Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:07 am on December 22, 2025  

Top ten most read posts on the Systems Community of Inquiry in 2025 (number four will have you *shook*!)

Every now and again I look at the stats for this site. It’s a useful little reality check for what people actually look for when they land here.’ (The stats I think only pick up web visitors; my suspicion is that a bunch of people look just at the emails).

If you’re new: this site is a public commonplace book, or what used to be called a ‘weblog’ – ostensibly an attempt to share all the systems | complexity |cybernetics links I come across, partly an Electric Monk, resource-based, a compost heap towards a curriculum.

The top clicks tell a clear story. People keep coming for foundations, for sources, and for practical bridges between ‘systems’ as an idea and systems as work.

McLuhan consistently sits at the top. That always makes me smile, because his point is basically what this site is for. Tools are extensions, and therefore amputations. If you extend your memory into a notebook, you also stop rehearsing. If you extend your judgement into a dashboard, you also numb your situational sense. Pretending otherwise is how we end up surprised by our own inventions.

Then comes the pragmatic end of the field, if we squint: poka-yoke, homeostasis, STAMP, promise-based management. The appeal here is not ‘be cleverer’, it’s ‘design so normal humans can succeed without heroics’. A cybernetic idea: shift the work from willpower to feedback.

Reading lists feature heavily too, which is both flattering and slightly alarming. A reading list is an honest artefact: it admits you don’t have the map. It also changes you as you build it. You notice what you keep omitting. You start to see the field as much as being a set of disagreements as a set of answers. Which is why debates like ‘systems thinking and complexity’ keep drawing attention. We want a tidy resolution, rarely get one, but sometimes get better questions.

And people really do care about attribution. The Kurt Lewin quote post keeps getting read. Good. There is far too much ‘systems’ talk built on lines no-one can trace. A misattributed quote can still be helpful, but it’s a different kind of helpful – dodgy authority rather than lineage.

A few other regular visitors show up in the stats: Bateson, Menzies Lyth, Joanna Macy. That’s the moral and emotional dimension of systems work. Organisations are not just information processing. They are also anxiety processing. If you don’t deal with that, you get defences that pretend to be structure.

And there’s a pleasing concentration of systems practice in the mix – SysPrac25, the upcoming Hull conference, and the OR Society: events, newsletters, debates. Systems | complexity | cybernetics stays alive when people meet, argue, teach, and keep the conversation going in actual places, not just on platforms. And this is in a year where I have substantially failed the core task and lost track of brilliant events from ISSS, CybSoc, ASC, Metaphorum, even SCiO.  But I think that the field also stays alive when someone bothers to ask ‘who are our fellow travellers?’.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s the current ‘most read’ list. If it looks like a slightly eccentric syllabus, well, there y’go!

Media, attention, and extensions

Cybernetics, quality, and the craft of organising

How we know, what we can cite, and what we should read next

People, communities, and places where the field stays alive

See also

Top ten most read posts on the Systems Community of Inquiry in 2024
Top ten most read posts on the Systems Community of Inquiry in 2023 (rather surprising!)