This week’s newsletter brings episode 23 of the Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast, featuring Benjamin Taylor, Managing Partner of RedQuadrant and a long-time advocate of the insights from systems thinking, complexity and cybernetics.
In this episode, Benjamin traces his personal and intellectual journey into these fields, sharing anecdotes from his early life, education, and career experiences that led him to embrace a systems-based worldview for understanding organizational dynamics and everyday life.
He discusses how organizations navigate complexity and the necessary balance between control and freedom - often referencing thinkers like Stafford Beer, Elliot Jaques, and David Chapman - to argue that organizational problems are "human complete problems" that cannot be solved with rote, mechanistic playbooks.
“…cybernetics is a way of looking at things, a way of understanding what’s going on. What is language? What are problems of that sort? And it is a little bit—if I may be a little bit naïve at that moment—for instance, if you have a chimpanzee and there is a banana, and he comes up with a stick and pulls the banana out: cybernetics is not the banana…”