, including ‘Saturday Review, Apr. 23, 1949’, ‘Instrumentation and Cybernetics, Saturday Review, Aug. 19, 1950’, ‘Feed-back to Idiocy’, and a separate heading ‘Mind and/or Machine’.

Source/credit

Shared by Sean Manion, @TheUnjournaling:
https://x.com/TheUnjournaling/status/2096067877493211220

His accompanying framing:

“Cybernetics is interested in matter and energy only insofar as they are bearers of information.”

In 1951, Barrett and Shepard of MIT did a rather comprehensive bibliography of cybernetics with hundreds of citations across half a dozen subcategories. Interesting framing.

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CYBERNETICS

by F. Dermot Barrett and Herbert A. Shepard
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction

Norbert Wiener defines cybernetics as “the study of messages, and in particular of the effective messages of control,” and as “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal.” His book, Cybernetics, is the central work to which other items in this bibliography are related.

Cybernetics owes many of its elements to the practical science of communication engineering. In recent years the demand for complex communication devices such as television, automatic control systems, and large-scale computing machines made the need for an adequate theory of communication evident. Wiener, Shannon, and many others have contributed to a general theory of communication and control, which Wiener calls cybernetics. For communications engineers, therefore, there is nothing revolutionary in cybernetics as it applies to their own work. For biological and social scientists, however, cybernetics presents a new point of view and system of concepts for studying the organism and its relations with other organisms and the inorganic environment.

The prime concept in cybernetics is information. The term information refers to the representation of an event. If information is transmitted without loss from a transmitter to a receiver, then the pattern which existed among the elements at the transmitter will be represented in the arrangement of other elements at the receiver. Patterns, not elements, are transmitted. Most physical sciences are primarily concerned with the transmission of matter and energy. Cybernetics is interested in matter and energy only insofar as they are bearers of information.

[Page 2]

The central interest of cybernetics is in the way information is used for controlling processes. A control mechanism is a system which uses information from other systems for continuously determining its own action relative to them. Control systems include all those which can be called adjustive or adaptive: servomechanisms, organisms, and social organizations. Thus cybernetics provides conceptual apparatus applicable to an enormous range of phenomena.

In addition, cybernetics provides a new frame of reference for considering some longstanding philosophical problems. The construction of machines which reproduce a set of functions hitherto restricted to organisms has called for a re-examination of such matters as free will, teleology, consciousness and scientific method. Some of the most noteworthy explorations of the metascientific aspects and philosophical implications of cybernetics have been those undertaken by Karl W. Deutsch and by D. M. MacKay.

The bibliography has been selected with the interests of social scientists in mind and engineering applications have been omitted, except for general material on servomechanisms and communication systems. For convenience, the bibliography has been classified under six headings, although some works properly belong in more than one category. The first class, “Popular Expositions” is intended for the casual or lay reader who seeks a non-technical treatment. The core literature is included under the heading “Cybernetics.” The third and fourth categories, “Information Theory and Communication Theory” and “Servomechanisms” represent two major foundations or branches of the science. The fifth class, “Cybernetics Concepts in the Biological and Social Sciences” consists of the literature concerned with applying the viewpoint of cybernetics to the life sciences.

[Page 3]

The rate of output of such literature is increasing rapidly, but the total quantity is still small enough that most of it could be included. It is likely, however, that within a short time some of the material included here will be seen as inferior in quality and of secondary importance. The sixth class, “Relevant Works in Social Science, Biology, and Philosophy” represents a somewhat arbitrary selection. The very relevance of cybernetic notions to many scientific fields has made this necessary. Thus Cannon’s The Wisdom of the Body, written nearly thirty years ago, is undoubtedly a “relevant” work since its viewpoint is in such close harmony with that of cybernetics, whereas Barnard’s Functions of the Executive is a much less clear-cut case, and has been included for the sake of scattered insights, rather than for its general approach.

https://criticalsystemsthinking.com

https://seanmanion.substack.com/p/moon-of-the-unforgotten-origin-story?r=3i02e2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/652023

Why the ‘Warm Data’ Process Matters

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ruth-malan-4558153_introduction-to-software-architecture-as-ugcPost-7491867855295188992-Rkjq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACnhUEBLGnaN1aiBOBs8FIh3ZaXqXWtR0g

Join the full conversation on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_publicservicetransformation-activity-7500448806606397440-VkuW?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

Back to term with an inspiring example of #publicservicetransformation that shows how hard the work is!

A lot of public service reform still has a bad habit; it takes a model from somewhere else, gives it a local name, adds a diagram, runs a few workshops, and then does a mishmash of ‘what we were doing anyway’ and whatever they understand of the imported model. And, guess what, it doesn’t stick…

That’s one reason talking to Lee Tillman and Damian Allen from Doncaster Council was so interesting; they weren’t trying to sell me a model.

In fact, they were careful not to. Their Thrive work isn’t presented as a five-step method, a branded product, or a heroic example. It’s much more serious than that – it’s a long-term attempt to change how the council and its partners work with places.

The important word is ‘with’.

Not doing things to places, designing services for places in a meeting room, or importing a success story and hoping the local conditions are roughly similar.

Doncaster has built a nested approach. There’s a ten-year borough strategy, the Team Doncaster partnership, five localities, locality partnerships, delivery networks, six regenerative neighbourhoods, and then work that gets right down to particular streets, schools, parks, landlords, GP practices and households. Inspired by a raft of brilliant thinkers and theories, a synthesis all about right action in context.

That’s what I think matters; a two-way connection of strategy to reality.
In Edlington, the work involved a very specific set of conditions: three streets, absentee landlords, derelict housing, crime, schools with deep relationships, and a need to rebuild trust through visible action. In Highfields, the conditions were different: weaker community capacity, a need for a gathering space, a new CIC, a community house, and even a pump track because that’s what local people and young people said would make a difference.
Same broad principles. Quite different work.

This is what too many discussions of ‘scaling’ (and ‘learning’) miss. You can transfer method, posture, and discipline. You can’t transfer the answer. And the mechanisms for both are quite different!

There is a tendency in public service reform to tidy things up too quickly. We turn situated practice into a model, then turn the model into a presentation, and fret when it doesn’t change the world.

The Doncaster story is more useful because it’s less tidy. It suggests that the real work isn’t to find a better model, but to build the capacity to understand a place, act with the people who have trust there, learn as you go, and keep enough political and organisational authorisation around the work for it to last. If you don’t understand the place, you’re not transforming it. You’re working for your own ego.

I recorded this interview some weeks ago; release delayed as unfortunately we’ve been unable to recover the video from Microsoft Teams! Full audio at link in comments.

What do you take from this story?

The Viable Operating Model: Organisation, Constraint and Human Development

Daniel Nemenyi · Robot Makes Free: The Leibnizian cryptowar of Norbert Wiener (2023)

https://transduction.systems/prior-maps/systemic-evolution/?node=n1&view=full&depth=1&realm=all&status=all

The map was originated by Eric Schwarz in 1996; extended in 1998 with material from Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy; elaborated in 2000–01 for the International Institute for General Systems Studies; and extended in 2016 by Benjamin Hadorn with Beat Hirsbrunner.

Main site

https://transduction.systems