Nour Abida
Biography
Nour Abida is an award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker and systems thinking practitioner working at the intersection of journalism, organisational design and public service media. With more than a decade of experience in international broadcasting, she has led editorial and strategic projects spanning digital transformation, global audience engagement and organisational change. Alongside her work in journalism, Nour is completing an MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice at the University of Exeter, where she explores how systems methodologies including Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, Soft Systems Methodology and Critical Systems Heuristics can help media organisations navigate complexity, strengthen resilience and improve decision-making. Her research focuses on applying systems thinking to contemporary challenges in public service media, including organisational viability, podcast discovery, audience trust and inclusive journalism. Nour is particularly interested in how diversity contributes to organisational resilience through Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and how cybernetic thinking can inform the future of journalism in an increasingly complex world. Nour was named Best Journalist at the 2025 Forty Under Forty Awards. Her documentary The Homecoming reached more than four million viewers and has been screened internationally, including at Columbia University, the University of Oxford and the Africa Centre.
Sessions
Can Stafford Beer Help Save Journalism? Applying the Viable System Model to Understand Resilience in Public Service Media
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.