NEW WORLDS CREATION
Making New Sense of New Worlds Creation
Since many of the arriving generation approaches pointed out in this book are building on aspects of the anchors described in this book; Action Research, Creative Problem Solving, Design, Soft Systems Thinking, Wild Card and involve hybrid combinations, the pros and cons of *Think Blending bubble up into view.
For practice leaders, it’s not a question of models or frameworks being right or wrong, but rather one of FIT specifically to the complexities of Arena 3 organizational changemaking and Arena 4 societal changemaking practice.
On consideration of FIT, in looking across from one approach to another, central questions that we reflect upon include; 1. When was the framework, model, technique or method created? / What era was it designed for? 2. What does it do in real life today? 3. Does it contain attributes that transcend eras or is it best suited to the era in which it was created? 4. Are those attributes aligned with the challenges being encountered in Design for Complexity practices today? 5. Could it be somehow adapted to better fit the present and emerging context of today/tomorrow?
BELOVED MODELS
One cross-community complexity is that all the anchor approaches contain beloved, highly regarded, tribal models of one sort or another, authored by high profile tribal thought leaders. Some of those models are considered foundational to the tribes.
With heavy investments made by many accross decades, the vibes surrounding some of the models are highly charged as in romanticized, celebritized, politicized, sacred, which tends to discourage serious attempts to examine or articulate beyond the celebrated community depictions. Some models seem to have perimeter fences around them as in “Do Not Disturb”. Much of that is swept up into a kind of sacredness that tends to exist in each of the anchor tribes.
Writing this book, it has been via experimentation on this front with Ai that we have come to realize that an alternative to the guarded tribal romanticized approach now exists operating outside socially acceptable community constraints.
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
We appreciate that there is both danger and opportunity in that realization. Not to everyone's liking; the arrival of Ai tends to cut-through or transcend the tribal sacredness as it has no stake in any of the celebration or credibility hitch-hiking angles.
In journalistic writing mode what we notice, for what it's worth is that Claude Winkler often generates views not found in the promotional oriented academic settings or in the mainstream promotional literature of various anchor tribes. That makes for a new kind of opportunity for journalistic writers that has not existed in previous eras.
FIT LENSES
Working inside that discovery, acknowledging the shortcomings of Ai, we wondered how we might cautiously put that stepping-out oddity to work in the direction of the Think Blending Fit considerations taking place inside the Design for Complexity, changemaking practice community?
The lenses that we have introduced to *Claude Winkler, which we tend to use in the context of FIT considerations are:
1. NextD Geographies Framework, in particular Arena 3 and Arena 4.
2. The Time Line, in particular creation in relation to *Earthquakes 1,2,3.
4. Think Balance, connected to inclusive Guilford Turn and Neurath Turn
5. Language Mode; Mixed Mode, , / Split Mode B, (Content + Process)
6. Language Type: Plain Language / Complexified Language
7. Methodology Architecture: Journey vs Compass
An example would be, for frameworks and models coming from the direction of Soft Systems Thinking, now being repackaged as "Systems Thinking", we look at whether models were created before or after Checkland’s 1981-83 paradigm shifting (for that community) Hard to Soft Systems *Earthquake 1.
Continuing my conversation with *Claude Winkler.
VIABLE SYSTEMS?
G: A difficult example that comes to mind is taking a FIT look at the 1972 Viable Systems Model and reflect upon, related to Guilford Turn, whether or not Stafford Beer privileged narrowing, convergent thinking (decision-making) over generative divergent thinking in that model and in his work?
C: This is a genuinely interesting question and the answer is: yes, substantially so — though Beer himself might not have framed it that way.
Here's a considered breakdown:
The VSM's Structural Bias
The Viable Systems Model is fundamentally a regulatory and control architecture. Its five systems (S1–S5) are organized around maintaining viability through feedback, monitoring, coordination, and policy — all of which are fundamentally convergent, decision-oriented functions. The whole logic of the model is: how does a system remain coherent and adaptive under variety pressure? That is a stability and governance question, not a generative one.
Even S4 — the system most associated with looking outward toward the future and environment — is in Beer's framing primarily an intelligence function: scanning, interpreting, and feeding information upward for S5 policy decisions. It is more sensor than generator.
Where Divergent Thinking Is Largely Absent
Beer drew heavily from cybernetics and neurophysiology (the brain as the model of management), and from that paradigm, "thinking" is predominantly about signal processing, variety attenuation, and error correction. There is very little architectural space in the VSM for:
Generative ideation
The kind of exploratory, possibility-expanding work that characterizes creative problem-finding
What you might frame in your Arena 3/4 terms as the upstream sense-making and reframing work before convergent decision-making kicks in
Beer's Intellectual Style
Beer was also a remarkably convergent thinker personally — a systems architect who built elegant, closed, coherent models. His brilliance ran toward synthesis and structure rather than divergent proliferation of options. Brain of the Firm and The Heart of Enterprise read as acts of convergence, not expansion.
