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The purpose of this paper is to present and explain an enactive tool to be used by managers to move effectively in the context of high uncertainty and complexity that organizations nowadays operate.

The approach raises in the enactive management that focusses on the ability of the manager to incorporate distinctions as an observer and self-observer to design interactions that can move the situation to be transformed. The key ontological tool that allow this learning is called CLEHES©.

Using a soft technology as CLEHES, re configures the ways to observe and self-observe of manager and opens the design possibilities of the situation in which the organization is. Managers become choreographers in the sense they can design and move the interactions they observe. The embodied us of this tool requires an educational program that takes the form of hermeneutical laboratory where managers incorporate distinctions in the body and change the perspective they enact.

This approach evokes changes in the observer and the enactor situation/situated in the organizational areas where the manager is responsible.

A different and nurturing technology to self-observer and observation, allow enactive management in multiples domains and organizational contexts where the manager dance. The structural dynamics of the CLEHES dimensions creates multiples realities, through enactive conversations in a learning self-awareness process.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the learning and adaptation of those particular human beings that manage modern companies. They are challenged not only by a very high rate of change, which is common to all of us, but by the fact that they are responsible for the viability of organizations that deal with a far larger complexity.

The methodologies used were self‐observation and observation of the actors that constitute a company by means of CLEHES, an ontological tool, and VIPLAN, an epistemic reference. Both together help enabling communications and conversations in different contexts and domains that otherwise would have been cognitively inhibited.

These tools have been used as an enactive management approach that has allowed the effective growth of a small organization, which is the focus of this paper.

The paper contains useful thinking, enaction and reflecting on the awareness to conserve and change structural adjustments.

The paper shows how crisscrossing between an ontological tool – CLEHES and an epistemic tool–VIPLAN permits enacting organizational communications and conversations between human beings as managers to take care of their organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to show and explain an innovative educational program in management and engineering called “Human Re‐Engineering for Action” that provides the students with different distinctions to make in their observations to allowing to face and manage complex embodied organizational problems and situations.

The methodology used in the program is based on the creation of conditions which allow embodied learning and therefore, creating enactive meta‐observers able to open new possibilities of action in different organizational contexts and domains. The program uses labs, maps, workshops, and ludic storytelling sessions structured through an ontological tool called CLEHES© which serves as a facilitator of observations of experience to enhance awareness of constructive possibilities.

Observations made by the graduates of the course over years have shown that the major achievement of the program is that it changes the graduates' paradigm in use from an external of reality to an embodied one which they have been using to cope more effectively with seemingly very complex organizational problems.

This approach evokes a new conception of responsibility in self‐management, giving senior staff new abilities and embodied skills to deal with practical organizational problems in a more effective way.

A new strategy for educating managers and engineers is presented and explained in this paper, where through the richness of distinctions in aspects of complexity based on the CLEHES dimensions, a variety of different recursive and recurrent organizational problem situations are brought to closure through the actions of the very same human beings who had created the organizations in the first place.

All sectors of the economy have shortfalls in the quantity and quality of management development, but a notably large skills gap is in the not‐for‐profit sector, compounded by a reluctance among many managers in the sector to engage with learning management skills. The purpose of this paper is to report on a novel approach which has successfully deployed web technology to create a soap‐opera style of material for the purposes of informal experiential learning for managers in that sector.

An action learning approach was used.

It has proved feasible to deploy the processes and style of soap‐opera (continuing drama) to the development of non‐formal management development materials. It has also been feasible to find and develop a team of authors with suitable management experience and fiction‐writing skills.

This is based on a single case study developed in a particular set of circumstances, so its generalisability has not been fully evaluated.

Significant appropriate management and technical resources are needed to set up and produce this type of material on a continuing basis.

Many managers are unable to participate in formal management education, but are hard to reach. Their needs are not simply for information, but also for a sense of a learning community and for engaging material, communicated with some drama and clearly relevant to their everyday experience.

The project relates to a unique large‐scale initiative to address hard‐to‐reach groups in need of management development.

The purpose of this paper is to explicate the ways in which the practice of the dramatic arts has evolved to facilitate second-order observation of social systems and can be used to “pragmatize” systems thinking for a wider audience.

