Latest Blog Posts

By Gerrit Van Wyk. West Churchman’s work and thinking looms large in my understanding of systems thinking. I don’t claim to be an expert on Churchman’s thought and work, hence what follows...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. I’ve been writing about systems and complexity for many years now. Most efforts started as essays attempting to organize my thoughts coherently, and many grew into book-long explanations...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Hermes, the messenger god. George Meade made a big contribution to sociology, but, as Huebner wrote, he is mostly known in a discipline he didn’t teach, for a book he didn’t write, and...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Learning versus an education. That my journey towards understanding human social complexity was social and complex, and perfectly illustrates what I tried to learn should be no surprise,...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Incubated learning. This is a companion piece to my previous blog, A Perspective of Social Complexity. Any perspective, theory, model, etc., of complexity must have practical implications...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. The law of requisite complexity. Boisot and McKelvey modified Ashby’s law of requisite variety, and stated that to adapt effectively, the internal complexity of a system must match the...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Geoffrey Vickers’ appreciative system. Geoffrey Vickers was a student at Oxford when WW1 broke out. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery on his 21st birthday. After his...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Accounting for systems. When I was at business school, the concept of return on investment (ROI) was hammered into our heads. There is a formula for calculating the profit on the money...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. How positions are filled. There’s a story about a university, who wanted to fill the vacant position for head of the department mathematics with someone with a track record in research...

By Gerrit Van Wyk. Don’t open the box! Jan Spies told a story about a farmer who trapped a leopard causing trouble on his farm, and since we live in an era of nature conservation, arranged to take it to...