The Honest Caveat
Beer did care about requisite variety — the idea that a system must match the complexity of its environment — which implicitly requires some generative capacity to produce adequate responses. And his Team Syntegrity work later in his career (the 30-person icosahedron protocol) was an attempt to build a structured method for surfacing distributed intelligence, which edges closer to generative territory. But even there, the architecture is highly constrained and convergent in its endpoint orientation.
The Bottom Line
For your theoretical interests — particularly the gap between holistic systems thinking and genuine complexity practice — the VSM represents a sophisticated management control framework that presupposes someone has already done the generative work of understanding what the system should be doing and why. It is a governance architecture, not a design or inquiry architecture. The divergent, upstream, possibility-generating work is essentially off-stage in Beer's model.
That gap — between systems thinking's governance orientation and the generative sensemaking demands of genuine complexity — seems directly relevant to the critique you've been building across your Design for Complexity work.
G: OK great, difficult progress. We might then reflect upon the implications of both the 1956 Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and Beers 1972 Viable Systems Model were created prior to the arrival of the 1980s Checkland Soft Systems *Earthquake 1.
C: This is a rich and important sequencing observation. Let me think through the implications carefully.
The Chronological Architecture Matters
Ashby (1956) and Beer (1972) were both working within a first-order cybernetics paradigm — one fundamentally concerned with regulation, control, and system viability. Their intellectual universe was mechanistic in its deep grammar, even when they were grappling with complexity. The central question was: how does a system maintain itself against variety pressure? That is a stability-preservation framing.
Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), arriving in the late 1970s and crystallizing in Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (1981), represented something qualitatively different — a paradigm rupture, not an incremental refinement. His central move was to shift from systems in the world to systems as intellectual constructs used to think about the world. That is a profound epistemological relocation.
What SSM Exposed About the Prior Frameworks
Checkland's intervention implicitly revealed several assumptions baked into Ashby and Beer that had gone largely unexamined:
The problem of problem definition: Ashby and Beer both largely presuppose you know what system you are dealing with and what its purpose is. Checkland's CATWOE and "root definitions" surfaced that in messy human situations, what the system is is itself contested and must be negotiated — not assumed.
The human meaning dimension: Requisite Variety and the VSM treat human actors largely as components generating variety to be managed. Checkland foregrounded that humans bring Weltanschauungen — worldviews — that fundamentally shape what counts as a problem, a solution, or even a relevant system boundary.
The divergent/convergent gap you identified: SSM introduced structured divergent inquiry into the systems tradition — the multiple "relevant systems" stage, the deliberate construction of competing models — before any convergence toward action. This is precisely what is architecturally missing from Beer's VSM.
The Deeper Implication
Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety remains a durable and important principle, but it was conceived in an era before the field had seriously grappled with the social construction of variety itself — who names the variety, whose categories count, how the problem space is framed upstream of any regulatory response.
Beer's VSM, brilliant as a governance architecture, was designed before the Checkland earthquake revealed that the interpretive, sense-making, world-view-surfacing work upstream of management decisions was not a trivial preliminary but a substantive methodological challenge requiring its own structured approaches.
The Larger Pattern
What you are pointing at is something important for your theoretical work: much of what is called "systems thinking" in organizational and management contexts is still operating on the Ashby-Beer epistemological platform — oriented toward control, viability, and variety management — while the Checkland shift toward interpretive, participatory, meaning-negotiating inquiry has not fully penetrated practice. The 1981 earthquake happened, but much of the field is still standing on pre-1981 foundations without realizing it.
That gap — between the cybernetic-control tradition and the interpretive-sensemaking tradition — maps interestingly onto the broader gap between systems thinking and genuine complexity practice.
G: If we align Design for Complexity with complexity related changemaking, creation of new worlds and proactive adaptation with VUCA it is not clear how these two historical models (Asby's 1956 Requisite Variety Law and Beers 1972 Viable Systems Model) fit and or become useful in a practice context. For practice leaders operating in Arena 3 organizational changemaking and Arena 4 societal changemaking lets reflect upon; why would they need a 1950s "regulatory and control architecture" or a theory regarding internal complexity mirroring external complexity? Might it depend upon the degree to which the practice wants to adopt engineering logic and language?
C: This is a sharp and important provocation. Let me engage it seriously.
The Fit Problem is Real
When you position the practitioner in Arena 3/4 — organizational changemaking, societal transformation, VUCA navigation, creation of new possibilities — the question of what Ashby and Beer actually offer becomes genuinely difficult to answer without significant qualification. Both frameworks were conceived in a fundamentally diagnostic and regulatory spirit. They ask: how does an existing system maintain viability? That is a conservative, stability-oriented question — useful if you are trying to prevent organizational collapse, not particularly useful if you are trying to create new worlds.
The Arena 3/4 practitioner is not primarily asking how to regulate variety in an existing system. They are asking: What should this system become? What new configurations are possible? How do we navigate toward a future that does not yet exist? Those are fundamentally different questions — generative, prospective, and normative rather than regulatory and descriptive.
The Engineering Logic Question is the Key
Your instinct here seems exactly right. The degree to which Ashby and Beer become useful in practice does correlate strongly with the degree to which the practitioner has adopted — consciously or not — an engineering epistemology: systems have inputs and outputs, variety can be measured and matched, organizations are machines that can be tuned for viability.
