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The Praxis of Cybernetics and the Cybernetics of Praxis

Abstracts for Papers, Conversations and Playshops for the ASC Conference, 2001
in alphabetical order by first author

Compiled April 15, 2001

Rosalind Armson and Ray Ison

Based on our experience of working for change within our own academic department, we find that a number of issues emerge when systems practitioners work in their own milieu. The emergence of meaning is an on-going process so we do not claim a final resolution of the issues we address. We do claim, however, that these issues need to be accounted for by the systems practitioner as part of the complex ‘real-world' situation he or she is working with. We further claim that epistemological awareness is essential for taking such account. We find the themes of managing for emergence, epistemological awareness, community of practice, and communities of conversation recur as we braid theory and practice within our own context. These concepts are frequently articulated through metaphor.

The following observations and learnings emerge for us from our engagement with our own context.

Jeanette Bopry

The reconceptualization of information as "in-formation," as Varela (1979) occasionally calls it, denies information a material existence. Information is constructed at the intersection of the sensory fields of an individual and the material world. This conceptualization of information requires a different model of communication. One possibility is Krippendorff's Recursive Model of Communication (Krippendorff, 1994), with its dependence on the conversation metaphor rather than the transportation metaphor. In Krippendorff's model each participant in a communication situation constructs the entire process, proceeding on an assumption of mutual understanding until such time as the conversation breaks down. Breakdown triggers a negotiation intended to bring the conversation back on course; this is achieved when the participants once again believe they understand one another.

If we take Krippendorff's communication model seriously, there are implications for educational design. Design ceases to be a causal mechanism and more closely resembles what the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984) calls the double hermeneutic. Design becomes an iterative conversation between designer(s) and design space, with both the designer's understanding and the state of the design space undergoing continuous change. Amongst other considerations, greater emphasis can be placed upon those things learners do (e.g., study, understand, perform, etc.) and the impact of these activities on design

The compatibility of the work of Varela with Krippendorff and with Giddens allows one to apply a consistent epistemological position across the biological, psychological and social domains we each inhabit.

Gary Boyd

John Brocklesby

Drawing primarily on Maturana's Ontology of the Observer the paper conceptualises Management Science as an activity that fundamentally belongs to the relational circumstances in which it is carried out and which reflects the dominant conversations and discourse that constitute these. The paper rejects the idea that Management Science is an activity carried out in the name of objectivity and/or as something that is reducible to the nature of the problematic situation under investigation. Its distinctive take on Management Science brings matters of agency, emotion, ethics, and power to the fore.

The theoretical perspective of the paper is illustrated through reference to a major Management Science intervention carried out by the author in a large telecommunications company.

Brent Cameron

How does one shift paradigms? If one is a fish, how does one become aware of the water one swims in? And how and why do we crawl up onto the land and into the air of a new paradigm? As humans we swim in the water of our language without realizing it. The membranes and boundaries of one's paradigm all reflect back on the logic contained within the paradigm, as if we are living inside a bubble. Breaking through requires critical tensions, whereby one cannot find any reason to stay and becomes fascinated with glimpses of possibilities beyond and within.

This playshop will consist of two experiences; one of presence and one of duration. The path of presence is discovering the world view of the unconscious of getting inside of our thoughts and ideas to noticing who is noticing, getting to the center. Then in the second experience we will take this presence on a lifelong spiral journey, an elegant unfolding of this infinite presence in a unique pattern of growth. This pattern of life timeline will provide a stage upon which to imagine one's future and re-experience one's life path. The unique 89 foot spiral map will allow all participants new insights into the patterns of one's life. Enthusiasm is a sacred place for us all.

Mary Lou Collins

Beth Dempster

Ely A. Dorsey

Elohim

Consequently my rationale managed suddenly to motivate myself to deeply encourage also me to search how I may contribute to find a way forward. Fortunately, I have had the chance of learning to organise my performance by means of systems thinking and cybernetics, in a large measure due to those very first significant contributions of von Bertalanffy and Norbert Wiener, who have made easier for many of us to start comprehending explicitly the concepts of systems thinking and feedback interactions (***); bearing in mind the reasons that motivated Bertalanffy to warn us that a systems science could equally be used for totalitarianism as for autonomous care. Similar concerns motivated Wiener to argue that he was pessimistic about the uses to which cybernetics, as a technology, would be put.

