ABSTRACT
Norbert Weiner’s group was interdisciplinary, bringing together mathematicians, biologists, operational researchers and physicists in a ground-breaking approach to developing a unified science for solving complex problems. Organisational cybernetics conceives of any organisation as a system composed of people, processes and information and existing as the product of their interactions. Organisational cybernetics builds upon and draws ideas from that fundamental work, but ‘breaks somewhat with the mechanistic and organismic thinking that typifies management cybernetics’. There are three principal cybernetic tools for dealing with these exceedingly complex, self-regulating, probabilistic organisations. In organisations the feedback systems are highly complex, containing large numbers of elements connected in a number of ways and consisting of both positive and negative loops, that is, information which when acted upon either amplifies or attenuates difference. The adoption of cybernetic principles generates several challenges to the established ways of thinking about organisations and achieving quality.
