Linkedin post from Kyla Avis: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kylaavis_have-you-ever-tried-to-work-with-a-group-activity-7493696398811598848-MI6E?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

Have you ever tried to work with a group of people to do system mapping? Maybe you tried it on Kumu or MIro or even on a whiteboard. It gets very messy, very fast. Even when the dialogue is powerful, the map can be useless at the end.

Gene Bellinger has created a really interesting tool with AI. His program will ask you/your team a series of questions to understand the problem and create a system map for you complete with highlighted feedback loops and system archetype descriptions. I’ve only started playing with it but it’s a very valuable tool if you like system thinking.

Here is a link to the tool: https://lnkd.in/gSTZ4SAB
Here is an explainer video: https://lnkd.in/gkuzvMaB

I enjoy this podcast and – underprisingly perhaps – it’s quite systems | cybernetics | complexity – ish.
In this interview with Ron Gantt I was just thinking ‘hmm this is Requitie Variety for safety – that’s insightful/obvious’ and sure enough, Ron Gantt actually uses the phrase ‘the requisite variety necessary to manage a construction site’.
https://preaccidentpodcast.podbean.com/e/rethinking-safety-ai-pre-jobs-and-the-power-of-listening/

So I asked my chat j’ai pété to do a dive into RV as a concept in Safety. It said:

His argument has a recognisable lineage, but he gives it a particularly useful inter-organisational and political twist.

### The closest precedent: high reliability organising

The nearest match I have found is Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe and David Obstfeld’s 1999 paper, [‘Organizing for High Reliability: Processes of Collective Mindfulness’](https://www.theisrm.org/documents/Weick%20%281999%29%20Organizing%20for%20High%20Reliability%20-%20Processes%20of%20Collective%20Mindfulness.pdf).

They say that high-reliability organisations:

‘cultivate requisite variety and assume that it takes a complex system to sense a complex environment’.

Their mechanisms include diverse perspectives, overlapping checks, job rotation, adversarial review and what Schulman called ‘conceptual slack’: disagreement and alternative interpretations that prevent the organisation from collapsing complexity too soon.

Even closer to Gantt, they describe safety as depending on ‘negotiated complexity’: informal and continually renewed relationships between organisations. Those relationships are not peripheral niceties. They form part of the machinery through which safe operation is produced.

That is almost exactly Gantt’s construction-site problem. The expertise needed to regulate the work is dispersed among client, principal contractor, subcontractors, supervisors, trades and workers. No single organisation contains enough of the relevant variety.

### The direct safety literature

There is also a paper whose title answers your question almost comically directly:

Vanessa Becker Bertoni, Tarcisio Abreu Saurin and Flávio Sanson Fogliatto, [‘Law of requisite variety in practice: Assessing the match between risk and actors’ contribution to resilient performance’](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105895), published in *Safety Science* in 2022.

It applies Ashby’s law to the relationship between the variety of risks and the contribution of different actors to resilient performance, using social-network analysis in a healthcare setting. The practical proposition is that safety depends not just on possessing expertise somewhere in the organisation, but on whether the network makes the necessary people and capabilities available to one another.

A related paper by Hirose and colleagues, [‘Functional Analysis of Law of Requisite Variety’](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2022.10.231), links Ashby explicitly with resilience engineering and FRAM. Their modelling suggests that strategies with a greater repertoire of possible actions cope better with variability in working conditions.

So there is an identifiable, if still rather small, literature explicitly joining requisite variety and safety.

### Safety-II and resilience engineering

A much larger body of safety work makes essentially the same argument without always naming Ashby.

The early resilience-engineering formulation defines resilience as the capacity to adjust functioning before, during or after disturbances so that required operations continue under expected and unexpected conditions. The [EUROCONTROL resilience-engineering white paper](https://www.eurocontrol.int/archive_download/all/node/11591) says, in effect, that the less completely work can be specified in advance, the more performance variability is needed.

That is requisite variety translated into safety language:

• Work generates more states and disturbances than procedures can enumerate.
• People therefore have to notice differences, interpret them and adjust.
• A safe system needs a sufficiently differentiated repertoire of responses.
• Attempts to remove all variation from human performance can remove the very capacity that keeps the system safe.

