Mini Symposia 2025-2026
Please join us for the weekly mini symposia!
The speaker schedule is posted below so please check back regularly. We always send out email reminders to current and past ISSS members with an alert for the upcoming sessions.
Sessions, until Dec 31, 2025, will be held each Thursday at 17.00 UTC.
Please use a timezone converter such as the one below to convert this time to your location.
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| Date | UTC Time | Presenter | Title | Abstract |
| 9 Oct | 17:00 | Paul Pangaro |
Cybernetics Escapes the Laboratory:
Cybernetics as Anti-Wicked Praxis
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When members of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University were invited to initiate a “laboratory” to situate their research, many probative questions arose for today’s presenter: If Cybernetics is a discipline that forefronts effective action in the world rather than pursuit of verifiable knowledge—then what is a “Laboratory for Cybernetics”?
That puzzle loomed larger than the School’s requirements for launching any new lab: Could its mission be defined in connection to the School’s 21st-century pedagogy of climate change, social justice, and artificial intelligence? Yes—bring it on. Can there be at least three research projects consistent with its mission? Not a problem. Can it identify future funding to support the lab? Will do.
Launched in January 2025, the Laboratory for Cybernetics (Lab4C) opened its virtual doors with a semester-long studio course, an ecosystem of documents, and a dose of audacity. Engaging Wicked Challenges is its studio course, serving as an on-ramp to its digital resources and scaffolding student-scholars to collaborate with its human resources, that of in-world practitioners, all to support addressing “wicked challenges.” Lab4C’s 2025 Cybernetics Prize has awarded $5000 for the best design proposal that embraces Heinz von Foerster’s “Ethical Imperative”, that is, increasing human agency and human potential through design. The most ambitious project of Lab4C may be Re-Braiding Cybernetics & AI, intent on bringing the two fields into conversation and even cooperation, catalyzed by a book exhibit, a symposium, and a publication, all occurring in 2027.
Today’s mini-symposium begins with glimpses into the intentions and projects of Lab4C and segues to the proposal of “praxis-sourcing”, an evolutionary model for impact that is not confined to a single laboratory. Can a cybernetic approach to “designing design” across a collective of organizations—academic design programs yet also NGOs and corporations—better untangle our 21st-century’s wicked challenges? How might we define the necessities for 21st-century design education? What advantages would come from bridging the boundaries of disciplines, geographies, and generations?
While much neglected, Cybernetics has recently been called out as something to revive, to teach, to practice, to help a world gone wild. What degree of practicality, in balance with an appropriate scale of audacity, forms an energetic tension for an open-source, anti-wicked praxis of Cybernetics, to respond to the wicked pandemics of our time?
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| 16 Oct | 17.00 | John Ingram |
The Food System and Food Systems Thinking
Systemic innovation for food system transformation
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The 45 minute presentation will introduce how adopting a systems approach helps to identify how to transform food system outcomes related to health and other social and economic interests, and the environment. This draws on an understanding of the wide range of food system activities from primary production through to consuming food, the actors involved, and the drivers that influence their decisions. In addition to considering the consequences of these activities on the range of outcomes, the presentation will highlight how, in turn, these outcomes need to be better balanced given the inherent trade-offs within the ‘diets-health-climate’ discourse. To this end, the presentation will unpack the notions of ‘food system’, ‘food system thinking’ and ‘transforming the food system’. Using the BeanMeals project as an example, it will stress the need for ‘systemic innovation’ involving the food system actors and public and private policy makers, and the food system challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. It will close with asking the questions of how the food system approach can contribute to systems thinking and how systems science can enrich food system thinking. |
| 23 Oct | 17.00 | Abel Mavura | Resilience and Participatory Urban Futures: Systems Approaches to Migration and Informal Housing |
This presentation examines how displaced populations build resilient communities within informal urban housing, focusing on the adaptive strategies migrants develop in restrictive environments. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in Paris for a PhD in Development Studies specialising in Migration, the researcher traced the lived experiences of young male migrants, revealing how agency and resilience emerge under precarious conditions. Part of this work received the 2025 Margaret Mead Memorial Award from the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) for advancing systems thinking and social justice in migration studies.
Building on this foundation, ongoing research at the University of Cambridge investigates how spatial design, community planning, and social networks foster a sense of “home” for displaced populations. The study applies systems science to conceptualise resilience as a dynamic property emerging from the interplay of individual agency, collective solidarity, and systemic exclusion (Holling, 2001; Masten, 2014). It also integrates Lefebvre’s (1996) Right to the City and Harvey’s (2012) Urban Commons to examine how migrants exercise spatial agency, collective governance, and resistance to exclusionary urban policies.
