Hello all This is a bit of an experiment, but it is such a rich group on here. SCiO (systems and cybernetics in organisations) is the UK’s biggest systems thinking society (I think), and certainly one of the most active. For members, we hold eight development days annually - private discussion sessions where people can bring any issues or ideas to talk around with other members. I hope we’ll start to use model.report and kumu.io to continue some of the discussions which aren’t confidential, and to surface the documents members dig up.

The group has been the standard-bearer for knowledge and application of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model over the years, and still has this core expertise, but is focused on systems practitioners and covers a whole spectrum of systems thinking interests.

We run four open days per year - Spring and Autumn in Manchester, Winter and Summer in London (UK). Each of these is completely unthemed and varied, and has four expert speakers on a systems thinking topic, mostly related to application, who attend as peers and give their time and expertise free. Attendance is only £10 to encourage participation. We’re now planning a series of additional SCiO focus days as well as the SCiO special open day (eight speakers) at the UK Systems Society conference, separately listed on here, and another Enterprise Architecture/Systems thinking conference. Focus days will be on systems thinking and: lean, agile/XP programming, new organisational forms, and design science.

Due to a mistake on the part of the organiser (me) we now need an additional expert speaker for Manchester, October 27, 2014. If you are interested in this or a future event, drop me a line at ben.taylor@scio.org.uk