This event will be held in conjunction with the
50th Anniversary Meeting of the American Society of Cybernetics which commences in Washington DC on Monday 4th August.
What can a cybernetic perspective bring to the issues of the day? With examples from Iraq, HealthCare, Transportation, and Finance.
"Monday August 4, 4-6 pm
George Washington Business School, DUQUES HALL,
2201 G Street NW, Room 258
The decision maker of today is faced with a complex world
composed of many open, value-laden, multi-level, multi-component
systems, situated in turbulent, unstable, and changing environments.
When a plane crash in eastern Ukraine with 298 people aboard will
affect the European gas supply, health care for AIDS patients, the
decisions of the UN Security Council, and international sanctions --
which will then alter trading on the NYSE, world trading partnerships,
British real estate prices and the American economy -- that complexity
seems both obvious and paralyzing.
Complexity is the
source of very difficult scientific challenges for observing,
understanding, reconstructing and predicting the multi-dimensional
dynamics of present-day systems. Cybernetics is the science of reflexive
constraints in systems consisting of many participants -- all of whom
observe, decide, act, observe, etc. It examines the role of context and
assumptions which together help shape the understanding of both problems
and their potential solutions.
When what is happening
in your world doesn't make sense, when it doesn't conform to your
beliefs about how things work, it's time to ask hard questions.
Cybernetics is the science of developing those questions by examining
both the situation and the people and institutions charged with
achieving adequate management, regulation or control.
While
the hard sciences may suggest that decision makers consider all the
information they can about both the current situation and the past, and
then with a sense of desired outcomes, lay plans of action to get to
those outcomes, cybernetics exposes the “wishful thinking” this entails.
Cybernetics questions our ability to rely on "predictive" models by
noting the blinders built into the models themselves.
We
bring into our decision-making process flaws and errors of our own. All
of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We
typically focus on anything that agrees with our view of the world and
the outcome we want. We need to acknowledge our tendency to incorrectly
process challenging news and actively push ourselves to hear that which
fails to match our prior expectations.
Cybernetics
helps you develop the very questions you should ask of both yourself
and of the situation you are examining. It highlights the pitfalls when
one attempts to understand the whole as a "black box." The view of
that crash from Donetsk differs greatly from the view in Iowa City.
Cybernetics
highlights the constraints as you map and parameterize inputs and
outputs, and as you observe systemic behaviors. Most importantly, it
demands reflective questioning when you decompose the system into its
constituent subsystems, recursively, until you think you have reached a
natural stopping place for decision-making. Such questioning may, for
example, help guide British policy toward Russian banking sanctions.
In
order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world throws
at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which is (at least)
as nuanced as the problems you face. Cybernetics should be part of your
repertoire."