Using mixed methods including spatial mapping, co-creation workshops, and scenario planning, the study evaluates informal housing models such as Fender Squat, Canal Saint-Denis, and La Kunda. Informed by Turner’s (1976) community-driven design and contemporary work by UN-Habitat (2020) and Awuor (2019), it positions migrants as co-producers of urban commons rather than passive recipients of aid.
Amid rising global migration and urbanisation, the project offers practical insights for policymakers, planners, and architects seeking inclusive, adaptable urban spaces. The presentation shares findings from Paris, introduces emerging Cambridge research on participatory urbanism, and proposes a “systemic inclusivity” framework integrating built-environment design, social networks, and equitable governance. Visual case study materials will enrich dialogue and invite attendees to explore how systems science can shape more just, adaptable urban futures for displaced populations.
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| 30 Oct | 17.00 | Roelien Goede | Introducing Critical Systems Heuristics 2.0: A Third Boundary Extending CSH From Reflections on Critical Realism in Information Systems Research | Poorly designed information systems compel employees to find workarounds for the system in order to do their work properly. However, such workarounds compromise the enforcement of organisational governance. In our sense-making of this specific phenomenon, we considered critical realism as a framework for understanding based on its adoption in the information systems research community. Traditionally, critical systems heuristics considers two boundaries: resources versus environment and involved versus affected. For a third boundary, we propose reflecting on the potential causal structures in organisations and possible feedback loops with a view to uncover more conditioned realities and to better understand the unintended consequences of activities of a system. We advocate complementarism at the methodological level, where all methods are applied from a critical ontological perspective, focusing on the totality of conditioned realities and giving a voice to the affected. We hope that our extension, CSH 2.0, can achieve even greater recognition and acceptance of the core tenets of critical systems heuristics, namely, the totality of conditioned realities, and the impact of unintended consequences on those affected but not involved in the planning of a system. |
| 6 Nov | 17.00 | Terence Love | Variety Dynamics: Because Systems Science Cannot Address Most Real-World Systems Problems |
This presentation introduces Variety Dynamics and demonstrates its practical application to highly complex problems, revealing both its effectiveness and efficiency in situations where conventional systems thinking approaches typically prove inadequate or fail entirely.
The axioms of Variety Dynamics indicate that most difficult, interesting or important real-world situations do not conform to the foundational assumptions on which Systems Science methods are based. Yet practitioners routinely apply these methods regardless, leading to demonstrable failure. This challenges the field's foundational belief that systems approaches can address any situation regardless of complexity.
Variety Dynamics is epistemologically more valid and much faster than causal systems approaches for complex and hyper-complex systems, providing more insightful, rapid guidance for professional decision-making in situations involving power asymmetries: disaster management, diplomacy, user interface design, epidemics, climate change, transport management, urban planning. Variety Dynamics identifies leverage points through variety distributions, revealing solutions invisible to causal methods. Easy for managers, decision-makers and designers to understand and use, the fundamental shift to variety-based thinking marks a useful change from causal systems methods.
Five case studies demonstrate rapid, effective application of Variety Dynamics across diverse domains, achieving in minutes what conventional approaches require weeks or months—when they succeed at all. In each case, Variety Dynamics provides rapid insights for situations that would be intractable and slow using conventional causal Systems methods.
Variety Dynamics works without requiring massive technical resources or specialist expertise that other Systems methods demand. It requires thinking in options (variety) rather than causes. It integrates well with AI: gathering information, applying Variety Dynamics axioms, and analysing situations faster than humans while being easily questioned. Practical experience with Claude AI demonstrates this is valuable and effective for real-world complexity.
The presentation concludes with implications for systems science. If highly complex problems can be addressed more effectively without causal analysis, what does this suggest about our methodological toolkit? How should practitioners be trained? What research becomes possible beyond the causal paradigm?
This presentation challenges fundamental assumptions of Systems Science and offers Variety Dynamics as a practical, demonstrable alternative for addressing the majority of real-world complex challenges which are in reality beyond the reach of causally-based Systems Science methods.
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| 13 Nov | 17.00 | James (Jamie) Rose | ||
| 20 Nov | 17.00 | |||
| 27 Nov | 17.00 | |||
| 4 Dec | 17.00 | |||
| 11 Dec | 17.00 | |||
| 18 Dec | 17.00 | Bai Li | LEVERAGE: Guidelines for reporting the use of systems approaches in health studies and projects |
Bai Li, primarily based at the University of Bristol, is a global health scientist specialised in the development and evaluation of complex health interventions and policies to tackle leading global challenges such as obesity, undernutrition, sedentary behaviour and climate change. She has co-authored with policy makers from 46 countries and led multi-nation, inter-discipline research consortia to generate impactful scientific outputs used by international and national authorities.
