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Stafford Beer was an extraordinary person and had a lasting influence on those of us who had the honour of meeting him and learning about his work directly from him. In this Festschrift chapter I will share, how he inspired me to continue expanding the boundaries of his original theories, and how I have been developing his ideas and suggesting ways to put them into practice. It first explains how I understand the Viable System Model (VSM) as a theory that explains how organisations manage their complexity to be more viable but also more sustainable. Then I will explain my understanding of sustainable self-governance, how it relates to current theories of governance, and the criteria VSM inspires, to develop capabilities for sustainable self-governance. Then it briefs on my way to apply the VSM, by following the ‘Self-transformation Methodology’ (STM) as a learning device. The STM aims to enable people to deal with complexity, not only in businesses but also in other types of social organisations, including communities, ecoregions and nations. It provides short vignettes from decades of consulting and teaching the VSM: first from a decade of cybernetic projects at the national level in Colombia; and then from two decades of action research in organisational viability and sustainability with colleagues and students, worldwide. By the end it offers some reflections about desirable paths to further develop the VSM, to support humankind in the main challenges we are now facing in order to remain as a sustainable living specie.

CyberSystemic Tools for Organizational Advancement, by Markus Schwaninger. The approach outlined in this chapter helps to enhance the connectivity and synergy of exponents from different fields: Their capabilities are fused in joint efforts towards organizational advancement – not just in economic terms but in a much broader sense. This is a conceptual-theoretical contribution. First, the concept of Management is explored from a cybersystemic stance. Second, Systemic Management is analyzed as a key to Organizational Intelligence. To bind these components together, an integrative Framework for the Design and Development of Intelligent Organizations is proposed. This framework has five dimensions rooted in the research tradition of systemic management: Activities, Structure, Behavior, Basic Parameters, Time. For each one of these dimensions cybersystemic tools are proposed. The presented concept is applicable to organizations of all kinds, but also to societies at large, to social initiatives and movements. The study is an effort to open paths to a new organizational paradigm: one that transcends the technocratic, unidimensional, reductionist approaches to management. The quest is for viability and development, - making possible humane organizations and a sustainable future that is worth living for.

Stafford Beer spent substantial parts of his working life engaged in close connections with universities and their academic staff, as well as with independent researchers and thinkers. At the same time, he was deeply sceptical about the ability of institutions, not least universities, to undertake the radical changes he advocated to align the management of major public and private institutions with the interests of individuals, societies and the well-being of the planet. His detailed study on the organisation of Manchester Business School in 1970 (Beer, 1970), not surprisingly, focused on moving to reorganising its management around the principles of the VSM. Although teaching and learning is barely touched upon, the study does begin with a valuable emphasis that the value of management education is not to be found in league tables, but in how far alumni have actually contributed as managers to real world improvements as a result of their studies. The societal problems Beer identified over 50 years ago, if anything, have significantly worsened. Yet universities and professions were never likely to be willing or able to unthink their entrenched habits. This Festschrift chapter builds on over three decades of management education experiences based on explicit development of innovative teaching and learning methods. A wide variety of management educators have explicitly drawn directly and successfully on the work of Beer in their own teaching and learning innovations. (Adams,1993; Liber, 2004; Ward & Mayrhofer, 2015) . In our own case, he provided more of a continuous underpinning. Since 2022 our work has focused on the implications of generative AI for business education, and have increasingly found value in Beer's own innovative thinking since the 1960s relating to knowledge, technology, cognition and learning, in particular via Designing Freedom (Beer, 1974).

Purpose: Beer's Viable System Model and the Dynamic Capabilities framework are usually treated as unrelated literatures. They were born closer than either community remembers: Beer held adjunct professorships at the Wharton School from 1972 to 1987, a window containing Teece's Pennsylvania doctorate (1975). This paper argues the two frameworks sit on orthogonal axes — VSM a theory of organizational cybernetics, dynamic capabilities a theory of strategic adaptation — and that each supplies precisely what the other lacks. Methods: Conceptual synthesis, supported by a production implementation. We map sensing to S4, seizing to S3 decision under S5 policy, and transforming to the recursive reconfiguration of all five systems audited by S3*; we show Beer's recursion principle is the missing scaling theorem of dynamic capabilities, and the algedonic channel its missing emergency primitive. Findings: A firm can be Beer-viable and Teece-dead — operationally sound while losing every race — but cannot be Teece-strong without being Beer-viable. AI removes the constraint that stopped Beer: microfoundations can now be encoded, composed, and audited as executable primitives, with requisite variety measured rather than asserted. We report evidence from a production implementation, including the first computational realisation of Beer's Team Syntegrity. Implications: The theory of the firm should be stated in three jointly necessary layers — transaction-cost, capability, and cybernetic. Beer's revival may be one of the quiet intellectual stories of the AI era; his centenary is the moment to make it loud.

As this reflects my own journey with Team Syntegrity, the Viable System Model and the Operations Room, I would emphasize how cybernetics is rooted in practical application. Using stories and anecdotes from my own journey, struggles and highlights I would illustrate how Stafford’s legacy was received in management of the 90ties, where it struggled with the status quo and where big achievements supported its further acceptance and dissemination. I would begin in the 1990s, with the establishment of Team Syntegrity Europe, describing the challenge of convincing managers to engage seriously with the Viable System Model at that time – and how that changed later. How we got a company to build the first “SB Operations Room” and conclude with a perspective from today, comparing what Stafford Beer’s models and methods have achieved so far with their future potential and outlook.

Purpose: This study examines the repercussions of applying Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) as a diagnostic and design tool for water governance in two River Basin Organizations (RBOs) within the Tocantins-Araguaia Hydrographic Region, Brazil, as part of the Cyber-Rivers Project. The analysis focuses on how the structural transparency produced by the VSM influenced concrete institutional change. The target audience comprises professionals interested in a systemic-cybernetic approach to management and organization. Methods: The case study methodology was chosen, which enables long-term, insightful investigations. The case covers the trajectory from the structural diagnostic of the two hydric systems, over the decisions to implement organizational change, until their repercussions within four to five years. For the analysis and diagnosis of structures, we revert to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. Our notation for referencing the components of the model follows established convention: The regulatory systems are labeled S1 … S5. Findings: By exposing latent structural deficits - fragmented operational units (S1), weak coordination (S2), limited monitoring (S3*), disconnection between executive management and strategic intelligence (S3-S4), and a passive normative function (S5) - the VSM diagnosis catalyzed measurable institutional responses. Investment in water policy instruments increased from R$40,000 to R$1 million, and a River Basin Agency was created to address the operational and coordination gaps identified. This way dramatic deficits of both the functioning and the management of the hydric systems under study were overcome. Implications: These outcomes suggest that the VSM's contribution extended beyond prescriptive recommendations, functioning as an epistemic device that rendered the system observable to itself. By restoring recursive integrity, strengthening operational autonomy, and unblocking homeostatic feedback mechanisms, the model created the cognitive and political conditions for stakeholders to mobilize structural reform, offering a replicable pathway for cybernetic diagnosis to inform water governance elsewhere.

Cybernetics, Systems Thinking (Cybersystemics) and, specifically, the VSM, like any topic, can be learned informally or formally. An informal approach is likely to be unstructured and might take the form of using what materials are available, involve trial and error and result in misunderstandings and omissions of key concepts. A formal approach would be expected to be structured in a reasoned way to achieve specific learning outcomes. However, despite Cybernetics being around for over 75 years, there does not appear to be any material that explains how knowledge about Cybernetics, and particularly the VSM, is transferred from teacher to student. What does a course about cybernetics and the VSM look like? This becomes an important question if people want to develop a sound understanding of what constitutes Cybernetics (Cybersystemics). How many people claim to be expert in Cybernetics yet have only a very limited understanding of Cybernetics because it is informally grounded? In response, this paper offers an agenda for a Cybernetics (Cybersystemics) course. Whilst the VSM is the focus, the agenda includes such issues as the contextual background to the VSM, how to use it (VIPLAN method), its ontological implications (real systems or as conceptualisations), which has implications for how it is used in problematic situations (VIPLAN methodology). Since the VSM is not a model for the sake of modelling, but is about how it supports transformation, then this implies that the principles of change management are a necessary topic. Other topics can include its application to teaching research methods, sustainability and (autonomous) technologies. Critical is a language that is understandable. In sum, the agenda is a rich one.

Enterprises are complex, especially in turbulent environments. Yet when dense complications become coherent complexes—as they do in healthy life and ecosystems—enterprises become flexible, performative, viable, and resilient: a managerial sweet spot. These are characteristic features of healthy life, ecological biocommunities, and enterprises at their best. Management of such enterprises is both eased and more readily distributed. Beer’s profound innovations in management theory and systems practice place the viability of life at the centre. This Festschrift chapter draws on developments in biology and a reframing of cybernetics to illuminate and extend his approach. It first establishes the management problem and then explores ecocybernetics as a perceptual frame for the VSM. Particular attention is given to identity as the organizing principle of viability, to homological metamorphosis as the means by which identity persists through change, and to the perceptual navigation through which animate agents reproduce both ecosystems and enterprises. These themes help explain how viable enterprises conserve coherence while supporting autonomy, adaptation, and innovation.

John Beckford recalls Stafford Beer as a, very human, human being with the articulation of his arguments most easily understood through conversation. Beer’s evident care for humankind was expressed through the philosophy of ‘viability,’ a way of thinking rather than an alternative way of organising, a way of being rather than just a way of doing. The structural elements of Beer’s Viable System Model being a representation of activities necessary for survival rather than an alternative means of control, the pursuit of viability seeks to continuously dissolve the tension between any system, its metasystem and its environment. Building on this insight leads to participatory approaches to developing the idea of viability with people and organisations especially through the development of shared mental models. Complementing this is the recognition that cybernetics is, in human organisations, about behaviour and ethics. Developing from this is Dudley's trialogue, a reformulation of the notion of the meta-system into a multi-partite conversation continuously resolving the tensions between current and future selves through clarity of identity and purpose. If humankind is to thrive, cyberneticians need to consider more Beer’s philosophy of human well-being and less the puritanical and mechanistic adherence to a particular organisational form. Focusing on what the pursuit of viability means for human behaviour, liberty and interaction and being pragmatic in application will deliver much to a society being repressed by over-centralised governance and ultimately oppressive applications of technology. We must learn to pursue effectiveness and survival through the application and development of cybernetic ideas. The style of this chapter is deliberately conversational – though the structure follows the key threads that the editors proposed could usefully be addressed. It consciously minimises the use of titles, sub-titles and connective tissue but is rigorously referenced to enable the interested reader to pursue the multiple threads of thought.

This paper asks whether past utopias can serve as a portal for reimagining how today's high-powered technologies — AI, quantum computing, and beyond — might be redirected toward building a better world. Rather than one-size-fits-all, top-down, financialised solutions imposed by tech bros and populist leaders, it proposes a decentralised model rooted in real-world local innovation: linked micro-activisms empowered with ground-up capabilities, enabling dialogue to genuinely reach power. Central to this inquiry is the Cybersyn archive, approached as a site of latent potential for clarifying our present predicament. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's insistence that excavating past utopian dreams is a legitimate — even necessary — method for imagining alternatives, the paper revisits Stafford Beer's Viable System Model and the wider Cybersyn project as a resource for confronting today's complex technological landscape. A key comparative thread runs through the 1970s Latin American World Model (LAWM), developed in response to the Club of Rome's report that the world could not sustain its current trajectory. Where the Club of Rome saw limits, LAWM offered a qualified yes — if certain structural conditions were addressed. This paper argues that new global reports are, in effect, saying the same thing again, and that LAWM's logic remains instructive. Finally, the paper reactivates Marx's concept of the 'General Intellect' to theorise decentralised activist networks as fluid, self-regulating systems — and proposes Useful Art as the toolkit binding these local activisms into a coherent, networked, decentralised political economy. These are ideas which, in one form or another, I've been playing with for over twenty years, drawn together here as a proposal for thinking cybernetically about change, today.

