A History of Systemic and Cybernetic Thought From Homeostasis to the Teardrop

Introduction For students of systems thinking and information science, the period from the early 1940’s to the late 1970’s stands out as the period when some thirty eminent thinkers and scientists laid down the foundation theories for what we today know as “Systems Theory” and “Cybernetics”. While there is a great deal of literature that covers these two disciplines, the author’s search for a single published paper that briefly describes the background of the major thinkers, as well as their major contributions, yielded no results. There is a need for such a paper to be used as an introduction to students of systems, cybernetics and the information sciences, especially non-Latin speakers whose limited translation or economic resources make it difficult for them to obtain the source papers or journal articles. Even researchers living and working in states where third wave technologies are easily available , there is a need to make them aware of “systemic thinking” and the powerful insights it has given us to examine and understand the fundamental laws that govern all systems, whether the systems are simple or complex ones, natural or artificial, mechanical or living, social or economic. In so doing both students and professionals will gain a broader perspective to examine or model the system whether at the level of a cell or at the level of a supranational system such as a multinational organizations. In so doing, they will also gain an awareness of the scientific tools available to them to study and model the underlying variables and mechanisms to some of today’s immensely complex organizational and global problems whether they are climate change, collapsing economies, failed nation-states, terrorism, mass migration, or the destruction of natural and living resources.. While researching the background of many of the great systems and cybernetic thinkers, it became apparent that many of these thinkers were born during the period 1894 and 1934, and by the end of the twentieth century most had passed away. The loss of a great number of the founding fathers and theorists of the field of systems, particularly in the last ten to twenty years, will undoubtedly be felt most by those fortunate to have been their students, and those researchers fortunate to have come across their intellectual contributions. The ‘conversations’ they had with each other and the varied cultural and educational background they came from, will be hard to replicate by a new generation of systemic thinkers. The choice of ‘Teardrop’ in the title of this paper is to act as a metaphor to reflect the human emotion at the loss of such great thinkers. It is equally disheartening to see that by the end of the twentieth century that many of their contributions have not been given their just ‘intellectual and economic budget space’. The content of theory being published in many disciplines, especially the social sciences, proceeds with little reference to such eminent researchers as Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask and Stafford Beer. While today the word “system” is widely used, very few academics are still aware of the system models and concepts developed over the past half century by these eminent thinkers. Few of their ideas have penetrated the social science community circles and there is continued resistance to what is seen as the ‘mechanistic’ approach of cybernetics and the ‘generality’ of systems theory. The European background of many of the theorists (Ashby, Bateson, Beer, Boulding, Checkland, Pask, Atlan, Morin, Prigogine, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Paul Watzlawick, John von Neumann and Luhmann) is important to highlight, as well as a special mention of the contribution that the Latin American thinkers, most notably the Chileans Maturana and Varela, had on the corpus of systems knowledge. The early thinkers had to build a common language to scientifically relate their ideas irrespective of their varying disciplines and different cultural backgrounds. They were able to bring new and relevant insights to the new and emerging field of system science. Many of the early European system thinkers immigrated to the United States prior to the Second World War, and many of them were involved in the British and American operations research efforts during the war. Together with their American-born (Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener) counterparts they laid down a corpus of knowledge which we today call “Systems Theory”.