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Stuart Anspach Umpleby (born March 5, 1944) is an American cybernetician and professor in the Department of Management and Director of the Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning in the School of Business at the George Washington University.
Umpleby attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he received degrees in engineering in 1967, in political science in 1967 and in 1969, and a PhD in communications in 1975.
In the 1960s, while a student at the University of Illinois, Umpleby worked in the Institute of Communications Research, The Biological Computer Laboratory, and the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory, the PLATO system. [1] From 1967 to 1975 he and other students developed computer conferencing systems and other applications for time shared computers. [2]
After moving to George Washington University, he was the moderator from 1977 to 1980, of a computer conference on general systems theory supported by the National Science Foundation. [3] Between 1982 and 1988 he arranged scientific meetings involving American and Soviet scientists in the area of cybernetics and general systems theory. [4]
From 1975 to present he has been a professor in the Department of Management at The George Washington University, where he teaches courses ranging from cybernetics, systems theory, and system dynamics to the philosophy of science, cross-cultural management, and organizational behavior. From 1994 to 1997 he was the faculty facilitator of a Quality and Innovation Initiative in the GW School of Business. [5]
He is a past president of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). In 2007 Stuart Umpleby was awarded The Wiener Gold Medal of the American Society for Cybernetics. [6] In 2010 he was elected an Academician in the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences, [7] an honor society created by the International Federation for Systems Research. He is twice divorced and has two sons.
Umpleby's research interests are in the fields of cybernetics and systems theory, the philosophy of science, and management methods. Other interests have been demography, the year 2000 computer crisis, academic globalization, and the transitions in the post-communist countries.
In the early 1970s Umpleby studied cybernetics with Heinz von Foerster and Ross Ashby in the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With Heinz von Foerster and Leo Steg he organized the first Gordon Research Conference on cybernetics in 1984. He worked to develop and promote second-order cybernetics or biological cybernetics. He also helped to create social cybernetics. [8] He provided an example of the amplification of management capability. [9] He clarified the nature of information in descriptions of the physical relationships among matter, energy, and information. [10] And he has pointed out that George Soros's reflexivity theory is quite compatible with cybernetics. [11]
Following his work on biological cybernetics and social cybernetics Umpleby suggested a way of unifying the philosophies of realism, constructivism, and pragmatism by combining world, description, and observer. [12] Building on the work of E.A. Singer, Jr., C. West Churchman, and Russell L. Ackoff, Umpleby has suggested that, since managers are part of the system they seek to influence, methods rather than theories are more effective ways to present knowledge of management. [13]
Umpleby recently has worked to further develop the Quality Improvement Priority Matrix, a method for determining priorities for improvement and for monitoring perceived improvement. [14]
In 1960 Heinz von Foerster published an article in Science showing that if demographic trends of the past two millennia continue, world population would go to infinity in approximately 2026. Although contested in the 1960s, the equation proved remarkably accurate, indeed even conservative, until the early 1990s. [15] Discussions of the doomsday equation revealed that demographers and natural scientists have fundamentally different ways of dealing with estimates and that these differences are not generally known by the public, science journalists, or other scientists. [16]
From 1997 to 2000 Umpleby worked on the Year 2000 Computer Problem, viewing it as an opportunity to test social science theories using a before and after research design. [17]
Between 1977 and 1980 he was the moderator of a computer conference on general systems theory supported by the National Science Foundation. This project was one of nine "experimental trials of electronic information exchange for small research communities". About sixty scientists in the United States, Canada, and Europe interacted for a period of two and a half years using the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) located at New Jersey Institute of Technology. [18] Continuing the work with computer-based communications media, Umpleby has experimented with applications of the internet. Currently he is developing the idea of academic globalization, since it is now possible for academics to collaborate via the internet with colleagues in foreign countries for purposes of education, research or community service. [19]
With the collapse of communism in 1989 many social scientists both in Russia and the West said that, although Karl Marx had described the transition from capitalism to socialism to communism, there were no theories to guide the transition from communism to capitalism. Umpleby refuted this claim by organizing meetings in 1990 in both Washington, DC, and Vienna, Austria, to discuss the theories of economic, political, and social development that can guide the transformation of socialist societies. [20]
Since 1994 the Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning at The George Washington University, which Umpleby heads, has hosted over 150 visiting scholars supported by the U.S. Department of State. Most of these scholars have come from the former Soviet Union and Southeast Europe. While on campus the scholars work with professors in their fields. They also learn process improvement and group facilitation methods, so they can be more effective in introducing changes when they return home. In this way Umpleby has experimented with ways to encourage the use of participatory methods in other countries. [21] He has found that the Participatory Strategic Planning methods developed by the Institute of Cultural Affairs not only improve the effectiveness of organizations but also lead to more humane management practices and build mutual trust among the participants. [22]
Umpleby has been an Academician in the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences, [23] an honor society created by the International Federation for Systems Research, since 2010. [24]
Stuart Umpleby has written numerous articles, edited several special issues of the journal Cybernetics and Systems, and edited two books:
Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian-American scientist combining physics and philosophy, and widely attributed as the originator of second-order cybernetics. He was twice a Guggenheim fellow and also was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980. He is well known for his 1960 Doomsday equation formula published in Science predicting future population growth.
Anthony Stafford Beer was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability.
William Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.
Systems science, also referred to as systems research, or, simply, systems, is a transdisciplinary field concerned with understanding systems—from simple to complex—in nature, society, cognition, engineering, technology and science itself. The field is diverse, spanning the formal, natural, social, and applied sciences.
Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western science". Second-order cybernetics was developed between the late 1960s and mid 1970s by Heinz von Foerster and others, with key inspiration coming from Margaret Mead. Foerster referred to it as "the control of control and the communication of communication" and differentiated first order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observed systems" and second-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observing systems".
Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask was a British cybernetician, inventor and polymath who made during his lifetime multiple contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, educational technology, epistemology, chemical computing, architecture, and the performing arts. During his life he gained three doctorate degrees. He was an avid writer, with more than two hundred and fifty publications which included a variety of journal articles, books, periodicals, patents, and technical reports. He also worked as an academic and researcher for a variety of educational settings, research institutes, and private stakeholders including but not limited to the University of Illinois, Concordia University, the Open University, Brunel University and the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He is known for the development of conversation theory.
The International Federation for Systems Research(IFSR) is an international federation for global and local societies in the field of systems science. This federation is a non-profit, scientific and educational agency founded in 1980, and constituted of some thirty member organizations around the globe..
The book International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics is an authoritative encyclopedia for systems theory, cybernetics, the complex systems science, which covers both theories and applications in areas as engineering, biology, medicine and social sciences. This book first published in 1997 aimed to give an overview over more than 40 years developments in the field of Systems and Cybernetics.
Principia Cybernetica is an international cooperation of scientists in the field of cybernetics and systems science, especially known for their website, Principia Cybernetica. They have dedicated their organization to what they call "a computer-supported evolutionary-systemic philosophy, in the context of the transdisciplinary academic fields of Systems Science and Cybernetics".
Management cybernetics is concerned with the application of cybernetics to management and organizations. "Management cybernetics" was first introduced by Stafford Beer in the late 1950s and introduces the various mechanisms of self-regulation applied by and to organizational settings, as seen through a cybernetics perspective. Beer developed the theory through a combination of practical applications and a series of influential books. The practical applications involved steel production, publishing and operations research in a large variety of different industries. Some consider that the full flowering of management cybernetics is represented in Beer's books. However, learning continues.
Gerhard Chroust is an Austrian systems scientist, and Professor Emeritus for Systems Engineering and Automation at the Institute of System Sciences at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Chroust is an authority in the fields of formal programming languages and interdisciplinary information management.
The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) is an American non-profit scholastic organization for the advancement of cybernetics as a science, a discipline, a meta-discipline and the promotion of cybernetics as basis for an interdisciplinary discourse. The society does this by developing and applying cybernetics’ concepts which are presented and published via its conferences and peer-reviewed publications. As a meta-discipline, it creates bridges between disciplines, philosophies, sciences, and arts. The ASC is a full member of the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR).
Richard Ferdinand Ericson (1919–1993) was an American organizational theorist, professor emeritus of management and director of the Interdisciplinary Systems and Cybernetics Project, Program of Policy Studies in Science and Technology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causal processes such as feedback. Norbert Wiener named the field after an example of circular causal feedback—that of steering a ship where the helmsman adjusts their steering in response to the effect it is observed as having, enabling a steady course to be maintained amongst disturbances such as cross-winds or the tide.
Laurence Dale Richards has been a key figure in the modern development of cybernetics as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry, often referred to as the new cybernetics. He was the first to create interdisciplinary masters and doctoral programs in engineering management, with curricula built explicitly on concepts drawn from systems theory and cybernetics. He served as president for both the American Society for Cybernetics (1986–88) and the American Society for Engineering Management (1998–99) and was elected an Academician in the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences in 2010.
Jason Jixuan Hu, is a Chinese American cyberneticist, independent scholar and managing director of WINTOP Organizational Learning Laboratory, and organizer/facilitator of the Club of Remy(Youtube Channel). He is noted for his work on "cognitive capacity in human communication, conflict resolution and cooperation solicitation," and on view on distance education in America.
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