Arend van Campen

When an organisation, corporation, industry or political process are understood as living systems, their interconnected and interdependent relationships within and outside of their networks change all the time. This complexity, due to dynamic and perpetually changing information feedback loops, can’t be managed by direct causal action (cause and effect reactions) but can only be maximally controlled by steering with that information in real time. Adaptability to constantly evolving changes by using all information directly is needed to ensure continuity and longevity of the living system. Nature works like that too. Complexity is a consequence of a myriad of unknown factors, relationships and reliance which nevertheless have a direct impact on organisations and can only be ‘controlled’ by learning and actual adaptation in real time. These so-called non linear effects or non causal stimuli from often unknown, but interconnected and interdependent sources, can’t be controlled by old-...

When I sit down to write this column, I usually don’t know what to write about just yet. It normally comes to me when I start typing words onto my keyboard but today, for some reason, it seems more difficult than before. I know I have written about risk management, HSEQ control and the use of Systems Sciences and Cybernetics quite a bit, so those subjects I will give a rest, because I feel that not many of you seem to have understood what I was trying to tell you. Few people contacted me to ask about these sciences. But now we are nearing summer and it is getting warmer, although now, as I am writing this, the temperature dropped 10 degrees. I have mentioned climate change before, but is man actually causing this? What man is certainly doing is using up earth’s resources at an exponential rate. In 2018, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 1. That marks the day when humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year. For the rest of the year, we are maintaining our ecological def...