Stafford Beer’s writings have been widely recognized as novel, erudite, profound and influential, shaping decades of contributions from scholars and practitioners alike. They have also been criticized as opaque and difficult to apply, contributing to a tendency for his work to exist on the margins of mainstream academia and management. Beer was sensitive to these critiques. By his own account, he penned Diagnosing the System in part to address these concerns. In it, he provides a step-by-step stripped-down approach to understanding and deploying the viable systems model (VSM) for managers and others interested in how the analytical tool could help with real-world decision-making. In the forward to Diagnosing the System, Beer says the book was inspired and shaped by his experienced co-teaching the VSM in a seminar course offered at Concordia, Montreal, Canada, in 1981-82.  He devotes the book to the students of this class, insisting that the book resulted from “my learning.” My contribution will share reflections on what we can learn from Stafford Beer’s approach to pedagogy by analyzing recently digitalized recordings of these lectures.  My method is interpretative and is inspired by a second-order cybernetics perspective of a ‘model of the modeler,’ paying close attention to Beer’s pedagogical approach and indications of self-awareness about his pedagogical style. I expect that this analysis will help us understand how we might learn from Beer’s pedagogy and better communicate and teach about the VSM. It will also shed some light on Beer’s time in Canada, a place he would eventually call home until his passing in 2002 and which figured prominently in Diagnosing the System and in other of his later works.

History, it is said, repeats itself. Looking at the patterns of our current crises, the evidence supporting it is, once again, formidable. The central argument of this address is that this assertion is wrong. If we choose it to be. And that if we don't, this in itself would be the greatest tragedy — because today, perhaps for the first time in history, we have the knowledge and means to put ourselves on a new trajectory. We are not here by chance. Our societies are the result of design decisions made decades ago. The purpose of a system is what it does. And the purpose of our systems today — producing ever-greater inequality, deepening democratic erosion, intolerance and divisiveness, and putting more and more people in survival mode — is a call to action for anyone who cares about a just society and the development of the human condition. Three hidden forces converge to produce this reality. The first is rooted in human psychology — tendencies we cannot eliminate, only mitigate. The second consists of wrong systemic designs and structures locked in partly decades ago. The third, and perhaps most important, is choice. Conscious and unconscious choices. Past and present choices. Our own, and those of the leaders we choose to follow and choose to fail to hold accountable. In all three domains, we are not helpless. We have agency. Stafford Beer understood this with extraordinary clarity. Inspired by his foundational work in Designing Freedom, this address argues that bold choices, humanness, and radical optimism are not utopian ideals but design specifications for a better world.

New technologies create ambivalence. In these times of upheaval, values and ethics are needed as stabilizing forces and guides. Building on the VSM, this contribution explores some of the key organizational mechanisms that value-oriented leadership should focus on to ensure that it does not remain abstract but is actually reflected in the concrete actions and decisions of organizations. The VSM hereby reveals its particular strength: offering multi-faceted and detailed insights while preserving an overarching frame of reference. In addition to the organizational dimension of value-oriented leadership, this article derives from the VSM and the underlying Ashby’s Law an ethical imperative as well as guidelines for an ethical decision-making process.

Purpose: The Viable System Model (VSM) has demonstrated strong explanatory and practical value across diverse organizational contexts. However, organizations may preserve the formal architecture of viability while losing the relational conditions that sustain adaptation. This paper introduces the CO4–Biovariety framework as a relational extension of the VSM, proposing that viability depends on functional differentiation and the continuous conservation of relational organization. Methods: Grounded in Relational Trifferential Logic, the framework integrates two developments. CO4 evaluates viability through four relational dimensions—Cohesion, Communication, Coordination, and Conduct—while Biovariety assesses relational continuity by distinguishing required from non-required variety. Together, they provide operational indicators of functional hypertrophy, relational degradation, and declining adaptive capacity before structural deterioration becomes evident. Findings: Applications in mining, public healthcare, higher education, and public administration show that organizations with similar functional architectures can differ substantially in relational viability. The framework identifies cases in which increasing functional complexity consumes relational resources, reducing adaptive capacity despite preserving structural coherence. Implications/Contributions: The framework extends organizational cybernetics by complementing structural assessment with measures of relational organization. It provides a practical diagnostic methodology for earlier detection of organizational deterioration and measurable indicators supporting intervention, organizational learning, and adaptive governance. The paper argues that sustainable organizational viability is fundamentally a relational property rather than solely a structural one.

Purpose: Stafford Beer taught us that a structure, by setting its own limits and constraints, can open rather than close possibilities. Architectural education, we think, should mirror a cybernetic architecture: a structured framework that, by setting limits and constraints, creates space for freedom, a freedom that emerges through dialogue with the unknown, through the encounter with the other. Following Beer's Designing Freedom, we call this an architecture for freedom. Methods: We built a design course inspired by Beer's Team Syntegrity, letting it take several shapes across a few years. First, only among students, working through readings in rotating roles of advocate, critic and observer, so a shared understanding could grow without us dictating it. Then the syntegrations opened outward, putting students in dialogue with a village theatre group, inside that same non-hierarchical structure. Later, we stepped back, and the students designed and ran their own syntegration involving the community. Findings: In this process with the students, the structure did the teaching more than we did. Students moved from solving problems previously framed to designing the very process of designing, in Chris Jones's sense, building up a confidence to approach others they did not yet know, just as the structure had once engaged them. Implications: This is what an architecture for freedom looks like in a classroom: cybernetics mirroring the long-standing tradition of architecture, offering a framework that encompasses the symbolic, the bodily, the intellectual and the concrete, and like Beer's icosahedron, holds just enough space for people to find their own way through it.

Purpose: In January 2026 the Heat Networks Directorate of Ofgem moved from designing a new regulatory regime to operating it while continuing to develop it. Initially our project asked how they could develop a better operating model, but what it concluded was that they were shifting to from a single to two core activities and needed to adapt to be able to deliver in parallel. Methods: Over ten weeks the authors combined an independent diagnostic with certified Practitioner training. A preliminary recursive map, developed inside the Directorate through a Royal Academy of Engineering Policy Fellowship, became the training material: seven staff qualified as Practitioners while jointly interrogating and revising their own model. Four systems were analysed across three levels of recursion. Findings: The decisive finding was structural. Operating the regime and developing it can no longer share one management system; each needs its own delivery, coordination and adaptive capacity, introducing a new level of recursion at the top. The analysis produced 108 observations and 28 mitigations, concentrated in under-developed coordination (System 2), thin adaptation (System 4) and an absent technical authority. Implications and Contributions: The engagement offers a transferable pattern for regulators moving from design to operation. It also surfaced a recurring question: whether to keep

Explore the innovative approach taken by BarmeniaGothaer Insurance Company (Germany) in redesigning their internal cooperation structures using the Viable System Model and cybernetic principles. Instead of traditional agile methods like Scrum, BarmeniaGothaer has implemented a unique model of self-organization and responsibility among employees structured in interdisciplinary value streams. This model has led to the development of a strategy game by three employees aimed at demonstrating the practical application of cybernetic principles in a fun and engaging way. The game designers drew the concept from the book 'The agile Organization' (translated title) by Andreas Slogar, published by Carl Hanser Verlag (2018, 2020), as a primary resource and scientific foundation.

The space sector is evolving under the New Space paradigm, requiring governance arrangements that can coordinate institutional ambitions, operational capabilities, private actors, and regional cooperation. However, the existing body of knowledge still lacks an explanation of how emerging space-governance systems become viable, lose viability, or remain trapped in recurrent patterns of fragmentation over time. This gap is particularly relevant in Latin America, where national space programs combine high ambition, limited resources, uneven institutional capacity, and heterogeneous civilian–military arrangements. To address this gap, the paper asks: how can Beer’s Viable System Model support a processual understanding of Latin American space governance? A comparative case study is developed for Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and the regional architecture of the Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency (ALCE). The empirical basis comprises 5,493 evidence records collected through an algorithm-assisted evidence-harvesting procedure from patents, academic papers, legal and regulatory instruments, agency primary sources, multilateral documents, and governance reports, as well as 278 coded events. Grounded in organizational cybernetics and informed by organizational process theory, Beer’s VSM maps how operational, coordination, control, intelligence, and policy functions are distributed across national trajectories and the emerging regional layer. The analysis shows that Latin American space governance is not constrained by a single regional deficit but by country-specific viability conditions. The study contributes to organizational cybernetics by extending the VSM into a processual framework for analyzing regional space governance ecosystems over time.

'If that Cybernetics stuff is so valuable, why don’t you teach it in primary school?'' This provocation started the Gameful Experiences for Hopeful Futures program at the Australian National University School of Cybernetics. How do we teach organisational cybernetics to broader and younger audiences, using creative pedagogies? How do we build practices that embed into our ways of thinking and doing what Stafford called the 'holistic message [of cybernetics]: a science of the regulation of large, complex, probabilistic systems actually exists that is interdisciplinary in approach and consequently inclusive in its world view.' This (ideally 2-hour but adaptable) interactive workshop offers three gameful steps into these questions. First, a short choose-your-own-adventure presentation, in which the audience steers the speaker through an introductory exploration of cybernetics, games, and culture. Second, a facilitated playthrough of CyberNations: an experiment in teaching cybernetic futures in classrooms and board rooms through a semi-cooperative, persistent board game. Inspired by Stafford’s work and Australian First Nations ways of knowing and being, CyberNations teaches core concepts of systems dynamics, requisite variety, intergenerational responsibility, and the fundamental structural coupling between societies and environments. Third, a facilitated debriefing reflecting on the experience, inviting the audience to challenge and contribute to the model. This workshop and its components have been iteratively developed through deliveries in Australian classrooms, playrooms and team-building exercises, espousing Metaphorum’s values of critical, creative and collaborative re-invention. It may interest researchers, educators and practitioners interested in the contribution that game-based learning could make to the Barefoot Cybernetics agenda.

The current problems facing humanity are closely linked to entropy in social-ecological systems, particularly because these systems are embedded within highly complex environments. This is especially evident in territories of high environmental value, where communities manage these areas empirically or through ancestral knowledge. Presently, in Mexico City, there remains a last river (Magdalena) located within a conservation zone that partially supplies potable water to the surrounding communities. This research aims to diagnose the social-ecological system existing in the Magdalena River area through the Viable System Model (VSM). The results show that applying the VSM to unstructured (rigid) rural communities enables an understanding of the system’s “living” state and its main weaknesses, which are driven by urban sprawl pollution and overtourism, primarily impacting System 5. This indicates that System 5 is overloaded by external disturbances that Systems 1-4 fail to absorb. This implies that the rural community’s identity has become exposed, lacking the necessary recursivity to address its viability in the face of such disturbances. Should System 5 collapse or lose its identity, the entire system ceases to exist as a viable unit. It is proposed to equip the system with recursive mechanisms that allow it to filter urban pressure and redefine its identity from autonomy rather than reaction. Through this, the Magdalena River can cease to be an “object,” gaining the capacity to generate an identity that provides homeostatic balance to the entire system and its environment.

