Laouris 2025 Incoming Presidential Address - From Influence and Responsibility to Collaboration and Collective Action
Summary
In this visionary keynote, delivered by Yiannis Laouris as the incoming president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), the yiannis calls for a bold shift in how the global systems and cybernetics community engages with the world’s accelerating crises. Against a backdrop of democratic backsliding, climate instability, technological disruption, and institutional breakdown, the presentation argues that linear solutions and technocratic fixes are insufficient. Today’s challenges are not merely complicated—they are deeply complex, adaptive, and interconnected. What is needed is not just expertise, but coherence, wisdom, and systemic integrity.
For over seventy years, systems and cybernetics scholars have developed a profound body of knowledge and frameworks for understanding feedback, purpose, emergence, entropy, learning, and self-organization. These are not abstract ideas; they are essential conditions for institutional resilience and social transformation. Yet this community, the speaker laments, has too often remained insular; rich in insight but lacking the unified clarity needed to reach practitioners, educators, and policymakers.
The talk outlines a key argument: the systems sciences must now step into public life as designers and facilitators of systemic change. We must not only study complexity but help govern it. To do so, we must communicate more clearly, align our frameworks, and amplify our collective voice. This requires creating accessible maps of how different systems approaches—System Dynamics, the Viable System Model, Soft Systems Methodology, Structured Democratic Dialogue, Resilience Thinking, Second-Order Cybernetics, and others—relate, overlap, and complement one another.
At the heart of the keynote is a preview of the speaker’s forthcoming book, Navigating Systems and Cybernetics, which offers such a conceptual map. The book does not merely catalogue methods; it identifies the unifying principles that link them and the different stances observers may take in applying them. It positions each methodology according to its purpose, scope, and relationship to learning and governance, providing both a compass and a bridge for the field.
The presentation then outlines a strategic direction for the ISSS under the speaker’s leadership. While continuing to build internal collaboration and partnerships with like-minded societies, the Society will aim to transform its deep intellectual legacy into applied influence. It will support members in becoming translators of complexity, conveners of dialogue, and stewards of systemic coherence. It will seek to ensure that systems thinking and cybernetic principles shape policy and governance at all scales—local, national, and global.
Closing on a unifying note, the speaker invites all ISSS members and allies to join in this effort. The time has come, they argue, to move from knowing complexity to navigating it—wisely, reflexively, and with integrity. If embraced fully, this vision could help redesign governance to become adaptive, participatory, and resilient—capable of guiding society through an era of profound uncertainty.