scientist, poet, painter, founder of "management cybernetics" and world leader in operational research, died at the age of 75 in 2002 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/sep/04/guardianobituaries.obituaries https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/611/ (2002) >his various favourite dicta, such as ‘Don’t bite my finger: look where it’s pointing’, or ‘You accuse me of using big words that you find hard to understand. But you need big words for big ideas. And you should find it hard to understand.’ >But there again, his notion of “control” was not quite the same as anyone else’s. It wasn’t authoritarian. The system exists anyway, whether it works or not. And the trick is to make yourself conscious of its workings, by seeing how things change, each time they come past you. Hence his abiding interest in appropriate feed-back loops, and his constant emphasis on the advantage to be derived from a system that gives the greatest possible autonomy of action to every level of its organisation, not just the top. >Thank goodness, systems analysis is beginning to penetrate our government’s corridors, as well as the high places and more creative places all over the world. (See, for example, Jake Chapman’s recent [DEMOS pamphlet](http://www.demos.co.uk/A_pubs.htm), System Failure: why governments must learn to think differently.) It may be a rather immature version that has surfaced so far – one that simply fails to grasp the holistic implications of Stafford Beer’s work...