Cybernetics is way of understanding systems with a focus on relationships and dynamics between humans, technology and physical environments. Cybernetics acknowledges that systems are complex and comprise a myriad of feedback loops that inform the way those systems operate, fluctuate, and change (or learn) over time.
Cybernetics is an ancient idea8 that was given new life at the dawn of the computing age. Norbert Weiner, in predicting the path of bombers and anti-aircraft machines in WWII, realised that these old cybernetic principles of goal-directed adaptive systems could be applied not just to humans (how we synthesise information and decide how to react, which in turns changes our environment) but also to technologies and ecologies.
Thus began the cybernetics movement that is most familiar today. In the postWWII period, when people were forming approaches to managing the rapid growth of computing technology and exploring the question of how we can incorporate the cultural and ecological into the design of new technologies that contribute to a safer world (as opposed to the design of technologies that wrought devastation in World War II), the Macy’s conferences were an extraordinary convening of ideas and set the benchmark for cybernetics through the
20th century.
Cybernetics has been a generative intellectual wellspring across the world – it helped shape everything from AI to critical systems theory, computer-driven art and music, design thinking, poststructuralist philosophy and the internet.
Its success in so many areas was ultimately the reason for the decline in the use of the word. However, with the recent rapid increase in technology development – the promise that was imagined in the 1940s is to some extent finally here – cybernetics is again an important platform from which to make meaningful change in the world. Cybernetics has been applied successfully to organisational design, psychiatry/psychology, robotics and large-scale change in other areas11, and has given rise to a range of systems theories*.
* For those keen to explore more, take a look at Beer’s Viable Systems Models, Checkland’s Soft Systems methodology, Bateson’s Family Systems Theory, and Ulrich and Midgley’s critical systems approaches, and associated post-structuralist work including Latour’s Actor Network Theory, affordance theory.
The application of recent evolutions in cybernetic theory to issues of leadership remains under-explored and a fertile area for practice. Cybernetics is a way to imagine steering systems safely in the world, and recognising the importance of ecology, people and technology in all systems.
Stay tuned, next up in this series of extracts, we will bring you – Leadership and cybernetic skills for leading change.