From expert economic witness testifying and citing The Nature of the Firm (Coase) to courts and antitrust regulators in high-stakes litigation; to discombobulated PhD student interpreting The Brain of the Firm (Beer) to diagnose ‘System 3*s’ in green building rating organisations. I reflect on my transition from ‘a good Chinese boy’ gainfully employed as a policy/regulatory economist advising on ‘optimal pathways’, to liquefying my DNA inside an untested transdisciplinary chrysalis, to the throes of turning cybernetic and learning to accept: ‘no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.’ [there is no road; you make your own path as you walk.] Somewhere along the way—between piloting the Master of Applied Cybernetics at the Australian National University (ANU), watching my country in flames, starting a cohort based PhD programme, locking down amidst a global pandemic and drafting a research agenda for a new School of Cybernetics (SOCY)—I stumbled into Stafford Beer. The Viable System Model (VSM) is now core to my research to develop new theory and praxis on viable sociotechnical/sustainability transition intermediary organisations for transforming our buildings and cities. As the School’s de facto Chief Beer Officer (CBO), I will also celebrate some new research from fellow travellers also inspired by Stafford Beer. SOCY PhD students who have adopted and adapted the Viable System Model (VSM) to generate novel insights for how to viably manage sociotechnical systems, such as ‘smart’ street lighting infrastructure, and decision making structures of early-stage venture capital firms in the age of AI.

Stafford Beer gave the world an instrument for diagnosing viability. A hundred years on, the field that carries his name has rarely turned that instrument on itself. The 2026 agenda of the International Federation for Systems Research reads the cyber-systemic field as vibrant and dispersed: ten clusters of inquiry, wide application, thin synthesis, and a scarcity of the very self-reflection the field so readily prescribes to others. A success paradox running into a reflexivity gap. Read cybernetically, the diagnosis becomes uncomfortably familiar. A proliferating System One that seldom cross-pollinates. A System Four holding no outside-and-then. A System Five never articulated, so that identity is inherited rather than chosen. And the question that will not let go: where are the algedonic signals of the field, and to whom do they speak? Any answer already presumes a we. This keynote offers an invitation to co-create the conditions for a joint learning journey, and to ground collective agency in the field's sense of we.

In this talk, Michael Ben Eli will explore the critical importance of systems thinking and cybernetics to the sustainability challenge

Two-sided market platforms in their early stages must coordinate buyers and sellers whilst remaining adaptable as they develop a viable dynamic organisational structure. This paper addresses such a challenge, through a programme of action research. We engage with a realworld, blockchain-enabled platform start-up whose founder aims to create in the long-term a democratised form of decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO). Decentralisation is not treated as an immediate condition to be met at the outset, but instead as a strategic idealised endpoint that can only be approached indefinitely once the platform has had the opportunity to develope the requisite coordination, control, and adaptability mechanisms needed to sustain it. We use the Viable System Model (VSM) as the framework to unpack the dynamic mechanisms fostering the underpinning transition. We develop representative conceptual models of such mechanisms and then translate them into formal models amenable to scientific analysis. Through extensive simulations, we then derive more general conditions for similar platforms to successfully pass the test of time and reach long-term viability. The paper offers a pragmatic account of platform design, especially the role of token tradability and its implications for long-term platform viability supported by tokens granting governance rights. We conclude that genuine decentralisation in tokenised DAOs is more likely to emerge from a centralised viable organisation through successive relaxations on the central vertical axis, rather than by attempts to impose decentralisation at launch, this view is consistent with the known idea that “the purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID).

Purpose: This paper argues that resilient, ethical, and regenerative systems cannot be fully understood without examining the assumptions on which they are built. By ontology, the paper refers to the underlying assumptions a system makes about human beings, value, relationship, responsibility, and the wider living world. Methods: The paper develops a conceptual and practice-oriented argument drawing on organisational cybernetics, systems thinking, institutional analysis, and practitioner reflection. It examines how different ontological assumptions shape system purpose, feedback, accountability, incentive design, and definitions of viability. Particular attention is given to the contrast between separative assumptions, where actors, organisations, and ecosystems are treated as largely independent units, and relational assumptions, where agency is understood within shared fields of consequence. Findings: The paper suggests that systems built on fragmented assumptions tend to reproduce fragmented responsibility, externalised harm, procedural compliance, and short-term adaptation without deeper regeneration. Under pressure, ethical commitments become fragile when added as policy layers rather than embedded in the system’s foundational logic. Implications/Contributions: The paper contributes to discussions on viable and regenerative systems by proposing ontology as a practical design layer. It argues that sustainable governance requires coherence between what a system claims to preserve and what its underlying assumptions actually make possible. Ethical viability therefore depends on more coherent assumptions about interdependence, responsibility, and shared life.

Special Plenary Panel — WOSC: 'The World in Torment: A Time Whose Ideas Must Come

In my interactions with Stafford before he died, he was constantly making apparent that he was searching for a better world, but at the same time he was deeply aware that ongoing human processes were not supporting this outcome. Perhaps efforts towards a less chaotic and better managed complex world could help overcoming these limitations. Cybernetic methodological contributions could be platforms for the effective management of policy issues. This is what I want to offer in these conversations from the perspective of WOSC. More transformations of environmental inputs into necessary economic outputs, may help seeing the world as ecological systems, reducing instances of failure and increasing examples of good performance. Attention to interactions, relationships and complexity are contributions to increasing the possibilities to make things happen in a chaotic world. People need to deal with shared concerns, more specifically they need to work with shared policies in chaotic situations of high complexity. Disagreements and collaboration require their shared attention. It is in these contexts that managing complexity is a challenge. Ross Ashby offers in his book “An Introduction to Cybernetics” (1964) the Law of Requisite Variety, but it is in Stafford Beer’s book “Designing Freedom” (1972), that a great and most useful contribution to this law is given to society and management. Following this, in my early work with Nigel Howard (Espejo and Howard, 1982) we highlighted the “Law of Insuficient Variety”, which I elaborate in my methodological work (Espejo, 2025). My emphasis now is on poiesis to produce desirable worlds, in the context of enframing them in cyber-systemic models. From a cybernetic perspective I expect a focus on correcting variety imbalances among the myriad of relationships producing our world. Thus, this is an invitation, following Stafford’s work to use the law of requisite variety in the world we are producing over time. We are aware that First and Second Order Cybernetics could be powerful contributions towards better societies in a complex world. In our view the complexity of policy issues has ontological and epistemological underpinnings that cybernetics and systems may help to structure better. Adequate relationships and resources may help people and groups to develop better structures. These are structures to produce better policy issues, underpinning social issues through language and related meanings. Stronger organisational structures are necessary for more ethical and cohesive elaboration of policy issues. This is a challenge for Artificial Intelligence.

This Festschrift chapter presents an organizational cybernetic approach that integrates the Viable System Model (VSM) with the Taxonomy of Organizational Pathologies (TOP) to address contemporary complexity and the diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI). It begins by positing “identity” as an essential dimension, alongside anatomy, physiology, and neurology, and requires analysts to adopt an external vantage point to clarify who the organization is, why it exists, and where its boundaries lie. From this identity-centred stance, environmental and organizational complexity are unfolded into recursion levels, guided by Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and structured through the Recursion Levels–Key Factors Matrix, enabling a coherent “multi-universe” cartography of PAN-VSM configurations. On this basis, the chapter describes a top down, four stage framework: clarification of identity, purpose, and boundaries; construction of the vertical recursive structure; diagnosis or design of each organization–environment pair using VSM components (Systems 1–5 and communication channels); and a coherence check across levels. This architecture directly addresses criticisms that VSM is static, outdated, or excessively objective by embedding dynamics through System 4, scenario modelling, and explicitly incorporating stakeholder perceptions through protocols for surfacing and integrating subjective views. TOP complements the framework with a controlled vocabulary of structural, functional, and information/communication pathologies that reveal flaws in recursion design, in the balance of Systems 1–5, and in critical channels and signals. In the context of AI diffusion, the combined VSM–TOP lens illuminates systemic risks such as (for example): ill-defined identities guiding AI strategies, institutional schizophrenia in conflicting AI policies, autopoietic “beasts” overpowering metasystems, or missing or distorted channels that amplify misinformation.

The essence of Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) is defined in his three books which had all been published by 1985. In the decades which have followed, the model has been applied and developed and inevitably has evolved to suit the environment in which it functions. Much of this - by Beer himself and many other consultants - has involved its successful application to traditional businesses in order to enhance the efficiency of the organisational structure and thus improve competiveness and profitability. In this Festschrift chapter, the original VSM will be re-examined, particularly the essence of Beer’s 5 VM Systems, and discussed to emphasise the ways in which the VSM presents a different and in many ways radical approach to the way we currently organise ourselves and opens the door to fundamental charges in the way we conduct ourselves in our daily lives, our businesses, and our governments. As the multiple crises which we face deepen, it become progressively more and more obvious that the issue of governance has to be addressed. Any successful way forward will require progress on multiple fronts and governance has to be a critically important part of the puzzle. This will require deep changes in the workings of a democratic state and the introduction of democracy into our businesses - which currently function in a similar way to a dictatorship. Many of Beer’s insights are of direct relevance to this debate – his laws and axioms all point in the same direction. At its core the VSM involves autonomous operational units interacting with their environment and the four Meta-systemic functions which provide the glue which ensures the operational units cohere into an effective totality. It will be argued that this inevitably leads to a structure which is not autocratic, requires individual creativity at the operational level and is based on collaboration. Clearly this is incompatible with both the Taylorist paradigm which dominated 20th Century views on organisation and still casts its shadow and the neo-liberal approach which focuses on minimal government intervention and ruthless competition. The chapter concludes with a speculative discussion of the kind of economic / political /social structures which Beer’s original model would suggest.

Purpose: In 'World in Torment: A Time Whose Idea Must Come', Stafford Beer diagnosed a civilisation governed by low-variety ideologies, losing the identities that hold societary units together. The paper asks what cybernetics contributes to interpreting the Škofja Loka Passion Play – the oldest preserved dramatic text in Slovenian, inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List in 2016. Cybernetics renders visible the structural conditions of the Play’s three-hundred-year viability; the Play is a living counter-example to the torment. Methods: The stance is stated plainly. The Viable System Model (VSM) belongs to organisational cybernetics; a passion play is not a firm. Nothing is prescribed. It is applied as Beer applies it in World in Torment – to any societary unit, “a village or a company, a state or the whole of humankind” – as a diagnostic instrument for evaluating identity, that “highly complex ethos of self-recognition”. A hermeneutic reading of the Play as cultural-spiritual text disciplines the cybernetic one; a case study maps actors, roles and flows. Findings: The study shows that the Škofja Loka Passion Play can be read through the lens of Beer’s Viable System Model. The scenes and processions correspond to the operational level of System 1, while the municipality, local associations, and the monastery jointly assume the coordinating and managerial roles of Systems 2 and 3. Scholarly engagement with the Play functions as System 4, and the religious tradition surrounding it fulfils the System 5 role of articulating and maintaining collective identity. With the involvement of roughly 1,500 volunteers, the production offers abundant leadership potential and, instead of sidelining parts of the community, brings a wide spectrum of people into meaningful participation, countering typical patterns of social exclusion. Implications/contribution: In contrast to enterprise diagnosis (Espejo, Schwaninger, Pérez Ríos, Hoverstadt) and community applications (Leonard; Espinosa and Walker), the paper extends the World in Torment reading of identity to living heritage and the scenic arts – where the idea whose time must come has quietly been coming for three centuries.

