PART ONE

After 50 years of Cybernetics and more than 40 years of Systemics, we have seen very little of their use in practical issues, especially the most important global ones. And effectively as many issues are becoming swiftly global, we have possibly a very short time left to apply our understanding of complex systems to the array of new problems which are emerging in a most precipitous way.

This seems to be a good time to try to understand why this is happening, and to see what could be done to correct this very unsatisfactory situation. So, the question is, why are so many of us so far away from these real and practical issues, while they rapidly turn into global messes?

It seems to me that, while in theory we are adepts of global systemic views, many of us are only interested in our overly simplified specific and favored models, held mostly in accordance with our static traditional and fragmentary outlook .

And in fact, closely shut up within our narrow windowless specialized professional cells, we are apparently unable to grasp the wider view. Most of us do not seem interested in or do not believe that we can do anything practical about those wider issues (the "That's not my field" attitude about real human and social issues, denounced many years ago by the founding fathers of ISSS,) or are not even merely trying to reach a clearer view in order to find some better adapted personal conduct.

Do we really have nothing to say? Can we really do nothing about, for example, abusive uses of infonets, economic disparity, or the excesses of the lawsuits industry, or the wildfire disaster of human abuse?

Can we really not reach a clearer idea of the underlying social and historical forces that could explain these negative situations? And have we really no personal responsibility to do anything about all this?

After all, if we do not use our systemic-cybernetic concepts and models to these ends, even while using some in our own business, one may as well ask oneself which real and global value do they carry, and let someone else carry the ball.

A general result of this lack of a deeper mental and psychological compromise is, of course, our frequent and pityfully inefficiency as active and useful participants to the life and well-being of our communities. We leave them mostly at the mercy of the various breeds of rabble-rousers, of scheming abusers, of swindlers, of incompetent tinkerers and of downright criminals.

We have the needed tools to construct better model[s] for the understanding of issues and their eventual management. But we seem to ignore it. This can even be observed in some insufficiently enlightened systemic groups whose good will and intentions remain impaired in practical action.

For such practical action, as well as mental and spiritual reconstruction in this swiftly changing world, we urgently need to apply the new understanding of which we are [the] potential bearers ...and first of all to find new ways toward useful action.

We face however three very serious hurdles, all of them resulting of our own readily observable shortcomings:. -The very limited number of so-called or would-be systemists who really have made a serious and more or less permanent effort to study and assimilate systemic concepts and models in a coherent way. -The still more limited number of people who really tried to apply such knowledge to some real situations and have learned lessons from the results. -The incoercible tendency of specialists who acquired a superficial smattering of systemics, to run back in a hurry to their cosy specialized niche.

If such attitudes persist in the future, it is obvious that: -Systemics will never be understood and accepted by specialists of any denomination as a necessary tool for coherent, non-contradictory action when collaboration with other specialists in some common complex action would be needed. -Complex issues will continue to be tackled in an unorganized way, in accordance with the famous Indian tale about the approach of a bunch of blind people trying to understand and describe an elephant. -We will be growingly exposed to try to pilot merely parts of ailing complex systems by blindly using our ever increasing material and digital power to erase symptoms instead of the causes. In this way global issues will become messes, with a growing risk to explode in macro- or megacatastrophes. What could be done?

We should try to create, worldly and in an open way, a kind of "invisible college" whose tentative program could be to: -Create good material in all important languages in order to widely diffuse systemic concepts and models. We could even begin with reprints of former valuable works and translations of good existing information. -Create a widening group of people vowing to organize transdisciplinarian, transprofessional, transcultural, transracial (etc...) groups whenever possible anywhere to study real complex issues and work out proposals for their better management. -Seek and obtain material means in order to further these goals more efficiently and easily.

Mental tools and practical methods in systemic ways

Hereafter I will try to define in a very synthetic overview how systemic and cybernetic concepts and models could be used in practical issues. They are, generally speaking, tools for the reshaping of a coherent worldview. Let us remember that the old western humanistic view - now mostly in ruins as culturally provincial and at the same time unable to cope with specialized fragmentalism - was in the past the main factor of resilience of our sociocultural systems when challenged by some historical crisis.

Now however, the complexity of our systems has increased relentlessly, but not so our understanding of this complexity.

In this sense, cybernetics and systemics are very probably an incipient immunological mental and social reaction of humankind to the new challenges.

So let us try to see how they could be used.

Charles Francois

This is end of Part One. Part Two will be found at

http://www.isss.org/primer/coremod.htm

Please visit the ISSS website at http://isss.org/homepage.html

and the Primer web page at http://isss.org/primer/

Return to Homepage