Recognising that it has become urgently necessary to answer properly "For what purpose are we living?" I dare to propose that a response to such a question can be searched through the synergism generated by accepting cybernetics as the indispensable praxis for globally concerned systems thinking . Further, I propose an exchange of views between members of the cybernetics community, starting with e-mail messages and culminating in an open face to face debate among small groups of 5 to 11 people. Such groups might - motivated by their respective rationale - search co-operatively how humans, individually and collectively, may develop capabilities in logical behaviour, rational forecast, intuition, concrete comprehension of causality, and purposeful transformation in an ethical, ethological and ecological manner. This activity would be derived and conditioned by spontaneity: as a generator of the complicated, but indispensable complexity of all possible human concerns

Carol English and Bert McGinnis

fundamental. For example, a child produces seemly random movements/actions (i.e. error), trying sequences of movements that become increasingly refined as the child experiences the results. Some sequences produce desirable results, others less desirable results, emotionally and physically. Thus, gradually, the child develops an active world image that enables both the conscious initiating of action, and the ongoing development of the image.

We want to say, firstly, that in this process the nervous system acts not as a filter, as has often been argued, but as an amplifier, amplifying through experience, certain system perturbations while dampening/ignoring others. The plasticity of the nervous system is sufficiently developed to allow this process to take place in an ongoing interactive fashion, at once top-down and bottom-up.

Secondly, we wish to present an innovative type of computer modeling approach designed to match and extend this fundamental perceptual coupling of individual and environment, in a natural extension of the senses. Traditional modeling approaches are severely limited because they are uncoupled from our powerful natural perceptual capacities. We have developed our approach over more than twenty years of experimentation and study in the fields of systems theory, human cognition and perceptual psychology, computer modeling theory and practice.

These models are designed to work as cognitive amplifiers, in the same way that the microscope and the telescope do, but with a profound difference: By interacting with models of this type, one can build the guiding perceptions necessary to large-scale decision making processes.

With this approach, we can hold out the hope of developing the necessary coherences in our actions directly through experience and the making of error, in precisely the same manner as a baby gains the capacity to act and make choices in the world. Our planet faces many critical choices in the near-future. Making use of the intelligence already embodied in our nervous systems affords the best possibility that the outcomes of these choices will be adaptive.

Janet D. Fiero

My central research focus was to study how citizens and their environmental organizations are engaged in the restoration of the ecosystem. By contrasting two, very different, environmental groups, I investigated how communication (not individual agency) enabled changes in the structures of the ‘function systems' of society for the betterment of the ecosystem. At the same time I studied how the structures of these ‘function systems' constrained or enabled communication.

My thesis is that citizens and their regional environmental organizations are changing the structures of some ‘function systems' of society – law, politics, science, economics, education, and religion – through their communication (and subsequent action). By changing the structures, perhaps resonance among ‘function systems' is improved, and actions can be taken to stop and even reverse ecosystem damage. My central research question is: How is it that two such different regional environmental organizations are both able to bring about change in the structures of ‘function systems'? Three conceptual frameworks anchor this research. First, structuration theory of Anthony Giddens addresses the recursive nature of agency and structure. People through their actions reproduce and create structures that shape them. Second, social construction theory addresses how individuals construct the worlds in which they live through communication. I situate both structuration and social construction concepts within the third framework, open systems theory – specifically social autopoietic theory as Niklas Luhmann describes it. I integrated these three research traditions and synthesized them to create my social con-structuration theory: Within the context of current function systems, people relationally communicate, become aware, and take action to change structures of the function systems that recursively shaped them in the first place.

Frank Galuszka

Frank Galuszka

Lee Gass

"Student-centred", "student-directed", "inquiry", and "problem-based" approaches to learning rest on different assumptions about students, about instructors, and about learning environments, than traditional approaches. In particular, they assume that students are self-regulating learners. I will use a combination of stories and simple cybernetic models of students, groups of students, and teaching-learning interactions, to prime a discussion of how simple cybernetic models can empower events that occur in and out of classrooms, and empower learning.

