Call for Abstracts

Stafford Beer was not only a pioneering theorist, but also a mentor, artist, and humanist committed to designing systems that serve human dignity and planetary wellbeing. His work emerged from a deeply held ethical and philosophical vision of organisations as living systems capable of learning, self-governance, adaptation and creativity.

This stream invites personal reflections, and creative contributions that explore Beer in his wholeness and illuminate how he contributed to change our way of thinking about organisations and societies; how his values shaped his theories; and how his theories continue to inspire creative design and ways of relating to others, and to inspire social change. We welcome contributions from those who knew him directly, as well as from later generations influenced by his work, who have pioneered creative artifacts to continue disseminating his legacy, or to find new niches where his legacy is still invaluable.

At the heart of organisational cybernetics lie the Viable System Model and Team Syntegrity. Over decades of application across sectors, cultures, and scales, they both have demonstrated both remarkable power and also some limitations. Several new methodologies and tools have emerged and been tested over the past few decades, which confirm and complement the power of the VSM and TS.

This theme focuses on the following questions:

• What are the constitutive principles of organisational viability?
• What are emerging and proven methodologies and tools?
• What forms of learning have emerged through practical application?
• What are examples of creative developments of tools to learn or practice the VSM?
• What are main challenges for further developing VSM theory, methods and tools?
• What are still the main challenges for VSM and TS application and how have we managed to deal with them?

We invite theoretical and methodological innovations; case studies, critical reflections, and empirical analyses that examine how cybernetic principles have been interpreted, adapted, and challenged in varied organisational contexts. Contributions may address innovations in different places, contexts, and types of organisations (e.g., public governance, health, education, energy, infrastructure, or other domains. Both successes and failures are welcome, as practice remains essential to refining theory.

As humanity faces climate disruption, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, political unrest, economic challenges, and the continued breach of planetary boundaries, organisations and societies are operating under intensifying systemic pressures and rapidly shifting conditions. In this context, the need for resilience, equity, and long-term sustainability has never been more urgent—not only as essential dimensions of viable systems, but also as pathways for going beyond viability toward adaptive, learning, and regenerative systems aligned with the spirit of Beer’s organisational cybernetics.

This stream invites contributions that explore how cybernetic principles can strengthen societal and organisational responses to complexity by enhancing resilience, supporting regeneration, and enabling democratic and ethically grounded governance. We welcome theoretical developments and practice-based insights that extend or reinterpret the VSM and Team Syntegrity (TS) to address emerging socio-ecological challenges.

Submissions may also examine how cybernetic concepts can help reimagine sustainable development for organisations and society alike and propose new ways of designing systems capable of navigating rapid change while upholding ecological and social justice.

Can human beings live differently, change the destructive, extractive practices that are changing our climate, and potentially ending our existence on planet earth? To live differently and develop social consciousness, we must think differently, we must prioritise that we are a small part of the living world. We must know and understand that all our actions have consequences that feedback to harm us and all other life. The living world is a pattern of inter-related dynamic processes, a world which needs systems and organisational cybernetics. Stafford Beer gave us very powerful tools with which we can better model and understand ourselves and our co-evolution with this complex world.

We see Organisational cybernetics as an emancipatory approach that opens transformative pathways for designing organisations and societies where our being one with nature is not systematically under pressure and where levels of social and material deprivation do not continue to escalate. We aim to clarify viable organisations as those that advance justice, inclusion, autonomy, and cohesionand social consciousness.

In this stream we invite contributors to think critically, and collectively, inspired by Stafford’s ideas, about the possibilities of creating a better world, where inequalities can be reduced, ecological justice is prioritized, and social and material deprivation no longer escalate. This is a call for a fundamental re-thinking of how we design and govern educational systems, non-for-profit organisations, cooperatives, and communities as human centred, fairer viable systems.

We welcome theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and practice-based contributions. These could include interdisciplinary perspectives, critical reflections, case studies, methodological innovations, and action-oriented frameworks, to advance structural transformation toward greater equity and justice.

In January 1993, Stafford delivered a provocative talk under the title: “The World in Torment: A Time Whose Ideas Must Come”. This was an incisive gaze of the state of affairs in which he saw the world was moving towards. He used cybernetic principles to analyse the systemic failures of global governance, and the “torment” caused by institutional inability to manage complexity. He argued that the world was suffering because its organisational structures were obsolete and incapable of handling the “variety” of modern global problems at the time. Interestingly enough, he gave this presentation as his Presidential Address to the 9th Triennial World Congress of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) in New Delhi (India) ⁽¹⁾

The purpose of this panel, organised by WOSC, is exploring current issues producing important shortcomings in the world we live in at all levels, from the local and global, with and emphasis in limiting resources. People are experiencing regulatory limitations in the management of their interactions among themselves and the environments they inhabit; in this world of huge complexity, it is necessary to work the purposes of collaborative actions as well as correct variety imbalances of people, institutions and organisations. We all need to reduce the damage we inflict through our actions to others and to the environments we inhabit.

In order to achieve these goals, WOSC will invite three key note speakers who we believe have worked in recent years towards reflecting about these complexity issues, and in one way or the other are updating and expanding Stafford´s arguments as he developed in his talk in 1993. In that talk Stafford moved beyond the technicalities of the VSM and Team Syntegrity to deliver a critique of why the world is constantly on the brink of collapse. He argued that our global “torment” (with famine, ecological destruction, poverty, and so on) is not due to “bad people” or “bad luck”. Instead, it is a result of pathological systemic and value structures, with fundamental weaknesses in the necessary relationships to produce desirable purposes and outcomes.

In particular, the violation of Ashby´s Law of Requisite Variety; the lack of institutional recursion as an alternative to a centralised decision and control mechanism; and the existence of nation-states that fragment our global identity and behave like competing predators rather than parts of a single, viable system. Since 1993, the world has developed by accelerating communication through global digital networks and expanding reasoning capacity through artificial intelligence, significantly reshaping existing structures and redefining interactions between humans and machines. These developments appear to enable both having centralised resources and de-centralise control functions and, at the same time, open communication, prompting questions about responsibility, control, and systemic design.

1. Stafford served as President of WOSC during the late 1980s and early 1990s.