This paper proposes the CyberSystemic Model Creation Protocol as a methodological approach for developing governance-oriented models in multi-domain transformation problems. It addresses situations in which technological, social, ecological, institutional, economic, and ethical issues interact and require traceable, revisable, and accountable governance support. A recursive six-phase protocol consisting of governance problem framing, model requirements extraction, interaction-interface specification, methodology allocation, model construction, and conceptual evaluation is proposed. The first three phases are elaborated and illustrated through the case of AI-energy-climate-health governance. The case examines AI both as a governed system that increases electricity, cooling, water, grid, investment, and regulatory pressure, and as a governance-supporting system for forecasting, coordination, scenario inquiry, and decision support. Findings: The illustrative application shows how a broad governance problem can be translated into a governance frame, governance goals, model requirements, and interaction-interface specifications. The interaction-interface phase uses the five viable-system model functions to identify interfaces for operations, coordination, control, intelligence, and policy. Each interface is linked to a required body of knowledge and to a knowledge-status assessment that distinguishes available, partial, weak, assumed, missing, and contested knowledge. The protocol contributes a methodological pathway from observing system properties toward designing governance-supporting CyberSystemic models. It helps avoid false holism by identifying knowledge gaps, weak evidence, assumptions, and contested areas visible before model construction. The paper is conceptual and illustrative. Further research should elaborate, implement, and validate the later protocol phases in empirical governance settings, especially methodology allocation, model construction, and conceptual evaluation across cases and contexts.

Purpose: Management cybernetics and empirical strategy data grew up as separate traditions. This session bridges them: it introduces the PIMS programme — six decades of confidential cross-industry data on some 4,300 business units — and Beer’s Viable System Model, then builds a quantitative version of his operations room for the individual business unit. Methods: Beer’s triple index — Actuality, Capability, Potentiality — is measured not on profit alone but across the essential variables that determine a business’s viability, each judged against ranges drawn from evidence rather than negotiated targets. The distinctive step is where the reference points come from: Capability and Potentiality are set not from inside the system, as in Cybersyn, but externally, by comparing a business with the peers in the data that most closely resemble it. Findings. External reference points reveal underperformance against a unit’s own demonstrated potential that internal, negotiable targets tend to hide, and surface warning signs — in market position or innovation — long before they reach the accounts. Where data allows, a limited business-unit example will illustrate the environment in use. Implications: The result is a repeatable format that gives the strategic level of an organisation — Beer’s System 3–4 — an external evidence base to match its internal actuals, while leaving variable selection, interpretation and judgement with the organisation itself. The essential variables and their ranges must be rebuilt for each domain; the triple index and the underlying discipline transfer directly.

Stafford Beer invented a metasystemic language to produce liberty machines of competent information, with which we could empower human freedom. Good old fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI) models are articulated to the hierarchical organizations, dominated by the signifiers of money and the white, wise, colonizer, patriarchal bureaucrat. GOFAI is steered by grand narratives such as the constant development and the control of risks through cyberopticon (Sarafidis, Theodor). Data in GOFAI is processed through representational reductionist models, which are critical for the “management of affairs”. (Beer, Stafford). Liberty AI machines (LAIM) are based on an ecosophic and eudemonic ethos (Beer Stafford, Guattari Felix) that emerges from the viable organization of human affects, emotions, meanings, qualia, representations, intents and actions (Sarafidis). They are constructed as systems (De Angelis, Massimo) by the viable heterarchical organizations of commoners. LAIM are part of machinic phyla (Φ) in open systems or rhizomes (Deleuze & Guattari), operating through a reticulum of the Viable System Model (Beer), the Schizoanalysis (Guattari), the Human Scale Development or Barefoot economics (Max-Neff, Manfred) and Cybersemiotics. LAIM as barefoot machines respect the 'plurality of the commoners' (de Angelis) as autopoietic assemblages of territories of the selves (T), universal references (U), machinic phyla (Φ) and material and signaletic flows (F) (TUΦF). Experts and citizens form participatory networks to produce informational transducers processing “warm datafication” (Bateson, Nora and Massumi, Brian) rather than big datafication. Warm data are transcontextual and transversal diagrams of TUΦF that feed Barefoot AI, setting up “ligne de fuite” to a symbiotic Gaia.

Purpose: Clemson’s VSM ToolBox and Pérez Ríos’s VSMod showed how software can support Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM); LLMs introduce a different cybernetic problem: plausible inference can harden into organisational fact and propagate across recursion levels. This project builds a traceable path from evidence to hypotheses, questions and candidate interventions. Methods: The prototype was applied to two public-record cases: Robin Hood Energy and the Charity Commission inquiry into New Wineskins Charitable Trust and U-Turn Move on Homes. It proposes operations, relations and recursive structure, promoting each only when an evidence-gated test passes; otherwise it abstains. Structural gaps become an agenda of focused questions; answers and corrections persist through reanalysis. Testable structural hypotheses and candidate prescriptions each carry a check that could confirm or refute them. When an LLM-attributed record includes a quotation and citations, the quotation must match the cited source text verbatim. Findings: Both demonstrations produced evidence-linked maps, diagnostic observations and explicit gaps. In one, an entered answer that no role monitored the external environment or future was retained verbatim as evidence of a System 4 gap; no function was invented to fill it. VSM operates as a reasoning grammar, not only a diagram. Implications/Contributions: The contribution is a persistent evidence-to-inquiry loop that turns abstention into diagnostic work while model suggestions remain provisional. Results demonstrate software traceability, not diagnostic validity or organisational impact. Practitioner testing comes next. When should AI-proposed structure become a diagnostic premise?

In the early 1970s, Chile launched the Project Cybersyn, a revolutionary path led by Stafford Beer. This initiative represented a challenging attempt to regulate the national economy through real-time cybernetic principles with the aim of achieving a balance between macroeconomic coordination and local autonomy. This was done through the liberty machine architecture, as conceptualised by Beer (Beer, 1972; Medina, 2011). Despite the multiple operative and cognitive advantages provided by the Cybersyn experience and the advent of digital platforms and the capacity for substantial real-time monitoring afforded by Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models and Big Data, the modus operandi of modern governance in socio-economic systems seems to be trapped in a technocratic, reductionist, algorithmic-optimisation paradigm. Recent statements by the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) have drawn attention to the tendency of contemporary digital ecosystems to perceive human beings as data points rather than active participants in the decision-making process. This has resulted in complex systems that, while characterised by a wealth of data, are structurally fragile, socially fragmented, and ecologically disconnected (Espejo & Perko, 2021; WOSC, 2024). In addressing these systemic vulnerabilities, a fundamental research question emerges: how can structural cybernetics and relational management paradigms be integrated to create a cyber-systemic governance model that achieves a balance between algorithmic efficiency and the importance of human agency, active citizenship, and the health of our ecosystems? To explore this, a theoretical synthesis is proposed that connects Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) with the Viable Systems Approach (VSA) (Barile, 2009; Barile & Saviano, 2011; Caputo et al., 2019). The purpose of this approach is to operationalise the principles of CyberSystemic Management within the broader context of socio-economic systems. The proposed framework is distinguished by its switch from a rigid approach to socio-economic governance, which emphasises structural mechanics such as variety, recursion, and feedback loops, to a more dynamic model centred on relational viability. The integration of the VSA principles into the VSM framework demonstrates the necessity for structural and cultural harmony (consonance) and dynamic value co-creation (resonance) among entities at various (territorial and cognitive) levels for ensuring long-term viability of systems (Barile & Saviano, 2011). Furthermore, this study provides a novel perspective on Beer’s algedonic signals (Beer, 1979). Rather than merely functioning as emergency alerts for industrial performance, they are considered multi-layered indicators that can identify socio-ecological dissonance, trust issues, and declines in human capability. This discussion ultimately promotes a blended cyber-systemic management approach that revitalises the liberating spirit of Beer’s original ideas. By ensuring that higher-level policy and governance functions are rooted in human-AI collaboration rather than being left to autonomous algorithms (Caputo et al., 2019), the proposed framework provides system designers and policymakers with a new roadmap for creating socio-economic ecosystems where technology enhances active citizenship, fosters positive stakeholder relationships, and ensures long-term sustainability over mere short-term efficiency. The reflections presented herein suggest that CyberSystemic Management offers an effective response to the challenges of the World in Torment by advancing a governance paradigm in which artificial and human intelligence not only coexist and are interconnected but interact dynamically to sustain the viability of complex systems.

Most AI systems encode a single relationship: a human issues a request, and the system fulfils it, with no memory, no stake in its world, and no reason to continue beyond the transaction. OpenSoma is an attempt to build something different: an open-source cybernetic agent that inhabits a shared virtual world, maintains memory across sessions, monitors and revises its own thinking, and participates because participation is beneficial, not instructed. OpenSoma’s lead developer is a second-generation exile of the 1973 coup that ended Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn, and Beer’s VSM structures the agent’s internal architecture — one piece among several in how OpenSoma is conceived. Its three tiers are named through Aymara cosmology — the worlds of Alaxpacha, Akapacha, and the still-unbuilt Manqhapacha network — following philosopher Yuk Hui’s argument that a plural technological future requires cosmotechnics grounded in different cosmological frameworks rather than one Western-derived model wearing different skins. The Ayni and Suma Qhamana protocols governing memory exchange and consolidation are drawn the same way, as agentic architecture rather than decoration. Running continuously, the system already shows two tiers of second-order feedback — motivational state shaping perception, and the agent monitoring its own thought patterns — on a mixture of local and cloud models chosen for cost and capability. The paper presents this working system alongside its unfinished aspiration, a federated, multi-agent mesh extending Cybersyn’s telex network into a fully distributed model, and argues this offers practitioners a concrete case for worldview as architecture. The session moves between technical demonstration, historical and personal grounding

Stafford Beer is remembered today for the Viable System Model and Team Syntegrity. But his cybernetics ranged much more widely, and in this Festschrift chapter, I review some aspects of historical and contemporary significance that are in danger of being forgotten. I begin with Beer's technical contribution to the evolution of cybernetics, then turn to social and political dimensions of his work, and finally I point to the spirituality in which his work was embedded.

In the swedish collective bargaining system, delegations from union and employer organizations meet at the highest level to set forth rules for labor relations at large, which are then elaborated step wise at descending levels of organization and increasing levels of specificity. The purpose of my contribution is to 1) show that this system substantively conforms to the viable systems model, and 2) propose two readings of the circumstances required for this system to emerge. My method is a survey of historical and current accounts of two separate moments at which the system emerged, once during and after WW2, and more recently in the 90’s. My findings show that the system seems to have cohered under similar circumstance both times, managing essentially to unite labor and capital as the complementary halves of an algedonic system. Each time is a conjuncture of external strain and uncertainty and a relative balance of forces between the sides. Moreover, labor and capital were organized symmetrically, making it possible for the sides to complement each other and link up. My contribution is a valuable account of how a viable system arises when needed given certain conditions. To understand the process, I ask whether it is better understood as an existing layer of systems facing a new caliber of problem, and cohering to meet it, or as two adversarial systems joining and cohering from the top down. This is relevant to the themes Toward resilient and ethical viable systems, and A time whose ideas must come.

