Introduction Update and History – September 2026

What was attempted

A Systems Literacy project began at the College of Exploration in 2008, following a poster on Geoscience Literacy presented at the American Geophysical Union that December. It built on fifteen years of literacy work in the natural sciences: Ocean Literacy, Earth Science Literacy, Atmospheric Science Literacy, and Energy Literacy. Each of those had produced a set of essential principles and fundamental concepts that a community of scientists and educators could agree on and teach from.

The effort was renewed in 2015 at the ISSS conference in Berlin, where the suggestion that the systems community might attempt something similar was taken up quickly. Work followed with ISSS, INCOSE and the IFSR. The 2016 IFSR conversation in Linz took Systems Literacy as its overarching theme and produced a published volume and the paper Systems Research: A Foundation for Systems Literacy. Workshops were held at IFSR, ISSS and INCOSE meetings over several years.

A single framework did not emerge from any of this.

Why a single framework did not arrive

The reason is not a shortage of effort or of goodwill. It is a property of the subject.

Ocean Literacy was possible because the community could agree on what it was describing. Disagreement concerned emphasis, sequence, and what a school-age learner needed first. It did not concern what the ocean was.

Systems literacy has no equivalent. A system is a boundary drawn by someone, for a purpose. The traditions gathered under the word disagree about who draws it, on what grounds, and whether the person drawing it belongs in the description. Those disagreements are not incidental. They are the substance of the field, and the disciplines have spent seventy years developing them.

A single framework would have to settle the question in order to exist. Any settlement would be a position taken, presented as a description of the field. So this project has stopped attempting one framework.

The other uses of the term

After 2015 it became clear that “systems literacy” had been used by others, in ways unknown to us at the time. Rather than list them as alternatives, it is worth reading them for what each one does.

These are not competing definitions of one thing. They are different answers to prior questions that are rarely asked out loud: what is taken as given, what a system is, where the observer stands.

Where the design came from

The change of approach was partly a natural evolution of the work described above. It was also assisted, and given its shape, by a specific source.

In August 2026 the American Society for Cybernetics met in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, under the theme Conversational Confluences. That theme was built on the work of Antônio Bispo dos Santos (1959–2023), known as Nêgo Bispo: a quilombola thinker, poet, teacher and political leader from the Quilombo Saco-Curtume in São João do Piauí.

Bispo described confluência as the law governing how elements of nature live alongside one another, and put it in a phrase that requires no elaboration: nem tudo o que se ajunta se mistura — not everything that comes together mixes. Waters meet, and each continues as itself. Its counterpart, transfluência, holds that not everything which mixes comes together. He set both within contracolonização, counter-colonization, and held consistently that knowledge among quilombolas is shared rather than sold. He declined the word “intellectual”, preferring to be described as a relator of thoughts and knowledges. His books include Quilombos, modos e significados (2007), Colonização, Quilombos: modos e significações (2015) and A terra dá, a terra quer (2023).

The design set out below is a direct debt to that idea, and to the Brazilian colleagues who brought it into the cybernetics conversation.

The difference should be kept in view. Bispo was writing about peoples, territories and cosmologies, and about a history of colonization. Applying confluência to a set of largely Western intellectual traditions is a smaller and safer use of it than he intended. The borrowing is acknowledged rather than assimilated, which is what the idea itself asks for.

Quilombola thought is also not the same as Indigenous thought. Bispo made that distinction himself, speaking of quilombola, Indigenous, Banto and Yoruba ways of life as distinct rather than interchangeable. Related understandings of difference meeting without dissolving are held in Andean reciprocity, in mātauranga Māori, in the knowledge traditions of First Nations peoples in Australia and North America, and in many others. None of them is summarized here, and no list assembled from outside would be the right instrument. Where such a stream appears on this site it will be written by people who belong to it, in their own terms, and will keep the right to refuse the questions put to it.

The design that follows

This site now holds the traditions side by side rather than attempting to reconcile them.

Each tradition is treated as a stream with its own water. Each may have its own literacy structure — its own essential principles, written in its own vocabulary, by people who work within it. That is the part this project cannot do on anyone’s behalf, and the part each community can do well, because it is describing what it holds in common rather than negotiating with a neighbour.

What this site provides is the space between them. Three things:

A comparative structure. Each stream answers the same short set of questions in its own words, so that the streams can be read across without being flattened into one another.

Confluences. Where a concept is genuinely fed by more than one stream — feedback, boundary, purpose, emergence, model — the different readings are set out together. Purpose as Ashby uses it, as Churchman uses it, as Ulrich uses it and as Bispo uses it are four different things, and displaying the difference teaches more than any single definition would.

Disputes, named and left open. Where the traditions disagree, the disagreement is recorded as a disagreement.

The comparative structure

Five questions, asked of every stream:

  1. What does this stream take as given?
  2. What is a system, here?
  3. Where does the observer stand?
  4. What counts as knowing a system?
  5. What is the knowing for?

These questions are authored rather than agreed. They were written by Peter Tuddenham, from a position that crosses several of the traditions, and they carry that position with them. They are offered because a community writes well about what it holds in common and less well about what distinguishes it from its neighbours, so the comparative questions have to come from somewhere.

A stream may answer a question by refusing it. A refusal is recorded as an answer, and it is informative about the structure rather than about the stream.

The streams

A first draft, offered to be argued with. Streams are distinguished by what each takes as already given, not by topic, since the topics overlap almost completely.

Whether the last of these is a stream alongside the others or the bed they all run in is itself one of the open disputes.

A cybernetics literacy companion

A cybernetics literacy was begun in 2009 and did not continue. It was American-centered, in its framing and in the community it consulted. It is being restarted in 2026 through The Cybernetics Society, initiated from the United Kingdom and global in its invitation.

The restart is the first working test of the structure described above. If a cybernetics literacy can be written to the five questions and survive contact with its own community, the pattern is demonstrated, and the other custodians are then being asked to join something that exists rather than something proposed. If it cannot, that is worth finding out before a dozen other communities are approached.

Two things are already apparent. Cybernetics is likely to need two streams rather than one, since the first-order and second-order answers to the observer question are different answers and not stages of a single one. And a British-initiated draft has to be explicit about what it does not cover: the Soviet lineage, Odobleja in Romania, the reception of cybernetics in Chile through Beer’s work there, and the Japanese and Indian receptions, which are barely documented in English. Those gaps will be marked on the page rather than left to be found.

Language

The term “systems literacy” is not without difficulty, even in English. Both words already carry several meanings, and “literacy” does not translate readily into many languages. This was noted at the outset of the project and treated as an inconvenience. It is better understood as the same problem in miniature: a word that gathers different traditions while appearing to name one thing.

On the shape of this page

A working principle underlies the design above: form enacts content. What a document does is a truer report of its position than what it says.

A framework that appeared to settle the observer question would misreport the field, whatever it stated in its text. A comparative structure presented as a consensus would conceal its author while asking each stream to declare its own grounds. So the structure here is authored and says so, the disputes are shown rather than closed, and each stream keeps its own vocabulary.

This page is a draft and will remain marked as one until the streams have been written by the people who belong to them.

An invitation

Not to join a network, but to write one stream.

If you work within one of the traditions above, and would be willing to set out in your own terms what it takes as given, what it means by a system, where the observer stands, what counts as knowing one, and what it is for — five or six paragraphs under your own name — that is what this project now needs.

If the five questions are the wrong five, say that instead.