Monique Giard

Gaetano Giordano

Ira Turkat in the "Divorce-Related Malicious Mother Syndrome", describes the "Child Visitation Interference In Divorce". In addition, according to other authors, the problem of the False Allegations of Child Molestation and Abuse made during divorce custody and visitation disputes (According to Wakefield and Underwager (1991), 80% of the allegations of child sexual abuse made during divorce custody and visitation disputes are blatantly false) is very important. Furthermore, it's not infrequent that a child custody dispute ends with a death — a suicide, a murder or even a massacre of the whole family.

In the opinion of the Author, these problems are not the result of the family's or individual's "psychopathological problems", but are behaviors that we observe to arise in the domain of the circular interaction between the conflict of the parental couple and the legal conflict praxis. From this point of view, the problem is in the recursivity of this social "solutions", because the social system that we call "Law" (and that according Luhmann is an Autopoietic System) prefers to utilize a conflictive praxis to resolve a conflictive praxis.

The aim of the Author is to propose a new way to understand what psychiatry, psychology, social and judicial studies, and common people, usually intend for "Psychopathological Problems in the Divorce Litigation". So, he makes a distinction within the so called "psychopathological behaviors" that we observe in the divorce litigation contexts and outlines three different syndromes that are defined through the domain in which we can observe their arising: 1) Syndromes arising in the parent-child relation; 2) Syndromes arising within the conflicting couple behavior; 3) Adjustment disorders arising in separated parent.

Jason Hu-Ji-Xuan

Under the seemingly similar organizational charts and business models, two types of companies can be distinguished: Agreement-binding (Type A) versus Leadership-binding (Type L). From the viewpoint of a Type A company, a Type L company may be unreliable and with little efficiency. From the viewpoint of a Type L company, a Type A company may be too fussy with detail data, inflexible and even cold-blood. Type As are more likely to be observed in the U.S. and other Western countries while Type Ls are more likely to be found in China and other Asian countries, due to their dominating cultural difference. The formation process, the decision style, and the organizational behaviors of these two types of organizations are highlighted and attributed to the key cultural elements residing at individual level, namely, one culture emphasizes creditability, fairness and inspiration while another culture emphasizes face-keeping, favor-seeking and fate-gambling. Initial testing questions to identify the types of a given company are developed. More understanding towards the other type during the encounter and cooperation of two types could be reached through the viewpoint of this paper.

Louis H. Kauffman

For this purpose this playshop will use the experimental devices of ropes, knot tying and knot illusions, soap films that span knots in beautiful singular surfaces, and the interactive graphics of the blackboard, pencil and paper that wraps upward into space as the paper is folded, bent and stapled or otherwise fastened to itself. In the course of traversing these boundaries nearly all the fundamental issues in Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form come forth in a geometric mode. In the last part of the playshop we will work with this aspect and in tandem with Christina Weiss we will play with the philosophy and the iconics of logical notation from Boole to Venn to Frege to Russell to Peirce to Spencer-Brown to Pask and to the present day. The theme is how meaning arises in the interaction of the spatial and the symbolic.

Allenna Leonard

Practicing cybernetics in social contexts often runs up against these contradictions. They may, if not dealt with, lead to silenced voices or feelings of exclusion or disempowerment. I'd like to have a conversation about how to make sharing perspectives and taking action in ways that are and appear to be non-coercive.

Philip Lewin

This paradox between cybernetics and praxis, between teleology and teleonomy, both extends and reproduces a number of related paradoxes posed by a cybernetic perspective. Among these are:

All these (and other) paradoxes arise from a fundamental tension that second-order cybernetics has helped bring forth so that it can be clearly seen, namely, the tension between drift and design, between living within one's situatedness and projecting a future, between two versions of nihilism that are simultaneously two versions of freedom, and two versions of meaning. In my own work, this paradox arises most directly in the tension between ego and soul.

