In my quest for better Systems Thinking understanding of the world as a whole, I still hang on to the fact that Cybernetics was always about self-adaptive governance of complex human systems from the start; its association with machine control systems being circumstantial of its early successes. There are of course many specific / specialised theories and sciences of Systems developed since Wiener (Cybernetics) and the 1946 Macy conference brought so many systems thinkers into one melting-pot. They emphasise different aspects, but to me they’re all variations on the same underlying theme, and I’m always sceptical when practitioners get too precious about which one is best, being critical of their competitors, even Dave Snowden of Cynefin, which may indeed be “the best”. Even Mike Jackson, whose “Critical” systems theory is essentially pragmatism with a qualifying name to distinguish it from other branded offerings.
I often get the push-back that the distinguishing idea about using the word Cybernetics was always “feedback” and was always naturally more suited to that mechanistic electro-mechanical machine view. (I actually have similar positive attachment to words like machine and mechanism too, even when talking of complex humanity, but we don’t need to go there for now.) Sure, feedback is an important part of Cybernetics – and of Systems generally, since the ancient Greeks no doubt – but I already noted this when reviewing Maruyama’s (1963) “Second Cybernetics” back in 2018.
It’s not just feedback. It’s mutual feedback, feed-back and feed-forward between any number of organisational levels of wholes and parts. Any parts of any systems. It’s about intra- and inter-system communications – of information. It’s always been about system evolution – self-adaptive organisational-learning – through parts and wholes mutually processing information.
Computation. Complex, many-layered computations on many different timescales.
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Critical Thinking has a lot to answer for.
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