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Ian Glendinning joined ISSS in 2021 and had involvement with INCOSE since 2009. He's an individual researcher in the original 1946 spirit of Cybernetics - helping humanity out of a world in crisis - since 2001 when he first started blogging as Psybertron. Seeing that same driver in the 1960's counterculture and our 21st C metacrisis. Now retired and full-time devoted to Systems Thinking research and writing, Ian had a 50+ years career in applied real-world systems engineering. Starting originally in Aerospace, Ian's engineering experience was mainly in the Energy and Process Plants capital facilities industries and software "solutions" consulting business. Systems scopes cover both Physical Systems (of fluids, pressure, energy, structures, process & control) and Human Systems (of people, behaviour, organisation, management, processes, methods, tools & procedures.) The majority, the last 30 years, of that 50 year career was focussed on Information Modelling the content and processes of such systems and hence their Architecture rather than the technology, seen primarily as the evolving toolset.
Personal Life
Born in 1956 to a Map Surveyor & Draftsman father from Edinburgh and a Primary Teacher mother from South Bank, Middlesbrough. Born in Barrow, Lancashire, raised in Guisborough, North Yorkshire.
Grammar School educated, specialising in Maths & Sciences at A level, going on to Aeronautical Engineering and continuing the techy "STEM" trajectory into aircraft design and manufacture and then into much broader engineering contracting in energy & process capital facilities industries.
I always identified as "Humanist" but it was a mid career masters degree course in 1988/91 focussing on the human "culture" aspects of managing organisational change that initiated the switch in focus from STEM technicalities to the psychology of the human predicament in the cosmos. It wasn't until 9/11 gave "the west" a kick-in-the-pants that I was moved to make this a serious research topic thereafter to this day. Within months of starting this research a statement by Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning Physicist I happened to meet in Cambridge, that "Eastern thinking was more fundamental than physics", set an important direction to my research - and turned this erstwhile techy nerd into a "born-again" reader of literature of all kinds.
Married to Sylvia since 1981, father of two (boys) grandfather of one (boy), I/we have been fortunate to live and work around the world, something I recognise as a massive contribution to my understanding of human culture and the planet we inhabit. My worldview remains humanist, massively evolved and reinforced by my experience and research.
Beyond the subjects of my work and research, my main interests and activities aimed at embodied engagement with humanity and our ecosystem are live music and hiking in the wild country of coast and moorland, the latter afforded by our having moved before retirement to a village very close to where I grew up, on the North Yorks coast with the moors national park behind us.
Academia and Career
Best summarised on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianglendinning/
Special Interests
Our knowledge of the world, and our decision-making to act in it, being More Than Science.
That more than science component - or Wisdom - being closely related to what has been characterised by many, many times in terms of adding "Eastern" world-views in contrast with "Western" views. This East<>West contrast is of course short-hand for a distinction that has been understood since before the re-Socratics, better characterised as Classic (objective, conceptual, intellectual, rational) vs Romantic (embodied, relational, participatory, aboriginal, indigenous) worldviews. The histories of natural philosophy and of science are littered with such references, but the model we inherited has been dominated by "footnotes to Plato" from the ancient Greeks via Arabic scholars through the "modern" European enlightenment. The overlooked philosophical alternatives were well recognised by the early quantum pioneers as well as the so-called post-modernists, but it was the 1960's counterculture that most brought "Zen" and other Eastern embodied and mindful practices to Western attention.
Our 2020's concerns with the existential polycrises or an underlying metacrisis - and our seeming collective incapacity to deal with them with traditional tools and models - very much mirrors the 1960's counter-culture reaction to the "military-industrial-complex". So much so that mindful practice has become "an industry" in its own right. Some (eg Watts) did most to promote Eastern practice into the West. Others (eg Pirsig) did more to add - to integrate - such practice and understanding into the otherwise successful Western worldview as a philosophical metaphysics.
Ian's special research interests therefore lie in two places:
- That 21stC neuro-science and neuro-psychology provide a sound basis fully supported by such a metaphysical worldview beyond physical science.
- That understanding this gives us an ontology supporting a new knowledge ecosystem enabling better collective human communication, decision-making and action, independent of the continuously evolving tools and technologies available to us.
Selected Links & Publications
Ian's work, with a few media exceptions, is primarily contained within his blog at Psybertron
Selected links will be posted here where they are topically related to ISSS interests.
In practice, Ian is writing-up his research so far into: (a) a PhD-style Thesis - current research proposal here. (b) a Technical publication for a wider audience, and (c) a Magic-realism Auto-fiction.