Category: cybernetics

Sensemaking in Organisations

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
No Comments on Sensemaking in Organisations

Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations emerged from a dissatisfaction with how organisations were typically described: as decision machines, information processors, or rational planners. Weick’s work cut against that grain. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and organisational studies, he focused instead on how people inside organisations actually come to understand what they are doing, usually after they […]

Tags action and interpretation, administrative decision making, algorithmic decision systems, attention management, authority and compliance, automation and governance, brittle institutions, bureaucratic rationality, bureaucratic systems, causality in social systems, collective cognition, communication in organizations, complex adaptive organizations, compression of feedback loops, coordination versus adaptability, crisis management systems, cybernetics and organizations, decision cycles, delay in organizations, digital bureaucracy, entropy in organizational systems, feedback and control, governance systems, high reliability organizations, information overload, institutional behavior, knowledge management limits, language and administration, logic of coordination, managerial ideology, media ecology in institutions, operational coherence, operational resilience, operational tempo, organizational control, organizational dynamics, organizational fragility, organizational learning failure, organizational sensemaking, philosophy of action, platform organizations, policy implementation, political organizations, political philosophy of institutions, procedural language, psychology of organizations, public sector management, retrospective meaning, signal and reception, structural realism in organizations, system design principles, systemic failure modes, systems theory in management, technocratic governance, technological acceleration, temporal structure of decision making, uncertainty management

cybernetics

Field Logic and Semiotics

Post author By G
Post date Jan 10, 2026
No Comments on Field Logic and Semiotics

This essay advances a limited but precise claim: meaning in communicative systems depends on structured delay, and that delay is constitutive of causal relations rather than incidental to them. Where there is a point of emission and a point of reception, the signal that passes between them is not merely a connector. It participates in […]

Tags algorithmic governance, attention economy, authoritarian language, boundaries and systems, causality in politics, communication collapse, communication fields, communication systems, complex adaptive systems, conflict semiotics, control and coordination, control society, coordination vs adaptability, crisis governance, cybernetics, delay theory, democratic fragility, differentiation theory, entropy and governance, environment and system, feedback loops, field logic, identity and difference, ideology and language, information and power, institutional dynamics, language and violence, language under pressure, meaning and causality, meaning production, media ecology, non-coincidence, organizational theory, phase difference, platform politics, policy communication, political acceleration, political communication, political entropy, political systems analysis, political theory, post-linguistic semiotics, power and meaning, pre-symbolic meaning, propaganda dynamics, recursive systems, self-reference, semantic compression, semantic degradation, semiotics, sign theory, signal and receiver, signal propagation, strategic communication, structural entropy, structured delay, systems collapse, systems theory, technocracy critique, uncertainty displacement, war and language, war systems analysis

cybernetics

Policy Brief: Field Logic, Delay, and Runaway Self-Reinforcement

Post author By G
Post date Jan 8, 2026
No Comments on Policy Brief: Field Logic, Delay, and Runaway Self-Reinforcement

Field logic approaches complex systems as relational fields sustained by difference over time, not as collections of discrete components governed by linear causation. It is most relevant where systems are fast, tightly coupled, and vulnerable to runaway self-reinforcement, as in contemporary technological, media, and political environments. In these regimes prediction does not mean forecasting specific […]

cybernetics

Populism

Post author By G
Post date Jan 6, 2026
No Comments on Populism

What we are dealing with is not primarily a moral or semantic crisis, even though it is experienced that way. Planetary-scale communication systems behave like physical systems with dense feedback and high throughput: they develop statistical biases toward states that reproduce the conditions of their own continuation. These systems have ontic reality—that is, they are […]

cybernetics

Meaning: Uncertainty Disco

Post author By G
Post date Jan 2, 2026
No Comments on Meaning: Uncertainty Disco

Meaning does not exist in words, ideas, or intentions taken in isolation. It arises from a relational system in which elements acquire significance only through their differences from one another over time. Words are defined by other words; references defer to further references; interpretation always lags expression. That lag is not an accident or a […]

