Join the discussion at LinkedIn: do you see stability, or change? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_theres-no-escape-from-the-fly-bottle-there-share-7508071308329496576-vgPl/
There’s no escape from the fly-bottle. There are only more or less useful fly-bottles (and knowing that is, of course, an escape).
I offered ‘A more useful fly-bottle – systems | cybernetics | complexity in six diagrams’.
It was ‘a’ view, in the spirit of ‘a history of rock and roll’: how I think about and work with these fields. Not a claim to define complexity or construct a complete meta-language. Heaven help us.
Any such overview oversimplifies. It reflects my history and proclivities. It risks being mistaken for the whole thing. So I wrote a critique.
The categories are heuristics, not reality. Insight doesn’t guarantee change. Viability isn’t legitimacy. Collaboration isn’t always desirable. Practices intended to enable learning can become coercive. Bringing traditions together may illuminate them, or quietly damage them.
Dave Snowden responded that the diagrams mislabel cybernetics as complexity: that they belong to the Ashby–Beer lineage of regulation and control, not to complexity science or a theory of emergence. I don’t accept that division.
Ashby’s law describes limits on regulation. It doesn’t require every disturbance to be known in advance, nor responses to remain fixed. Beer regarded an organisation capable only of reacting as pathological. The viable system model includes autonomy and adaptation. Second-order cybernetics puts the observer and their framing inside the account.
Developing the capacity to respond isn’t the same as specifying every response beforehand; nor is a constraint simply ‘enabling’ or ‘inhibiting’. A rule protecting a team’s experimental time inhibits its manager from commandeering it while enabling the team to discover something. Enabling what? For whom? At which level? For what purpose?
There is, though, a useful difference of emphasis.
Some people begin with: ‘What produces all this stability?’
Others begin with: ‘What produces all this change?’
That is a fruitful divide across the systems | cybernetics | complexity field. Neither starting point owns emergence, adaptation, or uncertainty.
Describing how to work with emergence is also different from explaining how it arises.
My ground – or groundlessness – is that the world is infinite pattern and unending nebulosity. And my literal grounding is work with real people in hierarchical institutions under pressure. They to question purpose, encounter other perspectives, protect agency, change practice, and adapt without pretending they stand outside the situation and control it.
The point isn’t to escape the fly-bottle. That would be to escape the world or the body; we need some control in a complex world just like an astronaut needs a breathable atmosphere. It’s to find one more fitting to the situation, remember that it is a bottle, and change it when it stops helping.
Full piece, with diagrams, self-critique, and Dave’s response, is in the comment.
When you look at organisation, what do you notice: what keeps it stable, or what keeps changing?
chosen path 