Ivo Velitchkov
Biography
Ivo is an independent consultant and author. For the past 30 years, he has advised large public and private organisations on their strategy, structure, and knowledge. He is the author of the books Essential Balances and Personal Knowledge Graphs, as well as numerous essays and articles. He holds a PhD in Computer Science. Ivo's work draws on cybernetics, complexity science, and cognitive science. His main interests are knowledge management and socio-technical systems. In the first area, he guides projects for implementing knowledge graphs and provides training courses on semantic technologies. In the second area, he works as a governance consultant and strategy advisor. He conducts independent research in both areas. You can find his latest publications at https://www.linkandth.ink .
Sessions
Autonomy and cohesion
The viability and welfare of socio-technical systems depend on their ability to balance autonomy and cohesion. Originating in Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM), the balance extends well beyond viable systems to networks, broader society, its functional subsystems, and purely technical ones.After locating the balance within the VSM, the chapter frames it as a general instrument for observation and reflection, and reviews a range of cohesion forces and tools. To compare different ways of achieving cohesion by their effect on autonomy, the latter is treated as a vector with two components – participatory and consequential – and familiar coordination regimes are arranged into a spectrum of zones, from imperative and administrative to normative and interoperable. Protocols are the main cohesion mechanism in the zone with the highest consequential autonomy. Well-designed ones can coordinate with little loss of autonomy. Yet systemic forces such as coordination rent and path dependency push most regimes toward extraction and power asymmetry.The chapter presents four applications: configurations of inference rules in software, the accumulation of data silos and technical debt in corporate IT, the tension between business and policy, and the unbalanced global system of the Anthropocene. It closes by suggesting that the lens, enriched by these uses, could in turn be brought back to enhance the VSM.