Another really significant figure sadly gone, and Merrelyn was still working and contributing very recently. I’ll leave the first brief obituary to the Socio-Technica Systems Round Table, as per their mailing list announcement:

It is with great sadness that we share the news of Merrelyn Emery‘s passing last week, after a long illness. Anyone who worked with Merrelyn will recognise the feeling right now: that mix of loss and enormous, uncomplicated gratitude. She gave so much, to so many of us, for so long. Over five decades, Merrelyn — with Fred Emery and then in her own right — developed Open Systems Theory and refined the Search Conference and the Participative Design Workshop into methods that put people back in charge of their own work and their own communities. She was rigorous, direct, generous with her time, and utterly unwilling to accept that people needed to be managed rather than trusted. Her legacy stays with us. It’s in the practitioners she trained, the communities she helped find their own way, and the organisations still being designed around her ideas today. Her body of work, decades of papers on the genotypical organization design principles, democratising organisations, education, media and perception, and theory turned into practice, remains freely available at Social Science That Actually Works.  We’d encourage anyone who hasn’t explored it to do so. Thank you to everyone who supported and worked alongside her over the years.  The work continues — and that is exactly how she would want it. In gratitude and loss, all of us at the Socio-Technical Systems Roundtable (STS RT)