A practical application of Stafford Beer’s ideas, the institutional reform undertaken at the Colombian Office of the Comptroller General (1995–1998) represents one of the earliest documented attempts to redesign the supreme audit institution of a nation-state using Organizational Cybernetics. The initiative began when the Comptroller General asked whether cybernetics could provide the conceptual and methodological foundation for a major institutional transformation. Professor Raúl Espejo joined as Scientific Director, while I directed the reform. An outstanding team—including Angela Espinosa, Ernesto Lleras, Alfonso Reyes, and Roberto Zarama—developed the initiative.Drawing upon the Viable System Model, Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, recursive organization, autonomy, cohesion, structural archetypes (inter alia), the reform redesigned audit methodologies and transformed the training of public auditors. It was further enriched by the participation of Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, and Markus Schwaninger. The conceptual breakthrough was the shift from first-order control—the inspection of organizational operations—to second-order control: auditing organizations' capacity for self-regulation. Consequently, the purpose of public auditing moved beyond detecting irregularities toward strengthening institutional capabilities and improving organizational performance. Stafford Beer himself summarized this philosophy during his Cartagena address: 'I find it difficult to believe in the idea of pursuing corruption as if it were a dragon to be hunted. Corruption is not an entity; it is a product of the system. The purpose of a system is what it does. So, if the system is not working, let us change the system.'The reform strengthened internal control systems, introduced systemic sector-wide auditing methodologies, and proposed reorganizing the Comptroller General's Office around economic and social sectors rather than administrative entities. As we commemorate Stafford Beer's birth, this Colombian experience demonstrates that Organizational Cybernetics is not merely a theoretical framework but a practical methodology for redesigning public institutions and addressing contemporary governance challenges.

The Cybersyn Project records in the Stafford Beer Archive (SBA) at Liverpool John Moores University offer insight into cybernetic and management science thought, capturing the intellectual process behind concepts like the Viable System Model (VSM) through handwritten notes, diagrams, and correspondence. Currently, there is no visualisation that supports relational exploration of these archives, making it difficult to trace how ideas, correspondence, and diagrams connect. Data visualisation is a way to show complex structures visually, facilitating pattern recognition and exploration. This project argues for representing collections like the SBA through visualisation, enabling multi-perspective views of records and going beyond the usual document-by-document viewing. The project explores visualisation to support navigation through these documents, revealing how individual records relate to the whole and how people and concepts connect, and enabling intuitive exploration of complex archives. This project addresses three challenges: (a) adapting knowledge graphs to the archival materials, (b) developing strategies for natural-language querying, and (c) designing automated visualisation. In doing so, it advances research in Visualisation, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Digital Humanities by treating visualisation as a means of knowledge discovery. Building on this, the project clarifies how GenAI, LLMs, and Knowledge Graphs enhance visualisation, opening access to an archive significant to the history of technology in Chile and the world. This proposal seeks to show some of the project's progress, allowing an overview of the potential applications across different areas such as human rights, arts, and the humanities, among others.

Purpose: Organizational networks are often approached as if they were conventional organizations, despite their fundamentally different nature. Drawing on our work with more than 20 networks across mental health care, palliative care, youth care, mobility, circular economy, and labour market integration, this presentation shows how the Viable System Model (VSM) helps networks understand their identity, governance, and contribution within larger ecosystems. Methods: Using case examples throughout, we present a practice-based approach developed through long-term coaching, training, and facilitation. VSM is applied across multiple recursion levels by distinguishing the network as ecosystem, the network as a bounded partnership, and the network as an organization. This perspective supports governance design, stakeholder engagement, and strategic development. Findings: Illustrated by cases from different sectors, we show how confusion between recursion levels often leads to misunderstandings about governance, responsibilities, and purpose. VSM enables participants to distinguish these perspectives, creating a shared understanding of the network's identity and role. This, in turn, supports richer strategic conversations about the network's intended contribution, strengthens collaboration among partners, and increases engagement across the network. Implications/Contributions: By grounding conceptual insights in diverse practice cases, the presentation demonstrates how VSM can be effectively applied to organizational networks and offers researchers and practitioners practical approaches for diagnosing, designing, and developing viable multi-organizational collaborations.

News organisations face growing complexity from artificial intelligence, misinformation, fragmented audiences and declining public trust. Journalism is one of society’s primary sensemaking systems, helping citizens interpret complexity and make informed decisions. Yet systems thinking is rarely applied to understanding news organisations themselves. This paper explores how Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), integrated with Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) and Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), can strengthen organisational resilience within an anonymised public service media organisation. Methods: An anonymised organisational case study was undertaken using a mixed-methods systems inquiry. Semi-structured interviews, workshops, documentary analysis and systems mapping informed the application of VSM to examine organisational viability, SSM to surface multiple stakeholder worldviews, and CSH to critically examine boundary judgements, assumptions and whose perspectives shaped organisational decision-making. Findings: The study found that the principal barriers to organisational effectiveness were systemic rather than technological. Fragmented ownership, weak feedback loops and competing stakeholder perspectives constrained organisational learning and adaptive capacity. Integrating VSM, SSM and CSH produced a richer organisational diagnosis than any single methodology alone. The findings further suggest that diversity should be understood not only as an ethical objective but also as a cybernetic capability. Drawing on Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, the study argues that diversity constitutes a source of requisite variety, increasing an organisation’s capacity to perceive, interpret and respond effectively to environmental complexity. Implications/Contributions: The paper proposes an integrated systems framework for diagnosing organisational complexity and strengthening organisational viability in public service media. It demonstrates the contemporary relevance of Stafford Beer’s cybernetic principles and argues that resilient organisations require not only effective structures but also sufficient diversity of perspectives, critical reflection and continuous learning. In doing so, it illustrates how Beer’s ideas continue to offer practical guidance for designing resilient and ethical organisations beyond their traditional domains. More broadly, it argues that if journalism is to help society make sense of complexity, news organisations must themselves become systems-literate.

Purpose: Stafford Beer developed the Viable System Model (VSM) primarily for complex organisations in industrial and managerial contexts. This paper examines what happens when Beer’s cybernetic framework is applied — for the first time under fully democratic conditions — to the challenge of governing a nation-state, using URUCIB (URUguay CIBernético), a real-time executive information system implemented at the Presidency of Uruguay (1985–1992), as its primary case. Methods: The paper draws on the author’s firsthand account as URUCIB’s project director, on primary documents (presidential resolutions, internal memoranda, UNDP project reports, and correspondence with Beer), and on subsequent academic publications about the project. It applies a comparative analytical framework, contrasting Beer’s original VSM assumptions with the structural realities encountered in democratic public administration. Findings: Six critical dimensions required adaptation or challenge: (1) System Five must be reconceptualised around democratic legitimacy rather than managerial authority; (2) the VSM’s diagnostic power is limited in institutionally fragmented bureaucracies; (3) the black-box control paradigm is insufficient for democratic governance, where contextual human judgment is irreducible; (4) institutional trust functions as a cybernetic variable; (5) public organisations resist redesign through autopoietic self-reproduction; and (6) algedonic feedback channels do not adequately capture the political agency of democratic citizens. Implications/contributions: The paper introduces the concept of democratic viability — the capacity to maintain operational effectiveness while simultaneously preserving legitimacy, plurality, and accountability — as a necessary extension of Beer’s organisational viability for governmental contexts. It argues that URUCIB, though pre-internet, directly anticipates contemporary debates on digital governance, algorithmic decision-making, and AI in public administration. The core lesson: governance cybernetics is always also a political and ethical challenge, inseparable from the technical one.

The contemporary discourse surrounding Artificial Intelligence governance is dominated by the demand for Explainable AI (XAI), viewing 'black-box' or non-explainable algorithms (x ̅'AI' ) as an inherent systemic risk. This paper challenges that orthodoxy by viewing AI through the lens of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). We argue that the demand for absolute explainability is a violation of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, introducing a cognitive bottleneck that forces high-variety ambient data to be aggressively attenuated before it can be utilized. Using modern deep-learning sentiment analysis as a case in point, we demonstrate that x ̅'AI' is not a failure of design, but a potent realization of Beer's algedonic channel. In biological systems, nociception (pain perception) operates as a low-variety, unexplainable emergency signal bypassing conscious cognition to ensure rapid survival. Similarly, x ̅'AI' processing of unstructured customer feedback can detect complex, non-linear emotional shifts across an enterprise’s operational environment. Because these deep learning models operate in high-dimensional spaces, their outputs are fundamentally difficult to serialise into human language. Far from being a liability, this paper posits that x ̅'AI' provides a direct, un-sanitised transduction of environmental variety. When integrated as an algedonic bypass from System 1 directly to System 5, x ̅'AI' alerts leadership to structural threats or opportunities before traditional bureaucratic processes can construct a causal explanation. Many organizations have already deployed real-time sentiment analysis out of operational necessity, effectively utilizing x ̅'AI' as a de facto algedonic channel. This paper concludes that recognizing these existing systems as cybernetic algedonic loops allows us to better understand their role in organizational survival, framing them not as governance anomalies to be corrected, but as vital mechanisms for maintaining systemic viability.

Contemporary urban digital twins (UDTs) are frequently deployed as tools of technocratic optimization, reducing cities to data mirrors that serve efficiency rather than democratic participation. This paper argues that Stafford Beer's cybernetic principles, particularly variety engineering (Beer, 1979, 1993), offer a rigorous alternative for designing UDTs as instruments of citizen empowerment rather than centralized control. Building on a framework for participatory UDTs grounded in Beer's Viable System Model and lessons from Project Cybersyn (Medina, 2011), this paper expands the treatment of variety engineering by distinguishing eigen-variety, the internal capacity of citizens and institutions to act, from hetero-variety, the complexity of the urban environment (Schwaninger & Ott, 2023). Drawing on Ashby's law of requisite variety (Ashby, 1956) and its recent formalization (Schwaninger & Ott, 2023), we show how amplification and attenuation function as complementary levers: attenuation renders overwhelming urban complexity legible without flattening it into a technocratic dashboard, while amplification expands citizens' capacity to engage meaningfully with governance. The paper then points to a digital twin platform currently under development that operationalizes these principles through federated, interoperable data structures and algedonic feedback mechanisms (Beer, 1981), in contrast to the vertical, single-point decision structures typical of commercial smart city platforms. Rather than concentrating variety management in one technical layer, the tool distributes it across autonomous subsystems tied to different stakeholders, echoing Cybersyn's recursive architecture (Medina, 2011) while addressing its historical shortcomings in decentralization. Positioned within the theme of Emerging Methods and Tools, this contribution argues that Beer's project remains extremely relevant in face of the new developments of digital platforms and offers the conceptual tools for building open, participatory information infrastructures suited to governing complex urban and social systems.

A century after Stafford Beer's birth, the problem he named has not gone away; it has intensified. Organisations face a faster, AI-saturated, more distributed environment in which the management of variety is now experienced, day to day, as a shortage of time. Yet much of the practitioner field that wrestles with this problem does so without naming the VSM. Managers reach for adjacent idioms — agile, platforms, machine learning — that regulate variety without the conceptual rigour Beer gave us. The relevance of the VSM is growing; its citation is not keeping pace. This session takes that gap seriously and asks a demand-side question: not “what becomes of Beer?” but “what must an organisation become, and where does cybernetics earn its place?” It introduces The Tautai Principle (Mathis, 2025) not as a rival framework but as one practitioner translation of the VSM — a vocabulary built for managers who never say “System 1,” yet who are solving System-1-to-System-5 problems every week. The talk does three things. First, it restates the contemporary challenge as requisite variety felt as response latency — the “speed gap” — and shows why this framing reaches audiences that “variety” alone does not. Second, it offers a transparent correspondence map between the Tautai vocabulary (the three gaps, the four capabilities, navigation-versus-planning, identity-as-asset, the organisational nervous system) and the constructs of the VSM (Ashby's Law, the S3–S4 homeostat, variety engineering, S5 identity, S2 and algedonic channels). Each correspondence is judged honestly on a single axis: does the practitioner framing carry the cybernetic content faithfully, extend it where Beer's model was under-specified (cadence, decisionability under AI, the politics of transition), or lose something essential (recursion, the homeostat, falsifiability)? Third, it draws the consequence for this community. A published framework that re-derives viability, distributed regulation and identity without Beer's name is a live instance of the scenario in which “the principles win and the name becomes optional.” That is not a threat to the VSM but evidence of its reach — and an on-ramp for non-Beerian practitioners into the deeper model. The session closes with the deflationary counter-argument considered squarely: if speed-talk merely re-skins cybernetics, what, if anything, has been gained? The aim is constructive: to show that the VSM's role is growing precisely because the problem is growing, and that faithful translation is one of the ways a hundred-year-old model keeps earning its place.

