2nd-Order Cybernetics and Modeling of Social Constructs
Abstract of a Talk at the Washington Evolutionary Systems Society
25 February 93
Paul Pangaro, President, PANGARO Incorporated, Washington DC
In the course of consulting contracts concerned with individual learning,
corporate organization, cooperative work and the like, it became clear that
certain crucial functions of social organizations are not being addressed
by software aids, no less by any prescriptive techniques. For example, it
appears that there is no commonly used formalism (beyond highly-flawed English)
for handling problems of:
- Unambiguously expressing goals
- Eliciting differences of interpretation from a group
- Checking whether proposed actions might actually achieve stated goals
- Managing a process whereby goals and strategies were subject to negotiation
and evolution
- Documenting shared mental models
Such problems exist squarely in the social domain, whether in interpersonal
relationships or collaborations between workers, or across organizations
such as corporations. The implications of failure to handle these problems
effectively need not be explained.
Under the encouragement of the pressing need for handling these problems
specifically in the corporate context, two fundamental techniques have been
developed by direct application of a body of work that has emerged from
2nd-Order Cybernetics:
- Language Modeler: accepts statements about a domain and does a "structural
comparison" to existing statements, based on user-defined nodes or
topics of the domain. Not a natural language processor, this software is
based on a logic of distinctions that includes a simple conflict detection
mechanism. (All semantic processing is performed by the users.)
- Organizational Modeler: accepts links between stated goals and the stated
means to achieve those goals. Provides rules for checking a number of details
of the relationship to evaluate whether it is actually consistent. Can be
used to plan and track cooperative projects, and interaction with models
so constructed can eliminate the need for "management" of the
process beyond the collaborators interaction with the model.
Pangaro will describe how these techniques work, how they emerge from 2nd
Order Cybernetics, where they have been applied to date (e.g. at Du
Pont) and the features of existing software prototypes.
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