See my post on LinkedIn (replicated below) and join the discussion there:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_rough-draft-systemscomplexitycybernetics-activity-7246779585235664896-64Xz
pdf: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/85zlt0t6ph8qarx7d7gic/2024-09-27-rough-draft-systems-thinking-reading-list-v1.1BT.pdf?rlkey=3rfavacsy4n6sl8j0pyedph1q&st=qagh1418&dl=0
Commentable Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tt8GgQQj4Qw4HnR7DxKeF370o_HlDlpv/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=115526108239573817578&rtpof=true&sd=true
How do you get into systems | complexity | cybernetics?
Here’s my rough reading list.
There are a lot of answers to the question, many of them connecting with some kind of disjointing break from ‘normal’ ways of seeing and being. Anything from being bullied at school to being dyslexic. Being in an outsider group. Naively applying thinking from one domain to another. Studying a technical problem long enough to suddenly see it in a completely different light – then either have your breakthrough celebrated or rejected.
It isn’t some mystic thing and it doesn’t require to you break from polite society. But it is one of the richest, weirdest, most diverse and challenging, inspiring and confounding, confronting and validating things you can study.
I’m often asked for a reading list for people interested in the field, and I usually suck my teeth. Some of the books are engaging, insightful, humorous, relevant. Others are dry as old twigs but less likely to kindle a spark.
Really, it depends on you and your context – as David Ing says, it’s better to talk of the thinkers and their individual constellations of interests, history, learning, and personal tendencies than it is to talk of schools and fields and separate places.
And even presenting this reading list, I’d say that I’d recommend Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Ursula K Le Guin, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Star Trek, old 20th Century Sci-Fi and Apartheid-era South African writing, art movies and music more – if you happen to be a bit like me. You’ll find your thing, if you’re interested.
But. The books are there – and many of them are *really good*. Top ones I’d recommend came out this decade
Hoverstadt’s Grammar of Systems
Jackson’s Critical Systems Thinking: A practitioner’s Guide
Opening the box – a slim little thing from SCiO colleagues
Essential Balances by Velitchkov
The attached list is a bit systems-practice focused. It is also too long and incomplete and partial simply for lack of time and energy.
There are *so many* flavours of systems thinking / complexity / cybernetics – do yourself a favour and don’t flog through stuff that doesn’t work for you, find things that bring your mind alive. Start with the articles and skim through.
But do start, because you will find in here the thinking and tools to find better ways of doing things for organisations, societies, the ecosystem, for people – and a lot of fun.
Tip: to save the pdf, hover over the image of the first page and find the rectangle bottom right – click that and it should go full screen. Top right you’ll have a download option, which when clicked will then resolve into a download button… (which might then open in your browser, but at least as a proper pdf you can save).
So… deep breath… what would you recommend? What do you think is missing?
On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B Whether dealing with monkeys, rats, or human beings, it is hardly controversial to state that most organisms seek information concerning what activities are rewarded, and then seek to do (or at least pretend to do) those things, often to the virtual exclusion of activities not rewarded. . . . Nevertheless, numerous examples exist of reward…
[h/t Ivo Velitchkov. This confused me a bit, it started off with the usual systems thinking / system dynamics confusion, then pivoted to cybernetics along with complexity.]
Ongoing conversations with Dan Everett on Facebook have me backtracking to recurring questions about the relationship between formal language theory (as I once learned it) and the properties of natural languages as they are found occurring in the field. A point of particular interest is the role of recursion in formal and natural languages, along with collateral questions about its role in the cognitive sciences at large.
It has taken me quite a while to bring my reflections up to the threshold of minimal coherence — and the inquiry remains ongoing — but it may catalyze the thinking process if I simply share what I’ve thought so far …
Comment 1
Recursion is where you find it — so, myself not being a natural language researcher, when someone who is says they don’t find it in a given corpus I just take them at their word …
Comment 2
The question to which I keep returning has to do with the relationship between two ways we find recursion occurring.
One way I’d call pragmatic recursion — if I wanted to be precise and cover its full scope — since so many of its operations occur without conscious direction, but for now I’ll defer to more familiar language, calling it cognitive or conceptual recursion.
Comment 3
If we discard from the idea of recursion what is not of its essence, we find recursion occurs when our understanding of one situation has recourse to our understanding of other situations.
Very typically, the object situation presents itself as complex, difficult, or unfamiliar while the resource situations are regarded as being better understood.
It must be appreciated, however, that any ranking of situations by level of understanding is contingent on the circumstances in view and may vary radically in alternate settings.
Comment 4
Recursion occurs more markedly in syntactic recursion, where the recursive process shows its character as such in the symbols of its syntactic expression.
A sense of the difference can be gained by looking at a case of ostensible syntactic recursion. (How much substance backs the ostentation is a subject we’ll take up, maybe at length, but later …)
Consider the following diagram for the computation of a simple recursive function.
For example, the factorial function has a definition in terms of the predecessor function and the multiplier function
Comment 5
Recursion is rife in mathematics and computation, typically sporting its recursive character on its sleeve in the fashion of syntax sketched above. But mathematics and computation are overlearned subjects and practices, enjoying long histories of being gone over with an eye to articulating every last detail of any way they might be conceived and conducted. So it’s fair to ask whether all that artifice truly tutors nature or only creates a rationalized reconstruction of it. Then again, even if that’s all it does, is there anything of use to be learned from it?
Comment 6
The prevalence of recursion in mathematics arises from the architecture of mathematical systems.
Mathematical systems grow from a fourfold root.
Primitives are taken as initial terms.
Definitions expound ever more complex terms in relation to the primitives.
Axioms are taken as initial truths.
Theorems follow from the axioms by way of inference rules.
Recursive definitions of mathematical objects and inductive proofs of the corresponding theorems follow closely parallel patterns. And again, in computation, recursive programs follow the same patterns in action.
I am pleased to present my latest and last book, a heartfelt plea to take open systems seriously. We are a brilliant species but we have fallen into a very deep hole. If we had had a science which was genuinely always based on reality, we may not be in this hole, and may have a more assured future. While there has always been a strand of science which is based on accurate descriptions and explanations of reality, it has been, in too many circumstances, overtaken by its closed systems relative. Far too many branches of science have succumbed to the hypothesis of mechanism and the first design principle. Here we look at a collection of examples in which science has taken a wrong direction while the alternatives are always available. In many ways, it is a bit of a romp through these problems so I hope you find it enjoyable as well as instructive.
Jill’s framing of the split itself is powerful: cybernetics took humans as an instance of self-organising systems, AI took humans as the self-organising system of concern. Tidy; enormous consequences. It changes what you think needs explaining, what you’re allowed to assume, what’s treated as background and what as the central problem. It’s where the trouble starts.
Once you narrow the question, you can get very good at modelling, classifying, predicting, generating and optimising, while tiptoeing away from purpose, observer, boundary, context and ethics. You can become extremely clever about the banana, even the stick, while losing interest in the cage, the shelf, the zookeeper, the audience, and the poor sod’s changing sense of what counts as freedom. Heinz von Foerster said, ‘cybernetics is not the banana’.
Pangaro’s opening definition: cybernetics is about information as feedback to effective action, and about purpose as something attributed by an observer. The observer is in the picture – so, therefore, is responsibility. So intervention isn’t just technical. It’s ethical and political. A much bigger challenge than ‘can the machine do the task?’ It asks who is deciding what the task is, from which world, and with what consequences.
Mike’s thread through von Foerster and Pask was excellent. Self-organisation, in this lineage, is not a magical property or a managerial slogan. It depends on interaction, coalition, adaptation, evolving boundaries, and non-zero-sum conditions. The system can’t optimise itself into wisdom. It has to become viable through relationship. Critical for anyone working in hashtag#publicservices, where our biggest failures come from treating living systems as if they were machinery.
The re-braiding question isn’t mainly about AI research, it’s about institutional design.
That’s what’s missing from a lot of the current conversation. The strands for the next symposium are ‘representation’ and ‘process’. Fair enough. But the questions that really bite in public life are purpose, power, boundaries, legitimacy, worlds, and agency – as substance, not optional.
This could be a great project, not just for history of ideas, but to help us ask a better practical question.
What would it mean to place AI inside purposeful, accountable, learning systems rather than bolt it onto broken ones? What would it mean to design for judgement and discretion within boundaries, over time, rather than automate transactions and call it progress? What would it mean to build public systems that can see themselves, and change themselves, instead of becoming more efficient at doing the wrong thing righter?
[Share on linkedin at the link below – with link direct to pdf in message]
Great to see such a great crowd at STSP. Feel free to share my piece about agentic AI and the self-managing enterprise. Linked-in can block external links so copy-paste this … sdl.re/AIshowITS
This paper establishes an ontological foundation for General Systems Theory by clarifying the nature of existence, entities, structure, and causality. Adopting an empirically grounded physicalist stance, it assumes that all observed phenomena occur within space-time and that there is no evidence of non-physical entities interacting with the physical universe. On this basis, reality is understood as comprising physically instantiated entities distinguished by boundaries and organised within space-time. The paper develops a systematic account of key ontological concepts. Entities may be considered individually or as sets, exhibiting duality between whole and parts. Abstract entities are reconceptualised as distributed physical configurations, understood both as sets of instances and as characteristics defining classes of entities. Structure is distinguished from configuration as the organised arrangement of entities and their relationships, and information is defined ontologically as non-random, recurring structure in space-time. Relationships are classified as configurational or causal, corresponding respectively to structural arrangement and transfer of matter, energy, or information. Events are defined as time-bounded causal interactions, and networks as interconnected systems of such events. Causality is further analysed through two complementary representations: processtransfer-process (PTP), emphasising relational interactions between systems, and transfer-process-transfer (TPT), emphasising internal transformation within systems. Finally, entities are described in terms of characteristics and states, with change understood as variation in these characteristics over time. Together, these concepts provide a coherent and physically grounded ontology that supports the analysis of systems, processes, and dynamics, and establishes a foundation for subsequent developments in structure, information, thermodynamics, and social systems theory.
To let coding agents work with less supervision, we need ways to increase our confidence in their result. As software engineers, we have a natural trust barrier with AI-generated code – LLMs are non-deterministic, they don’t know our context, and they don’t really understand the code, they think in tokens. This article explores a mental model that brings together emerging concepts from context and harness engineering to build that trust.
Birgitta is a Distinguished Engineer and AI-assisted delivery expert at Thoughtworks. She has over 20 years of experience as a software developer, architect and technical leader.
Hello and welcome to the end of March mailing from SCiO. Please check the Events page on the website for updates https://www.systemspractice.org/events. Please note that you are welcome to attend any event (allowing for restrictions on members-only events) so long as you speak and understand the language.
COURSES
Please remember that All thirty-one courses now on the SCiO LMS are discounted 10% to members – use the discount code MEMBER10 when booking. The courses currently available are here.
Multi-course discounts: There is a discount of 20% for any four or more courses and 25% for considerably more. The full set of courses (including future additions) can be had with a 30% discount and this includes access to coaching.
Organisational Development Programmes: If your organisation is interested to use any or all of the courses, substantial discounts of around 50% are available and bespoke programmes can be prepared.
2026 CONFERENCE
The three-day conference: Systems Thinking Systems Practice, took place at Hull University from 24–26 March 2026. It was good to meet some of you there and I hope that you enjoyed it. SCiO was not as involved in the organisation this year and so I cannot guarantee that as much material will be made available. However, Hull have committed to making everything available that they can and this will include recordings of key note speakers and panels. Other material may be more piecemeal. We will structure it in a single page when we see what we have.
SCiO’s Development Event offer an opportunity to draw upon the collective expertise of SCiO members in a friendly and supportive atmosphere. By taking Development Events online, using the Zoom meeting platform, we aim to make them accessible to more SCiO members. Development Events are both for members who are just starting out on a journey to explore Systems Thinking approaches, and for those who have many years of exploration and practice. This is a bring your issues of interest Development Event.
Members only; FREE; Online event; English BOOK NOW
Virtual Open Meeting: A series of presentations of general interest to Systems and Complexity in Organisation’s members and others. SCiO organises Open Meetings to provide opportunities for practitioners to learn and develop new practice, to build relationships, networks hear about skills, tools, practice and experiences. This virtual meeting will be held on Zoom.
In deze laatste activiteit verkennen we hoe we vastgeroeste denkpatronen kunnen doorbreken en nieuwe perspectieven kunnen creëren. Door middel van provocatieve vragen onderzoeken deelnemers de grenzen van hun eigen systemische benadering verkennen en innovatieve oplossingen vinden voor complexe problemen. Enkele voorbeelden die relevant zouden kunnen zijn voor het systeem waarmee je geconfronteerd wordt:
“Wat als we het probleem precies tegenovergesteld zouden benaderen?”
“Stel dat de meest onwaarschijnlijke oplossing de juiste is, wat zou die dan zijn?”
“Wie zou er het meeste baat bij hebben als dit probleem niet werd opgelost?”
“Welke regels of aannames moeten we breken om een innovatieve oplossing te vinden?”
We vatten de avond zeer interactief op en werken in kleine groepjes, vertrekkende van de systemen waarmee de deelnemers worstelen. Het wordt een avond waarin we creatief, onconventioneel en respectvol gevoelige onderwerpen zullen omdenken.
Members only + guests; 50 euro; Kon. Astridlaan 144, 2800 Mechelen, Belgium; Dutch BOOK NOW
Zwischenergebnisse einer laufenden Dissertation zur Messbarkeit organisationaler Komplexität im industriellen Umfeld. Im Fokus: Wie nehmen operative Führungskräfte steigende Komplexität wahr – und inwieweit lässt sich diese Wahrnehmung datenbasiert im Unternehmen abbilden? Ein praxisnaher Einblick in erste Befunde, methodisches Vorgehen und weiterführende Forschungsfragen.
Organisaatiot ovat yhä suorituskykyisempiä. Ne optimoivat prosesseja, asettavat tavoitteita, seuraavat mittareita ja palkitsevat onnistumista. Nämä vahvuudet eivät kuitenkaan välttämättä takaa kestävää menestystä tai organisaation elinkelpoisuutta pitkällä aikavälillä. Esityksessä tarkastellaan suorituskykyä organisoivana logiikkana sekä sen rakenteellisia rajoja. Keskustelemme siitä, miten tavoitteilla johtaminen ja suorituskyvyn optimointi menettävät tehoaan ympäristöissä, joissa epälineaarisuus lisääntyy ja arviointikriteerit muuttuvat epävakaiksi, sekä siitä, kuinka nämä rajat usein tulkitaan toimeenpanon ongelmiksi sen sijaan, että kyseenalaistettaisiin taustalla olevia perusoletuksia. Esityksessä tehdään erottelu suorituskykylogiikan ja adaptiivisen logiikan välillä. Tarkoitus ei ole hylätä suorituskykyä, vaan paikantaa sen rajat – ja avata tilaa toisenlaiselle organisoinnin logiikalle.
SCIO-NL komt elke 1e of 2e vrijdag van de maand live bijeen, meestal in Woerden (Pelmolenlaan 2). Er staan (meestal) geen vaste onderwerpen op de agenda (daarvoor organiseren we specifieke andere meetings), maar de ervaring leert dat er altijd wel een interessant gesprek op gang komt over een systemisch onderwerp. Toegankelijk voor iedereen die de jaarlijkse fee voor de live-bijeenkomsten (€50,-) hiervoor betaald. En voor KNVI-leden. En voor gasten. Neem contact op via ed@doitogether.nl als je interesse hebt, maar nog geen lid van de club bent.
NL Members + guests; FREE; Pelmolenlaan 2, Woerden (At the Office) 5, Woerden, Netherlands; Dutch BOOK NOW
SCIO-NL komt elke 1e of 2e vrijdag van de maand live bijeen, meestal in Woerden (Pelmolenlaan 2). Er staan (meestal) geen vaste onderwerpen op de agenda (daarvoor organiseren we specifieke andere meetings), maar de ervaring leert dat er altijd wel een interessant gesprek op gang komt over een systemisch onderwerp. Toegankelijk voor iedereen die de jaarlijkse fee voor de live-bijeenkomsten (€50,-) hiervoor betaald. En voor KNVI-leden. En voor gasten. Neem contact op via ed@doitogether.nl als je interesse hebt, maar nog geen lid van de club bent.
NL Members + guests; FREE; Pelmolenlaan 2, Woerden (At the Office) 5, Woerden, Netherlands; Dutch BOOK NOW
has a definition in terms of the predecessor function 
and the multiplier function 
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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