Judith Lombardi

Behavioral Cybernetics is a systemic process that offers a contextual technique that is observer central (thus more than just a technique. Since we are more than just rational beings) for ordering, understanding and responding (vs. controlling), any behavior that may arise in the relational space of human being. When emphasizing our rational characteristics, emotional awarenesses and creative intuitive abilities.

During the presentation, participants will explore meanings for these terms and processes for de-escalating behavior This praxis is heavily inspired by the works of Herbert Brun and Humberto Maturana.

Sonia MacPherson

As beneficial as such reflective practices may be to help us to understand experience, they tend to cast experience as just more information, rather than the site where our living and learning is enacted. In a similar way, ecological knowledge is reduced to just more "information" with which to form decisions

In this paper, I explore how a reorientation from reflective practice to reflexive praxis in education can support ecological pedagogies capable of changing the way we live in the world. Even the phonetic and syntactical shift from "ct" to "x" suggests moving from the dualism or two sounds and two letters to the singular sound and mirror image implicit in the letter "x." In terms of the connotation of the terms, unlike the script/stage analogy suggested by "reflection," reflexion suggests understanding the world as a mirror, never entirely separate from the underlying activities of one's own bodymind. The "real world" in such a view, is not located on either the side of the mind or the world, but rather in the experience that is generated through their encounter.

In marked contrast, the dominant view pervading education and curricula is that "the real world" for education is the future marketplace. Yet, by understanding the biology of cognition from a systems theory orientation, we can appreciate that the marketplace is a third order system, more abstract and recursive than "the real world" of immediate classroom experiences and relationships. Nonetheless, the perpetuation of the mind-environment dualism in education fuels distorted views that treat social and economic systems as if they were living systems needing serving, rather than as recursive spaces designed to further the well-being of underlying living systems.

So, when people speak of preparing students for the technological world of tomorrow, for example, what they are really doing is pressuring students to "conform" to their own images and desires of how the world should be-that is, more technological. These desires and image, in turn, are imposed on local classrooms through standardized, mandated curricula and exams to impose conformity over creative adaptation in learning processes in classrooms.

After considering some of the differences between what it is to conform or creatively adapt to classroom environments, I will conclude by offering some potential methods for cultivating reflexive praxis in education, principally through attention, mindfulness and awareness.

Mary-Ellen Perley

My research demonstrates how meaning making is enhanced and enriched in an experiential environment. This presentation outlines how process drama can be used as an instructional methodology for English literature. Not only does this approach demonstrate a concrete method to facilitate the representational strand of the Western Canadian Protocol for the four Western Provinces and two Territories (1996), it also exemplifies the concept of praxis in this interdisciplinary context.

Antonín Rosicky

A phenomenal increase of shared human cognition is happening along with a growing abstraction of thought. Accordingly it require effort to understand the principles of many of contemporary disciplines - such as cybernetics, systems theory, and others. This is particularly so with regard to a shift of basic concepts from the prevailing mechanically based world-view. The pragmatically oriented culture of 'the industrial era' calls for simple solutions to problems posed within concepts as 'Economic Welfare' and the invisible acceptance of premises such as the anthropocentrically grasped notion 'Progress'. The various systems science may lay the foundations for Lord Snow's "third science" and emphasize the increasing complexity and impacts of our intentional activities. A new general paradigm points out the limited feasibility of achieving our (human) dreams while remaining responsible for what we do.

The modern evolutionarily grounded world-view highlights the ever-changing nature of processes that arise from the interactions of matter, energy and information. The concept of information is essential for cybernetics in order to describe the phenomena participating on the system's organization (or better self-organization). A generally valid notion of information is one which accepts its self-referential character and its constitutive role within a system. However, the prevailing notion of "information" as understood within the constrains of modern information technology does not acknowledge information as a construct of the human mind. What we distinguish as information arises (emerges) from both immediate perception and previous cognition (knowledge, learning. experiences). Information, when distinguished as such, may expressed by symbols (data) in a form that can be captured, stored, transferred, transformed... Information retains constitutive role through the actions it may initiate or coordinate, directly or indirectly. The mutable process of interpretation consists in the actual acting rather than in ascribing meaning.. I would like point out a few problems:

According to the above, information changes the character and evolution of social systems. Because action depends on individual knowledge, the same data triggers different actions. In this way the increasing amount of data as mediated by information technology enhances variation and fluctuation within social systems as well as influencing the dynamics of their evolution. This alters the relation between conceptual and empirical information. At the same time there is a change in individual information competency so that the position of individuals and the distribution of power within a society changes. A new type of "anonymous power" emerges and leads to problems in the relation between individuals and society (parts and wholes).

