ME Nov 2025
How did open systems theory come about – what problem were you and Fred trying to solve at the time?
OST is as old as the hills, there has always been a thread of OST in our ways of understanding the world. For example, Aboriginal and Islander cultures have built up a massive knowledge based on studying the transactions of environment and the systems within it. They also chose the second genotypical design principle to govern their culture which enabled them to generate and continuously evolve and adapt cultures of cooperation across the whole continent.
There is reason to believe that that pattern was the majority one in the ancient world as we see in The Dawn of Everything by Graeber & Wengrow.
In the more modern era, Fred traced the development of open systems thinking with the likes of Michael Faraday with electrical fields and in social science we have such famous names as Andras Angyal and Isidor Chein. Fred and Eric Trist called that thread the Thin Red Line.
It is of course the formalization and codification of the concept of open system that really marks the advent of OST as a coherent conceptual framework and the publication date for that is 1965. However, that is far from the beginning of the concept itself as e.g. Fred built the first version of an L22 scan into the design of the first Search Conference in 1959. As a kid from the bush he was well aware of the fact that system and environment determine each other and could see that organizations at that time (beginning of Type IV environment) were being affected and in some cases transformed by forces originating in the environment. He was well attuned to Bertalanffy’s concept of an open system where Bentalanffy only regarded the environment as the thing systems went into and came out of transformed. He left the thing itself as a black box.
Fred not only fully conceptualized this black box as a knowable entity with a causal texture but also documented its historical change over the span of human history. This meant people would be able to research why and how their organizations were being affected by previously invisible forces coming from the environment.
The second major prong of OST, the organizational design principles, was the final result of decades of research into organizational theory and change. The holy grail of this research had always been a foolproof, reliable method for producing organizations which were high performing and also produced healthy, productive, motivated employees.
There had been a major breakthrough in the early 1950s when Trist & Bamforth worked out what was going on with the introduction of new technology in a midlands coal mine. The upshot of that was the birth of sociotechnical systems, the fact that it is only when the social and technical systems are jointly optimized that you get high performance and highly motivated healthy people.
It was during the first phase of the Norwegian Industrial Development program that Fred and Einar Thorsrud pulled together all the various pieces of research on intrinsic motivation and published the full set for the first time (in 1969). This was one dimension of the holy grail fixed in place.
The discovery of design principles came during the second phase of that program, testing sociotech on 4 sites of national importance to Norway. As we know that testing was successful and the discovery of the principles has completed the search for the holy grail. It showed there was a viable alternative to autocracy in the workplace and totally revolutionized the whole field of organizational change.
There was only one task remaining and that was to design a method using the design principles to replace the old slow, expensive, expert based method used previously. Fred started work on that method after he returned to Oz in 1969 and first tested it in 1971. He called it the Participative Design Workshop because the people who work in the organization design their own section of it rather than having a design imposed upon them.
We tested that design and worked on it for three years, in Australia and several countries overseas, until we were sure it did exactly what it was supposed to. Then we published a first draft of Participative Design: Work and Community Life in 1974.
After a couple of early Searches in 1972-3, I could see the holes in it and realized it should be structured on DP2 all the way through. The small group of us at CCE started experimenting with both methods and for example merging them in the DHR workshops.
Some innovations were the result of problem solving. For example:
1. when we were working on the phone as medium project for Telecom, we didn’t have a personality test we were happy with, a genuinely open systems one, so we invented one. That works brilliantly.
2. when we asked ourselves ‘what actually happens when a person watches a functioning TV set?” that resulted in A Choice of Futures which featured our hypothesis about the effect of the TV screens on the human nervous system. It also got us into such hot water we both eventually lost our jobs but the work has never been refuted. In fact it continually receives further confirmation.
Most work resulted in changes of one sort or another, either of theory or method or both, bringing OST to its current state of readiness and reliability.
In simple terms, what is OST, and what makes it different from other approaches to understanding organizations and change?
