Cybernetics is not the Banana! (Part 1)

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.

Members of the Cyb3rSyn Community can watch/discuss the podcast episode on the www.cyb3rsynlabs.com portal or the mobile app (iOS and Android).

In this episode, I sat down with Benjamin Taylor, a long-time advocate for the application of the insights from systems thinking, complexity, and cybernetics and a personal inspiration for me. Benjamin shares his journey, starting from a transformative moment in his early career to his dynamic approach in consulting.

He touches on themes ranging from the interplay of power dynamics in organizations to the philosophical underpinnings of sense-making and pattern recognition. The discussion also goes into the importance of both structure and freedom in organizational effectiveness.

Here are the key takeaways from my mind-expanding discussion with Benjamin Taylor:

Ben’s journey into systems thinking was catalyzed by a "real moment of process breakthrough" in his early operational jobs. He saw a radical way to improve outputs and performance by seeing a whole process differently.

This excitement culminated when he attended a conference and saw a presentation by John Seddon on applying lean principles to service systems. This was his "Aha!" moment: "Wow, this is it. This is why I'm correct and all my managers are idiots". While Benjamin dutifully wrote a 17-page memo to the chief executive, he quickly learned that this isn't the way to achieve organizational change. This realization set him on a mission to understand systems thinking.

He found his true learning environment with SCIO (Systems and Cybernetics in Organization), where he absorbed core systems concepts like the VSM and Gregory Bateson’s work through what is called "legitimate peripheral participation". For Ben, systems thinking offered "parsimonious effective explanations" for fundamental patterns.

Ben’s core worldview is heavily informed by David Chapman’s work on Meaningness and Buddhism, asserting that the world is both infinitely nebulous and endlessly patterned simultaneously.

To explain this concept of pattern recognition and differentiation, Benjamin uses the post by David Chapman that talks about Bongard games. These pattern recognition tasks, used in evaluating artificial intelligence, require finding a distinction between six images on the left and six on the right. When you find the desired solution, you have an instant insight: "I see the patterns now. I can see the differentiator. I can see the difference that makes the difference".

What's fascinating is that there are infinitely many solutions to every Bongard game. If you loosen the rules beyond geometric shapes—for instance, asking which shapes drawn from an alphabet would fall over under gravity—it becomes a human-complete problem.

This is the central insight for Ben's works: organizations and humans are human-complete problems, meaning that everything is contingent, relational, and messy, and you cannot consult via a rote playbook.

Organizations create a coherent, rational world by "shielding ourselves from the complexity of the world". We establish framings, distinctions, and practices that generate meaning and value. However, this situated view of rationality is always incomplete and ultimately vulnerable.

This leads to the concept of  Antidromic—a thing which, in the extreme, becomes its opposite. Benjamin referenced the classic Princess Leia quote to Darth Vader:

The lesson is this: the more we seek to control, tighten, and firm up our worldview, the more brittle it becomes, making it more likely to shatter with a "big shock".

In organizational life, Benjamin emphasizes the importance of understanding the different sense-making worlds that exist within a structure. These worlds (like operations, management, and senior leadership) are separate and necessary for coherent sense-making, much like different parts of the elephant.

Benjamin described a workshop exercise where simply giving participants badges designating them as "top," "middle manager," or "team member" instantly creates these dynamics.

These immediate, instinctive responses snap people into roles and create "lockin patterns" of organizational life. The structure creates the conditions, and our reactions lock those patterns in. Leaders must appreciate these real sense-making worlds and the interplay of dynamics between them.

Benjamin cited the quote often (mis-?)attributed to Kurt Lewin: "You never understand a system until you try to change it".

Complexity, Benjamin argues, is an experience, not a fixed condition of the world. It depends entirely on your purpose, context, perspective, and framing. Therefore, offering rigid structures - like a 2x2 matrix - to characterize a situation is dangerous. It risks mirroring back the user’s own understanding, giving them false confidence and a likely wrong prescription for action.

The ultimate goal is to apply epistemic humility (humility about what we know) and avoid ontological arrogance (arrogance about what the world is). Understanding these essential dynamics allows leaders to think through and reset their approach to organizational challenges, whether it’s communicating between engineering and marketing or dealing with a failing strategy.

For premium-tier members, here is a handy table of the books mentioned in the conversation: