Sascha Kullak
Biography
Sascha Kullak is an independent practitioner of applied cybernetics, working at the intersection of urban development and organisational self-governance, based in Münster, Germany. Since 2015, he has co-founded and co-governed B-Side Münster — a commons-public-partnership cultural centre developed through ten years of lived self-organisation. From 2019 to 2024, he orchestrated Hansaforum Münster, a federally funded model project for democratic neighbourhood governance. It was during this time that he became painfully aware of the lack of a self-organisation system as simple to apply as it is potent in effect.c He holds an M.A. in Nonprofit Management, with a thesis on the transfer of Christopher Alexander's Fundamental Differentiating Process to non-profit organisations — which was also the scholarly birth of his heart project: a VSM-based serious game that puts the power of self-organisation into as many people's pockets as possible. He currently works as 'common good officer' (for lack of a better translation) at the Montag Foundation Urban Spaces in Bonn, where he enables a public-interest concept-based tender process for the allocation of real estate to the best idea instead of the highest-bidder.
Sessions
Gamifying the VSM
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.