Tag: adaptation

Categories
cybernetics

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 […]

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cybernetics

Organisational Holism

Field Integration Protocol — Metaphysical Complexity in Organisational Strategy 1. Orientation Every organisation lives within a field larger than itself—an ecology of signal and response. Leadership is not command but participation in coherence. Institutions, like thought, are recursive epistemic fields. They translate the world into language, law, and data. When translation hardens into doctrine, systems […]

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cybernetics

Phase Modulation and the Evolutionary Field

Biological evolution can be read not as a ladder of material refinement but as a synchronisation phenomenon—a system exhibiting Kuramoto-like synchronisation (1984), a mathematical model of how independent oscillators—like fireflies or human hearts—fall into rhythm. Each organism, gene, or mind acts as an oscillator, sustaining an internal rhythm through cycles of metabolism, reproduction, or thought. […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Necessary Distance: Why Perfect Synchrony Destroys Identity

Imagine a crowd of fireflies. Each blinks on its own rhythm, yet over time many begin to flash together. The spectacle is mesmerizing, but beneath the beauty lies a puzzle: if they all blink at precisely the same instant, the individuality of each vanishes into a single, undifferentiated pulse. This isn’t just a curiosity of […]

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cybernetics

OODA Budo

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, writing in the 19th century, observed that no plan of operations could be expected to survive first contact with the enemy. His insight was not that planning was useless, but that the continuity of command intent required adaptation under conditions of uncertainty. Strategy, as Moltke framed it, could not be […]

Categories
cybernetics

When Technology Owns Our Experience More Than We Do

Technology inserts itself into experience by mediating, amplifying, and normalising it. What once belonged to us in the raw, unfiltered sense is now shaped by templates and signals recycled from past data points. The repetition of what is measurable and recognisable makes certain experiences feel inevitable, while sidelining the nuance that refuses codification. This isn’t […]

Categories
cybernetics

On Meta-Stability: Why Things Have to Break

We keep lying to ourselves about stability. The polite story is that systems aim for balance, that institutions exist to keep things steady, that culture and politics and technology are here to make life manageable. But none of that is quite true. Things don’t hold together because they are stable in any simple sense. They […]

Categories
cybernetics

Recursive Tension: Orbit Frame, Logical Orbit, and the Viability of Communication, Culture, and Ecological Systems

Abstract This paper advances a cybernetic account of complex adaptive systems in which coherence is sustained by unresolved tension rather than equilibrium. The orbit frame is introduced as a relational model that represents systems as networks of elastic constraints across gaps that never fully close. Logical orbit is defined as the recursive dynamical process that […]

Categories
cybernetics

Entropic Respiration

For a system to persistently self-sustain, it has to negotiate and/or “exhale” its own waste products as entropy. Generating waste that is reusable by something or someone else is all but ubiquitous in biology. Human systems (and consequences, in a scaled, industrial and technological sense) might be uniquely distinguished by the volume, diversity and cadence […]

Categories
technology

Education and AI

We have stepped across an event horizon in which accelerating rates of technical change and the proliferation of “cognitive” tools have outpaced our personal, professional and/or collective ability to stay on top of the diversity and utility of these rapidly speciating systems. Strategic planning for education (as much as for the broader world) will be […]

Categories
communication

AI Ethics, Alignment, Responsibility, Strategy

Responsibility is significant. Aligned factors: the most disruptive feature of new technology is counter-intuitively NOT (or at least not only) the novel artefact, entity or system. It is the literally self-sustaining(!) discontinuity by and through which existing and persisting organisational or communications systems defensively lash themselves to the mast of strategic and communicative anachronisms. They […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI and Strategy

The relationship of new technologies with sustainable organisational learning and growth is not itself new. It’s a journey of adaptive sociotechnical integration that is as beneficial to consider in the strategic whole as it is mandatory to define and refine in the instrumental parts. What is new is that non-linear effects are inevitable at scale. […]