The cybernetics of brand and identity

Today, June 22, 2021, I'm speaking to the subject: The Cybernetics of Brand. The forum is the CybSights Insights Event hosted by the Cybernetics Society, a learned scientific and design society. I have the privilege of being its Secretary. Tomorrow, I'm speaking to the question, What Is the Identity of an Organisation? The forum is Metaphorum, a learned group of designers, biologists, cyberneticians, consultants, and the socially engaged. The two talks are related and both draw on my work over the last 20 years on propriopoiesis, the self organising of companies towards the co-creation of value.

Metaphorum — Identity

The theme at Metaphorum proposes that an organisation — company, NGO, government department — is always understood to have an identity — but how this is described is very variable and how it is handled sometimes curious.?Finance, marketing, HR et cetera approach it differently.?Several systems theories approach it as a matter of practitioner definition of the system to be modelled.?An autopoietic identity is related to organizational closure.?The mouse running from a cat has the mousy equivalent of an existential experience.?So how should we think about identity and how is this reflected in the methods of management and the use of tools such as VSM (the viable systems model developed by Stafford Beer)?

An organisation is a social organism?

The exploration will consider the possibility that an organisation is a social organism with its own non-arbitrary self-organizing inhering identity.?It will ask how such tools as policies in VSM S5 relate to this as well as the extent to which identity cannot be confined to S5.?What type of paradigm for the wholeness of an organisational entity is needed??How is this in turn related to its environmental ecosystem??In this context, what does it mean to be a chief executive and what do they (and other leaders) do??As time allows this will also question prevailing systems and complexity models.

Connection and details are here

CybSights — Brand

For CybSights, I am interested in exploring three different aspects of the topic of 'brand'.?Firstly, what does cybernetics tell us about brand.?Brand is an energetic concept and?important operational and commercial aspect of the contemporary business world and indeed of more than just businesses — political parties, politicians, cities, even countries. What is it and how does it relate to identity and other fundamentals??The second aspect is what looking at this might tell us about cybernetics.?What is the distinctive go of cybernetics??Sometimes looking into the detailed examples is a good way to learn and think.

But there is a third and possibly even a fourth aspect.?What does it tell us about companies themselves??What might that tell us about the world, human and natural? And the nature of the their systemic organization??And then there is the distinctiveness of cybernetics itself — let us say as ‘a brand’ in the field of systemic thinking.

I am going to relate brand to customers, to value, to values; to processes and organization; to identity and purposes and why we are all here.

My interest in this is not merely academic or scholarly or even technical.?Businesses and companies are a huge part of our world — huge in terms of their influence, power to do good or ill, and so contribution to the essentials and failures of modern civilisation.?Billions of people are employed by and dependent on them and they are getting tougher to manage as they get bigger and more complex. 'Brand' matters to citizens, consumers, policy makers, leaders.?

Businesses and companies are a huge part of our world?

I am going to relate brand to customers, to value, to values; to processes and organization; to identity and purposes and why we are all here.?And in this also to other classic management questions like culture, business model, and intelligent systems.

But I would also like to look at such fundamental questions as observers and how they see the world and what that means practically and scientifically.?How do we need to rethink scientific method itself given the pragmatic reality and empirical fact of “brand” as a contemporary world phenomenon? A competent science should be able to deal with it.?Does science have the requisite variety in its methods? Is it fit for purpose?

And to make sure that there is some usefulness for those who would like something useful I will share practical approaches — taking actual situations and not just abstract notions.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-cybernetics-of-brand-tickets-159176853253