Todd Conklin’s formulation that safety is ‘the presence of capacity’, rather than merely the absence of accidents, belongs in this family. Dekker and Tooma develop that idea more systematically in [‘A capacity index to replace flawed incident-based metrics for worker safety’](https://sidneydekker.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/ilr.12210.pdf). Among the capacities they identify are operational knowledge, resources, diversity of voices, local decision authority and the ability to respond to emerging risk.

### What Gantt is adding

Gantt’s point is not simply ‘we need more perspectives’. It is that the variety already present on a construction site is prevented from becoming usable regulatory variety.

| Construction-site feature | Cybernetic reading |
| ———————————————————— | —————————————————————– |
| Changing conditions, interacting trades and emerging hazards | Disturbance variety |
| Local knowledge and different contractors’ capabilities | Potential response variety |
| Contracts, liability anxiety and organisational silos | Attenuated communication and action channels |
| Hierarchy and power differences | Suppression of signals and reduction of actors’ effective options |
| ‘The right people at the right time’ | Appropriate selection plus sufficiently rapid response |
| Trust and joint problem-solving | Coupling distributed variety into a functioning regulator |

This makes power a cybernetic variable. A worker or contractor may perceive a dangerous condition and know how to respond, but anticipated blame, contractual exposure or lack of authority can remove that response from the system’s effective repertoire.

In other words, nominal variety is not enough. It has to be:

• perceptible;
• communicable;
• authorised;
• resourced;
• co-ordinated;
• available quickly enough to matter.

Gantt’s suggestion that the more powerful client should accept some liability risk and actively earn trust is therefore not merely a cultural recommendation. It is an attempt to alter the control structure so that distributed knowledge can participate in regulation.

### One important qualification

Requisite variety is a necessary condition for regulation, not a complete theory of safety.

More variety is not automatically better. Unstructured diversity may produce noise, conflict or paralysis. Systems also achieve safety by attenuating disturbance variety: guarding machinery, separating traffic, simplifying interfaces, providing physical buffers and standardising genuinely repeatable work.

The useful question is therefore not simply ‘How do we increase variety?’ It is:

Which disturbances should we prevent or attenuate, and what remaining variety must the system be able to detect, interpret and respond to?

So my short answer is: yes, several traditions have done this. The strongest explicit precursor to Gantt is Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld’s combination of requisite variety, collective mindfulness and ‘negotiated complexity’. What seems particularly sharp in Gantt’s version is the application to the client–contractor boundary: liability, hierarchy and mistrust can leave a construction system full of expertise while making that expertise cybernetically unavailable.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064526000606

https://publicvitality.substack.com/p/strategic-foresight-for-viable-futures

Update — 24 October 2026. The Necessary Tangle now has developed reading guides on OrgLens, 42 The Systemic Review, and systems leadership and action, alongside current events and calendar subscriptions. You can send a rough thought or correction through Quick contribute, without an account, with an optional private email for follow-ups. Read the 0.34 update. The announcement below describes the August launch; the atlas itself carries the current coverage and its limits.

I’ve been wanting for years to do a ‘better map’ of systems | complexity | cybernetics, having strongly criticised the Castellani ‘complexity map’ and seen some others – and been involved in the SCiO SysBoK where we tried to map key concepts, their necessary antecedents and dependent thingummies, people, meaning, and so on (- and always inspired by ‘rock family trees’ and the way it’s the constellation of influences and people around individual practitioners that actually makes the difference, as David Ing says).

So with the assistance of ChatGPT, and I’ve been building The Necessary Tangle – a living, evidence-backed atlas of systems | complexity | cybernetics.

At the August launch, it mapped 411 public entries and 32 developed profiles from 93 registered sources.

The key difference from the usual family tree is that every line has to say what sort of relationship it represents: logical antecedent, historical precursor, documented influence, teaching, collaboration, practical use, and so on.

The eventual ambition to: trace the human as well as conceptual lineages; connect theory to practice; distinguish espoused intellectual genealogy from the clusters the evidence actually produces; and let categories emerge from the resulting network rather than deciding the schools in advance.

It’s very much a public alpha. Some areas are already quite deep; others are little more than markers saying ‘this belongs here’. I’m putting it out now precisely because corrections, missing connections, rival genealogies and ‘surely you can’t say that’ responses are part of building it.

AND I’m very happy to share, collaborate or whatever….

Have a look
https://transduction.systems

Benjamin
www.antlerboy.com

Submissions are still coming in through our Call for Contributions, and we’re already getting a sense of what September will look like.