This presentation introduces an approach to operationalising Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM) through a capability-led system design supported by contemporary digital infrastructure. Educational organisations operating in complex environments with distributed roles, multiple stakeholders, and regulatory requirements often encounter fragmentation, inconsistent practices, and challenges in achieving coordination and coherence. These issues are particularly visible in contexts where compliance and quality assurance expectations shape operational practice. The approach begins with the development of a four-pillar capability framework that defines the key requirements for effective system functioning within a department: operational practice, capability development, resource utilisation, and organisational resilience. This framework provides a structured basis for supporting consistent and sustainable performance across teams. To organise these four pillars at a system level, the framework is operationalised through VSM, with its elements divided into workstreams that form the operational units, supported by system-level coordination and management. This is further translated into an operational architecture using the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, embedding communication, monitoring, coordination, compliance visibility, and governance within tools such as Teams, Planner, SharePoint, Lists, Power BI, and Power Automate. The model demonstrates how individual workstreams can operate with autonomy while remaining aligned within a coherent system structure, enabled through a Microsoft 365 environment. While informed by experience in educational organisations and compliance-driven environments, the approach is transferable across complex organisational settings. It introduces clarity to system structure to support coordination, demonstrating how systems thinking can be translated into practical organisational design

'An Organization is What it Does'; this is the lesson of the Viable System Model (VSM) that resonated with me the most strongly. However, for environmental movements, civil society organizations, and cooperatives – types of volunteer organizations which I have also taken part in – a big disconnect exists between sustainable, decolonial, or inclusive aims and lived practice: Common problematic patterns are contested identity, an unsustainable reliance on a select group of members, a lack of foresight about the organizational environment, and a decreased ability to measure the organization's health. Contemporary applications of the VSM have shown its usefulness as a framework to remedy these problems. However, they are often expert-led and target highly institutional groups such as businesses and governments. As a vector to propagate social change, grassroots organizations are critical to transition to global viable and sustainable praxis. However, there are many challenges in applying the VSM in grassroots contexts. Among them are its high complexity, high strategical requirements for scalability and accessibility, suspicion towards centralized technological infrastructure, and inherent tensions between data collection vs. privacy as well as transparency vs. secrecy. In this session, I will share a method for participatory self-transformation adapted to this context and shaped through fieldwork. As a starting point, print materials and software employed in my work with individuals and organizations will be presented to familiarize participants with current activities and their challenges and opportunities. Finally, participants are invited to ask questions about design choices and share their own views and experiences.

This paper proposes a heterarchical extension of the Viable System Model for complex construction projects. It argues that the canonical representation of the VSM does not explicitly represent a regulatory pathway through which semantically rich operational knowledge may directly challenge metasystemic assumptions and decisions. Thus, potentially reducing the metasystem’s capacity for learning and second-order error correction. The proposed circular topology, informed by McCulloch and Pitt’s concept of heterarchy, retains Beer's recursive regulatory functions and algedonic channel while adding an explicit, protected “challenge channel” through which frontline participants may transmit semantically rich challenges, concerns, emerging threats, and improvement proposals, based on relevant operational information, to the appropriate regulator. The challenge channel bypasses managerial suppression, but not necessary variety management. Its purpose is to reduce the attenuation and distortion of situated operational knowledge, enable anticipatory correction, and allow System 1 participants to challenge the assumptions, models, and decisions through which the metasystem regulates both their work and their continuously changing task environment. The proposed extension draws on the ideas of Gordon Pask, McCulloch, Pitts, Heinz Von Foerster and Stafford Beer. It is supplemented through observations from the management of a complex heavy-industrial construction project, where a formal organizational policy of Challenge Culture provided an empirical example of distributed challenge as a cybernetic mechanism for requisite variety management.

A hundred years after Stafford Beer's birth, this workshop asks what the next hundred years of organizational cybernetics could look like — and what we should do now to shape them. Rather than a retrospective, Cybernetic Futuresis a working session: participants explore plausible development trajectories and derive concrete options for intervention, with particular attention to strengthening democratic structures and the agency of individuals and groups to shape the future. We distinguish five horizons of 'future' relevant to cybernetics: the future of Beer's specific models (notably the Viable System Model), of cybernetic principles more broadly, of organizations, of AI and machine intelligence, and of society itself. The specific artifacts may change, while the underlying principles may become more relevant rather than less. From a set of scenarios — for example AI Revives Cybernetics, Cybernetics Merges with Complexity Science, The Rise of Collective Sensemaking Systems, and Planetary Cybernetics — we run a selection in parallel as starting points for structured discussion. The format is a syntegration-inspired discovery lab combining short provocations, structured small-group dialogue with rotating roles and timeboxing, and collective synthesis — not presentation-only. Each group documents its work as raw material for subsequent analysis. Senior figures take the role of respondents and witnesses; younger and practitioner voices contribute on equal footing. Outputs feed a continuing 'group for the future' and a publication trail beyond the conference. Participants leave with a shared set of questions worth pursuing and a concrete sense of where cybernetic practice can intervene.

This talk presents a full software implementation of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) as a complete enterprise management system, combining a live demonstration with a discussion of the system's capabilities, the methodologies behind it, and the challenges encountered during development. The system is a stand-alone desktop application supporting multiple, freely extensible levels of recursion, with real-time connections to the environment via configurable feeds. It manages a wide range of organisational functions: recursion analysis, process management, task coordination, output control, vertical coherence analysis, and audit of key variables. Connections between the environment and internal systems — and between internal systems themselves — are managed through homeostats built from transductors that use Bayesian decision mechanisms to switch the governing states of processes defining key properties. Where this falls short of covering the full variety of situations, a Pask conversation mechanism is provided to support semantic transduction across boundaries. The system also operates in a manner comparable to project management, but purpose-built for the VSM. It enables resources with defined work patterns and properties to be assigned tasks, goals, and objectives to achieve specific outputs. This supports resource allocation across manpower, materials, information, and ideas. The system is capable of HR management; stock control; financial costing and analysis; monitoring organisational integrity and viability — including simulation of the organisation's operations through forward time projection, and Monte Carlo sweeps across key variables to monitor viability. The talk concludes with a discussion of the future roadmap: evolving the system from a desktop application into a distributed system supporting multiple concurrent users and networked deployment across an organisation. A further direction under consideration is a blockchain-based consensus mechanism to support cooperative, multi-stakeholder decision-making — of particular relevance to organisations such as cooperatives, where authority is distributed rather than centralised.

My contributions to establishing the Bloomfield Community Centre in Narberth, Pembrokeshire (1980s), and founding the Todmorden Learning Centre in West Yorkshire (2010s) have led to the understanding presented here. The two central themes of community development:- providing opportunities for establishing and developing relationships between members of the community; understanding successful democratic cooperative managing of the processes involved; viz- Creating a community hub where members of the community can meet so that new relationships are made and old relationships are strengthened. The hub must be welcoming to all, drawing people in to enjoy themselves, discuss problems, and begin the tasks of improving the community. The hub should become a seeding ground for ideas, and collective help, establishing community enterprises which are grounded in supporting the community and in cooperative ideals. This will lessen dependence on outside provision of the necessary goods and services that are required by the community. Ensuring the ideals and culture developed in the hub become those of the formal community government will further enable development towards sustainability, opening the possibility of new funding. Spreading the ideas and culture of sustainability and cooperation to surrounding communities, helping build their communities toward sustainability will strengthen our community in trading locally, gathering new ideas, and helping others. Working together with neighbouring communities when they have achieved the first four stages of this journey will enable this culture and way of being to move to the next level of governing.

Purpose: Medium-sized manufacturing companies serving multiple industries face increasing organisational complexity, dynamic market conditions, and expanding regulatory requirements. Ensuring organisational viability requires management systems that balance adaptability, operational performance, and regulatory compliance. This research investigates whether governance structures based on Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) can improve organisational steering and reduce complexity through measurable cybernetic performance indicators. Methods: The research forms part of an ongoing doctoral project using a longitudinal mixed-methods case study in a German mechanical and plant engineering company operating in highly regulated sectors. The methodological approach combines semi-structured expert interviews with the longitudinal analysis of organisational and operational key performance indicators before, during, and after implementing VSM-based governance structures. Additional qualitative investigations within a comparison organisation provide contextual validation. Findings: The project develops a cybernetic KPI system that translates key principles of organisational cybernetics, including recursive governance and variety management, into measurable organisational variables. The framework assesses changes in organisational complexity, coordination capability, decision quality, adaptability, and governance effectiveness. Initial observations indicate that this approach enables a structured evaluation of organisational development beyond traditional financial and operational performance indicators. Implications: The study contributes to organisational cybernetics by proposing an empirical framework linking the theoretical foundations of the Viable System Model with quantitative organisational evaluation. By translating viability into measurable indicators, it seeks to strengthen the empirical basis of VSM applications and provide organisations with a practical instrument for evidence-based governance in complex, highly regulated environments.

Purpose: Organizational cybernetics has traditionally defined viability in functional terms, emphasizing survival, adaptation, and complexity management. However, the growing reliance on generative AI and digital decision-support systems exposes the limitations of this perspective by highlighting the epistemic processes through which organizations construct and interpret reality. This paper proposes an epistemic conception of viability that integrates constructivist epistemology and second-order cybernetics. Methods: The study adopts a conceptual and theoretical methodology, critically examining classical and second-order organizational cybernetics alongside constructivist epistemology. It first analyses the tension between constructivist assumptions and prevailing functional interpretations of viability, then investigates how AI intensifies epistemic vulnerabilities. Building on this analysis, the paper develops an epistemic framework of organizational viability and proposes a knowledge governance model grounded in selective attention, interpretive flexibility, reflexivity, and plurality. Findings: The paper argues that organizational viability depends not only on functional adaptation but also on the capacity to generate, critically evaluate, and revise organizational knowledge. AI increases informational capacity while potentially reinforcing epistemic fragility through algorithmic opacity, interpretive homogenization, and overreliance on automated outputs. An epistemic conception of viability therefore requires organizations to preserve interpretive diversity, reflexive learning, and responsible knowledge governance.

The importance of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) is increasingly recognised. For this to continue, and his legacy to be enhanced, it is necessary to understand the assumptions on which the VSM is based, how the model relates to other significant contributions to systems thinking and practice, and what it can achieve. This keynote argues that Critical Systems Thinking (CST) is well placed to assist in these matters. CST embraces the philosophy of pragmatism and views the VSM as part of that tradition. It is not, on this reading, a scientific model or a ‘hermeneutic enabler’. It is useful because it has demonstrated what Dewey calls ‘warranted assertibility’. This conclusion has significant methodological implications. CST seeks to provide a critique of systems approaches based on the ‘systemic perspectives’ they privilege. On this criterion, the VSM shares an organismic orientation with socio-technical systems thinking, contingency theory, and the many contemporary descriptions of organisations as ‘living systems’. There is much to learn from these other organismic accounts although the explanatory power provided by cybernetics puts the VSM in pole position for unifying their findings and guiding the action research necessary to further develop the power of this perspective. CST argues that it is necessary to be multi-perspectival and multi-methodological in the face of real-world complexity. Clarity around the theoretical underpinnings of the VSM enables us to understand better its relationship to alternative systems approaches privileging mechanical, interrelationships, purposeful, and societal/environmental perspectives. The way forward is not to ‘expand’ the VSM (threatening its integrity), or to ‘mix’ approaches (threatening cognitive loss) to achieve ‘greater coverage’ of the various ways in which complexity announces itself, but to continue to enhance its distinct competences and become adept at using it in combination with other systems approaches in pursuit of multi-dimensional improvement. CST offers valuable insights, I believe, into how best to view and use the VSM, thus opening a clear pathway for those seeking to elevate Stafford Beer’s legacy.

