Where should one begin with a design for the self-control of social systems? That is the question addressed by this paper. The traditional concepts of control reset on the feedback loop; control is essential to the attainment of goals. However, the simple feedback loop is insufficient for the modeling of a control system for an organization or other social system. For those systems, which search for multiple goals, it is necessary to design multilevel control systems incorporating the notion of pre-control. This eminently anticipatory function has hardly been considered by past research. Pre-control as understood here is a higher-order control that takes place between different logical levels of a control system. The Model of Systemic Control (MSC), a framework for multilevel control with pre-control relationships, is expounded and illustrated by means of a System Dynamics model.
This contribution is based on the Ludwig von Bertalanffy Lecture delivered by the author at the 47th Conference of the International Society for the System Sciences (ISSS) in Crete, 7 July 2003. The conference was organized around the issue Conscious Evolution of Humanity: Using Systems Thinking to Construct Agoras of the Global Village. This article explores the potential and actual contributions of cybernetics to organizational and societal evolution. The focus is on the models and conceptual tools of managerial cybernetics. When properly used these can become powerful pivots of an evolution by design, as opposed to an evolution at the mercy of mere chance.