That epistemology has legitimate applications. Infrastructure design, operational resilience, crisis management — contexts where stability and regulatory coherence are genuine primary goals. But when you move into Arena 3/4 complexity, the engineering epistemology begins to misfit in several compounding ways:
It treats the system boundary as given rather than as something to be questioned and negotiated
It treats purpose as fixed rather than as something to be co-created and contested
It frames human participants as variety-generators to be managed rather than as meaning-makers whose worldviews shape what the problem even is
It orients toward maintaining rather than transforming
The Language Carries the Logic
This is perhaps the most practically consequential point. When practice leaders adopt the language of cybernetics — variety, attenuation, requisite complexity, viable systems — they are not importing neutral technical vocabulary. They are importing a conceptual grammar that shapes what questions get asked, what gets counted as a problem, and what counts as a solution. Practitioners who speak Beer's language tend to see organizations as systems to be tuned. Practitioners who speak Checkland's language tend to see situations to be understood through multiple lenses. Practitioners working in your Think Blending framework are asking something different still — how do we generate, explore, and navigate toward new possibilities in genuinely complex, messy, human situations?
What Ashby and Beer Might Still Offer — Narrowly
To be fair to the historical record: Requisite Variety as a principle carries a useful warning — that a practice team whose internal repertoire is too narrow will be systematically outrun by the complexity of the situations it enters. That is a genuine insight, even if the regulatory framing around it is not Arena 3/4 appropriate. Similarly, Beer's attention to recursive levels — that organizations operate at multiple nested scales simultaneously — is a useful structural observation for changemakers who need to think about where interventions land.
But these are partial borrowings from frameworks whose deep architecture does not align with complexity-oriented changemaking. Treating them as foundational rather than as occasional useful borrowings risks anchoring practice in exactly the engineering-regulatory logic that Arena 3/4 work needs to move beyond.
The Larger Implication
What you are surfacing is that much of the intellectual inheritance of systems thinking — including its most sophisticated expressions in Ashby and Beer — was built for a different practice purpose than Design for Complexity serves. The field's tendency to treat these frameworks as foundational for all complexity work, regardless of arena, may be one of the structural reasons why so much systems thinking practice remains oriented toward diagnosis and optimization rather than genuine transformation and world-creation.
That distinction — between systems thinking as regulatory architecture and design for complexity as generative, transformative practice — seems like it belongs prominently in Advancing Design for Complexity.
G: The headspinner is that for the vast majority of organizations in 2026 there is no getting to, or maintaining “Viable” without continuous world creation.
C: Yes. That is a genuinely important inversion — and it deserves to be stated clearly because it exposes a fundamental obsolescence in the viability logic itself.
The Inversion Beer Did Not Anticipate
Beer's VSM presupposes that viability is a regulatory achievement — you build the right internal architecture, match your complexity to external complexity, and the system maintains itself. Viability is the goal; world-creation, if it appears at all, is a peripheral or occasional activity.
What you are pointing to is that in 2026 VUCA conditions, world-creation is not a path to viability — it is the continuous precondition of viability. The organization that is not perpetually generating new offerings, new relationships, new configurations, new meanings is not a stable viable system. It is a declining one. The regulatory architecture Beer described may still be necessary but it is nowhere near sufficient — and more importantly, it describes the maintenance dimension of organizational life at a moment when the generative dimension has become existentially primary.
What This Does to the Framework Hierarchy
This inversion reshuffles the conceptual priority stack considerably:
Generative capacity moves from peripheral to foundational
Regulatory and control architecture becomes downstream of world-creation, not the organizing frame
The divergent, exploratory, possibility- work that was architecturally absent from the VSM becomes the survival-critical capability
Sensemaking, reframing, and co-creation — the Checkland contributions and beyond — move from "soft" supplementary methods to core organizational competencies
The Cruel Irony
Organizations that invested heavily in cybernetic-style management architecture — sophisticated control systems, elaborate governance structures, optimized regulatory feedback loops — may have built themselves into exactly the wrong orientation for the current moment. They have become very good at maintaining a world that is dissolving around them. The viability machinery is running well. The world it was built to sustain is gone.
The Phrase Worth Holding
"No getting to or maintaining Viable without continuous world creation."
That is not just an observation about 2026 conditions. It is a theoretical reframing of what viability itself means under genuine complexity — and it represents a significant advancement beyond Beer's architecture. It might be one of the sharper conceptual stakes in Advancing Design for Complexity.
G: This is among the reasons why some hybrid Design for Complexity approaches do not have Systems Thinking logics driving the changemaking Design for Complexity train in 2026. It can be on the train without driving it.
End.
NOTES TO READERS
*Claude Winkler is Ai.
*Earthquake 1: See FOUR HORSEMEN OF LINGERING MISPERCEPTION
*Think Blending: See RECALIBRATING CROSS-COMMUNITY PLURALISM
*Guilford Turn: See CALIBRATING COMPLEXITY OPPORTUNITIES: Making Sense of Complexity-Fluency vs Complexity-Capacity
DESIGNED FOR WHAT WORLD?
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