First, that it acknowledges that the world consists of open systems and
secondly that it never forgets that the work we do must improve the world for people, and all other life forms. Most social science is based on closed systems, totally neglects the environment and often objectifies people so OST stands out.
Third, it is genuinely scientific in everything it does, following scientific method and never rushing into print until results are confirmed and e.g. all stats are fully documented. Again this contrasts with so much social science that is merely a rush of blood for some consultant which results in some fad which usually costs a heap, and fails. e.g. Hammer & Champy with Business processing re-engineering.
Human systems and technology: As AI becomes more capable, what does OST remind us about the human side of systems – the things machines can’t replicate?
AI as another technology bears the same relation to OST as every other technology. When people organized by DP2 use AI, it is likely to be used adaptively and for constructive purposes. Otherwise, like all other technologies, AI can be misused and put to purposes inimical to humans and the planet.
There is a lot of rot being talked about AI at the moment by people who generally have no clue about anything much and haven’t tumbled to the fact that we can’t create life yet, except in films like Frankenstein. For all its hyped up properties, AI remains a machine.
Impact. Could you share one or two stories OST really came alive – where it changed how people worked or related to each other?
One would be at the end of the Search Conference at Geelong when they finally came up with the stretch of road around the city plus some traffic management measures as their brilliant creative alternative to the consultant’s recommendation of a 6 lane freeway through the middle of town that would have split the town and destroyed over a 1000 houses. People were literally jumping out of their skin with joy and of course, that road is still there.
Sheer joy and extreme levels of the creative working mode which often looks just like playing is the common affect at the end of most Searches, particularly those where we started with a conflicted issues or participants who belonged to conflicting groups of some kind, ethnic etc.
One PDW that stand out is the one we ran for some Telecom employees, groups of techies and women from the complaints section. In those days, the techies were all male and the workshop started with some slinging off between the two groups. The blokes started by asking “What do you sheilas do up there all day? ‘What do we pay you for?’ To which the women responded “If you blokes did your jobs properly, we wouldn’t be running around like cut cats dealing with complaints’. So it was on for young and old but by the end of the workshop, men and women were working together with great creativity and respect.
Like the Search, PDWs often result in powerful new relationships and open up new horizons.
The Future. In a world now driven by algorithms and automation, what do you think OST can teach us about designing humane and participative systems?
I am not at all sure the world is driven by algorithms and automation – some workplaces maybe but people usually spend only a few hours a day at work. Social media is a problem for some but certainly not all. When you watch people when they are just at home or out socializing or at the shops, there is very little sign of algorithms or automation apart from a few people still on the phone.
I wish along with a lot of other people that there was more automation so people were no longer burdened with all the ghastly jobs such as various cleaning, or working on construction sites. If AI was put to work to relieve humans of a lot of this work, we would all be a lot better off but of course, the masters of the universe want to show off by trying to emulate some of the more intellectual feats of the human.
When AI is put to work to detect patterns based on cues too subtle for most people to pick up, it is proving a boon for all sorts of research and there is no reason why this cannot be happily integrated with any sort of constructive endeavour. But there is no machine yet that can behave like a person for the simple reason that they are not animate creatures.
OST uses a definition of people which is accurate, describing people are purposeful, all equipped with decision making capacities and interdependent with their environments, both autonomous and homonomous so very different to the one dimensional people described in closed system approaches.
OST has been teaching us how to design humane and participative systems for decades now and nothing has bested it – so why should it stop?
Closing. If you could leave one message for the next generation – who will inherit both AI and OST – what would it be?
Put much more pressure on governments all around the world to rapidly ditch fossil fuels and reduce emissions before it is finally too late. Both AI and OST and a lot else are going to be totally irrelevant unless we rapidly stabilize emissions and in fact start bringing down the ppm CO2e in atmosphere and oceans.
PS. We had built up such a momentum around the world by the middle of the 1980s that we reckoned there would be enough DP2 structures along with their ideal seeking to get on top of climate change. But neoliberalism put a halt to that. It is now up to you mob to regenerate that momentum.