Terence Love (TBC)
Biography
Prof. Dr Terence Love has been involved in Systems since first studying at Lancaster University and later moving to Australia. He has worked as an academic and practitioner across several institutions. More recenly, He developed Variety Dynamics as a new systems methodology that focuses on the use of power in better shaping of outcomes in hypercomplex situations beyond the reach of conventional systems methods. (e.g. disasters, epidemics, wars, diplomacy,climate management, geopolitics and geoeconmics, multi-role oganisaitons etc.) Terence is a Fellow of the Design Research Society, a Chartered mathematician, a member of the OR Society and and a long term member of the ACM. Terence has written around 150 papers and is currently training members of the Ministry of Interior of the Middle East, Police, planners, managers, architects and designers in Australia and internationally. He is in the final stages of completing a book on the first 60 axioms of Variety Dynamics.
Sessions
Viable for Whom? Contested Identity in the VSM
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.