Current Approach – September 2026

Many traditions. One word. Side by side.

For thirty years, people working in systems, cybernetics, complexity and design have all used the word literacy for what a person needs in order to understand systems. They have not meant the same thing by it.

This project stopped trying to reconcile them.

Instead, each tradition is invited to set out its own literacy in its own words: what it takes as given, what it means by a system, where it places the observer, what counts as knowing one, and what the knowing is for. The answers are set side by side. Where they converge, that is shown. Where they do not, the disagreement is left standing.

The approach is borrowed, with acknowledgment, from the quilombola thinker Nêgo Bispo and the idea of confluência: waters meet, and each continues as itself. Not everything that comes together mixes.

Three ways in

Read the argument →
Why a single framework has not arrived, and what is being built instead.
https://systemsliteracy.org/introduction-update-and-history-september-2026/

Explore the streams →
Thirteen traditions, each answering the same five questions in its own voice.
https://systemsliteracy.org/systems-literacy-streams/

Write one →
If you work inside one of these traditions, we would like your account of it, under your own name. Five or six paragraphs. If the five questions are the wrong questions, say that instead.
Send an email to streams at systemsliteracy.org

Where this stands

This is a draft and is marked as one. Most streams are not yet written. The comparative questions were authored by Peter Tuddenham rather than agreed by anyone, — which is stated here because the project’s own subject matter says that boundary judgments have authors.

A companion cybernetics literacy is being restarted in 2026 through The Cybernetics Society: initiated from the United Kingdom, global in its invitation.

The Systems Literacy Project · The College of Exploration
Text on this site is available under a Creative Commons license. Each stream remains the work of its named author.