Our Cyber-Systemic Future

Abstract

How can systems and cybernetics address the issues arising from an increasingly complex world, that often is beyond our traditional response capabilities? The author argues that to address such complexity we require imaginative propositions and innovative behaviours to see and address the inherently systemic nature of our world, which too often is fragmented by policies driven by non-systemic models. Socially, we live in a world experiencing systemic deficit; our policy responses are often fragmented, but even if they are not, socially designed responses fail to recognise environmental constraints and produce innovative allocations of requisite resources to make them happen. The author argues that conversational spaces, such as those offered by the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics [WOSC], and other cybersystemic associations, should help dealing with fragmentation and resources allocation; he sees these conversations as necessary contributions to redress our systemic deficit. Systemic thinking should help in visualising social situations as wholes, thus reducing the chances of dysfunctional fragmentation and cybernetics should help us understanding processes of dynamic stability in the interactions among and between people, institutions, and organizations. Systemic thinking should give us methodological tools; cybernetics should give us communication tools to manage the complexity of situations from the local to the global. The paper discusses complexity management strategies, emphasising the need to deal operationally with this complexity rather than cognitively; operational complexity is orders of magnitude larger than cognitive complexity. The paper ends up with an illustration of these complexity management strategies in higher education.