Confirmed speakers (at this early stage) include:

 Janne Korhonen
Jan de Visch
 Denis Fisbacher Smith
 Kim Warren
 Roelien Goede
 Patrick Hoverstadt
 Simon MacCormac
 John Rogers
 Gavin Roberts

What’s clear so far is that SysPrac26 stays true to its founding idea:

 No keynotes, no lectures from a stage
 Themed streams built around real practice – public service, health, organisational change and more
 Workshops and talks where you bring the challenge and your experience

If you’ve got a case, challenge or experiment from your own practice, there’s still time to submit and be part of the programme.

We’ll be sharing more on streams, sessions and who you’ll be learning alongside over the coming weeks.

SysPrac26 is 21–22 September 2026 at Cranfield University. Early bird tickets are open until 17 August.

+++++++++++++++++

Contribute your practice by 10 August: https://tally.so/r/q4eWEk?source=sciolinkedin

Tickets at early bird prices available until 17 August: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/scio/2291367?r=sciolinkedin

#SysPrac26 #SystemsThinking #SystemsPractice

Jesuit Cybernetics Culture Research Unit (JCCRU)
 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Patristics, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference
Villanova University (Online & In-Person) 
October 9–11, 2026 (panel schedule, date, and time TBA) 


This panel of the 2026 Patristics, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference seeks to explore and develop a new Jesuit Cybernetic critique of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) (c. 1995–2000) for the purpose of renewing the hidden theological tradition of cybernetic theory in light of Trinitarian Ontology.

JCCRU

So much to unpack from the Re-braiding Sympoisum#1:”The Split”, held on 25 March 2026, but I’ll jump-in with some explorations on Artorga as a good place to build on?

From Symposium #1 – Thank you to fellow attendee Anthony Weiss for making the connection to ARTORGA as being relevant to Re-braiding, and to Bernard Scott’s direct insights on the organisation.

(#1 assets available here: https://tinyurl.com/Cyber-AI-Rebraid  including the Video of the #1 presentations)


I’ve dug into Artorga a bit, and I found it fascinating and rich with leads to Re-braiding, and historic cybernetics in general.

In terms of Hugh and Paul’s Re-braiding timeline (available on the Re-braiding repository), Artorga seems to have been active from 1958 to ~1970, right at the overlap of Cybernetics and Symbolic AI: 

Artorga stood for the endeavour of Artificial Organisms, and broadly speaking, ARTORGA was a…

(a) Laboratory/ series of experiments …

(b) that “… sought to revise cybernetics’ disciplinary history, claiming its origins in biology rather than information theory and operations research.” (Cartelli, 2023)

(c) running from 1958 – ~1970

(d) Steered by: Oliver Wells; and an Advisory Group involving: Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, Heinz von Foerster.

(e) Producing:

• A network of interested people.

• A mainly monthly Newsletter, called ‘Communications’

• Pamphlets

• Books

• Conferences

• Products (the Drogulus)

• An ‘Investment group’

The most comprehensive review on Artorga I’ve found so far on is this reference:

Machines, Fabrics, and Models: ARTORGA and Biology’s Cybernetic Utopia, by Gregory Elias Cartelli, 2023, 29 pages. I attach a copy that someone has extracted (available online here) (also of interest to CMU’s Architecture Code Lab?)

(the full, main publication is Open Access, and is freely available here: UTOPIA COMPUTER: The “New” in Architecture, 2023, 332 pages: https://verlag.tu-berlin.de/en/produkt/978-3-7983-3270-6/ )

The other fun thing found, is a video of:

            Automatic Mechanical Self Replication (Part 1), Lionel Penrose, 1958

which really made alive for me, the Drogulus mentioned frequently in the Penrose papers and Oliver Wells communications from Artorga, and the whole pursuit of self-reproduction pursued by that early Cybernetic period.

I think this Penrose machine also speaks to Jill’s point of Cybernetics seeking general, self-reproducing behaviours, as a Cybernetic paradigm, in tension with AI’s different paradigm.

There seem to two main Archives which have Artorga material (1. Wellcome Collections > L. S. Penrose Papers > Artorga, and 2. University of Illinois Archives > Heinz von Foerster Papers > Artorga ).

If anyone else is looking at Artorga, and or can help fill in the missing copies of the Communication newsletter, then I have compiled (,what I call, ) a ‘finding-aid’ on Artorga resources: (available here: Artorga-Collections). I also attach a latest copy to this email.

