Our world and our society are in trouble. Nature’s systems are complex and interconnected, yet our knowledge resides in disciplinary silos. As a result, our human activities tend to originate from within these siloed domains, and as they become increasingly impactful, the risk of unforeseen consequences becomes ever stronger. The interdependent systems we rely on for our survival and our welfare are in danger, sometimes even due to the actions we take to try to protect ourselves and our planet.
The Bertalanffy Circle envisioned that a GSTD could be developed and used to support interdisciplinary communication and cooperation, to facilitate scientific discoveries in disciplines that lack exact theories, to promote the unity of knowledge, to help to bridge the divide between the object-oriented and the subject-oriented disciplines without reducing either to the other, and to contribute to the building of a “better world” 16–19.
Although progress towards this vision has been slow, we believe that the conditions have turned in favour of breakthrough progress towards a GSTD in the immediate future:
We, the authors of this Manifesto, believe that the discovery and development of a General Systems Transdiscipline is both possible and important, so we have been striving to outline a vision and research agenda for how progress might made by a research community working towards this common goal. Initially, we abstracted the structure and dynamics of a discipline, and used this to show what would be involved and contained in a “systemological” discipline31,40. We also explored the nature of transdisciplines, to understand what would additionally characterize a general systems transdiscipline 41,42. We argue that this disciplinary structure provides a framework for organizing the collective efforts of the GSR community. In addition, we realized that progress towards discovering a GST* is intimately linked with progress towards articulating a General Systems Worldview (GSW), and that this provides a potentially powerful new route towards a GST* 29,43. We hold that these foundations will facilitate collaboration towards realizing the vision of the founders, and call upon general systems researchers to join in our collective efforts.
In accordance with the new vision outlined above, we believe that progress can best be made by focussing on the development of:
We encourage general systems researchers to meet, connect, discuss and report on progress towards the establishment of GSTD, whether by creating new opportunities or via existing fora e.g.:
We call on all who support the vision for a better tomorrow facilitated by GSTD to:
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[35] see e.g.:
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[40] D. Rousseau, J. M. Wilby, J. Billingham, and S. Blachfellner, 'A Typology for Systemology', in prep.
[41] D. Rousseau, J. M. Wilby, J. Billingham, and S. Blachfellner, 'The Scope and Range of General Systems Transdisciplinarity', in prep.
[42] D. Rousseau, J. M. Wilby, J. Billingham, and S. Blachfellner, 'Systems Philosophy and its relevance to Systems Engineering, Workshop held on 11 July 2015 at the International Symposium of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) in Seattle, Washington, USA. Available at https://sites.google.com/site/syssciwg2015iw15/systems-science-workshop-at-is15.'
[43] D. Rousseau, J. Billingham, J. M. Wilby, and S. Blachfellner, 'The synergy between General Systems Theory and the General Systems Worldview', in prep.