Bai is a member of the World Obesity Federation Policy and Prevention Committee which is responsible for guiding and shaping global obesity policies. Bai is a global leader in advocacy and methodological innovations of methods rooted in systems science for health research and policy. For example, she developed systems methods to understand Global Syndemic that co-exist and interact with each other in time and place (SYSTAM consortia) and leads the development of the world’s 1st guidelines for reporting and writing the development, evaluation and implementation of health interventions and policies underpinned by systems science (LEVERAGE project). Bai launched and co-edited the 1st journal collection dedicated to systems approaches to tackling global nutrition challenges, and has chaired international symposia in different countries to share the 1st empirical experience of applying a systems approach to nutrition interventions in HICs and LMICs.
Bai led the evaluation of the world's first, nation-wide, multi-sector, regulatory intervention on sedentary behaviour among children and adolescents (ENERGISE project), providing the 1st evidence for regulatory interventions on sedentary behaviour. For this, Bai was honoured the 2024 Practice Leadership Award from the Sedentary Behavioural Research Network (SBRN) for her exceptional and sustained leadership in raising awareness and offering solutions to reduce and manage excessive sedentary behaviour.
In March 2025, Bai published ‘The iceberg of childhood obesity system - conceptualising levels of interventions through systems thinking’ to support the theme of 2025 World Obesity Day. In August 2025, Bai led World Obesity Federation’s Position Paper calling Heads of United Nations Member States to implement systemic actions to tackle obesity and other leading non-communicable diseases.
Bai's contributions to global health and behavioural medicine have also been recognised by prestigious awards from the ISBNPA, The Lancet, UKSBM and UKCO.
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| JAN | ||||
| Feb |
Mark Enzer
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| Mar | Andreas Nicolaides | Speciation through Genomic Reorganisation: The Phylogenetic Meta-Programme Hypothesis |
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species left unresolved the problem named in its title: how new species arise. The Modern Synthesis, though uniting Mendelian genetics with natural selection, has produced no coherent theory of speciation. Instead, evolutionary biology has accumulated a patchwork of mechanisms, often treating anomalies—such as long periods of evolutionary stasis, apparently sudden transformations, reticulated phylogenies (branching complicated by cross-lineage gene flow), and recurrent hybridisation (interbreeding between distinct lineages)—as exceptions rather than signals of a deeper order.
This presentation introduces the Phylogenetic Meta-Programme Hypothesis: the claim that speciation is not the incidental by-product of auxiliary processes linked to natural selection, but is structured by higher-order regulatory systems, encoded in the germline, that govern the mode and tempo of evolution. These are not fixed typological essences but dynamic, multi-scale architectures intrinsic to life’s organisation. Framed within the broader perspective of Genomic Essentialism, the hypothesis advances the view that biological organisation is driven by genomic programmes that are constitutive of life itself, rather than by emergent properties alone.
Four systemic functions illustrate this architecture:
1. Initiators: timers and triggers that delimit and precipitate transformation, including tandem-repeat turnover, germline resets, hybridisation, duplication, and viral invasion.
2. Generators: mechanisms that expand and rewire genomic material, such as bursts of transposons, endogenous retroviruses, segmental duplications, retrocopying, and 3-D architectural change.
3. Coordinators: processes that synchronise transformations across populations, including viral and symbiotic dynamics and germline programmes that align thresholds.
4. Stabilisers: systems that preserve lineage coherence, such as centromeric divergence with drive suppression, piRNA surveillance, inversions, supergenes, imprinting, and incompatibility complexes.
These functions do not direct development itself but transform the regulatory logic that structures it. In this sense, the system constitutes a meta-programme: a higher-order genomic architecture that converts existing developmental programmes into novel ones, linking organisms across space and time. Crucially, they also resolve the anomalies: stasis reflects stability maintained by stabilisers, sudden transformations occur when initiators cross thresholds, reticulated histories arise from coordinating processes across lineages, and hybrid dysfunction stems from divergence in stabilising systems.
On this basis, the hypothesis yields distinctive predictions: genomic turnover should track clade-specific tempos of speciation; bursts of mobile elements and duplications should cluster around radiation events; shared viral or symbiotic agents should generate concordant genomic change; and hybrid dysfunction should correlate with divergence in coherence-preserving systems. Evolutionary anomalies, on this view, are not noise but signatures of a genomic meta-programme in action.
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