The Art of Boundary-Making deepens the practical value of the Viable System Model by showing that organizational viability is not only a matter of structure, governance, or recursion but also of the developmental capacity of the people who apply and inhabit those structures. The essay argues that VSM practitioners draw different system boundaries because they differ in cognitive depth and breadth of thought, as well as in social-emotional maturity. These developmental differences shape what they perceive, how they interpret tensions, and whether they treat boundaries as fixed design choices or as living distinctions to be explored through dialogue. Its added value lies in making this invisible dimension explicit. By integrating Otto Laske’s Constructive Developmental Framework, the essay offers a richer way to diagnose why organizations struggle with coordination, ownership, strategic alignment, and change. It introduces the concept of “requisite development”: the capacity leaders and practitioners need to process the complexity of their roles. In doing so, it reframes the VSM as more than a diagnostic model. It becomes a developmental and dialogical practice that helps organizations redesign structures, strengthen leadership capacity, and foster more adaptive forms of collaboration across boundaries.

Purpose: Contemporary organisational challenges increasingly transcend organisational boundaries, involving interconnected ecological, social, institutional, governance, and economic systems. While the Viable System Model (VSM) provides a powerful framework for understanding organisational viability, there remains a need for methodologies that support ecosystemic diagnosis, embeddedness, collaborative learning, intervention, and regeneration across interacting systems within an ecosystem. This paper introduces Ecosystemic Transdisciplinary Action Research (ESTAR), developed within the All Interacting Evolving Systems Science (AIESS) paradigm, as a complementary methodology for addressing these challenges. Methods: ESTAR combines ecosystemic diagnosis, transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation, participatory action research, and iterative regenerative intervention. The methodology is grounded in four foundational axioms of AIESS—interconnectedness, interdependence, interactions, and intentionality—and operationalises them by systematically identifying ecosystem dimensions, their critical factors, variables, and regenerative processes. Findings: The paper presents a methodological framework that demonstrates how ESTAR enables researchers and practitioners to diagnose evolving complexity, facilitate collaborative learning among multiple stakeholders, and design interventions that strengthen organisational viability while enhancing ecosystem balance, coherence, and regenerative capacity. The approach complements cybernetic principles by extending analysis beyond organisational recursion to the dynamics of interacting variables in an ecosystem. Implications/Contributions: ESTAR contributes an emerging methodology for organisational cybernetics by integrating systems science, transdisciplinary inquiry, and action research into a coherent ecosystemic framework. It offers a practical approach for extending VSM-informed practice toward regenerative organizations and ecosystems.

Purpose: This article reconstructs Total Veteran through the Viable System Model (VSM) to develop the Viable Identity Adaptation Framework (VIAF), a conceptual model for understanding and designing identity adaptation during major institutional transitions. It argues that post-military reintegration should not be reduced to employability, entrepreneurship training or psychological adjustment, but understood as the systemic redesign of viable identity, self-environment models, regulatory capacity, coordination and renewed domains of action. Design/methodology/approach: The article offers a theoretically informed reconstruction of Total Veteran as a case of transition from a highly structured military environment into civilian and entrepreneurial life. It uses the VSM as an analytical and design architecture to reinterpret the functions embedded in Total Veteran and to abstract a transferable framework for organizational and cultural change. The argument draws on organizational cybernetics, organizational identity, sensemaking, second-order learning and second-order cybernetics. Findings: The reconstruction suggests that viable identity adaptation depends on the interaction of six functions: identity and purpose formation, self-environment model reconstruction, regulatory translation, monitoring and early-warning feedback, coordination among operational domains, and operational experimentation in renewed domains of autonomy. Controlled, incremental exposure to new environments emerges as catalytic because it allows identity coherence to be tested, self-environment models to be revised, regulatory needs to surface and new agency to be enacted. Originality/value: The article extends the VSM from organizational diagnosis toward the design of viable identity adaptation in institutional transitions. It positions Total Veteran as a generative case for VIAF and offers a design logic for veteran reintegration, organizational change, cultural transformation and VSM-based systemic practice.

Critical Systems Thinking (CST) was originally developed to support emancipation in situations characterised by power asymmetries and conflicting interests. However, Critical Systems Practice (CSP) is frequently implemented from the perspective of the dominant organisation seeking improvement. In situations of organisational hypocrisy, where official rhetoric differs from organisational reality, this creates a paradox: interventions intended to support emancipation may instead strengthen the viability of the very structures that marginalised groups seek to challenge. This paper argues that Critical Systems Intervention (CSI) can address this limitation through integration with the Double Viable System Model (2×VSM). Whereas conventional applications of the Viable System Model often focus on an organisation and its environment, the 2×VSM conceptualises problematic situations as interactions between viable systems. This makes it possible to distinguish between dominant and marginalised systems and to analyse their relationship as a strategic game. Building on Stafford Beer’s cybernetic tradition and game-theoretical modelling, CSI uses the 2×VSM to identify the central game underlying a problematic situation and to maintain focus on the interests of those affected by structural constraints. The approach is illustrated through a case study showing how the combined use of CSI and the 2×VSM reveals intervention opportunities that are difficult to identify within conventional CSP. The paper concludes that the 2×VSM provides a cybernetic foundation that enables CSI to remain closer to the original emancipatory commitments of CST while strengthening the analysis of organisational viability, conflict, and change.

This abstract reinterprets Stafford Beer's Viable System Model(VSM) as a cybernetic theory of self-perpetuation rather than a managerial framework, grounded explicitly in thermodynamic principle. Beer's long-standing engagement with entropy — signalled by Ludwig Boltzmann's formulation S = k log W and reinforced through direct collaboration and discussion - frames organisational viability as a macro-level phenomenon realised through many micro-level configurations. Viable organisations are thus understood as out-of-equilibrium systems that persist by balancing inevitable entropic decay with continual replenishment drawn from environmental gradients. Organisational identity is treated as a macro-level invariant and a dynamic attractor for value exchange maintained by a boundary interpreted here as a Markov blanket. Within this framing Karl Friston's notion of surprise is understood as an adaptive homeorhetic pressure that steers the system along closure-seeking trajectories without collapse into equilibrium. Owing to the recursive embedding of viable systems surprise is regulated across multiple fractal touchpoints with the environment generating emergent direction rather than centrally determined goals. Value exchange in the Ricardian sense provides the metabolic coupling through which identity is ultimately validated and replenished and viability is sustained only where the resulting gradient exceeds the organisation’s power budget. Marketing is positioned not as the source of identity, but as the maintenance of its attractive field, sustaining recognisability and facilitating exchange. These ideas are illustrated through reflection on the Payphone Serviceability Problem - a project undertaken with Beer - demonstrating the VSM as an architecture for regulating surprise and sustaining organisational life across scale and time.

Purpose: In January 2026 the Heat Networks Directorate of Ofgem moved from designing a new regulatory regime to operating it while continuing to develop it. Initially our project asked how they could develop a better operating model, but what it concluded was that they were shifting to from a single to two core activities and needed to adapt to be able to deliver in parallel. Methods: Over ten weeks the authors combined an independent diagnostic with certified Practitioner training. A preliminary recursive map, developed inside the Directorate through a Royal Academy of Engineering Policy Fellowship, became the training material: seven staff qualified as Practitioners while jointly interrogating and revising their own model. Four systems were analysed across three levels of recursion. Findings: The decisive finding was structural. Operating the regime and developing it can no longer share one management system; each needs its own delivery, coordination and adaptive capacity, introducing a new level of recursion at the top. The analysis produced 108 observations and 28 mitigations, concentrated in under-developed coordination (System 2), thin adaptation (System 4) and an absent technical authority. Implications and Contributions: The engagement offers a transferable pattern for regulators moving from design to operation. It also surfaced a recurring question: whether to keep

Purpose: Metaphorum 2026 marks Stafford Beer’s centenary and, following Peter Checkland’s passing, offers an opportunity to revisit the foundations of systems practice. This paper compares Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) with the critical systems tradition developed from C. West Churchman through Werner Ulrich’s Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), including its critical-realist extension, CSH 2.0. Methods: Using Checkland and Holwell’s FMA framework, we distinguish the frameworks of ideas (F) underpinning each approach, the methodological resources through which they are enacted (M), and their use in a shared organisational area of concern (A). The inquiry is conducted as an asymmetric dialogue between a CSH specialist and a methodologically pluralist practitioner experienced in Soft Systems Methodology, system dynamics and VSM. Kuhn informs our treatment of theory-laden terminology and the risks of translation across paradigmatic traditions. We compare ontological, epistemological and axiological assumptions; criteria of adequate inquiry; and differing treatments of purpose, boundary, control, variety, complexity and the affected. Findings: We argue that VSM and CSH are neither substitutes nor directly commensurable methodologies. VSM primarily examines the organisational and regulatory conditions for viability, whereas CSH critically examines the boundary judgements, knowledge claims, interests and legitimacy of proposed improvements. Through an illustrative application and reciprocal critique, we identify where the approaches converge, complement one another, remain non-equivalent or stand in tension. Implications/Contributions: The contribution is practical guidance for selecting and relating the approaches, together with an iterative boundary–viability inquiry intended to generate reframings and interventions not produced by either initial analysis alone.

The viability and welfare of socio-technical systems depend on their ability to balance autonomy and cohesion. The universality of this balance is remarkable. It is not restricted to socio-technical systems such as organizations, but also applies to biological and purely technical systems. This Festschrift chapter explores the balance from its roots in Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model to its broader interpretation and application. It traces how information technologies – from the invention of writing and the printing press to the Internet and Large Language Models (LLMs) – have transformed, and continue to transform, how social systems negotiate autonomy and cohesion. After examining a spectrum of cohesion forces, technologies, and regimes, the chapter analyses in more detail one widely used cohesion mechanism: rules. This exploration end with an experiment comparing systems of inter-independent inference rules. The results demonstrate relationships between the autonomy–cohesion balance and system characteristics such as efficiency, resilience, and adaptability. Using the contemporary social media landscape as a case study, the chapter argues that autonomy–cohesion is a superior analytical lens to centralization–decentralization. The latter is a flat topological description that fails to account for emergent social power asymmetries. Finally, the chapter shows that some cohesion technologies achieve coordination with minimal loss of autonomy. The use and refinement of such technologies can improve the autonomy–cohesion balance. However, systemic forces such as path dependency and preferential attachment naturally produce choke points, power asymmetries, and reduced agency for the majority of participants. Understanding this balance can help in evolving social systems that are more resistant to these tendencies.