Survey of selected dramatic theory and practice from the nineteenth century to the present framed within the cyber-systemic theories of Niklas Luhmann, Werner Ulrich and Oswaldo Garcia de la Cerda and Maria Saavedra Ulloa.

Beginning with Naturalism in the late nineteenth century, theatrical practitioners have increasingly revealed the structure of social systems through their work, largely without any explicit adoption or deployment of systems theory. Current methods of theatrical presentation are highly compatible with cyber-systemic heuristics and could be used to make this body of theory known to a wider public.

Work involving the direct application of systems theory to theatrical practice is still in its very early stages.

Despite the lack of direct influence by systems theory, Western theatrical practice has evolved in such a way as to facilitate increased opportunities for second-order observation of, and subsequent intervention in, the structure of social systems. The deliberate cultivation and integration of systems theory could allow theatre to become a significant tool for the explication of systems theory to the general public in a highly practical manner.

As a communal and, in certain forms, interactive endeavour, a systems-oriented theatrical practice can provide an inclusive public space for the critique of social systems as they are currently structured and for the modelling of alternative structures.

Theorizing selected moments of theatre history as the development of platforms for second-order observation is a unique analytical approach. The applications suggested in this paper may lead to novel approaches to the development of systems literacy across society.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a more central role for reflexive artistic practices in a clarified research agenda for second-order cybernetics (SOC). This is offered as a way to assist the field in the further development of its theoretical/methodological “core” and, subsequently, enhance its impact on the world.

The argument begins by reviewing Karl Müller’s account of the failure of SOC to emerge as a mainstream endeavor. Then, Müller’s account is recontextualized within recent developments in SOC that are traced through the Design Cybernetics movement inspired by Ranulph Glanville. This alternate narrative frames a supposedly moribund period as a phase of continuing refinement of the field’s focus upon its “proper object of study,” namely, the observer’s mentation of/about their mentation. The implications of this renewed focus are then positioned within Larry Richard’s vision of the cybernetician, not as “scientist” per se but rather as a “craftsperson in and with time” capable of productively varying the dynamics of their daily interactions. Having centered widespread capacity building for this “craft” as a proposed research agenda for a new phase of SOC, the paper concludes by pointing to the unique and necessary role to be played by the arts in this endeavor. Personal reflections upon the author’s own artistic and theoretical activities are included throughout.

The development and application of artistic methods for the enhancement of individual capacity for second-order observation is consistent with the purpose of SOC, namely, “to explain the observer to himself.” Therefore, it is in the field’s interest to more fulsomely embrace non-scientific, arts-based forms of research.

In a truly reflexive/recursive fashion, the very idea that first-person, arts-based narratives are seen, from a mainstream scientific point of view, as an insufficiently rigorous form of research is, itself, a research limitation. This highlights, perhaps ironically, the need for cybernetics to continue to pursue its own independent definitions and standards of research beyond the boundaries of mainstream science rather than limiting its own modes of inquiry in the name of “scientific legitimacy.”

A general uptake of the view presented here would expand the horizon of what might be considered legitimate, rigorous and valuable research in the field.

The view presented here implies that many valuable contributions that SOC can make to society take place beyond the constraints of academic publication and within the realm of personal growth and social development.

The very clearly defined and “refocused” vision of SOC in this paper can be of substantial utility in developing a more robust, distinctive and concrete research agenda across this field.

Accrediting boards and employers agree that there is a growing need for engineering leadership training. The aforementioned recognized, soft skills training is still an incipient initiative in the engineering discipline. This paper aims to summarize the implementation of the Engineering Leadership Program at the School of Engineering, where the implementation process uses the model for learning and teaching proposed by Reyes and Zarama, 1998b, as a strategy to embody engineering leadership capabilities. The best practices in regard to the capabilities that promote engineering leadership are discussed. The final remarks highlight the relevance of the active student roles in the development of the Engineering Leadership Program.

The author describes the implementation of the Engineering Leadership Program using Reyes and Zarama’s process of embodying distinctions.

The use of systemic models for teaching and learning in the implementation of Engineering Leadership Programs helps facilitate leadership competencies in students. The implementation of “engineering leadership” as complementary activity in the engineering curriculum demonstrated individual and program advantages – in comparison to solely modifying the current engineering curriculum.

This work enhances the understanding of how engineering schools can design activities to promote engineering leadership in former engineers as is requested by international accreditation boards and by engineering employers.