As announced earlier, on this Thursday, the 1st of December, from 4-5:30 pm (UK wintertime), we have our next webinar by Dr. Olag Brugman, on “Ten Synergetic Ideas for the VSM and Management Cybernetics Community”. See below details of this webinar.
The webinar would be at our usual zoom link:
Topic: Metaphorum’s Webinar Series
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81943981395
See also below the agenda for the forthcoming webinars in 2023.
To begin our webinar series in 2023, we will have an open conversation with Vanilla Beer, on her personal experience and learning with Stafford. We invite our members to send in advance any questions they may have to include in the conversation, to metaphorum.org@gmail,com, before the end of the year.
Please note there is a new webinar in the agenda, by Mike Jackson on March the 15th – details will be posted in our website Metaphorum-webinar-series.
Looking forward to having you with us in this webinar.
Yours,
Angela Espinosa, Allenna Leonard and Jon Walker
Olaf Brugman
Ten Synergetic Ideas for the VSM and Management Cybernetics Community
Thursday, December the 1st, 2022, 5:00- 6:30 pm (UK wintertime)
The leading question for this webinar is: “What can we do to enhance the applicability of the Viable System Model and Management Cybernetics?” Ten ideas will be presented to explore opportunities to take research, education, and application in practice of the VSM and Management Cybernetics a step further. The ideas are inspired by agile software development, pattern language architecture approaches, and from management practice in cooperative organisations. It will address the VSM as a tool, dissemination of knowledge and know-how, and its practical application. The webinar aims to share notions around the VSM and Management Cybernetics that participants can connect to their academic and professional activities.
Dr. Olaf Brugman has been a systems practitioner ever since he first got to know the Viable System Model in 1985. In the systems sciences community, he currently acts as the Vice President Conference on the board of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. His main professional engagement is with Rabobank, at which he serves as the head of sustainability policy & risk. He holds a master’s degree in public administration from Twente University and a doctorate from Radboud University Nijmegen, both in the Netherlands. He currently lives in and works from The Hague.
www.olafbrugman.com
Forthcoming Metaphorum webinars 2023
Olaf Brugman Ten Synergetic Ideas for the VSM and Management Cybernetics Community December the 1st 2022
Vanilla Beer Interview with Vanilla Beer January the 4th 2023
Katharine Farrell Holarchies, heterarchies and hermeneutics: exploring relationships, between Beer and Bateson February the 1st, 2023
Jose-Carlos Mariategui CENTRO and the construction of a mathematical model for Latin America March the 1st 2023
Mike Jackson Alexander Bogdanov, Stafford Beer, and intimations of a post-capitalist future March 15th, 2023
Raul Gonzalez How to enhace business platforms using the Viable System Model (VSM) in order to face the current and future complexity business challenges April the 5th 2023
Joe Truss The Meta architecture of TS for participatory democracy May the 3rd 2023
For this installment of our series on Actually Existing Socialism we take a look at an attempt to solve the issues of central planning with a novel experiment unlike any other in history: Project Cybersyn in Salvador Allende’s Chile. In a discussion based on Eden Medina’s book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Donald, Christian, and Rudy discuss the idea of Stafford Beer and their limitations, the difficulties of the democratic road to socialism, and if Cybersyn is totalitarian but in a good way. Outro music is “Litany for a computer and a child about to be born” by Angel Parra and Stafford Beer.
Nicolas Villarreal joins Ash Milton to discuss his 05 article on how capitalist giants use socialist cybernetic planning, cybernetic methods of organizing supply chains, and their impact on the worker.
Socialist Chile centrally planned its economy using Project Cybersyn, which used computerized feedback loops to give production managers live updates on changes in demand and other production indicators. This helped solved the “bullwhip” problem, where producers belatedly learned of changes in demand that originate further down the supply chain.
Capitalist supergiants like Amazon and Walmart use similar systems to maintain efficiency. But ultimately the workers are made to work at the tempo of an automated feedback system that leads to injury and exhaustion. Nicolas and Ash also discuss how industrial rationalization and efficiency can lead to worker organization. Nicolas’s article “How Capitalist Giants Use Socialist Cybernetic Planning” is featured in PALLADIUM 05: Centralizing Society.
Nicolas Villarreal works as an analyst for a government contractor and formerly worked in federal banking regulation. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, and author of the novel Caeruleus. He tweets @NicolasDVillar1.
Distributed systems provide a particular challenge to program. They often require us to have multiple copies of data, which need to keep synchronized. Yet we cannot rely on processing nodes working reliably, and network delays can easily lead to inconsistencies. Despite this, many organizations rely on a range of core distributed software handling data storage, messaging, system management, and compute capability. These systems face common problems which they solve with similar solutions. This article recognizes and develops these solutions as patterns, with which we can build up an understanding of how to better understand, communicate and teach distributed system design.
This Wednesday – Community of Practice – online event
Complexity, Community Development and Systems Change
Learn how experienced community development practitioner, Helen Rodd is using Wicked Lab’s complexity-informed framework and tool in her projects and evaluations.
In today’s post, I am continuing on my thoughts on stoicism through the lens of cybernetics. In Cybernetics, we call regulation the act (art) of responding to external disturbances in order to maintain selected internal variables in a range. For example, our body maintains the internal temperature in a specific range. We have internal regulations built in through evolution to ensure that this is done. In the language of cybernetics, regulation refers to the act of countering the external variety. In order to counter the external variety, we must have requisite variety. As noted in the last post, only variety can absorb variety. If the external temperature goes up or goes down, our body should have a mechanism to react so that the internal temperature is maintained in a specific range. If it is not able to do this, we will not stay viable. The goal of requisite variety in…
As a middle way between the extremes of allopoiesis (other-making) and autopoiesis (self-making), Holopoiesis designates a dynamic process by which an integrated and diversified field “creorders” (creatively re/orders) itself holonically, that is, simultaneously as whole and part, universal and particular, self and other.
Systems Thinking in Climate ChangeInteractive workshop and masterclass on different ways of thinking about climate changeDate:Tuesday, November 22, 2022Time:7:00 pm
Jessica Flack, Panos Ipeirotis, Thomas W Malone, Geoff Mulgan, Scott E Page
Collective behavior is a universal property of biological, social, and many engineered systems. However, the study of collective intelligence—roughly, the production of adaptive, wise, or clever structures and behaviors by groups—remains nascent. Despite that, it is growing in various disciplines, from biology and psychology to computer science and economics, management, and political science to mathematics, complexity science, and neuroscience. With the launch of Collective Intelligence, we aim to create a publication that transcends disciplines, methodologies, and traditional formats. We hope to help discover principles that can be useful to both basic and applied science and encourage the emergence of a unified discipline of study.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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