The concept of information and its general consequences, as sketched above, has implications for many disciplines. One consequence is the necessity of a wider framework of considerations for organizations. The wider framework goes well beyond conventional IS/IT to include, among other, the media and education systems. This has implications for designed IS and ingenuous information (knowledge) management. Similarly, individual human knowledge must be considered in relation to education, and appropriate processes within "learning organization". In contrast to tele-teaching (as for example an electronic university) the author proposes the concept of action learning based on experiences of Prague's "Holiday school".

Dennis Sandow

Stephen Sloan

"I presented the first of a series of pieces entitled "My Current Self-Description of Manic Depression in a System" at the May, 1995, American Society of Cybernetics conference in Chicago, honoring Heinz von Foerster. The presentation was very well received. I felt great about it. Yet, less than a month after making the presentation, while I was attending in a week long tai chi workshop in San Francisco, I relapsed into an altered state of mind in which I began closing up in conversation with myself again. Afterwards, I did not take proper care of myself, and within a few months, I was hospitalized for complications from diabetes again. I did not go into a coma this time, but I contacted an infection that required my foot be amputated.

Alan Stewart

Pie in the sky? I suggest that there are key cybernetic principles which can be brought forth to help create and sustain this kind of culture. My fundamental premises are that ‘Intelligence is a property of conversation' (Gordon Pask). I claim that when conditions are right for conversing, including it being explicit that ‘We will treat each other well' and that ‘We're in this together', intelligence automatically emerges. This intelligence can be observed as people being continuously questioning, creative, curious, committed and playful. When this is in place, new knowledge is created from questions that arise in conversation. And that this is precisely the knowledge which companies need to sustain their business, keep flexible in the competitive world and be enjoyable organizations to 'work' for.

I will outline the epistemological and ontological foundations of such a culture, drawing heavily on insights derived from the new cognitive sciences (the science of wholeness) as articulated by Humberto Maturana and as practised by Meg Wheatley and others. Features include notions of autonomy, closure, the observer, love, surrender, truth and unity (Lloyd Fell). And I will introduce stories from the rich heritage of systemic thinking (Robert Flood) and of organizations based on principles and practice of Open Space Technology (Harrison Owen and Birgitt Williams). I will also explore implications for leadership in promoting recognition that conversing is working and that time and space be allocated accordingly. Creating the architecture and other infrastructure for this process to happen and be maintained is challenging yet vital work.

Fleurette Sweeney

During this playshop the participants can expect to participate in several traditional English folk songs folk song-games, selected for the way they ‘hold' oral English. Connections will be drawn between the patterning of acoustic properties in these songs and in spoken English, namely:

• the melody of the songs reflects intonation in speech;
• the rhythm of the songs corresponds to patterns of articulation in speech;
• the phrases and cadence in the songs correspond to those in ordinary speech;
• the loud/soft clustering of sounds within phrases and word groupings in the songs, parallels similar dynamic patterning of stress/unstress relationships in speech.

The song-games have been developed in conjunction with children and teachers in classrooms across Canada and the United States over the past 30 years. Although the education of children has been the specific focus of this work, I will guide the participants to reflect on aspects of the type of social play with particular emphasis on oral language (both sung and spoken) as patterned sound.

