UK Cybernetics Society

Citation

(2006), "UK Cybernetics Society", Kybernetes, Vol. 35 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2006.06735iab.003

UK Cybernetics Society

Cybernetics Society 2005-2006 Meetings

A series of successful meetings was organised by the Cybernetics Society in London, UK, during the current year 2005-2006. The conference held in September 2005 has already been reported in this journal and other summaries of the events and meetings organised by the society will be published in issues of Kybernetes, Vol. 36, 2007.

Kybernetes is represented at the society by Dr Alex M. Andrew, the internet Editor. He can be contacted at: alexandrew@britishlibrary.net

Cybernetics Society Meeting-27 February 2006

Using cybernetics to evaluate and design social organisations, Dr Shann Turnbull addressed the meeting, which was held at King's College Council Room, London in February last. He was particularly well qualified to speak about using cybernetics and social organisations and he has written extensively on economic reform. He has a background which includes studies at, Melbourne, Hobart, Harvard and Macquarie. We are informed that he participated in the re-organisation of a dozen listed Australian companies as a shareholder/chairman and/or CEO from 1967 to 1974. He has founded a number of businesses, three of which became listed in Australia. He became a founding author in 1975 of the first educational qualification in the world for company directors and used his PhD research to create an MBA course for designing governance systems in the public, private and non-profit sectors.

In a summary of his presentation, he says that:

Command and control hierarchies are the dominant communication and control architecture of organizations in the advanced societies. These are not found in nature as they are inconsistent with cybernetic laws identified by Von Neumann, Shannon and Ashby. The network of nested network firms found around the Spanish town of Mondragon were used to illustrate how requisite variety of communications and control provide sustainable competitive advantages and how their architecture represents a continuum of the holonic architecture of nature.

The society looks ahead to further successful events when the trans-multidisciplinary nature of cybernetics will again be illustrated to such good effect.