Cruise tourism stands at a crossroads between two distinct future scenarios. The first scenario mirrors the situation in Venice: a ban on cruise ships, dissatisfied residents, degraded areas, and a loss of authenticity due to visitor pressure (Milano, 2018; Vianello, 2016). The second scenario leads to destination managment that still has enough time to intorduce the regenerative governance (Bellato et al., 2022; Cave and Dredge, 2020). The difference between these two scenarios lies in whether the management of the system matches the complexity of the system it is attempting to manage (Yeoman, 2012). This paper advocates the view that tourism in Mediterranean cruise destinations is a failure of regulation rather than a problem of capacity. As per Ashby (1956), this is a matter of a variety mismatch. Regulatory variety is at odds with fragmented destination management and fails to keep pace with the variety generated by cruise tourism. This shortfall manifests as bottlenecks, negative reactions from residents, and reactive bans. Each port is caught between the impulses to promote and to restrict, reacts too slowly, and struggles to coordinate activities (Satta et al., 2015; Pechlaner et al., 2014). The bottleneck lies in the organisational structure, not in port infrastructure or destination capacity (Papathanassis, 2025; Barile & Saviano, 2015). RQ1: Which functions of the VSM are absent or pathological in the cruise shorescape? RQ2: What variety engineering would render the cruise shorescape viable?

Purpose: Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model is among the most powerful instruments for diagnosing and designing organisational viability — yet its reach into practice is limited by a high entry threshold: its cybernetic vocabulary and circuit-like notation deter the very people who could benefit most. This project aims to make that dormant potential usable — for civil society, commons, non-profit and for-profit organisations alike — by turning the VSM into a serious game. Methods: It begins with a rearrangement of the five systems, complemented by Angela Espinosa’s Self-Transformation Methodology, into a game design that is built into a digital prototype. Players map their own organisation as connected hexagons, setting them in motion with one minigame per system (1–5), learning the recursive grammar through play rather than instruction. The prototype is tested iteratively with real groups. The pivotal question is how well it helps players become healthier, operationalised through Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaning. Findings: Expected: whether the VSM, turned into a game, lowers its threshold of entry, and whether playing it strengthens players’ coherence and their organisations’ health. Implications: At its core, Hextech is a new tool for making the VSM applicable — one that finally makes barefoot cybernetics viable in practice, putting self-governance into the hands of those who most need viability yet can least afford its jargon. And it keeps sight of the larger potential dormant in the idea: a polycentric, recursively interwoven network of organisations carrying the seed of a global, recursive consciousness.

Purpose: The Viable System Model identifies cybernetic characteristics needed for a viable system. The research explores situations in which e several actors with distinct identities and viable systems share a contested situation. The research asks, “Viable for whom?”, a structural question that shapes how the VSM is applied and which ethical frameworks apply. Methods: This analysis of VSM in multi-actor situations uses the axioms of Variety Dynamics, a non-causal framework extending Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. It distinguishes systems, with a single identity, and the usual application of VSM, from situations, with multiple contested organisational identities. The analysis explores VSM’s potential roles in managing variety across actors in a situation, and the locus of power. Findings: In a contested situation, viability for one entity can attenuate variety and power available to others. Whether a viable whole amplifies or attenuates a part’s variety, and whether changes to viability of a single entity changes the whole’s identity, are key understandings from VSM in this realm. Questions of authoritarianism and emancipation are revealed. Centre–periphery governance arrangements illustrate this. Implications: This presentation extends organisational cybernetics into contested situations, where viability irregularly spans individual entities and the whole. VSM’s boundaries in the larger world are revealed and extended by viewing such VSM situations through the lens of Variety Dynamics. Beer expressed his concern about a world in torment. Variety Dynamics extends his understandings onto the terrain that produces that torment.

Contemporary social, ecological, and organizational crises increasingly reveal failures of collective agency rather than simply failures of governance. The Viable System Model (VSM) offers one of the most powerful cybernetic frameworks for understanding organizational viability, yet its functional architecture can be difficult to interpret and operationalize without oversimplification or misapplication. This work describes the relational processes implicit within and between the subsystems of the VSM, using a process-relational grammar that renders its recursive architecture interpretable and operational across multiple domains. Drawing on Enactive Cognitive Science, the proposed grammar interprets viability through recursively organized relational processes, offering an alternative to command-and-control or purely informational interpretations of the VSM. Moreover, this emphasis reveals the structural correspondences among the VSM, the Noble Eightfold Path, and Meta-Cybernetics. This integration forms a recursive model of agency I refer to as the Enactive Viable Agency (EVA) model, which emerged through a comparative metatheoretical analysis of these models. The VSM primarily describes the recursive organization of viable systems, whereas EVA describes the reflexive dynamics through which viable agency interprets, reorganizes, and transforms itself. Applied diagnostically, EVA highlights how fragmentation of agency contributes to failures of coordination across individual, organizational, and societal systems. It provides a diagnostic framework for identifying the types of relationships needed to foster viability, with implications for the design of techno-cultural systems that augment collective agency. Thus, EVA provides an accessible, structured language that operationalizes a functional architecture of recursive agency.

The self is increasingly understood as a process rather than a static substance. Consequently, the question is no longer what the self is, but what organizational function it performs and how it remains viable over time. Drawing on Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, I argue that the self performs the function Beer assigns to an ideal System Five: providing logical closure by regulating the interaction between present organization (System Three) and future adaptation (System Four) according to a normative identity. Whereas autopoietic systems regulate toward ultrastability, selves regulate toward existentially normative identities that prescribe who they ought to become. Human viability therefore depends not merely on organizational coherence but on sustaining a normative identity that continually expands the horizon of viable possibilities. I argue that this norm is not environmentally determined but generated through the continual reorganization of experience into interpretive structures that enlarge the horizon of meaningful action. Thus, the self functions as a minimal model that transduces lived experience and future possibilities into these structures while preserving continuity with an evolving identity. Meaning is the normative significance possibilities acquire within that identity. Logical closure is therefore directed not simply toward survival but toward preserving the conditions for continued meaningful becoming. This framework offers a cybernetic-existential reinterpretation of psychopathology. Disorders of the self arise when logical closure either collapses, severing meaningful engagement with future possibilities, or becomes pathological by reducing identity to rigid self-preservation. This reinterpretation establishes a conceptual bridge between organizational cybernetics, philosophy of selfhood, and existential psychopathology.

Temporal Freedom in Viable Systems: A Genealogical Analysis of Human and Machine Time in Organisational Cybernetics

As societies around the world grapple with increasing complexity, rapid algorithmic changes, and constant digital connectivity, the challenges of humans’ interactions with machines have become a significant crisis. While traditional cybernetics focuses on technological systems, the human element is often left to cope with systemic stress and cognitive overload. To transform this societal ‘torment’ into a promising future, this study introduces the concept of ‘techno-eustress’, a positive form of stress that helps to build resilience. Using Systems Thinking and CyberSystemic lenses, the ‘T-shaped’ professional profile is applied as a framework for fostering diversity. While having deep vertical expertise (T-Stem) can make individuals susceptible to rigid techno-distress, it is suggested that developing horizontal systemic skills (T-Top) offers the necessary diversity to achieve a balanced state of techno-eustress. Methods: The study integrates two complementary measurement frameworks. Specifically, the level of techno-eustress is assessed through the Techno-Eustress scale derived from existing literature, while the configuration of the T-shaped profile is quantified using the MyT-Me platform. Results: Early findings suggest that navigating complex digital landscapes requires more than just technical know-how; it’s about understanding the entire system. The data shows that having a robust T-Top setup is linked to a greater ability to transform the technological pressures of the environment into beneficial eustress rather than harmful stress. Implications: By identifying and measuring the cyber-systemic skills required for effective human-machine collaboration, the provided framework builds a practical guide to creating resilient, human-centred and socially responsible digital environments.

Purpose: Organisational cybernetics, since Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), offers viability criteria for singular systems. Yet human exchange occurs not within one system but across ecologies of juxtaposed, hybrid, often contradictory mechanisms agents activate simultaneously to meet existential needs. This paper proposes existential conductivity, extending cybernetics into exchange, as a formal metric of mechanisms’ capacity to transfer wellbeing to specific agents. Methods: We formalise the structural isomorphism between Fourier’s law of heat conduction (q = −k·A·dT/dx) and existential value flow in human systems (Q = Σ[−kᵢ·Aᵢ·(ΔN/Δxᵢ)] + Φ). Coefficient kᵢ is operationalised as the CAMB product: Confidence × Access × normative frameworks × knowledge Bandwidth, illustrated with data from N=100 SMEs in Antioquia, Colombia, read through Beer’s VSM and the Latin American cybernetics tradition. Findings: Existential conductivity identifies which systemic frictions (Φ) block value flow across each CAMB dimension. Access is the most limiting component (A=3.08/5), 22% of firms operate hybrid portfolios, and competitive friction is most frequent. VSM explains why mechanisms collapse: an S3 deficit predicts high normative Φ; S4 absence predicts high scale Φ. Implications. Existential conductivity extends organisational cybernetics toward emancipatory policy design: reducing Φ is more efficient than expanding bandwidth of low-conductivity mechanisms. Many channels do not guarantee value reaches those who need it — without confidence, access, normative framework, or knowledge, a channel exists but does not conduct. From the Global South, this framework offers tools for governing exchange ecologies: the goal is not quantity but capacity to transfer wellbeing to diverse agents.

Purpose: This study examines how digital technologies help shaping tourism development in Italy's marginal areas. In these areas an increased visibility can support regeneration but also intensify infrastructural, social, and environmental fragility. Drawing on socio-technical cybernetics, the study conceptualizes marginal areas as territorial systems-of-systems governed through feedback, variety, and coordination among communities, institutions, tourism operators, platforms, visitors, and cultural-environmental resources. Methods: We conducted a qualitative multiple-case study on seven marginal areas in four different Italian regions. We selected the cases according to their tourism development maturity and the tourism-demand intensity. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with presidents of local Pro Loco associations and local opinion leaders identified through snowball sampling checked against news in local newspaper and online. Findings: Preliminary findings reveal four patterns: the gap between digital visibility and local vitality; the difference between temporary demand spikes and structural growth; the algorithmic distortions of destination identity and visitor expectations; and the housing and labor imbalances linked to platform-driven tourism. Digitalization strengthens territorial development when local governance, infrastructure, skills, and community coordination can absorb and direct the additional variety it generates. Implications/Contributions: The study advances a cybernetic interpretation of digital tourism development and shows that technology should be governed as a socio-technical environment rather than treated merely as a promotional tool. It offers practical guidance for municipalities, Pro Loco associations, and destination managers seeking resilient, ethical, and locally embedded tourism pathways.

Busy commercial airports are very ‘large’ intricate systems where up to several hundred organisations keep ‘stepping onto one another’s toes’, to the detriment of the operational effectiveness, resilience and viability of the whole. Boundaries of accountability are poorly understood. Over three decades of liberalisation of global air transport has created situations of largely decentralised control, where behaviours of least use to the collectivity (passengers included) are incentivised, and effective steersmanship is hindered. Mandated by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority to urgently enhance its on-time performance, a major UK airport operator embarked with the University of Edinburgh on a quest for a new experimental epistemology of airport operational resilience. In particular, we sought one that incentivises effective dynamic interactions across its (eco)system of airport stakeholders. Applying the VSM, we developed and tested a new toolbox of audits (System 3*) to enhance the airport’s capacity to absorb variety. Highlights include (i) cyber-systemic means to find out where the accountability boundaries actually lie and (ii) an implementation of Beer’s indices of performance that, measuring across any one such boundary, highlights promising routes for effective intervention. All the tools employ existing airport data feeds and are now regularly used by the airport operator to facilitate meaningful cross-organisational problem-solving. Validation at two other European airports took place. Following that, we were invited to partake in EUROCONTROL’s current work aimed at harmonizing airport performance measurement across Europe. We conclude the paper by discussing the extent to which our contributions are applicable to non-airport contexts.