This contribution offers reflections about Chilean Cybersyn, 50 years ago. In recent years, Cybersyn, has received significant attention. It was the brainchild of Stafford Beer, who conceived it to support the transformation of the Chilean economy from its bureaucratic history to hopefully create a vibrant and modern society, driven by cybernetic tools. These aspects have received much attention in recent times; however, in this contribution, I want to discuss how working in Cybersyn influenced my work after the coup of 1973. (...) Perhaps, for me, its major influence was in the management of complexity, through what I refer here as variety engineering and through the Viable System Model VSM as a paradigm to the management of relationships with implications to enterprises, society and the economy. After the 1973 coup major interest was in technological aspects of Cybersyn such as real-time management and its contribution to decision support and executive information systems. In the late 70s I was personally influenced by information management, but by the early 1980s my work moved towards methodological aspects of how to use the VSM. By 1989 I had created the VIPLAN method. Key questions I attempted to answer were, how to model the complexity of enterprises and their interactions with environmental agents. Later on, in the 1990s and 2000s, the main direction of my work was epistemological, ontological and methodological towards second-order cybernetics and relationships. Only in recent decades the political transformations proposed by Cybersyn have captured the imagination of many commentators. The confluence of social and cultural changes with information technology, data models, artificial intelligence, algorithms and several additional technological developments have challenged the excesses of capitalism, particularly after the banking crisis of 2008–2009. The purpose in this paper is discussing this evolution in the light of those early days in Chile. (shrink)

This contribution offers the author’s personal experience with a project that took place 25 years ago in Latin America. This was about Second Order Auditing in Colombia during the second part of the 1990s. This project was carried out at the Country’s National Auditing Office, and was an application of the Viable System Model and the Viplan Methodology to a National Context. It was an innovative project at the CGR, focused on Second Order Auditing, to improve communications within the fabric (...) of the Colombian government. Its emphasis was building responsible trust between public enterprises, ministries and political agencies. Its emphasis was building communications between ministries and public entities, with the aim of increasing their effectiveness. At its core were methodological and epistemological developments. Key questions it attempted to answer were how to model the complexity of the enterprises and how to transform the auditors’ views of their relations with people in public entities, from one focused on requesting information, to one focused on communications. Structural changes were proposed for the National Audit Office and state enterprises, and hundreds of auditors were trained, through epistemological methodological workshops, in second order auditing and the reports of their auditing were debated extensively in government and beyond. This paper finishes with a short discussion of these transformations in the light of organisational cybernetics and in particular of the Viable System Model. (shrink)

Today, societal decisions in areas of complexity are often dominated by one of three alternative ways: (a) by scientists, nowadays often in combination with commercial interest; (b) by politicians alone; and (c) by simply “laissez-faire,” or “the tyranny of small steps.” None of these three ways of decision making is fully democratic because they do not create enough awareness among the politicians and the general public. One reason is that the decision making basis becomes too narrowly framed and fragmented. Biotechnology (...) will continue to feed society with new democratic challenges for many years, perhaps decades, to come. The initially promising ideas of participative and deliberative democracy do not seem to solve the awareness problem. Instead, the authors propose an approach with more structured efforts for awareness building with transparency and participation taking place within the framework of representative democracy. (shrink)