IFSR Conversations legacy

The IFSR Conversations are part of the living legacy of the International Federation for Systems Research. They were established as a deliberately informal, dialogical format to complement conferences and publications, and to sustain the federation’s intellectual and relational vitality between major events.

Rather than functioning as panels or webinars, the Conversations were conceived as open spaces for collective inquiry. Their focus lay not on presenting finished results, but on engaging with emerging questions, unfinished ideas, and shared uncertainties within the global systems community. In this sense, they embodied a consciously second-order orientation: participants were invited to reflect not only on systems, but also on how systems thinking itself is shaped, practiced, and limited.

In practice, the Conversations relied on short conversational impulses rather than keynote lectures, generous time for dialogue, and facilitation styles that avoided hierarchy and disciplinary gatekeeping. This created a setting in which diverse traditions, cybernetics, systems thinking, complexity sciences, governance studies, philosophy, and transdisciplinary practice, could encounter one another without pressure to converge prematurely.

Over time, the IFSR Conversations became a low-threshold entry point into the federation’s intellectual life and a continuity mechanism linking different generations, regions, and paradigms of systems research. Their legacy does not primarily consist in formal outputs, but in the cultivation of a community of conversation: a shared capacity to listen, to question foundational assumptions, and to hold complexity without immediately reducing it to solutions.

As such, the IFSR Conversations can be understood as an ongoing experiment in governance through dialogue, one that has helped the federation remain responsive, reflective, and relationally grounded in a changing world.