There are a lot of references to other foundational archival aspects. For instance, lots of mentions to the Namur meetings that Mike mentioned; and to meetings on self-organization, which also ties in to Mike’s foundational s-o theme that he presented on.

Many copies of the Artorga Newsletter are missing – so if anybody can help with that, please do get in contact.

There is a lot more emerging from this Artorga lens, including some tensions between Cybernetics and AI from that time. It strikes me that, unless we investigate (and mitigate somehow) these tensions from the past, then we may be ‘doomed’ to repeat them? That may be for future discussions, but for now, I am enjoying the hopes and aspirations that Artorga endeavoured, as Cartelli writes: “ARTORGA was a series of experiments that sought to revise cybernetics’ disciplinary history, claiming its origins in biology rather than information theory and operations research” (Cartelli, 2023, page 213).

Thanks to Paul Pangaro and the team for organising this Re-braiding Project.

Best regards,

Rob

Robert Young

Cambridge, UK

Matthew Shapiro on linkedin:

The Mary Parker Follett Foundation / Capacity Building for Participatory Democracy


I’m happy to share The Best We Can Do: An Introduction to Designing Our Systems, Together. This unique booklet is an introduction to the participatory design of social and societal systems. Enjoy, and I’d love to hear from you about it, both in terms of feedback and regarding opportunities for undertaking the journey of participatory design.
https://lnkd.in/gH3HuuCs

Post | LinkedIn

🌍 Cybernetics Live — Wednesday 22 July 2026, 17:00–19:00 BST (online)

Have we entered a New Normal? The physics, the feedbacks, the implications and the responses to our changing climate.

Speaker: Tom Harris

Using the very latest satellite data, Tom will walk through the physics of climate change: how the planet is out of energy balance, accumulating energy at an accelerating rate, and where that heat is going in different Earth systems.

The talk will cover:
🔹 The coming ‘Goliath’ El Niño, past events, and the phenomenon of temperature ratcheting — with predictions for the second half of this decade
🔹 Tipping points in the ocean currents and the Amazon rainforest, and the economic consequences of continued warming
🔹 The triad of measures still available to us: decarbonising the economy, removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and deploying solar geoengineering

Tom has a PhD in neural computing from Brunel University — “back before it was called AI” — and has spent 25 years working across 200+ grant-funded projects including carbon capture, smart energy grids and energy efficiency. He now writes on climate science at his Substack, Climate Uncovered, translating complex scientific papers for a wider audience.

Free and open to all. Register on Zoom:
https://lnkd.in/dRtnrwE6

The Cybernetics Society — advancing the science of effective organisation since 1968.

#Cybernetics #ClimateChange #ClimateScience #SystemsThinking #TippingPoints #ElNino #Feedback

Post | LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cybernetics-climatechange-climatescience-share-7482708902690779136-4l1U

Adversarial dynamical systems characterize when data-driven learning succeeds or fails

Matthew J. Colbrook, Igor Mezić & Alexei Stepanenko

Nature Communications 17, Article number: 5397 (2026) | Cite this article

Abstract

Many systems resist analytical modeling, making data-driven inference of dynamics important. Yet data-driven methods can fail to converge or generalize, leaving open a central question: When can system behavior be learned reliably from data, and when is such learning impossible? We answer this question using adversarial dynamical systems to identify the boundary between accessible and inaccessible regimes. In Koopman operator learning, a leading framework for representing nonlinear dynamics through linear spectral objects, we design optimal data-driven spectral algorithms with convergence and certification guarantees under conditions arising broadly in physical systems. This yields a convergence theory for Koopman-operator approximations and resolves a longstanding open problem in Koopman spectral analysis. Conversely, by constructing adversarial systems, we prove matching impossibility results: without these conditions, no single-sequence limiting procedure can guarantee learning, regardless of data quality. These results sharply characterize when data-driven spectral learning can succeed and when it must fail. We validate the framework on oscillators, chaotic fluid flows and Arctic sea ice concentration forecasting. In the latter, we uncover hidden modes of Arctic sea ice decline, deliver long-range forecasts with geographic error bounds, and outperform state-of-the-art dynamical and deep learning models at substantially lower computational cost, enabling real-time deployment on standard CPUs.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74220-8

[I just came across this very moving tribute by coincidence)

Sophia Parker

Sep 14, 2025

Four life lessons from Jake Chapman, one of the most extraordinary humans I know | by Sophia Parker | Medium