Tags adaptation, ambiguity, Artificial Intelligence, authoritarianism, automation, climate systems, coercive power, communication systems, complex governance, complex systems, control systems, cybernetic governance, cybernetics, disinformation, ecological collapse, entropy analogy, environmental crisis, Epistemology, fascism, feedback loops, field theory, geopolitics, global instability, Global Systems, governance-failure, information ecosystems, information entropy, knowledge systems, language philosophy, manifold semantics, meaning, meaninglessness, misinformation, planetary boundaries, planetary governance, platform governance, policy failure, political systems, post-truth politics, power dynamics, relational meaning, resilience, semiotics, shock absorption, socio-technical systems, systemic resilience, systemic risk, systemic-fragility, systems collapse, systems theory, technological systems, uncertainty

cybernetics

Civilisation Collapse

Civilisation is not a stable object. It is a continuous process of partial failure and provisional repair, with collapse always occurring somewhere while continuity is maintained elsewhere. What changes is not whether collapse happens, but its rate, distribution, and perceptibility. When coordination, trust, and meaning decay faster than institutions can reconstitute them, collapse ceases to […]

Tags civilisation, collapse, complex systems, continuity and collapse, coordination breakdown, entropy, field dynamics, governance-failure, historical cycles, institutional decay, meaning crisis, phase transition, social cohesion, societal resilience, systemic failure, systems theory, trust erosion, visibility of collapse

cybernetics

Service Delivery: Delay Is the Control Parameter

Post author By G
Post date Jan 1, 2026
1 Comment on Service Delivery: Delay Is the Control Parameter

Executive summary Delay is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is the control parameter that sets a system’s operating frequency. Most complex organisational and institutional service delivery systems tend to fail when their timing is misaligned with the realities they are intended to regulate. That misalignment is rarely visible as a single “slow […]

Tags adaptive-systems, burnout, change management, complex systems, complexity management, control theory, cybernetics, decision-making under uncertainty, delay, delay management, digital operations, emergency services, enterprise IT, error propagation, escalation loops, escalation management, feedback delay, feedback loops, frequency domain, frontline operations, governance design, healthcare systems, human factors, incident management, institutional failure, institutional trust, IT help desk, IT service management, itsm, KPIs, operational efficiency, operational excellence, operational resilience, operational risk, organisational behaviour, organisational debt, organisational design, organisational learning, organisational systems, performance metrics, phase lag, problem management, public sector services, queue dynamics, queueing theory, resilience engineering, rework, service delivery, service delivery management, service desk operations, service reliability, SLA design, socio-technical systems, system failure modes, system stability, systems control, systems theory, systems thinking, technical debt, throughput vs quality, workflow design, workload management

cybernetics

What Is New Year’s Eve?

New Year’s Eve is not a clean break in time. It is a maintenance ritual. It presents itself as a boundary between years, as if time were neatly divided and we simply step from one container into the next. That framing works because cognitive, communicative systems like ours require distinctions to operate. We draw lines […]

cybernetics

Exclusionary Tactics

I lost a great deal of time mistaking other people’s expectations for responsibilities I was obliged to meet. Not because they were explicit, but because they were ambient. They arrived as tone, as assumption, as the quiet sense that something was already required before any choice was made. Quietly, over years, I volunteered to process […]

cybernetics

Metabolic Power

Post author By G
Post date Dec 28, 2025
1 Comment on Metabolic Power

Modern power does not stabilise disorder. It metabolises it. At planetary scale, technological and financial systems do not merely respond to uncertainty. They generate specific instabilities that make their own interventions appear necessary, then present themselves as the most probable remedy. This is not a claim about intent. It is a structural tendency of adaptive […]

cybernetics

Freedom from Self

Post author By G
Post date Dec 26, 2025
1 Comment on Freedom from Self

Freedom is not something the self acquires; it is what becomes possible when the self loosens its grip. The more freedom is claimed by the self, the more tightly the self binds itself to definitions, expectations, dependencies, and obligations that must be maintained. Identity hardens. Choice narrows into rehearsal. Autonomy turns into enclosure. What is […]

Tags adaptive capacity, attention dynamics, authoritarian psychology, cognitive entrainment, complexity systems, field logic, freedom from self, global interdependence, identity and freedom, invariance under transformation, non self psychology, political affect, relational identity, rigidity and fragility, self-propagation, systemic collapse

cybernetics

Global Field Logic

Applying field logic to the global socio-economy means treating politics not as the source of direction but as a surface articulation of deeper structural dynamics. By field logic, I mean understanding social, economic, and technological systems as continuous relational environments that shape what can stabilise, propagate, or decay before intention, belief, or ideology come into […]

Tags attention economy, cascading failure, communication systems, complexity theory, edge of chaos, emergence, entropy dynamics, field logic, global socio economy, governance limits, harmonic structure, meaning and continuity, political affect, self-propagation, structural instability, systemic collapse