Stuart A. Umpleby

The history of cybernetics in recent decades suggests that these two kinds of more general theories require different strategies to win their acceptance. It appears that the second type of theory is easier to call attention to. One need only ask how the position of the observer affects the observation. More abstract theories seem to be more difficult to call attention to, particularly when the audience is academic specialists. Specialists in one field often see no need for a more general theory that will show the relationship of theories in that field to theories in other fields. Also, more abstract theories cannot stand by themselves. They require the "domain specific knowledge" of existing disciplines to connect theories with observations. It may be that research administrators, who may perceive an advantage in catalyzing research within their institutions, will be more interested in the first type of general theory than specialists within academic disciplines.

Randall Whitaker

The integration of the Internet into global life opens a new context for conflict - one in which IW takes precedence over traditional (physical) warfighting. This also means any of us may encounter warfare with an immediacy unknown previously. Disturbingly, we can characterize current events in many domains of activity (e.g., the business domain) as IW. Even more disturbing is the prospect of IW as the most 'human' (as opposed to humane) warform - a mode of adversarial interaction involving the very essence of our 'humanness'.

The praxis of IW research mandates a coherent vantage on IW's operational context to support descriptive and explanatory analyses. Much IW literature concentrates on systems of 'language' (i.e., symbols and their vehicles), leading to a narrow focus on (e.g.) 'hacking'. This obscures the fact that the intended effects of IW relate to the humans engaging those language systems. To properly account for these effects one must invoke second-order cybernetics, incorporating the observer into the equation. The observer must be addressed in terms of both her self-engagement (reflective cognition) and her coupling with other entities (human or technical).

To accomplish this requires acknowledging languaging (cf. Maturana, 1978, 1988) as the fundamental context of both IW descriptions and explanations. It is through languaging that (a) observation and the observer arise, and (b) linguistic interactions among observers are conducted. As such, languaging is the fundamental context for addressing both intra- and inter-observer phenomena. It is also the fundamental context for addressing our 'humanness', because "...language defines humanity." (Maturana, 1988b, 6.i.) We therefore find an intersection between the fundamental contexts for description / explanation for both 'being human' and information warfare. This recommends our community of interest as a population well-equipped to address the emergent (and prospectively dominant) mode of conflict for the coming decades.

Randall Whitaker and Ulf Essler.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the praxis of current research to illuminate the intersection of second-order cybernetics principles and enquiry into the rapidly-proliferating area of electronic commerce (eCommerce). Business and management communities have been trying to understand eCommerce by analyzing cyberspace with theories and practices evolved in and for the physical business venue ("real space"). Such approaches underestimate how much cyberspace negates or obviates presumptions of established business practices and theories. Cyberspace has de-territorialized business, and eCommerce must be addressed in a new perspective unencumbered by historically-territorialized concepts. Furthermore, conventional business models focus on one (one's own) enterprise as a discrete producer of marketable outputs involved in a linear 'value chain' leading from raw materials to consumer. In practice, online businesses more closely resemble Normann and Ramirez's (1994) 'value constellations' - nonlinearly interconnected networks.

Business transactions can be usefully differentiated into three phases of interaction between supplier and consumer. Customer actions in the earliest, exploratory, poremptive phase are no longer constrained to vendor-selected channels of access. As a result, control over customer poremptive activity is surrendered to the customers themselves or to intermediaries. Business modeling must therefore account for fluid connectivity and interactivity among providers and customers.

Traditional business modeling focuses upon optimum enterprise infrastructure (structural composition) -- a view circumscribed by the bounds of the enterprise itself. We focus upon an enterprise's configuration of actions and operations -- a vantage whose delimitation expands to the bounds of those domain(s) in which the enterprise operates. We call such a configuration the enterprise's agitecture , which connotes an enterprise's activities as an entity within a domain of interactions with other entities.

Our agitectural emphasis has allowed us to take a fresh look at business modeling issues and eCommerce. We now approach eCommerce as the generation of interactional value in providing an affordance a consumer (e.g., an individual customer; another business) elects to pursue. We have recast the notion of 'aggregation' in terms of interactions rather than channels of access per se. We have also been able to redefine the conventional construct of 'intermediation' along a linear value chain as 'paramediation' among actors in a nonlinearly-connected value constellation. These and other innovations permit us to evaluate eCommerce in terms more appropriate to the emerging business venue of cyberspace.

Elizabeth White

Philip Wrigley